Italy's easternmost city — a 12th-century cathedral floor mosaic that covers the entire nave with the Tree of Life, a chapel of 800 martyrs' skulls, and the sheerest turquoise water on the Adriatic
Otranto (pop. 5,500) occupies Italy's easternmost point — a small walled city on the heel of the boot facing Albania (80 km across the Adriatic), with the clearest water on the Italian Adriatic coast and one of the most extraordinary floors in European art. The Cattedrale di Santa Maria Annunziata (built 1088, floor mosaic completed 1165) contains the largest medieval floor mosaic in Europe — 800 sq meters of colored limestone tiles depicting the Tree of Life, the calendar, mythological and biblical scenes, Alexander the Great, and King Arthur, composed by a monk named Pantaleone under the in…
Otranto has been settled since the Bronze Age — the Greeks called it 'Hydruntum' and the Romans made it an important Adriatic port (Julius Caesar embarked here for his Epirus campaign in 49 BCE). The city's defining moment was the Ottoman siege of 1480: Gedik Ahmed Pasha's fleet of 150 ships landed 18,000 troops who besieged and sacked the city, killing approximately 12,000 people, enslaving the survivors, and beheading 800 men who refused conversion on the Minerva Hill overlooking the sea. Pope John Paul II beatified the 800 Martyrs of Otranto in 2007; Pope Francis canonized them in 2013 — m…