Venosa

Venosa (anc. Venusia, q.v.), a town and bishop's see of the Basilicata in the province of Potenza, Italy, on the eastern side of Mount Vulture, 52 m. by rail S.S.E. of Foggia, 1345 ft. above sea-level. Pop. (1901) 8503. The castle was built in 1470 by Pirro di Balzo, and contains four stables each for fifty horses. Many fragments of Roman workmanship are built into the walls of the cathedral, which is due to him also. The abbey church of SS. Trinita is historically interesting; it was consecrated in 1059 by Pope Nicholas II. and passed into the hands of the Knights of St John in the time of Boniface VIII. (1295-1303). In the central aisle is the tomb of Alberada, the first wife of Robert Guiscard and mother of Bohemund. An inscription on the wall commemorates the great Norman brothers William Iron Arm (d. 1046), Brogo (murdered at Venosa in 1051), Humfrey (d. 1057) and Robert Guiscard (d. at Corfu in 1085). The bones of these brothers rest together in a simple stone sarcophagus opposite the tomb of Alberada. The church also contains some 14th-century frescoes. Behind it is a larger church, which was begun for the Benedictines about I i 50, from the designs of a French architect, in imitation of the Cluniac church at Paray-le-Monial, but never carried beyond the spring of the vaulting. The ancient amphitheatre adjacent furnished the materials for its walls.

See A. Avena, Monumenti dell' Italia Meridionale (Naples, 1902), 323 sqq.; O. de Lorenzo, Venosa e la Regione del Vulture (Bergamo, 1906).