An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia

by Seward, Desmond

  As soon as the French occupation began in 1806, not only were many more monasteries dissolved, but the Dogana delle Pecore and the Apulian System were abolished, causing considerable hardship on the Tavoliere. The nomadic shepherds from the Abruzzi and Basilicata suffered most, since they had nowhere else to take their sheep in winter. Many became brigands. However, the Dogana delle Pecore and pasturage rights returned in 1817 after the restoration of the Borbone monarchy.

  Terrible misery would ensue in the wake of the Risorgimento, when the new regime sold off the Regno’s crownlands and the lands of the Church, United Italy’s attitude being essentially that of an asset-stripper. The Apulian System came to an abrupt end in 1865, with the auction of vast areas of the Tavoliere. Since by now this included not just the Capitanata but parts of the Terra di Bari and the Terra d’Òtranto, the sales had a disastrous impact on the lives of countless Apulian labourers and their families.

  15

  Latifondismo

  No words descriptive of wretchedness can portray the utter deprivation

  of the peasantry in these southern provinces, or the way in which large

  families are huddled together, with their pigs and fowls, eternally

  unwashed and covered with vermin, to which in time they become

  impervious, like the beasts themselves.

  Augustus Hare, “Cities of Southern Italy and Sicily”

  THE PEASANTS OF THE TAVOLIERE became victims of latifondismo (land ownership), a term derived from the Latin word for the vast estates of Roman times that had been worked by slaves. Even if the Tavoliere men’s life on the former estates of the crown and the church or on the sheep runs had been wretched enough, it is no exaggeration to say that now they were reduced to slavery.

  The introduction of free trade resulted in the collapse of Southern Italy’s factories and textile mills. Overnight, land became the only safe investment. Anyone who had any money or could borrow it rushed to buy when the confiscated estates were sold off, changing the Tavoliere out of recognition. For the first time in centuries it went under the plough, huge latifondi (estates) being created. The province of Foggia became known as ‘The Apulian Texas’. No attempt was made to form a new class of peasant proprietors, the buyers ranging from finance companies to tradesmen, many from Northern Italy. The enormous new farms were let on very short leases, run by massari whose sole concern was to make money as fast as possible, without worrying about the soil, let alone the workers. Grain yields were miserably low, wine of the poorest quality. Because the buyers had exhausted their credit, there was no capital for development, the purchase money going north. Far from “liberating” Apulia, as often claimed, the Risorgimento reduced much of it to semi-colonial status, especially the Tavoliere.

  Augustus Hare, not the most compassionate of men, was horrified by what he saw. “Much of the misery is due to the immense size of the great farms (latifondi), which are worked by gangs under an overseer, and to the absenteeism of landlords... Their vast do-mains are managed by fattori [farmers] or rented by mercanti di campagna [merchants of the campaign], the sole intermediaries between the proprietors and the peasantry, of whom they are often as much the cruel oppressors as the slave owners in South America.”

  Most Tavoliere labourers worked as diggers, zappatori, boys as young as eight spreading fertiliser or killing mice. Hired by the day, before dawn they lined up in the local town’s main piazza (city square), hoping to be hired by the massaro’s overseer, many of whom demanded a bribe to take them on. They then walked as far as twelve kilometres, to work from dawn to dusk, after which they walked back; at harvest time they slept in the fields or in dirty sheds. Their food was bread and pasta, broad beans, a little oil and plants picked on the way to work, vegetable plots having vanished with the common land; meat was eaten only at Easter and Christmas. It was a way of life that broke a man by the time he was fifty, when he became unfit for work in the fields. There was no poor relief, the system operated by the Church having disappeared with the monasteries.

