An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia

by Seward, Desmond

  This mysterious friar is more like some figure from the Middle Ages than a man who died only in 1968, and many people alive today owe Padre Pio their physical or mental well-being, and some-times both. With St Michael, he has become part of the Gargano.

  6

  The Gargano Coast and the Tremiti

  Behold me again launched on a small sailing

  boat on the waters of the Adriatic.

  Crauford Tait Ramage, “The Nooks and By-ways of Italy”

  ALTHOUGH EVEN TODAY the Gargano remains secret and mysterious inland, it has become a very different story on the coast, where in summer the lonely beaches and the little fishing towns of former times are now overrun by tourists. Yet these places too are often very ancient, most of them with colourful and dramatic histories. If possible, it is best to explore them from a boat, as Crauford Tait Ramage did in 1828.

  Manfredonia lies at the foot of Monte Sant’ Angelo and is the most important port in the Gargano. It was founded by King Manfred in 1260 to replace nearby Siponto, destroyed a few years before by earthquakes and malaria. After consulting famous astrologers specially imported from Sicily and Milan to advise him when and where he should lay the foundation stone, according to the Abate Pacichelli the Hohenstaufen king “provided for it most nobly, with walls, towers and a castle, and also a jetty that could accommodate any number of big ships.” It was said that Manfred had such enormous quantities of stone, sand, lime and timber brought to the site that every ox and mule in Apulia was in a state of collapse.

  Significantly, despite King Manfred having been overthrown and killed by the Angevins, who were always infuriated by any reference to their Hohenstaufen predecessors, the city has kept the name he gave it. Manfred remains one of Apulia’s great heroes, even if he only became king of the Regno by pretending that the real heir to the throne, his half-brother’s infant son Conradin, had died in Germany.

  The Turks captured Manfredonia in 1620, razing two thirds of the city to the ground. Although Manfred’s castle survived and a new cathedral was built in 1680, the city has never really recovered. Most of the travellers found it a dismal little place. In 1818 Keppel Craven was surprised to learn that its women were obsessively house-proud: “I was informed by the commandant... that they every morning made up their beds with a pair of fine sheets, which again being removed at night, were never destined to be slept in.” Ramage thought Manfredonia “not unlike the ‘lang toun of Kircaldy’, the main thoroughfare being a long and wide street from one gate to the other.” He says the inhabitants had a pale, unhealthy appearance, due to malaria.

  Janet Ross met a fine old innkeeper here. “He held up the lamp to my face, then put it down, slapped me on the shoulder and said ‘Tu mi piace’ (Thou pleasest me). When Signor Cacciavillani asked him to prepare his famous fish soup, he rushed off to give the order, and waited upon us himself at dinner, producing a bottle of good old wine.” He insisted on her drinking from a silver mug, and presented an absurdly small bill. Such an establishment was untypical. Twenty years later, Sir George Sitwell was bitten by fleas eighty times on one arm between wrist and elbow during a single night at a Manfredonia inn.

  Edward Hutton’s experiences in 1914 at “the miserable house in the main street which did duty for an inn” help to explain why there were so few foreign visitors. He describes the hostess as “something between Mrs. Gamp and Juliet’s nurse... so dirty that it was horrible to go near her.” When he decided to eat out, he declared “It would be impossible to find in a Tuscan village a place so wretched as the restaurant in Manfredonia... full of flies, even at night, even in the spring; chairs, tables, plates, glasses, forks, and spoons, all were filthy, and we could scarcely eat anything that it could provide: even the omelette was rancid because of bad oil.”

  Once, nearby Siponto was the port serving the ancient city of Arpi, and the last safe anchorage before the dangerous waters of the Gargano coast. Hannibal captured it, while the Romans settled a colony of veterans here. King Manfred tore down what was left after a terrible earthquake, using the stone for Manfredonia. “The sea has retired from its old beach and half-wild cattle browse on the site of those lordly quays and palaces,” wrote Norman Douglas. “Not a stone is left. Malaria and desolation reign supreme.” Since then malaria has been eradicated, and there is now a holiday resort, the Lido di Siponto. One of the two buildings to escape Manfred’s demolition, the cathedral of Santa Maria Maggiore, standing forlornly next to the Foggia road, has an air of deep melancholy amid its pine trees. Built over a fifth century church – although Byzantine in proportion and feeling, especially the crypt with columns in the form of a Greek cross – it is nonetheless a Romanesque basilica from the eleventh century. The interior has been restored and tidied; all the votive offerings seen by Augustus Hare went long ago, “women’s hair, ball-dresses, and even a wedding-dress, which must have a strange story.” Yet you can still see what he meant when he said the interior had “the effect of a mosque.”

