An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia Read online

  Besides the Italy that everyone visits, there is, if one goes deeper into the South, a genuinely unknown Italy, no less interesting than the other and in no way inferior in the beauty of its landscapes or the grandeur of its historical monuments.

  François Lenormant, “À travers l’Apulie et la Lucanie”

  For Andrew Ciechanowiecki

  An Armchair Traveller’s

  History of Apulia

  Desmond Seward

  and

  Susan Mountgarret

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Haus Publishing Ltd

  This new, revised and extended edition published in 2012 by

  The Armchair Traveller at the bookHaus

  70 Cadogan Place, London SW1X 9AH

  www.thearmchairtraveller.com

  Cover image courtesy gettyimages

  Copyright © 2009 Desmond Seward and Susan Mountgarret

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

  Maps copyright © Martin Lubikowski

  ebook ISBN 978-1-907973-76-5

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  All rights reserved.

  Contents

  Foreword: Old Apulia

  1 Introduction

  Part I: The Gargano

  2 The Gargano

  3 Monte Sant’ Angelo

  4 The Norman Conquest – of Apulia

  5 San Giovanni Rotondo and Padre Pio

  6 The Gargano Coast and the Tremiti

  7 The Heretic from Ischitella

  Part II: Hohenstaufen Country

  8 “The Wonder of the World”

  9 Castel del Monte

  10 The Emperor’s Faithful Andria

  11 The Land of Manfred

  Part III: The Tavoliere

  12 Foggia and the Tavoliere

  13 The Tavoliere: Lucera, Troia and Cerignola

  14 Life on the Old Tavoliere

  15 Latifondismo

  Part IV: The Adriatic Shore

  16 Cathedral Cities on the Coast

  17 King Ferrante’s Coronation at Barletta, 1459

  18 Trani

  Part V: Bari

  19 The Catapans

  20 Old Bari

  21 Bari, 1647 – Revolution

  22 New Bari

  Part VI: The Murge

  23 The Murge

  24 Cities of the Murge

  25 The Battle of Cannae, 216 BC

  26 Maundy Thursday at Noicattaro

  27 The Masserie

  28 The Via Appia

  29 Horace, the Apulian

  30 Life at Altamura

  Part VII: The Cave Dwellers

  31 The Cave Dwellers

  32 Gravina-in-Puglia

  33 Matera

  Part VIII: Trulli and the Difesa di Malta

  34 Trulli

  35 The Difesa di Malta

  36 The Duel at Ostuni

  37 Brigands

  Part IX: Tàranto and Brìndisi

  38 Classical Tàranto

  39 Two Men from Taras

  40 The Princes of Tàranto

  41 The Travellers’ Tàranto

  42 Brìndisi

  Part X: Lecce and the Baroque

  43 Lecce

  44 Don Cirò, the Bandit Priest

  45 Baroque in the Salento

  46 A Band of Brigands – the Vardarelli

  47 Tarantismo

  Part XI: Greek Apulia

  48 The Byzantine Terra d’Òtranto

  49 The Castle of Òtranto

  50 Manduria

  Part XII: Three Little Courts

  51 Conversano

  52 Martina Franca

  53 Francavilla Fontana

  Part XIII: Risorgimento?

  54 The death of the Regno

  55 The Brigands’ War

  56 “A war of extermination”

  Part XIV: Epilogue

  57 Apulia Today

  Acknowledgements

  Picture Credits

  Further Reading

  Short chronology and Rulers of Apulia

  Historical Gazetteer

  Author Biographies

  DESMOND SEWARD, born in Paris, was educated at Ampleforth and Cambridge. He is the author of many books, including The Monks of War: The Military Religious Orders and The Wars of the Roses. His latest, Wings over the Desert: in Action with an RFC Pilot in Palestine 1916–18, is based on his father’s experiences.

  SUSAN MOUNTGARRET, educated at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, is co-author (with Desmond Seward) of Byzantium: A Journey and Guide. Among the reasons that drew her to Apulia was a wish to study the Byzantine frescoes in its cave churches.

