An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia

by Seward, Desmond

  Accounts of what happened in Bari during the Fascist Era are often deliberately confused, but clearly Mussolini found more than a few supporters when he was seen to be firmly in power. Economic expansion revived, an annual trade-fair, the Fiera del Levante being established in 1930 to encourage trade between Italy and the Middle East, a university was founded and emigration continued, many Baresi settling in Abyssinia when it was an Italian colony. Little was done, however, for the slum-dwellers of Old Bari.

  In 1939, the invasions of Albania and Greece were launched from Bari and Brìndisi. The following year, however, Bari seemed to be in real danger when the Italian offensive in Greece collapsed; for a time there were fears that the Greeks were going to invade Apulia. The Fascist Era ended with considerable bloodshed in July 1943, after which the city became the headquarters of Marshal Badoglio’s anti-Axis government. When the Germans attacked in force in September, General Bellomo counter-attacked, taking many German prisoners and saving the port for the Allies.

  Allied troops did not behave well at Bari, requisitioning houses and evicting their owners without any warning. In a sad little book, “Il Regno del Sud”, Agostino degli Espinosa tells of famished children flocking round the city’s restaurants and cafés, reserved for British or American personnel, and begging for the scraps left on their plates. The only way to avoid starving to death was to buy stolen army rations.

  Evelyn Waugh came here and (in “Unconditional Surrender”) says less compassionately that there was an agile and ingenious criminal class consisting chiefly of small boys. Yet he comments, too, that the city regained the “comsopolitan martial stir” which it had enjoyed during the Crusades. Allies soldiers crowded the streets and the harbour was full of small naval vessels. For in late autumn 1943 Bari became one of the three main ports of the “British Italy Base”.

  Waugh adds that the city “achieved the unique, unsought distinction of being the only place in the Second World War to suffer from gas.” On the evening of 2 December a hundred German planes from Foggia attacked the harbour, sinking seventeen ships. Among those that blew up was the USS John Hervey with a secret cargo of mustard-bombs; over 600 Allied personnel were gas casualties besides those killed by German bombs, together with all too many Baresi. ‘Many of the inhabitants complained of sore throats, sore eyes and blisters’, says Waugh: “They were told it was an unfamiliar, mild, epidemic disease of short duration.” Even now, you meet aged Baresi whose respiratory problems are due to mustard-gas. Old Bari was further damaged in 1945 when the American ammunition ship Henderson exploded in its harbour.

  Part VI

  The Murge

  23

  The Murge

  ...an arid region, not unlike parts of northern Africa.

  Norman Douglas, “Old Calabria”

  NORMAN DOUGLAS decided he did not care for the Murge, which he dismissed as “that shapeless and dismal range of limestone hills.” He never saw them properly, however, only glimpsing the western Murgia from the train, on a wretched journey by night from Venosa to Tàranto.

  The Murge form the plateaux seventy miles by ten that covers most of the Terra di Bari. From the coast it rises almost imperceptibly till in the south-west it is a good 1,500 feet above sea level. In the north east, where the limestone has been heavily eroded, the rich red soil is very fertile indeed; inland from Bari vines are grown, while climbing towards Gioia del Colle, olives and fruit trees take over. By contrast, in the south-west the Alta Murgia is bleak, rocky downland, providing only a small amount of poor quality arable and some scanty grazing, a landscape that was known in Roman times as Apulia Petrosa. Partly because they were unafflicted by malaria, from the eighteenth century until the Risorgimento the Murge’s little cities were generally much more flourishing than those on the Adriatic coast, although they seem to have been visited by comparatively few of the early travellers.

  The River Òfanto marks the boundary between the Capitanata and Terra di Bari. In the mountains behind Melfi, which the poet Horace knew well, this can be a boiling torrent in winter, but here the Òfanto is no more than a sluggish trickle, almost dry in summer, the “stagnant Aufidus” of the ancient writers. The last river in Apulia as you go south, it is a reminder of just how little water there was until recent times.