  The other survival from medieval Siponto is the beautiful Romanesque church of San Leonardo, also on the main road to Foggia, with Byzantine vine-leaves on its capitals. It was part of the abbey of San Leonardo, given by King Manfred to the Teutonic Knights. Ferocious warrior-monks, always of German blood, their order was modelled on the Templars and founded in Palestine during the Crusades. So rich were the fourteen Apulian commanderies the Hohenstaufen gave the Deutschritter (command) that the revenues enabled them to wage their own Crusade on the Baltic, exterminating the heathen Old Prussians and setting up an independent state. The Iron Cross was modelled on the cross they wore on their white cloaks.

  In an area that suffered constantly from raids by North African or Turkish corsairs, there were few ports on the actual coast of the Gargano, notably Rodi, Peschici and Vieste on the north east. Rodi is the most ancient. Cretan in origin, by the eighth century BC it belonged to Rhodes, from where it takes its name. A maze of steep, narrow streets and glaring white, flat-roofed houses, Rodi’s greatest attraction lies in the light and the intense blue of the sea at its feet.

  Flanked by handsome Aleppo pines, the road from Rodi to Peschici runs beside a long sandy beach, with orange and lemon groves inland, as Pacichelli observed. Life has always been easier here than in the rest of the Gargano, probably than in most of Apulia. A tiny walled town on a cliff, Peschici was founded by Slavs in the tenth century but, apart from being saved by St Elias from a plague of locusts, has little history.

  Ramage visited the “miserable village” of Vieste by boat, and describes it as “standing on a kind of peninsula, and washed on three sides by the waters of the Adriatic.” It must have changed a good deal since 1828. Although catering increasingly for tourists, the medieval town on its rocky headland is charming, with a Romanesque cathedral and a Hohenstaufen castle. Near the cathedral is the chianca, a stone on which the corsair Dragut had several thou-sand of the inhabitants slaughtered in 1554 before dragging the rest off to slavery.

  From the Gargano southwards along the Apulian coast, and along the coastline of the entire Regno at intervals of a mile stand squat, square forts which were designed to guard against raids of this sort, and are still called ‘Saracen Towers’. Although some of them date from the fifteenth century, most were built in a programme begun in the sixteenth by the Spanish viceroy Don Pedro de Toledo. Machiolated and crenellated, proof against naval gunnery, they offered shelter to anyone in the area, communicating by smoke-signals – when an enemy sail was sighted as far off as Sicily, the authorities at Naples knew within ten minutes.

  In classical times the Tremiti Islands, 22 kilometres off the Gargano coast, were named the Diomedean Isles, after one of Homer’s heroes, “Diomedes of the Great War Cry”, who took eighty black warships to the siege of Troy. Shipwrecked on the coast of Daunia – northern Apulia – he became King of the Daunians. When he died, his companions mourned him so deeply that Zeus changed them into sea-birds – during the sixteenth century local monks told the Duke
of Urbino that the birds, apparently great shear-waters, could often be heard talking among themselves. Augustus Caesar confined his granddaughter Julia here because of her notorious promiscuity. When friends tried to intercede for Julia’s mother, who was in prison for the same reason, the angry Emperor shouted at them, “May your own daughters be as lecherous and your wives as adulterous!”

  According to legend, a church was founded on the largest of the three Tremiti islands, San Nicola, when Diomedes’s crown was discovered there in the fourth century after a vision of the Blessed Virgin. Benedictine monks were certainly on the island from the eighth, building the abbey “just like Monte Cassino rising from the sea.” Later it passed to Augustinian canons. Since Pacichelli was an Augustinian, he sailed over from the mainland to inspect the abbey. He says that it was heavily fortified, with a garrison of a hundred soldiers under six officers. He tells us too that the famous human birds looked like starlings and, always a gourmet, adds that they were “excellent, boiled or fried.”

