The Italian Catholic archdiocese of Acerenza lies in the south, in Lecce and Potenza. It has existed since the fourth century, and was united in 1203 with the diocese of Matera; the dioceses were split again in 1954. Its metropolitan is the archdiocese of Potenza-Muro Lucano-Marsico Nuovo.

History

Acerenza was certainly an episcopal see in the course of the fifth century, for in 499 we meet with the name of its first known bishop, Justus, in the Acts of the Roman Synod of that year. The town was known in antiquity as the high nest of Acherontia.

Acerenza was in early imperial times a populous and important town, and a bulwark of the territory of Lucania and Apulia. In the Gothic and Lombard period it fell into decay, but was restored by Grimwald, Duke of Beneventum (687-689). An Archbishop of Acerenza (Giraldus) appears in 1063 in an act of donation of Robert Guiscard to the monastery of the Holy Trinity in Venosa.

For a few years after 968 Acerenza adopted the Greek Rite in consequence of an order of the Byzantine Emperor Nicephorus Phocas (963-969), whereby it was made one of five suffragans of the archdiocese of Otranto, and compelled to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople Pope Urban VI (1378-89, Bartolommeo Prignano), was once Archbishop of Acerenza. The cathedral is one of the oldest and most beautiful in Italy, known for a bust long supposed to be that of St. Canus or Canius (Ascanius?) patron of the city, but now judged to be a portrait-bust of Julian the Apostate, though others maintain that it is a bust of the Emperor Frederick II, after the manner of the sculptors of the Antonine age.

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