  In February 1817 the eighteen-year-old Charles Macfarlane explored the banks of the Òfanto, to see the battlefield of Cannae where Hannibal had defeated the Romans: “I had no companion, except the Calabrian pony that carried me, and a rough haired Scotch terrier.” Whatever scholarly conclusions Macfarlane may have reached about the battle, he has left us a fascinating glimpse of a long vanished way of life that had been lived on the desolate uplands of the Murge for centuries before the coming of the Romans.

  The young traveller met some shepherds, who invited him to spend the night in their tugurio, a long, low hut, where he was given a meal; an omelette, fat bacon, maize bread and ricotta, with a glass of rough wine.

  When all the pastoral society was assembled, the patriarchal chief shepherd taking the lead, they repeated aloud, and with well modulated cadences, the evening prayers, or the Catholic service of “Ave Maria”. A boy then lit a massy old brass lamp, that looked as it if had been dug out of Pompeii, and on producing it said “Santa notte a tutta la compagnia” (a holy night to all the company). The shepherds then took their supper, which was very frugal, consisting principally of Indian corn-bread and raw onions with a little wine....

  The hut was just a single room with no chimney, smoke finding its way out through crannies in the roof. The beds were made of sheepskins and dried maize leaves.

  Several of the huge dogs lay dreaming with their faces to the fire... Soon, however, the flames died on the hearth, the embers merely smouldered, and all was darkness, but not all silence, for the men snored most sonorously; the wind, that swept across the wide open plain, howled round the house, and occasionally the dogs joined in the chorus.

  Macfarlane says that the shepherds were going to stay here until the middle of the spring, when they would slowly make their way to the Abruzzi, returning to the Pianura di Puglia at the approach of winter.

  Even in the bleak south-west, however, most of the Murge’s peasants lived a very different sort of existence, going out daily from the little cities to scratch a living from the stony soil, ploughing with oxen if they were lucky but more often using mattocks or digging-sticks, by night sheltering their beasts from brigands near some fortified masseria. Life was still more dissimilar in the fertile north-eastern Murge, a rich land of olive groves, vineyards, and almond and cherry orchards, that in autumn swarmed with huge gangs of fruit-pickers, men and women who camped in the masserie’s courtyards. There were also dense forests, more than one of whose clearings contained a famous horse-stud.

  The roads of the north-eastern Murge frequently go for miles through grove upon grove of olive trees, their gaunt branches trimmed in the Italian way as opposed to the Greek method used in the Salento, reaching up to the sky in a witches’ ballet. “They are pruned into the form of a cup, by cutting out the centric upright branches, in the same manner as gardeners trim gooseberry bushes”, noted the ever observant Swinburne. “This treatment lets in an equal share of the sun and ventilation to every part, and brings on a universal maturity.”

  The absence of tall trees throughout the Murge dates only from the late nineteenth century. Formerly whole areas were thickly wooded, very like the Forest Umbra in the Gargano. Full of game, these had been the primeval forests through which Frederick II had once hunted with such pleasure. After the Risorgimento, however, laws specifically designed for clearing useless dwarf oak and chestnut from the lower slopes of Piedmont’s mountains, were cynically distorted on behalf of the new, ruthless speculator landowners. They systematically cut down all the great oak and beech trees, stripping the entire Murge of its woodland, and transforming its landscape.

  24

  Cities of the Murge

  The Apulians... are
strong bodied with fine complexions and white

  skins, energetic in matters of business, faithful, highly intelligent,

  and very kind hearted.

  G.B. Pacichelli, “Il Regno di Napoli in Prospettiva”

  One reason why early travellers seldom visited the Murge was that there were no mail-coaches. Carriages had to be engaged by the day, the worst in Italy, according to Octavian Blewitt in 1850. If they were unavailable you had to hire horses instead, “one of which, as the sumpter horse, will carry portmanteaus, and enable the padrone, who generally travels on foot, to get a lift occasionally.” Yet Blewitt was impressed by the roads, built “by the present King Ferdinand II, who has done more in twenty years to improve the internal communications of the kingdom than his ancestors in many centuries.” After the fall of the Borbone monarchy, no new major roads were built in Apulia for nearly another hundred years.