  The canons left in the eighteenth century, when the monastery became a prison. During the Fascist Era Mussolini used the Tremiti as a place of confinement for political opponents. It is hard to believe that somewhere so beautiful should hold such cruel memories.

  7

  The Heretic from Ischitella

  Giannone... so celebrated for his useful history of Naples.

  Voltaire, “Age of Louis XIV”

  THE GARGANO has produced heretics as well as saints and holy men. The most famous is Pietro Giannone, author of a book read by many of the eighteenth century travellers to Apulia.

  If you turn inland from Rodi and drive a short way up through the orange and lemon groves, you come to Ischitella, a tiny, very pretty hill-town, which has a wonderful view out to sea. After a wistful reference to “the exquisite eels” of Lake Varano nearby, the indefatigable Abate Pacichelli says “it is on a delightful hill looking over the Adriatic, with a sweet climate”, but he does not tell us very much else about the town except that it is a principality belonging to the Pinto y Mendoza family. Their palace still stands in the main piazza, a crenellated seventeenth century palazzo (a grand urban residence) with a medieval castle for its nucleus.

  The only other traveller known to have come here is the young Charles Macfarlane during the 1820s, as a guest of Don Francesco Pinto y Mendoza, Prince of Ischitella. He says the town was on “the edge of a forest, which for extent and wilderness, and the sublime height of its trees, I have never seen surpassed.” Although the prince had begun his career fighting for Napoleon, he later became a Borbone general and King Ferdinand II’s minister of war. At that time, however, he was distrusted by the court and spent his time improving his estates, building roads and digging much needed wells. He showed his guest another of his great houses, the “half-ruined baronial castle” at Peschici, where Macfarlane met a pardoned brigand in the prince’s service, who told him nightmarish stories of bandit life in Borbone Apulia.

  The son of a poor chemist, Pietro Giannone was born in Ischitella in 1676, just before Pacichelli’s visit. At sixteen he went to Naples to read law at the university, but kept his links with his birthplace, dedicating a book to the then Prince of Ischitella. In 1723, after twenty years research, he published his sensational “Storia Civile del Regno di Napoli”, portraying Neapolitan history as a struggle down the centuries between the civil authorities and the Catholic Church, attacking the Inquisition and the ecclesiastical courts, together with the clergy’s corruption and greed. He claimed that the Roman Church had destroyed the kingdom’s freedom.

  The Church reacted furiously, placing the “Storia Civile” on the Index of Forbidden Books. The author was excommunicated by the Archbishop of Naples, hooted in the streets and nearly lynched. Since the Austrians, who then ruled Southern Italy, were far from displeased, he took refuge in Vienna where he was given a pension; here he wrote “Il Triregno”, attacking the Papacy even more fiercely. When the Austrians were driven out of Naples and the Borbone monarchy was established in 1734, he lost his pension and moved to Venice, but was expelled within a year. He wandered through Northern Italy under an assumed name, eventually settling in Calvinist Geneva. However, crossing the border into Piedmont in 1736 to visit friends, he was arrested.

  Giannone spent the rest of his life in Piedmontese prisons, dying in the citadel at Turin. Although his gaolers allowed him books, pens and paper, even letting him write an autobiography, they forced him to sign a recantation of everything in his books critical of the Catholic Church – he seems to have been threatened with torture.

  Europe’s intellectuals understandably hailed Giannone as a martyr. His “Storia Civile” was translated into English, French and German, consulted by Edward Gibbon when writing “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, and read by travellers who wanted to find out what had happened in Southern Italy after the barbarian invasion. Nowadays his criticisms of the Church have lost their relevance, but his history remains gripping stuff, especially its lurid accounts of the Mezzogiorno in medieval times – of the murder of Queen Giovanna I, of the private lives of King Ladislao and Giovanna II (“two monsters of lust and filthiness”), and of King Ferrante’s dreadful banquet for his rebellious barons. The book helps to explain a good deal about Apulia during the earlier centuries.

