An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia

by Seward, Desmond

  In the Piazza della Disfida is the gloomy Cantina della Disfida, the ground floor of a medieval palace turned into a tavern. This was where the Italians met on 13 February, 1503 before going off to fight in the Disfida (Challenge) of Barletta. During the war between France and Spain over who should rule the Two Sicilies, when the Italo-Spanish army under General Gonsalvo de Cordoba was besieged in the city, a French captain, Guy de la Motte was taken prisoner in a sortie. He told his captors scornfully that Italians would never face Frenchmen in open combat. Gonsalvo gave the boast wide circulation, after which thirteen Italian men-at-arms, led by Ettore Fieramosca, met thirteen French men-at-arms led by de la Motte in an olive grove between Barletta and Andria. They had agreed that the vanquished should forfeit horse and armour, besides paying a hundred gold ducats in ransom. Watched by a huge crowd, after six hours they had fought each other to a standstill, the ground being dyed red with blood and littered with broken lances and discarded armour. The sixteenth century historian Guicciardini, who had spoken to eyewitnesses, says the spectators watched in “a wonderful silence.” The Italians finally won, killing one of the Frenchmen, which made the others limp off. “It was almost unbelievable how their victory discouraged the French army and put new heart into the Spaniards”, comments Guicciardini.

  While travelling from Barletta to Trani, Swinburne noticed the huts in nearly every field, built with stones picked out of the soil when digging. “These conical towers serve as watch houses for the persons that attend before vintage, to prevent the depredations of quadruped and biped pilferers; when old and overgrown with climbing weeds and fig-trees, they become very romantic objects, and appear like so many ancient mausolea. The shape of these piles of rude stones, covered with moss and brambles, has deceived a writer of travels [Riedesel] into a belief of their being Roman tombs.” Octavian Blewitt tells us that in his day the hut roofs were used to dry figs, “which are arranged on a ledge on the outside, winding round the buildings to the summit.” Sadly on this stretch of the road they are no longer visible, hidden by shoe factories and stone-yards, although many remain elsewhere.

  Many of the travellers found Trani so interesting, and had so much to say about it, that we have given this elegant city, which lies next along the coast, a chapter to itself.

  Bisceglie’s medieval streets lead down to a port below the castle. The cathedral is a fine piece of Apulian Romanesque, a basilica with three aisles and a splendid thirteenth century façade. Alfonso d’Aragona, a bastard son of Alfonso II of Naples, was created Duke of Bisceglie and in 1498 married Lucrezia Borgia; despite being a most amiable young man, he fell foul of his brother-in-law, Cesare, who had him garrotted. The Abate Pacichelli called Bisceglie “a joyful city”, writing of “a handsome theatre for staging comedies and tragedies in turn, which has not its like in the realm.”

  Molfetta, on the other hand, in the eyes of the travellers, lacked charm although impressive from a distance. Count de Salis visited it with Archbishop Capecelatro of Tàranto. While admiring its past glories as one of the most important trading ports in Apulia, he found it “filthy, ugly and badly built.” It is full of unhappy memories; in 1902, for example, thousands of starving men and women besieged the municipality and the carabinieri’s (national military police) barracks, then looted the flour mills. To some ex-tent the city is redeemed by the duomo vecchio, the former cathedral, begun in 1150 and as much Byzantine as Romanesque, whose twin white towers dominate the harbour.

  In the eighteenth century travel by land between these cities was not always easy. According to de Salis, the road between Molfetta and Giovinazzo, the next port, was “the worst I have every traversed in my whole life, so cluttered up with stones, that the mules were obliged to leap like goats, from one heap to the next; so that at a certain point we were obliged to leave the carriage and make our way on foot.”

  At Giovinazzo, once known as Iuvenis Netium by the Romans, a forgotten mosaic floor from the early Middle Ages slowly emerged before the cathedral’s high altar during a recent restoration. “The view of the sea and the symmetry of its architecture, including that of its suburbs, make it delicious” was Pacichelli’s flattering opinion of Giovinazzo, whose enthusiasm may have been prompted by admiration for its feudal lord, the Duke Giudice, “noble from the dignity of the purple and splendour of the toga, and from sagacity.”

  Keppel Craven ate an excellent dinner at Giovinazzo, washed down with a good local red wine. Afterwards he took a stroll, before retiring to a bed at the inn spread with clean linen, entering “possession of it with the prospect of a comfortable night’s rest. But in this I greatly erred; for the bed and all its alluring appendages contained ‘that within which passeth outward show’, a most numerous and lively population.” At the end of the nineteenth century, however, Janet Ross did not need to worry so much about bed bugs, although at least one Apulian inn-keeper mistook her travelling bath for “some novel musical instrument.”

