History
Begun by Robert Guiscard in 1076 during the episcopate of Alfano I on a pre-existing church (in turn erected over a Roman temple's ruins), the Duomo was consecrated by Pope Gregory VII in 1085.
It was several times modified in the following centuries. In 1688 the architect Ferdinando Sanfelice remodeled in Neapolitan Baroque and Rococo Architecture the interior of the Duomo. Finally, a restoration in the 1930s brought it back to an appearance similar to the original one. Historically the Duomo is remembered as the initial symbol of the Italian Renaissance, because inside there it is the tomb of Pope Gregory VII, the Pope of Canossa who started the rejection from Italy of the German domination of the Holy Roman Empire.
The Duomo was damaged during the Operation Avalanche, when the Allies landed in Salerno in September 1943, during World War II.
Read more about this topic: Salerno Cathedral
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—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
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“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)