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 | Salerno Downtown car rental - Travel Guide |  |
Capital of Campania's southernmost province, SALERNO has much of the scruffy, disorganized charm of Naples: a busy, dirty port city that's well off most travellers' itineraries and so holds a good supply of cheap accommodation - making it a good base for both the Amalfi coast and the ancient site of Paestum further south. During medieval times the town's medical school was the most eminent in Europe. More recently, it was the site of the Allied landing of September 9, 1943 - a landing that reduced much of the centre to rubble. The subsequent rebuilding has restored neither charm nor efficiency to the town centre, which is an odd mixture of wide, rather characterless boulevards and a small medieval core full of intriguingly dark corners and alleys. But the town's siting, strung along the top of its gulf and looking across to the sheer wall of the Amalfi coast, is fine.
The Town
There isn't a great deal to see in Salerno, but it's pleasant to wander through the vibrant streets of the centre, especially the ramshackle old medieval quarter, which starts at the far end of Corso V. Emanuele , lined with designer shops and heaving with people (especially on Saturdays), and has Via dei Mercanti as its main axis; the roads around, such as Via Giovanni di Procida, can sometimes feel like a social club rather than a commercial centre. To the right of Via dei Mercanti, up Via Duomo, the Duomo (daily 7am-noon & 4-8pm) squeezes into the congested streets, an enormous church built in 1076 by Robert Guiscard and dedicated to St Matthew. The main features are yet another set of bronze doors from Constantinople and, in the heavily restored interior, two elegant mosaic pulpits dating from 1173, as well as the quietly expressive fifteenth-century tomb of Margaret of Anjou, wife of Charles III of Durazzo. The crypt holds the body of St Matthew himself, brought here in the tenth century. Outside, the courtyard is cool and shady, its columns plundered from Paestum, centring on a gently gurgling fountain. Outside, turn right at the bottom of the steps for the Museo Diocesano (daily 9am-8.30pm; free), which, although its opening times are erratic, is worth a hammer on the door to see its large altar-front, embellished with ivory panels in the late eleventh century and the largest work of its kind in the world. Failing that, turn left out of the church, left at the bottom of the steps, left again and then first right, and 100m or so further on is the Museo Provinciale (Mon-Sat 9am-8pm, Sun 9am-1.30pm; free) - a largely dull museum that occupies two floors of an over-restored Romanesque palace. It's worth heading upstairs though, past the deadening array of fossils and fragments of ancient sculpture, to see the sensual Head of Apollo , a Roman bronze fished from the Gulf of Salerno in the 1930s. |
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