  17

  King Ferrante’s Coronation at Barletta, 1459

  Whether it was his blood or the plots formed against his life by the

  barons which embittered and darkened his nature, it is certain that he

  was equalled in ferocity by none among the princes of his time.

  Jacob Burckhkardt, “The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy”

  AS WELL AS the Emperor Frederick and King Manfred another royal ghost haunts this landscape, even if no Pugliese would ever wish to call King Ferrante an Apulian. “Besides hunting,” says Burckhardt, “his pleasures were of two kinds: he liked to have his opponents near him, either alive in well-guarded prisons, or dead and embalmed, dressed in the costume they wore in their lifetime. He would chuckle in talking of the captives with his friends, and made no secret whatever of the museum of mummies.” He is also credited with feeding prisoners to a pet crocodile, which he kept in a dungeon.

  Ferrante’s coronation as King of mainland ‘Sicily’ (Naples) took place in the cathedral at Barletta on 4 February, 1459. In the know-ledge that everyone present was aware of his illegitimacy and being challenged for the crown by a rival, he made heralds throw silver coins into the crowd with an inscription stating that his cause was just; they had been minted out of reliquaries stolen from Monte Sant’ Angelo. A coronation banquet followed, in the hall of the great Hohenstaufen castle by the sea.

  Meanwhile the Neapolitan Wars of the Roses dragged on. Ferrante’s father Alfonso of Aragon had routed his rival, Réné of Anjou – but Réné’s son, the Duke of Calabria, and the Angevin party remained extremely dangerous. In the circumstances Barletta was a good place for a coronation since it was near the Tavoliere, enabling Ferrante to get his hands on the revenue from the grazing tolls. He needed money desperately. John of Calabria had the support of France, and the French occupied Genoa, controlling its formidable fleet. He knew that the Regno’s haughty barons despised Ferrante as a young Catalan bastard who was widely rumoured to be the son of a Moorish slave. He also knew that the king’s brother-in-law, the Prince of Rossano, hated him for having committed incest with his sister. Even Ferrante’s uncle by marriage, the Prince of Tàranto, the greatest magnate in Apulia, was in close touch with the Angevins.

  In autumn 1459 the Duke of Calabria landed north of Naples and many barons rose in rebellion. Even so, within a year Ferrante had almost beaten off the challenge, but then his army was unexpectedly defeated at the mouth of the River Sarno near Naples, and he fled with only twenty men-at-arms. He continued the struggle from Apulia, where in 1461 he suffered a fresh disaster, when large numbers of his troops and horses perished from thirst during a dreadful, waterless march across the Gargano. He took refuge in Barletta. Save for Trani, the rest of Apulia belonged to his enemies.

  Both sides employed mercenaries, Iacopo Piccinino fighting for the Angevins, Alessandro Sforza for the king. By mid-summer 1461 the Prince of Tàranto occupied Andria, Giovinazzo and even Trani, while the Duke of Calabria held the Gargano. The tide soon turned, h
owever, when Ferrante’s ally, George Castriota Skanderbeg, brought 800 tough Albanian veterans from across the Adriatic. In August the king besieged the castle of Orsara di Puglia near Troia. Calabria tried to relieve it, a skirmish turned into a pitched battle and suddenly the Angevins were routed beyond hope of recovery. The barons, including Tàranto and Rossano, changed sides. The rebellion was over.

  “No one could ever tell what King Ferrante was thinking”, re-cords the French statesman Commynes. “Smiling in a friendly way, he would seize and destroy men... His kinsmen and close acquaintances have told me he knew neither mercy nor compassion.” After a show of reconciliation he had the Prince of Tàranto strangled and flung the Prince of Rossano into a dungeon, to await a nightmare death for a quarter of a century. He lured another old enemy, Iacopo Piccinino, to Naples, welcomed him like a brother, wined and dined him for a month, and then had him murdered – thrown from a window.

  “Where money was concerned, he never showed pity or compassion for his people,” writes Commynes. He bred horses and pigs on a huge scale, his subjects being made to pasture his horses, lend him stallions and fatten his pigs. In oil-producing areas like Apulia, he bought the oil cheap, then forced the price up and compelled the public to buy it. He used the same method with corn. Loans were ruthlessly extracted from every rich nobleman.