  There was competition for even this miserable employment, however, from migrant workers like those seen at Foggia by Charles Yriarte in 1876:

  You would have thought the city’s entire population sleeps under the stars, when we walked through interminable rows of sleepers wrapped in cloaks on pavements turned into dormitories... Natives told us that these unwanted lazzaroni [homeless] had been camping on them for three days; they were all peasants from the Abruzzi, come for the harvest... I was able to watch them at my leisure, and they were thin and haggard if well built, dark-skinned; many shook with fever and had a greenish hue; their only belongings consisted of a small bag and a big, worn-down sickle with a very thin blade. All day long they wandered listlessly through the streets, their eyes lack-lustre and expressionless.

  A small class of skilled workers, the annaroli, consisting of ploughmen, vine-dressers, shepherds and carters, were recruited from outside the Tavoliere, so that they would have no kinsmen or friends in the labour gangs, and hired annually instead of daily. They had good pay – an ordinary labourer’s wage could not even buy the bare necessities of life – and vegetable plots. From their ranks were recruited the overseers and estate guards, who were mounted, armed with rifles, cudgels and whips, and accompanied by notoriously vicious dogs.

  When American wheat began to be imported in large quantities in the late 1870s, many landowners went over to vines. Minute plots were let on twenty-five year leases to day-labourers, who somehow found the money to buy them and time to plant and dress vines – the owner’s overseer making sure the conversion was done the way his master wanted. When the lease expired, the land reverted to the owner, turned into a thriving vineyard at no cost to himself. He then had it worked by day-labourers, whose conditions were only marginally better than in the wheat-fields.

  A sub-human existence as a day-labourer was the sole occupation open to four out of five Tavoliere men. Not all accepted it tamely. Overseers and estate-guards were knifed as they slept or had their faces slashed with cut-throat razors, many never daring to go out of doors without a revolver. The fortified masserie (fortified farms, see chapter 27) were occasionally attacked, the occupants being murdered and the buildings going up in flames. Some labourers became brigands, fighting battles with the carabinieri especially peasants known as ‘ciccivuzzi’ who had lost their land because of enclosures.

  Cerignola at the end of the nineteenth century has been called ‘the company town’. Behind the corso (main street) on which stood the land-owners palazzi were the worst slums in Apulia. The streets were muddy paths that doubled as sewers, giving off a sickening stench, the houses hovels with ten people in a single, filthy, windowless room, often underground. Here lived the labourers who formed the bulk of the city’s population, paying exorbitant rents. From December to March, when there was no work, they stayed in bed, the only furniture. Diseases such as malaria, trachoma, syphilis and leprosy flourished. The death rate was the highest in Apulia, the chief causes in 1905 being cholera, enteritis and bronchitis, though tuberculosis took its toll. Starvation was the tenth commonest cause of mortality.

  Most of the new landowners were ex-tradesmen, the old Apulian nobles making way for people with titles purchased from the House of Savoy or the Pope. Frank Snowden (in “Violence and Great Estates in Southern Italy”) writes, “as parvenu nobility with freshly acquired titles, the Apulian proprietors assumed the grand manner. On the rare inspection tours that owners made of their property, for instance, they insisted that the labourers should bow and kiss their hands.” To such men their workers were “wild unwashed people who lived underground with their animals, and spoke an impenetrable dialect. The workers believed in magic and committed savage crimes.”

  The men in the labour gangs saw the new landlords as thieves who had stolen the common lands where they once grew vegetables and kept a pig or a goat. Enclosures had begun during the French occupation, continuing a little under the restored monarchy,
but accelerated drastically under the Risorgimento. By 1898 only 6,000 acres remained. “They cannot accept the thought of having been robbed for ever of fields they regard as part of their very being,” a journalist observed: “Again and again they revisit them, like some Irish farmer’s children brooding over the cabin with a long dead fire from which the family has been evicted.”