  Foreword: Old Apulia

  It is clear that the God of the Jews did not know Puglia, or He would

  not have given His people Palestine as the Promised Land.

  The Emperor Frederick II

  APULIA (OR PUGLIA) is the heel of Italy, stretching down from the spur of the Italian boot. Its landscape is often very beautiful and it has wonderful old cities with Romanesque cathedrals, Gothic castles and a great wealth of Baroque architecture, together with ‘rupestrian’ churches that contain Byzantine frescoes. But, although far from inaccessible, until quite recently it was seldom visited by English-speaking tourists. Today, however, Apulia is becoming fashionable, “an alternative to Tuscany”. It is featured on radio and television; travel supplements describe its beaches and its cooking, supermarkets stock Apulian wine, oil, bread and pasta. Yet almost nothing about the region has been published in English since the days of Norman Douglas and the Sitwells. And there is no popular introduction to Apulian history, not even in Italian. Our book has been written to fill this gap.

  Both of us believe that to understand the present you must know the past, and this is a portrait of the old Apulia, concentrating on its people, its heroes and its shrines. Whenever possible, we have made a point of using accounts by early travellers, since the landscape has changed surprisingly little. You can still see it with eighteenth or nineteenth century eyes.

  Geographically, in northern Apulia the mountainous Gargano contrasts starkly with the flat Tavoliere, while going south and west the stony plateau of the Alta Murgia, Apulia Petrosa, has little in common with either. On the western border great wheat-fields sweep up to the hills of Basilicata. Much of the ground is limestone karst, the Apulian Platform, through which rain-water seeps down so quickly that there are virtually no streams or lakes. The rest, which a million years ago was under the sea, is mainly soft tufa filled with fossilised shells, and gashed by long ravines (gravine) riddled with caves; many of the ravines are choked by prickly pear, especially in coastal areas. Everywhere the fields are divided by dry-stone walls. There are innumerable orchards; in spring you can drive through mile upon mile of blossom – almond, peach or cherry – while the ground is covered by an almost vulgar profusion of wild flowers. But the most characteristic and most prized tree in Apulia is the olive, that lives for five hundred years (some say for two thousand) and whose silver-green groves cover vast tracts of dark-red Apulian soil.

  The landscape is not only unlike Northern Italy, it is unlike the rest of the Mezzogiorno. There is no resemblance to mountainous Calabria or harsh Basilicata. Much of the soil is extremely fertile, so that there has always been great wealth for those who own the land, while the seaports are ideally placed for trade with the Levant. The people, too, are subtly different from other Southerners, although they are no less secretive and have the same beautiful manners.

  Apulia’s history is one of repeated invasion and conques
t. The first known settlers were the Messapians from the Balkans, followed by the Greeks in about 800 BC, both absorbed and Latinised by the Romans. Goths arrived in the fifth century AD, soon evicted by a Byzantine reconquest, but followed by a further wave of Germans, the Lombards. After this, Saracens laid the region to waste, enslaving its inhabitants and establishing short-lived emirates at Bari and Tàranto. Then came a Byzantine revival, accompanied by Greek re-colonisation.

  The Norman conquest of the eleventh century established a kingdom that endured for seven hundred years. The Regno was medieval Italy’s most feudal state and Apulia possessed its most lordly fiefdoms, with vast estates whose lords dominated the cities. The kingdom was inherited in 1194 by the Hohenstaufen, brutally displaced seventy years later by the Angevins, who reigned until 1442. Then followed the Aragonese kings, dethroned in 1501, after which Southern Italy was governed by Spanish viceroys until 1713, briefly succeeded by Austrians. From 1734 to 1860 the Regno was ruled by a branch of the Bourbons. The Borboni’s reign was interrupted in 1799 by the Neapolitan Republic, and again from 1806–15 by a French occupation under Joseph Bonaparte and Marshal Murat.