  Ferrante’s private life was equally swinish, especially after the death of his beautiful, highly intelligent queen, Isabella Chiaramonte. According to Commynes, “ he raped several women savagely.”

  A paranoiac, he became as frightened of Turkish invasion as he was of revolts by his barons, and he added cannon-proof bastions to every castle on the Apulian coast. From his friend Skanderbeg, he realised that what had happened to Serbia and Albania might all too easily happen to Southern Italy, especially after the Turkish occupation of Òtranto in 1480.

  The barons were terrified of his heir, the future King Alfonso II, who was even crueller than Ferrante. In 1485 a plot, the famous Congiura de’ Baroni (conspiracy of the barons), attracted many of the kingdom’s great dignitaries; they wanted Ferrante to be succeeded by his second son, the gentle Federigo. There was sporadic fighting during 1485–86, some of it in Apulia, and then the king made a peace which the plotters foolishly took at face-value.

  One of the plot’s leaders was an Apulian baron, Francesco Coppolo from Gallipoli, Ferrante’s financial adviser, whom he had made Count of Sarno. The king invited several people involved in the plot to the marriage at Naples of Sarno’s son Marco to his own granddaughter. During the celebrations in the Castel Nuovo, all of them were arrested and beheaded soon after. A few months later several other magnates were seized, none of whom was ever seen again; according to Giannone, “it was generally believed that they had been strangled, put in sacks and thrown into the sea.” Among the victims were Ferrante’s brother-in-law, the Prince of Rossano, who had spent twenty-three years in prison, and Pirro del Balzo, Prince of Altamura.

  Surprisingly, King Ferrante died a natural death in his own bed in 1494, after a stroke. He did so knowing that the French were about to invade the Regno and that his dynasty was doomed. The Apulians do not care to remember him, even if he was crowned at Barletta.

  18

  Trani

  ...the whole town is so gracious in spite of modern improvements that

  a whole day is not too much to give it, lingering in the old churches, or

  about the harbour, or lounging in the pretty public gardens by the sea.

  Edward Hutton, “Naples and Southern Italy”

  MANY PEOPLE THINK TRANI is the most beautiful of all Apulian cities. It has a long history and its famous maritime code, the Ordinamenta Maris, dates from 1063 when it was part of the Byzantine Empire. Under the Normans countless Crusaders embarked for the Holy Land from Trani, after a night spent in vigil at the church of Ognissanti.

  Facing the sea, its deep moat filled with seawater, Trani Castle is one of the few Hohenstaufen castles to retain its original geometric pattern. The Emperor Frederick, who built it, hanged Pietro Tiepolo, the Doge of Venice’s son, from its walls in full view of the Venetian fleet cruising outside, in revenge for Venetian raids on the Apulian coast. The Via Giudea commemorates the Jewish quarter at Trani, to whose community the Emperor gave a monopoly of the city’s silk trade, and the little thirteenth century churches of Scuolanuova and Sant’ Anna began as synagogues.

  It is King Manfred, however, who has the most dramatic associations with Trani. In 1259 an anonymous Dominican chronicler, from the friary next to the harbour, watched the arrival of Manfred’s Byzantine queen, Helena Comnena:

  On 2 June eight galleys brought to Apulia the bride of King Manfred, Helena, daughter of the Despot of Epirus, accompanied by many lords and ladies of our realm and from her father’s. She landed at the port of Trani where the King was waiting for her. When the lady landed from her galley, he warmly embraced and kissed her. After leading her all the way through the city to everybody’s applause, he took her to the castle where there was feasting and dancing, while during that evening there were so many illuminations, with beacons in every town in the land, that it seemed just like day-time.... the said queen is most agreeable, with a kindly manner, far more beautiful than the King’s first wife, and people say that she is only seventeen.

  In 1496, King Ferrantino pawned Trani to the Venetians, who remained here for thirteen years. They occupied it again in 1529, but were driven out by the Spaniards. Some palazzi have a distinctly Venetian air. The city then declined steadily under Spanish rule, the harbour being deliberately left to silt up, to make it uncompetitive.

  When the tireless Abate Pacichelli visited Trani at the end of the seventeenth century, he was distressed to find it so decayed. Many fine houses had been allowed to fall down while its spacious squares were deserted. This was partly due to the plague of 1656, in which “more than a hundred of the best families had been extinguished.” He noticed and, uncharacteristically, queried an inscription over a gate, claiming that the name Trani combined those of Diomedes’s son Tyrrhenius, who founded it, and of the Emperor Trajan who restored it.

