Pescara Cathedral

Pescara Cathedral — formally the Cattedrale di San Cetteo Vescovo e Martire — is the city's principal church, standing on Via d'Annunzio in the old quarter of Castellammare south of the river. The current building dates from the 1930s, designed in a severe travertine-clad style that sits somewhere between stripped Romanesque and the monumental architecture fashionable in Fascist Italy. It is not a beautiful building, but it has a certain austere presence.

The interior is more rewarding than the exterior suggests. The relics of San Cetteo are housed in a crypt beneath the nave, and the apse contains a large mosaic in a Byzantine-influenced style. The cathedral is also notable as the site of Gabriele d'Annunzio's baptism, a fact the city mentions at every opportunity. For visitors passing through the old quarter, it is worth a brief stop.

things to do sight
A story
The cathedral is dedicated to San Cetteo, a fourth-century bishop martyred under Diocletian whose relics are kept here. D'Annunzio himself was baptised in the cathedral in 1863, and the connection is marked inside — the poet made much of it in later life, claiming a spiritual kinship between his own Dionysian excess and the martyred bishop.

Other places in Things to Do