  The Risorgimento of 1860 was far from being a “liberation”. During the late nineteenth century new speculator landlords reduced Apulian labourers to near slavery, one in ten emigrating during the decade before 1915 and many others leaving after the Second World War. During modern times, however, life here has been transformed by “the coming of the water”. Formerly in desperately short supply, it came first from the Abruzzi through the Great Aqueduct completed in 1939 and then from wells sunk deep into the tufa after 1945.

  The Apulians have always possessed a genius for survival. They escaped from the Goths and later the Saracens by living in cave-cities, hewing grotto churches out of the rock. In spite of their Norman conquerors’ harsh rule, they amassed so much wealth from exporting oil, wine, almonds and wool to the Levant that they were able to build gleaming white towns above ground, while during the seventeenth century, despite plague and Spanish taxation they created the lovely Baroque city of Lecce. They warded off brigands or corsairs with masserie, fortified farms where entire communities and their flocks could take refuge.

  They have learned, too, how to make an invader’s culture their own, especially the Byzantine and the Norman. In many churches Mass was said in the Greek rite until the seventeenth century and, even if the Greek language is now almost extinct in Apulia, other Italians still regard certain Apulian qualities as Byzantine, whilst Norman cathedrals continue to be the most treasured feature of the Apulian landscape.

  Suffering and privation, from the fire and sword of barbarian invasions to the Risorgimento, have also played a large part in shaping the Apulian character, instilling the endurance and adaptability that has made the economic achievement of the last half century possible.

  In our book we link Apulia’s history to its topography. We know the terrain well and we write from personal experience – besides living in a small Apulian town for several months we have made many visits over the years, systematically tracing the footsteps of early travellers. We would like to share not only our fascination with this beautiful land and its history, but also our admiration for its people.

  1

  Introduction

  The Early Travellers

  In the past, Apulia was largely avoided by sight-seeing travellers. In 1883 Augustus Hare wrote that “the bareness and filth of the inns, the roughness of the natives, the torment of zinzare (mosquitoes), the terror of earthquakes, the insecurity of the roads from brigands, and the far more serious risk of malarial or typhoid fever from bad water, are natural causes which have hitherto frightened strangers away from the south.” None the less, a few came, and some of these recorded their impressions.

  The Abate Giovanni Battista Pacichelli (1641–95), born in Rome though by origin from Pistoia, was an indefatigable traveller who went as far as Ireland. During the 1680s he visited every town in Apulia, however small, describing each with gusto in “Il Regno di Napoli in Prospettiva”, which was not published until 1703. Antiquary, jurist, theologian, hagiographer, letter writer and a member of the Royal Society at London, Pacichelli seems to have been the only priest for whom Norman Douglas ever felt any sympathy. “I like this amiable and loquacious creature, restlessly gad-ding about Europe, gloriously complacent, hopelessly absorbed in trivialities, and credulous beyond belief,” he wrote. No doubt, the Abate’s obvious love of wine was one of the reasons that endeared him.

  For over a century the literary visitors who followed Pacichelli came in search of Roman remains, presumably inspired by Livy’s account of the battle of Cannae or by Horace’s journey to Brìndisi. The first was an Anglo-Irishman, Bishop George Berkeley (1683–1753), then Dean of Derry, later famous for his ‘immaterialist’ philosophy – that matter exists only in so far as it is perceived – which Dr Johnson ridiculed by kicking a stone. He came here in the course of an extended Grand Tour in 1734, when he was companion to the Bishop of Clogher’s son, writing down his impressions of Apulia in terse notes, very different from his usual stately prose. He also sent letters to his friend Sir John Percival, enthusing over Lecce, which he considered the most beautiful city in Italy, amazed to come across such impressive architecture in so remote an area. He says that he has seen in a single day five fine cities built in marble “whereof the names are not known to Englishmen.”

  The next visitor to put pen to paper was an Englishman, Henry Swinburne (1743–1803), the son of Sir John Swinburne of Capheaton in Northumberland. “A little genteel young man”, was how he struck the philanthropist Hannah More: “He is modest and agreeable; not wise and heavy like his books.” This is unfair – even if his “Travels in the Two Sicilies” is strong on facts, it is written with a caustic wit and a keen sense of the ridiculous.