  Life imprisonment, with no hope of release, must have been particularly miserable for a man with so active a mind and such racy humour. He says in his autobiography that he is writing “to assuage in some degree the boredom and tedium.” On his deathbed at Turin in 1748, poor Giannone must surely have remembered the orange and lemon groves above the blue Adriatic at Ischitella in the Gargano.

  Part II

  Hohenstaufen Country

  8

  “The Wonder of the World”

  There has risen from the sea a beast full of blasphemy, that, formed with

  the feet of a bear, the mouth of a raging lion and, as it were, a panther in

  its other limbs, opens its mouth in blasphemies against God’s name...

  this beast is Frederick, the so-called Emperor.

  Pope Gregory IX

  GOING DOWN FROM THE GARGANO into the Southern Capitanata and the flat Tavoliere that stretches as far as Foggia, you enter the region most closely associated with the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II (1194–1250).

  He captured the imagination of the thirteenth century English chronicler Matthew Paris, who called him “Frederick, greatest of earthly princes, the wonder of the world”, and he continues to fascinate. Not even Adolf Hitler was immune to his spell. Among the travellers, he appealed to Norman Douglas in particular, as a “colossal shade”. For Apulians, “Our Emperor, Federico di Svevia” is beyond question a Pugliese, by choice if not birth, and there is nobody they admire more. They remember Hannibal from his elephants and Bohemond from his tomb at Canosa, but Frederick made his home among them.

  What did he look like, this great Apulian, who terrified both friends and enemies? All Western chroniclers, even the most hos-tile, agree that Frederick was handsome and impressive. The face on his gold coins shows a fine profile. Yet an Arab who saw him says he was covered with red hair, bald and myopic, and would have fetched a poor price in a slave market.

  His father, Emperor Henry VI, became King of Sicily and ruler of Apulia by right of his wife, Constance of Hauteville, burning his opponents alive on the day after his coronation, blinding and castrating a seven year old rival for the throne. At Henry’s death in 1197 the child Frederick was crowned king. His mother died shortly after, placing her son under the Pope’s protection, and he grew up in Palermo, so neglected that he begged for food in the streets. He made Arab friends there, from whom he learned Arabic and an interest in science, while from his Greek subjects he discovered how the Byzantines saw their own emperor as God’s representative on earth. His first wife, the Count of Provence’s sister, taught him the polished manners of the Provençal court, so that he became famous for his charm.<
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  The ‘Puer Apuliae’ (Boy from Apulia) as he was nicknamed, spent his early manhood in Germany, winning all hearts and vanquishing a competitor for the German throne. When crowned King of the Romans at Aix-la-Chapelle he proclaimed a Crusade – something he would live to regret – before returning to Italy in 1220. As he expressed it, “We have chosen our kingdom of Sicily for our very own from among all our other lands, and taken the whole realm for our residence, and although radiant with the glorious title of Caesar, we feel there is nothing ignoble in being called ‘a man from Apulia’.” He always came back to the plains and marshes of the Tavoliere, the uplands of the Murge and the forests of Monte Vulture.

  The chronicler Villani, writing half a century later, tells us Frederick “built strong, rich fortresses in all the chief cities of Sicily and Apulia that still remain; and he made a park for sport in the marsh at Foggia in Apulia, and hunting parks near Gravina and near Melfi in the mountains. In winter he lived at Foggia, in summer in the mountains, to enjoy the sport.” One of the reasons the Emperor loved Apulia was the opportunity it gave for hunting and hawking. In those days much of the landscape was covered by dense wood-land, containing wolves, wild boar, deer and game birds – he him-self introduced pheasants – whilst the marshes were full of wild fowl.

  Years after, one of Frederick’s sons, King Enzo of Sardinia, by then a prisoner in a cage at Bologna, sang in his canzonetta (a popular secular song): “e vanne in Puglia piana – la magna Capitanata/la dov’è lo mio core notte e dia” (“go to flat Apulia, to the great Capitanata, where my heart is, night and day”). Enzo was remembering days spent hunting with his father.