  After decades of bad farming, by 1900 the Tavoliere was producing less and less wheat, a crop fetching lower prices every year. Vineyards were destroyed by phylloxera; what wine was made faced a French tariff war. Employment was harder to find and at Cerignola starving men fell dead in the streets. All over Apulia rioters shouted for work, bread and a guaranteed wage at the start of the day. The first strike took place at Foggia in 1901 and ‘peas-ants leagues’ (unions) were founded. Their members, who called themselves “syndicalists”, demanded the replacement of landlords by workers’ co-operatives. In their few free moments, they tried to look like borghesi, wearing tattered frock-coats and battered bowlers instead of the old Apulian folkdress. Yet it was almost impossible for them to air their grievances in the parliament at Rome. Men were given the vote only if they had served in the army or could read and write; most Apulians were too undernourished to be accepted for military service or were illiterate. In any case, the ruling Liberal party was hand in glove with the latifondisti.

  Even so, emigration was reducing the supply of cheap labour. “The roles are now reversed, and while landlords are impoverished, the rich emigrant buys up the farms or makes his own terms for work to be done, wages being trebled” Norman Douglas wrote with considerable exaggeration. Besides emigration, another escape from life on the Tavoliere was work on building the new Apulian aqueduct, which began in 1906, although contractors paid starvation wages. To some extent, the effects of emigration and the aqueduct were offset by labourers from the Abruzzi and Basilicata.

  The new unions’ demands meant bankruptcy for the latifondisti. They fought back, breaking strikes with hired thugs and calling in troops, 2,000 of whom were needed to crush a rising at Cerignola. They welcomed the outbreak of war in 1915; wheat prices rose dramatically, there were government contracts and subsidies, and it forced into the fields women who could be paid less than men. When Italy was nearly defeated in 1917, they staved off revolution by promising to share out the latifondi and restore common rights as soon as the War was over.

  The landowners went back on their word in 1918. But Apulian soldiers came home hoping for a Russian-style revolution. Very soon, bands armed with scythes and mattocks were terrorising the Tavoliere, and many other rural areas as well, slaughtering live-stock, burning masserie and lynching overseers. All workers demanded impossibly high wages.

  In 1920, labourers from Cerignola occupied the land of a young ex-army officer, Giuseppe Cardona, burning his grain and smashing his wine vats. In response he set up a Fascist cell, recruiting veterans from the trenches. Union activists were beaten up, forced to drink quarts of castor oil or chained naked to trees while their offices were burned down. The authorities openly supported Cardona and by 1922 he controlled all the provice of Foggia. The unions had been broken. Overseers on the Tavoliere now wore black-shirts and the latifondi would survive until Mussolini’s land reforms of the later 1920s and the 1930s.

  Part IV

  The Adriatic Shore

  16

  Cathedral Cities on the Coast

  English travellers nearly always play at follow the leader,

  and there are probably not two hundred living who have

  explored the characteristic cathedrals of Apulia.

  Augustus Hare, “Cities of Southern Italy and Sicily”

  ONE OF THE REASONS for Apulia’s fascination is the fact that its landscape has changed so little. Despite motorways and container lorries, despite light industry and high-rise flats, in the old city centres and on the roads between the cities, often you can still see the same buildings – generally in a much better state of repair – and the same countryside that the early travellers saw. Sadly this is no longer true when you are following the shore of the Adriatic southward. The coast and the hinterland from Barletta down to Bari have one of the most remarkable concentrations of medieval architecture in Europe – cathedrals and churches built in a distinctive style known as Apulian Romanesque, combining the Norman Romanesque of Jumièges and the Burgundian Romanesque of Vézélay, with Byzantine and even Arab elements – but the countryside, particularly between Barletta and Trani, has been covered with factories and stone-yards.

  Before the Norman conquest, the coastal towns of Apulia were merchant communes trading very profitably with the Byzantine Empire and Egypt. Later they prospered spectacularly during the Crusades, as the ports from which pilgrims, soldiers and supplies could most quickly reach the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. How-ever, the Black Death caused a crippling fall in their populations, while political instability put them in the hands of feudal overlords; there were also attempts to absorb them into the Venetian empire that lasted until the sixteenth century. The long regime of the Spanish viceroys was a period of stagnation and decline, eventually brought to an end by the re-emergence of an independent Southern Italy under the Borbone monarchy in the first half of the eighteenth century.