  No other British travellers of this sort visited Apulia during the eighteenth century. The Swiss Baron von Riedesel, who came in 1767, looking for classical remains, was sometimes unintentionally comical – as when he thought trulli were Roman tombs or mistook quarries for ancient baths. Another Swiss, Count Charles Ulysses de Salis Marschalins, who toured the region in 1789 was a friend of Giuseppe Capecelatro, the free-thinking Archbishop of Tàranto. Capecelatro organised de Salis’s tour, providing him with a guide and accompanying him from Naples to Tàranto. The resulting book gives a vivid picture of Pugliese rural life.

  Jean-Claude Richard, Abbé de Saint-Non, who visited Apulia during the 1770s, had not much to say but commissioned a number of famous artists to illustrate his sumptuous “Voyages pittor-esques ou descriptions du Royaume de Naples et de Sicile”, published in 1781–86. The beautiful plates show how comparatively little Apulia has changed. Another Frenchman, the mysterious Paul-Louis Courier, who was afterwards murdered by his game-keeper, was garrisoned at Foggia and Lecce as a gunner officer from 1805–7. Although brief, his letters convey the bloodthirsty mood of the period.

  In the winter of 1816–17 a young Scot rode alone through Apulia, which he later revisited with his friend the Prince of Ischitella, who had estates in the Gargano. Charles Macfarlane is described by the “Dictionary of National Biography” as “a miscellaneous writer”; in 1856 he lamented that “literature no longer affords me the ample income I derived from it during more than quarter of a century” and he died as a Poor Brother of the Charter-house. If clumsily written, Macfarlane’s accounts of shepherds and brigands in “The Lives and Exploits of Banditti and Robbers” (1833) are of considerable interest.

  As a young man, the Hon Richard Keppel Craven settled in Naples, where he was famous for coloured waistcoats and his hospitality at the Palazzo Craven. “A Tour through the Southern Provinces of Italy” recounts his adventures in Apulia in 1818 with ponderous humour. Ten years later the extraordinary Crauford Tait Ramage, tutor to the sons of the British Consul at Naples, walked or rode a mule through the region, travelling along the coast by felucca; he wore a white frock-coat and shoes, an
d carried an umbrella for protection from the sun and rain. His “Nooks and By-ways of Italy” (subtitled “Wanderings in Search of its Ancient Remains and Modern Superstitions”) was not published until 1868, a classic of travel admired by Norman Douglas and Harold Acton. Edward Lear confined himself to the western border during his painting tour of 1848 but his description of Venosa, in “Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria and the Kingdom of Naples” is well worth reading. He also composed a limerick:

  There was an Old Man of Apulia,

  Whose conduct was very peculiar;

  He fed twenty sons

  Upon nothing but buns,

  That whimsical Man of Apulia.

  This appears to be the only English verse inspired by the region.

  “A Handbook for Travellers in Southern Italy being a guide to the continental portion of the Two Sicilies” appeared in 1853. Not very much is known about the author, Octavian Blewitt, save that for many years he was Secretary to the Royal Literary Fund (the charity for indigent writers) and catalogued its archives. He spent the 1830s wandering through Greece, the Levant, and Italy, often returning to the Mezzogiorno, and certainly knew his history besides having a good eye for topography. Published by John Murray, his pioneering study went into many editions, being heavily plagiarised by Augustus Hare.

  That odd figure Charles Yriarte went to the Capitanata with the Piedmontese army in 1861, going on to Lecce and Òtranto fifteen years later. A journalist and painter, he was inspector of France’s lunatic asylums and then of the Paris Opera while contributing articles to the Press under such pseudonyms as “Marquis de Villemer”, illustrating the Monde Illustrée, and writing a life of Cesare Borgia. From “Les Bords de I’Adriatique et de Montenegro” (1878) he obviously liked the Pugliesi.