An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia

by Seward, Desmond

  During the spring of 1809 the brigand Antonio Mirabella informed the commune of Gioia that he was “Prince Leopoldo di Borbone” and had surrounded the city with 1,500 Calabrians equipped with cannon. Terrified, the commune let him into the city, and after a Te Deum (hymn of praise) in the chiesa madre (mother church) to celebrate the restoration of Borbone authority, he and his army were given a banquet in the friary. When they sat down, however, the ‘Prince’ looked suspiciously unregal while his ‘troops’ were a mere handful of ragamuffins, clearly intent on getting drunk as quickly as possible. Armed men were called in and several brigands were killed, but Mirabella escaped to the woods.

  The friary was later turned into a police barracks, part being set aside as the Unione, a club for the city’s élite. Nicola De Bellis of unhappy memory once held court here. During the agricultural disturbances of the early 1900s, Gioia suffered miserably, De Bellis, who was its mayor as well as its deputy, ensuring that the landlords’ overseers had police help in breaking strikes. At elections no-one dared to vote against the “King, Tsar and God of Gioia del Colle”, police and gangsters with revolvers patrolling the streets to see that the hostile or uncommitted stayed at home. On one occasion the city voted unanimously for De Bellis. In 1920 mounted estate guards rode down a hundred striking field-hands just outside the city, killing ten labourers and wounding another thirty.

  Until quite recently, after funerals at Gioia the coffins were taken from the church-door to the graveyard on a hearse drawn by black-plumed, red-hooded horses. This could often be seen en route, sometimes bound for a funeral in Massafra, Noci or Santeramo, or returning at night to Gioia. Once there was an accident in the dark, a car killing two of the lead horses, but the service was soon resumed, to meet popular demand.

  Gioia del Colle acquired a brief notoriety in 1999 during the Kosovo war, when planes flew from a NATO aerodrome outside the city to drop bombs from a safe altitude onto the Serbs, and pound them into submission.

  There is not much to bring a sightseeing traveller to San Michele, apart from the Museum of Country Life in an otherwise uninteresting castle. This has a fine collection of ploughs, olive-wood presses for wine or oil, pruning-knives for olive-trees, short-handled mattocks that deformed a man before he was fifty and yokes for the oxen that were used until the Second World War. What look like lacrosse-sticks were nets for catching small birds by night. Preserved in jars of wine and bay-leaves for feast days, these birds were often the only meat ever tasted by labourers and their families.

  At Capurso the Royal Basilica of the Madonna of the Well houses yet another miraculous icon. Together with the gigantic Franciscan friary that once served it, the basilica was built by King Charles VII in 1740, his son Ferdinand IV adding its majestic Baroque façade thirty years later. Rooms at the side contain ex-votos (trusses, corsets, sticks, splints, crutches, wooden limbs, wedding-dresses and baby-clothes) while a gallery of crude paintings shows the Madonna saving suppliant donors. In 1705 she appeared in a vision to a priest of Capurso, Don Domenico Tanzella, who had been diagnosed as incurably ill, and told him to drink the water from a nearby cistern. After being completely cured, he explored the cistern and found the icon. Pilgrims still toil down the long stairs below the basilica to drink the healing water.

  The cistern here began as a grotto chapel for Basilian monks, who painted a fresco of the Virgin on the rockface – the icon. Like so many other Apulian shrines, Capurso is Byzantine in origin.

  25

  The Battle of Cannae, 216 BC

  Nearly the whole army met their death here...

  Livy, “The History of Rome”

  HANNIBAL'S TRIUMPH over the Romans at Cannae is one of the world’s great victories. A foreign army consisting mainly of mercenaries annihilated a well-led, well-equipped, much bigger force fighting for its homeland. Down the centuries soldiers have been fascinated by the battle and, even if Apulia were known for nothing else, it would still be famous because of Cannae.

