Basilica di San Nicola

Basilica di San Nicola tickets: which one to buy

The basilica is free to enter and there is no ticket for the church or the crypt where the relics lie. A small museum in the adjoining buildings charges a modest fee and holds the church treasury, including gifts sent by Orthodox rulers over eight centuries. Guided tours of Bari's old town include the basilica and cost a moderate amount; they are useful because the building's double life, Catholic upstairs and Orthodox in practice below, takes explaining.

Concerts are held in the nave through the year and ticketed separately. Combined tours with a beach club or a cooking class are sold to cruise passengers at a markup. Bari old town is compact and the basilica is five minutes from the waterfront, so walking there costs nothing. The crypt has its own entrance from the courtyard and is where most pilgrims go first. The old town is walled and the basilica sits at its centre, so any tour that begins at the castle will pass the door.

Visiting Basilica di San Nicola: what to see

In 1087 sailors from Bari stole the bones of St Nicholas from Myra in what is now Turkey, ahead of a Venetian expedition with the same intention, and the city built this basilica to hold them. Consecrated in 1197, it set the pattern for Apulian Romanesque: a broad white limestone front between two unequal towers, plain to the point of severity, with a carved doorway and an arch on the north side resting on two stone oxen. The interior has three aisles under a seventeenth-century coffered ceiling, with a twelfth-century episcopal throne carved with straining figures behind the altar.

The crypt below is a forest of twenty-six columns with capitals from Roman and Byzantine buildings, and beneath its altar are the relics, which exude a clear liquid called the manna, drawn off once a year on 9 May. An Orthodox chapel in the crypt serves the many Russian and Greek pilgrims. The silver altar in the crypt was given by a king of Serbia, and the Orthodox liturgy is celebrated there by arrangement with the Dominicans who hold the church.

Basilica di San Nicola opening hours and the best time to go

Open daily from early morning to evening with a break around midday, and the crypt keeps similar hours. The feast of St Nicholas on 6 December and the translation of the relics on 7 to 9 May are the two great dates, when Bari fills with pilgrims and a procession carries the statue to the sea and back. Summer brings cruise groups in the late morning. The white stone glares at midday and photographs best in the early evening, when the piazza fills with local families.

Dress code is applied at the door. Photography without flash is allowed. Allow forty-five minutes for church and crypt. The cathedral of San Sabino is five minutes away and the old town's lanes, where women make orecchiette pasta on tables in the street, surround both. Bari is a ferry port for Greece and Albania, and the basilica is often the first or last thing travellers see on the way through.