  Canosa attracted travellers, being close to Cannae. A Greek colony founded by Diomedes of the Great War Cry, its coins bore Greek inscriptions while its people remained bilingual until the time of Augustus. The oldest diocese in Apulia, founded in the fourth century, then wrecked by the Goths, it recovered only to be sacked by the Saracens, after which the Byzantines moved the archbishopric to Bari. In 1734 Bishop Berkeley thought Canosa “a poor town on a low hill”, although he was intrigued by its pre-Christian tombs. A century later Ramage echoed Horace’s grumble that its bread was full of sand. “I find that the traveller still has the same complaint to make, owing to the soft nature of the rock from which their millstones are made.” Today modern Canosa has bound the medieval town in a ring of high-rise flats.

  The body of the Norman hero Bohemond lies at Canosa in a tomb reminiscent of an Arab turbeh (mausoleum). During his colourful career he twice defeated the Byzantine emperor and played a key role in the First Crusade, becoming Prince of Antioch. He then spent two years as a Saracen prisoner before being ransomed, returning to Europe and marrying the King of France’s daughter. The Byzantine chronicler Anna Comnena says that Bohemond was just like his father, Robert Guiscard, and she had met both, “Father and son resembled locusts, Robert’s child devouring anything missed by his father.” His tomb just outside the cathedral is a small, square building of white marble with an octagonal cupola, an inscription on its Byzantine bronze and silver doors telling of his bravery. Inside, a flagstone bears a single word in Lombardic script:

  BOAMUNDUS

  In 1712 Canosa was acquired as a principality by the Capece Minutolo. Their ancestors may have known Bohemond, who died in 1111, since they were at the coronation of the first Norman king, just a few years later. Their name was originally ‘Caca Pece’, pitch-shitter, from having thrown pitch at enemies besieging their castle; each branch of the Capece took an extra name, Minutolo meaning dwarf. The most famous Capece Minutolo was Prince Antonio, Minister of Police in 1821, who had the Carbonari revolutionaries flogged. “He regarded the French Revolution as the fatal result of renouncing medieval institutions and beliefs, which could still, if revived, produce a generation of Galahads”, writes Sir Harold Acton. But the Prince of Canosa’s private life was not quite that of a Galahad – he fathered three bastards by a rag-picker’s daughter.

  First settled by Peucetians, Ruvo di Puglia became a staging-post on the Via Traiana, Horace’s Rubi. An attractive little town, perched on the edge of the Murge 732 feet above sea-level, its few visitors are charmed by an exquisite Apulian-Romanesque cathedral on top of a Paleo-Christian predecessor, itself over a Roman house-church. The campanile is a Byzantine watch-tower, while Frederick II built the castle of which only a solitary, crumbling bastion survives.

  Ruvo’s other attraction is the Museo Jatta, containing Greek and Apulian ceramics dating from the 6th to the 3rd century BC Giovanni Jatta bought vast estates round Ruvo from the Carafa family in 1806 and began to collect Attic and Apulian artefacts discovered in graves on his land. The city had had close links with Greece in the 5th century BC, importing quantities of kraters, vases and cups and then in the following century Greek artisans to found a factory. This local ware, admittedly of far less beauty then the Attic, was usually destroyed when found, until the beginning of the nineteenth century when it suddenly became immensely sought after. His son became an archaeologist, adding to what would be-come one of the greatest collections of Apulian ware in Italy.

  Janet Ross tried to see the Museo Jatta in 1889, without success. “Signor Jatta has gone to Bari, bearing the keys of the museum in his pocket”, she was told. “Some of the streets are exceeding pictur-esque; all are dirty”, observed Mrs. Ross. “The people were very civil, but evidently unused to strangers.” No one explained to her what had paid for the kraters. It was sweated labour, most of the town’s male population being day labourers on the enormous latifondi owned by the Jatta and Cotugno families. In 1907 a general strike was broken by 200 armed peasants from the Jatta estates, who fought a pitched battle with the strikers, hunting them through the streets with knives and guns.

