Photo: Sailko · CC BY 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Cattolica di Stilo

Small Byzantine church with a central plan and five brick domes, among the most important Byzantine monuments of Calabria.

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About the museum

The Cattolica di Stilo is a small Byzantine church built between the 9th and 10th centuries, before the Norman conquest, at the foot of Mount Consolino. It was the mother church among the five parishes of the village, and in the 16th century it passed from the Byzantine rite to the Latin rite. It is considered one of the most important Byzantine sites of Calabria.

The building is in brick masonry and has a square central plan, comparable to a Greek cross inscribed in a square. Four columns divide the interior space, and the roof is covered by five domes, the central one higher and wider; three apses open to the east. The walls were once entirely frescoed, with paintings made between the late 10th and the 15th century, including a Christ Pantocrator brought to light in the 20th century.

The sources on the church are silent for centuries; the monument appears in the literature in the 19th century. The first restoration in a modern sense was carried out by Paolo Orsi between 1912 and 1927, followed by other interventions in the 20th century, during which inscriptions in Arabic were also discovered. Between 2004 and 2006 the interior frescoes were restored, and a new restoration campaign began in 2015. Since 2006 the Cattolica has been, together with other Basilian-Byzantine sites of Calabria, among the candidates for the UNESCO list.