  Hannibal’s strategy was to beat the Romans so often that their allies in the Roman Confederation would eventually abandon them as a lost cause. He had already destroyed two Roman armies, in 218 BC at the River Trebia and in 217 at Lake Trasimene. Nevertheless, the Romans remained convinced that their legions were invincible.

  He had wintered his troops in Apulia, at Gereonium near Lucera, and during the summer seized the town of Cannae to provide himself with a base from where he could devastate all Southern Italy. The Romans decided that they had to engage and eliminate him at all costs.

  The battle took place on 2 August not far from Cannae, at the foot of the Murge and on the banks of the River Aufidus, today known as the Òfanto. The consuls Emilius Paulus and Terentius Varro, one cautious and the other rash, who according to custom commanded on alternate days, had 80,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry. Hannibal had 40,000 foot-soldiers, Gaulish and Spanish swordsmen, Libyan spearmen and Balearic slingers, together with 10,000 Gaulish, Spanish and Numidian cavalry. It was the turn of Varro, the rash consul, to command and despite their inferiority in cavalry, the Romans marched across the flat Apulian plain to attack Hannibal.

  On his right, next to the river, Varro placed his armoured horsemen, volunteer Roman citizens, putting the more effective allied cavalry on his left towards the plain. His infantry was in the centre, legionaries in armour with shields, short swords and javelins. They marched in unusually deep formation, to give them maximum impact so that they would smash through the opposing centre. A screen of light troops, archers, slingers and javelin men ran ahead of the legionaries as they advanced. When the Romans got near, they saw that Hannibal’s infantry in the centre was in a very odd formation, his swordsmen bowed outwards in an arc, with the Libyan spearmen on their flanks. More conventionally, on his left, next to the river and facing the Roman heavy cavalry, he had put his own heavy cavalry, while on his right the Numidian horsemen were placed opposite the Roman allies’ horse.

  As the Romans grew closer, Hannibal’s screen of Balearic slingers, the best in the Mediterranean, opened fire. Their sling-shots inflicted many casualties, smashing the arm of one of the Roman consuls, Emilius Paulus. Then Hasdrubal, Hannibal’s chief engineer, led his mounted Celts in a charge against the Roman heavy cavalry, routing them, after which he brought his men across the field to help the Numidians break the allied cavalry. But about 500 Numidians surrendered, throwing down their shields and javelins, and were taken to the Romans’ rear.

  Meanwhile, in the centre the Roman legions were pressing for-ward steadily, pushing back the Gaulish and Spanish swordsmen so that the arc-shaped formation was reversed, becoming concave. But as the closely packed Romans advanced, the Libyan spearmen began to outflank them, attacking from each side. Suddenly the Numidian ‘prisoners’ behind drew swords from beneath their cloaks, picked up shields from the fallen and started slashing the Romans’ backs and legs. Having sent the other Numidians in pursuit of the Roman and allied cavalry, to ensure it did not return, Hasdrubal now brought his horsemen back and charged the Roman legions from the rear.

  Surrounded on all sides, they were annihilated. By the end of the day, out of 86,000 Romans, 70,000 had been killed and another 4,500 taken prisoner. The dead included the consul Emilius Paulus, twenty-nine tribunes and eighty senators. Among the few who escaped, fleeing to Canosa or Lucera, was the consul Varro. Many thought that this shattering defeat meant the end of the Republic.

  Despite centuries of passionate debate, it is not possible to re-construct the battle with complete accuracy, since the River Òfanto has altered course. Livy says the Romans were defeated as much by Hannibal’s brilliant use of ground as by his troops: “a wind that got up, locally known as the ‘Volturnus’, hampered the Romans by throwing dust in their eyes.” Ramage asked his guide “if he had ever seen this phenomenon, and he said that it was not uncommon in autumn, after the stubble had been burnt, and the land exposed to the air, for clouds of dust to be driven along the plain.”