  Bitonto was once an important Roman city on the Via Traiana, retaken for Byzantium in 975 by the Catapan Zacharias. In a purple-draped litter, Frederick II’s body passed through in 1250 on its way to Tàranto to take ship for Sicily, escorted by barons in black and weeping Saracen bodyguards. The citizens are unlikely to have wept – the Emperor had put an inscription over their main gate reading “Gens bitutina, totia bestia et assinina” (the people of Bitonto are all beasts and fools).

  The castle’s round towers date from Bitonto’s expansion in the fourteenth century. Unlike Apulian ports, it prospered under the Spaniards, famous for its oil, still the best in Apulia. In 1734, Charles of Bourbon routed the Austrians outside the city, restoring the Regno’s independence and founding the Borbone monarchy. Augustus Hare calls Bitonto’s cathedral “the noblest in Southern Italy”. The ultimate example of Apulian Romanesque, inspired by the church of San Nicola at Bari, it dates from the first half of the thirteenth century and was built with unusual speed, probably within twenty-five years, so in style it is all of a piece. A white mar-ble pulpit dated 1229 has a panel portraying Frederick II and three of his sons, with the name of the priest who carved it, “Nicolaus sacerdos et magister” (Nicholas priest and teacher).

  Swinburne thought Bitonto’s inhabitants “more polished and improved in their manners than those that dwell along the coast”, commenting on “an air of affluence”. Yet, Hare says it was impossible for him to sketch in Bitonto because of “the violence of the half savage crowd in every lowest stage of beggary and filth.” Decline had set in, partly due to large scale planting of vines during the 1870s and 1890s, followed by the ravages of phylloxera which appeared in the Salento in 1889 and had almost destroyed the entire Apulian wine industry by 1919. There were bloody riots in 1920, the town hall being stormed and food shops looted. A few years before, Edward Hutton had sensed the misery here, writing of “a curiously lonely city”.

  Although undistinguished at first sight, the little city of Gioia del Colle has a certain charm. Significantly, on certain Sundays since time immemorial, generations of Gioiesi have picnicked together on a low hill to the north-east, Monte Sannace, the site of the city of their Peucetian ancestors. Gioia became an important Norman fief in 1089, its first lord being Robert Guiscard’s brother, Richard the Seneschal, who built the castle. The Emperor Frederick II rebuilt it when he returned from Jerusalem, giving it an appearance that is half Teutonic and half Arab. A Gioiese legend claims his bastard son Manfred was born in the castle, together with his other children by Bianca Lancia. The castle was a key Hohenstaufen fortress, guarding the road across the “heel of Italy” from Bari to Tàranto. Trapezoidal in plan, it has two huge square towers, the Torre de Rossi and the Torre Imperatrice. Frederick II used it as a hunting-lodge since in his time, and for long after, Gioia was surrounded by dense wood-land. Pacichelli calls it “a sumptuous and ornate palace with a gallery of choice pictures and a theatre”, adding reverently that the Princes o
f Acquaviva often stayed here, accompanied by their court. Made into a county, during the seventeenth century Gioia del Colle was bought, together with the principality of Acquaviva nearby, by the Genoese moneylender Carlo De Mari, who henceforward referred to his “stato di Acquaviva e Gioia” (state of Acquaviva and Gioia). His tombstone at Gioia styles him “Prince of Acquaviva, Patrician of Genoa and Knight of Naples”, but he began his career behind a counter. The castle was lived in until not so very long ago, by Donna Maria Emanuela Carafa from 1806–68, and by Marchese Luca De Resta into the twentieth century. It now houses the Museum.

  “Nothing else worth seeing remains in this busy city of peas-ants”, says Edward Hutton, yet the Baroque façade of the Franciscan friary that dominates the main square, built in 1633 at public expense, surely deserves at least a glance. So does the little neo-Classical Teatro Rossini, built in 1832, bombed during the Second War but triumphantly brought back into use in 1997, and also the seventeenth century Dominican monastery which houses the Municipio (town hall).