Museum The complex of St Peter at the Court

The monumental complex of S. Peter at the Court in Salerno, consists of the hypogeum - Chapel of St. Anne, the bell tower the courtroom and the upper hall of representation from the Church of St. Peter at the Court (Palatine Chapel), dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul. Duke-Prince Arechis II founded it during the Lombard age in the eighth century A.D., during the time span between 758 and 774. It is a unique example in Europe of preservation of standing original walls of Lombard civil architecture. The area where the Palatium was built had been occupied in the Roman period by a thermal bath of the Flavian-Trajan era (I-II cent. AD). In late antiquity the structures, long abandoned due to flooding, were partly re-used as a place of Christian worship with an attached burial ground that returned inscriptions dating from the mid-fifth to the seventh century AD. In the eighth century, in order to build the Palatium, the vaults of the thermal building were demolished, and inside the hall and its early Christian burial forepart were built powerful pillars and half-pillars designed to hold the overlying floor of the hall of representation of the Church (Palatine Chapel).
The monumental complex has five main layers:
• Roman baths (I-II cent. D. C.);
• Building of early Christian worship, with an adjoining burial ground (V-VII centuries. D. C.);
• Throne hall and private chapel of the palace of the Lombard period (second half of the eighth century. D. C.);
• The Church of St. Peter 'at the Court' with its phases and the Romanesque frescoes (from the twelfth century).
• The medieval public palace: during the thirteenth century, the building was also the site of the meetings of Parliament and in it was held the ceremony of conferring the degrees of the Salerno Medical School.
The Chronicon Salernitanum bears witness to a bell tower erected by Prince Guaimar II around 922 AD. The present Romanesque bell tower that stands on the north side of the church belongs to a period later than the tenth century, as it was established based on stratigraphic relationships with the other surviving structures and quotas of the ancient roadways. Against the north wall of the complex, the small chapel dedicated to St. Anne, adjoining the Hypogeum has a sixteenth-century painting representing the Virgin and Child with Saints as well as other frescoes on the north face and the vault devoted to the life of the Virgin attributed to Filippo Pennino, of the second half of the eighteenth century.