  Bishop Berkeley enjoyed the wine here in 1734. “N.B. The muscat of Trani excellent,” he recorded. As usual, his notes are as vivid as they are terse: “This city, as Barletta, paved and built almost entirely out of white marble; noble cathedral, Gothic, of white marble... port stopped and choked.” He adds “piracies of the Turks make it unsafe travelling by night.” By “Turks” he meant North Africans or Albanians, who generally arrived in fast boats, abducted a few women and animals, and then vanished as swiftly as they had come. The last raid of this sort on Apulia took place in 1836.

  During the mid-eighteenth century Charles VII briefly made Trani the political and administrative centre of Apulia, siting all the law courts here. He dredged the harbour, enabling its merchants to export wool, grain and olive oil. However, it soon silted up again.

  Swinburne had a low opinion of the wine, and of the cathedral too– “in very mean taste, the ornament preposterous.” The interior had suffered from Baroque “improvements”. Nor did this dour Northumbrian care much for the inhabitants:

  Our evening was spent with the archbishop, a worthy conversable prelate. He told us he had taken great pains to introduce a taste for study and literature into his diocese, but hitherto without much success as the Tranians were a very merry race, gente molto allegra, but unfortunately born with an unconquerable antipathy to application. The collegians, though under his immediate inspection, were above his hand, and often, when he thought the whole seminary buried in silence, wrapped up in studious contemplation, or lucubrations, he had been surprised, on entering the quadrangle, to find all ring again, with gigs and tarantellas. We were satisfied that he spoke without exaggeration, for never did we hear such incessant chattering, and so stunning a din as was kept up the whole day under our windows. It is a rule established by the custom of time immemorial, that no work shall be done in Trani dur
ing dinner; the whole afternoon is to be spent in dozing, chattering or sauntering: we could not prevail upon the blacksmith to shoe one of our horses in the evening.

  The ancient custom of the siesta still infuriates Northern tourists in Apulia. Even the most famous churches are firmly shut in the afternoon. According to J.J. Blunt, writing in his book of 1823, “Vestiges of Ancient Manners and Customs discoverable in Modern Italy and Sicily”, this comes from the old pagan practice of closing temples at noon for several hours so that the gods may sleep. “Hence the goatherd in Theocritus ventures not to play upon his pipe at noon, for fear of awakening Pan.”

  In 1799, the common people of Trani rose for the King when the municipality proclaimed the Neapolitan Republic, hoisting the white Borbone standard and taking control of the administration. Sailors, fishermen and labourers, they defended the city heroically for several days against the troops of General Broussier and Ettore Carafa, the revolutionary Count of Ruvo. In the end, the besiegers stormed it at the point of the bayonet, reducing the buildings to ruins and the population to mounds of corpses.

  During the nineteenth century, Ferdinand II was so proud of the city that he made his second son Count of Trani. He dredged the harbour once again, this time for good, finally restoring prosperity. The depots near the cathedral, inscribed “AMSTERDAM”, “DANIMARCO”, “LONDON” AND “SVEZZIA”, all date from his reign.

  In 1865 Mme. Figuier and her husband, eager to escape from the chambre d’horreur and the restaurant nauséabond at Foggia, looked forward to seeing Trani. They expected to eat better, even if they prudently brought a basket with a cold chicken and a bottle of wine. When they arrived in the rain, however, they both thought the town uglier and unhealthier than Foggia, with dark, narrow, winding streets, badly paved and crowded by wretched looking houses, although the population of sailors and traders seemed bustling by comparison. Out of the seething mob that fought for their custom at the station, they hired a driver and his assistant: “One was a peevish old man with red eyes and hair like a hedgehog, only half-dressed in tatters, and the other was a squat, one-eyed youth in rags.” These two drove them in search of a room. In the first locanda they tried, they were puzzled at seeing six pillows on each of the four beds in the camera d’onore till informed that six persons slept in a bed – one being reserved for women. The next hostelry was a complex of huge passages opening into each other, window-less and doorless, faintly lit by night-lights. The beds were smaller, flanked by jars of foul-smelling oil. There was a knife on every bed. “My locanda is for merchants who carry a lot of money when they come here”, the proprietress explained proudly. “So they like to sleep with a knife handy.” She suggested the couple might lodge with her sister, the widow of a sea-faring man, where they could have a proper chambre bourgeoise.