Teramo

Capital of the province in Abruzzo of the same name, Teramo is a city of ancient origins. It retains few traces of the Baroque. Yet the tourist who is passionate about Baroque art and its vicissitudes will find a visit to the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta (Saint Mary of the Assumption), whose construction dates back to the twelfth century, an intriguing experience. In the eighteenth century the church conformed to Baroque style but under the Fascism regime its original Medieval and Romanesque elements were restored to the point that now only the Chapel of San Berardo (the patron saint of the city) still bears an obvious signs of the restructuring of the eighteenth century. In this case, therefore, rather than by its persistence, the curiosity of the visitor will be attracted by the disappearance of the Baroque. This is an experience which is quite common in Abruzzo: a land where, as noted by the title of a recent book, in the course of the twentieth century the Baroque was culpably ‘denied’, through removal as was the case in Teramo in the mid-thirties.