  Going south through the Terra di Bari, the first of these beautiful little cities is Barletta. It became important under the Normans, who gave it a castle and a cathedral. In the seventeenth century Pacichelli described it as “one of those fine cities of the realm which may truly be called royal.” Swinburne, who came a hundred years later, gave it qualified if scarcely less flattering praise. “Barletta has, from without, a ruinous aspect; its walls tumbling down, and its ditches filled with rubbish. But the inside of the city is magnificently built, though thinly peopled. It conveys the idea of the capital of some mighty state reduced to the condition of a conquered province, or depopulated by a raging pestilence... the port is at present a mere labyrinth, consisting of several irregular piers, where ships are moored; but without any shelter from the north wind which sweeps the whole bason [sic]”. He gives a typically Pugliese explanation for Barletta’s origin – it had begun “as no more than a tower or drinking house, on the road to Cannae, which had for its sign a barrel, ‘barilletta’. ” In 1805 Major Courier found that although it was a port, fish was unobtainable because its fishermen never put to sea, frightened of being kidnapped by North African slavers.

  After the Risorgimento, Barletta went into a decline and in 1883 Augustus Hare saw “filthy streets” and “innumerable beggars.” Six years later, Janet Ross wrote of “another milk-white town whose dirty streets do not correspond to one’s first impression of gaiety and brightness.” She was very upset by her cabman, who “insisted on taking us to the church of the ‘Teatini’ to see ‘bella roba’ (beautiful things), which turned out to be horrible mummified bodies in the crypt.” Even so, Hare admired the cathedral, part Romanesque and part Gothic. “Marvellous marble monsters adorn its doors,” he tells us, noting its noble campanile and twelfth century west front, and the pierced marble windows which he thought “quite Saracenic”. The sinister King Ferrante was crowned here in 1459.

  The city has another superb medieval church, San Sepolcro, built by the Templars during the thirteenth century, where Crusaders kept vigil on the night before they sailed to the Holy Land. It houses a relic of the True Cross that locals credit with many miracles. Around the reliquary hangs a gold chain and a gold medal with a Maltese cross in enamel; both church and relic had been acquired by the Knights of Malta, whose prior gave the medal he wore round his neck to serve as an adornment in 1759, in thanksgiving for a miracle. Pacichelli says that the Knights’ Priory at Barletta was particularly opulent and luxurious.

  Outside San Sepolcro stands a bronze statue sixteen feet tall, a Roman centurion holding an orb and a cross. Probably the Emperor Valentinian (364–75), it was once thought to be Heraclius, which is why it is known locally as ‘Are’. Once considered to have been
looted at the sack of Constantinople in 1204, and ship-wrecked here on its way to Venice, recent forensic research has proved it was never immersed in sea water. It is now thought to have been sent from Ravenna by Frederick II to be set up at Melfi but arrived after his death in 1250 and remained in Barletta. The hands and feet of the statue were barbarously chopped off, to be recast as bells for a friary in Manfredonia, but were replaced by new ones in 1494.

  The castle of Barletta was a favourite residence of King Manfred, who roamed the streets at night, dressed in green and singing to a lute. After holding his coronation banquet here in 1459, Ferrante made it one of the strongest fortresses in Italy. Fearful of Turkish invasion, Emperor Charles V made it even stronger, siting huge rectangular bastions packed with earth at each corner; the gun-turrets inside, with vents for smoke to escape, anticipate those of a dreadnought battleship. There are huge guardrooms, halls, store rooms, cellars and an unusually deep moat. When attacked by Suleiman the Magnificent’s fleet in 1537 the castle proved to be impregnable, and it was still able to stand up to shelling by the Austro-Hungarian battleship Helgoland during the First World War.