  Li
ke Ramage, most of the travellers had been brought up to read Livy, and in consequence Cannae was a place of pilgrimage for them, one of the main reasons for visiting Apulia.

  Not only early travellers were fascinated by the battle. At the end of the nineteenth century, Cannae became an obsession with the chief of the German Imperial General Staff, Count Alfred von Schlieffen, who wrote a book about it – Hannibal’s tactics inspiring his plan for the next war against France. He hoped to tempt the French into invading Germany and then attack their flank with overwhelming strength through Belgium. In 1914, however, the infallible Schlieffen Plan went off at half-cock because the German commander, Field-Marshal von Moltke, lost his nerve when the Russians advanced with unexpected speed into East Prussia, and brought too many troops back to Germany.

  26

  Maundy Thursday at Noicattaro

  Whosoever doth not bear his cross and come after me,

  cannot be my disciple...

  “Gospel of St John”

  MOST MODERN VISITORS TO APULIA, seduced by the blue of the Adriatic, confine themselves to the beautiful cities of the coast or the Baroque splendour of Lecce. If they bother to adventure inland into the Murge, it is usually to inspect such showpieces as Ruvo or Alberobello, or to wander over the battlefield of Cannae. They miss a lot that is well worth seeing.

  Noicattaro is among the Murge’s quieter little cities, and at first sight does not look very interesting, save for a good Romanesque chiesa madre from the thirteenth century. Formerly its name was Noja, only becoming Noicattaro in 1863. All that Pacichelli could find to say about the city was that it was “the seat of the Duchy of Noja of the Lords Carafa, set amid fertile fields”. And full of “commodious houses, palaces and convents.”

  The abate does not mention an incident that occurred some years before his visit. In 1676 a servant of the Count of Conversano was caught poaching in the forest which then surrounded the city and resisted arrest so violently that the Duke of Noja sent him home minus ears and nose. Shortly after, Count Giulio Acquaviva came to Noja at dead of night with 300 armed men, broke into the ducal palazzo, dragged the duke out of bed, bound him and threatened to amputate his features in the same way. Only the tears of his duchess and of his mother the dowager saved the Lord Carafa.

  As has been seen, there was a bloodthirsty streak in this branch of the Carafa family who were also Dukes of Andria, and the unfortunate citizens had to put up with some occasionally savage misrule. Adjoining the main piazza at Noicattaro are the battered remnants of what was once the Carafa’s palace, where a heartfelt inscription on a worn tablet hails “the breaking of the feudal yoke.”

  In November 1815 bubonic plague broke out at Noja, probably imported from Albania. For a month the citizens refused to believe it. Then the entire city was put into quarantine for a year, three trenches being dug around the walls and cannon mounted at the gates, to prevent anybody leaving; if a man tried to jump over the trenches, he was shot by the guard of the cordon sanitaire (quarantine barrier). Three bored soldiers who used a pack of cards thrown to them by someone inside the city went in front of a firing squad. The carnival became a Dance of Death, when out of fifty celebrating the days before Ash Wednesday forty-five were dead within a week. No less than two thirds of the population died of the plague, the last in June 1816.

  When Keppel Craven came two years later, he found a ghost town: “The whole was untenanted, the habitations having been unroofed at the time that the general purification took place; this consisted in repeatedly burning all suspected clothes, goods and furniture, and in renewed ablutions and fumigations, followed by a scraping of the walls and universal white-washing.” The chiesa madre was white-washed too, when the first victims were buried there in a communal tomb inscribed:

  Sepolcro di Appestati

  Pena di morte a chi osa aprirlo

  (Tomb of the plague-stricken

  Who dares open does so on pain of death)

  Most, however, were buried in a plague-pit next to the Augus-tinian priory on the edge of the city, which had been converted into a plague-hospital.

  The drama of Maundy Thursday at Noicattaro rivals anything that takes place in Italy during Holy Week. After a white-hooded confraternity, a doleful band and finally the sindaco (mayor) in tri-coloured sash have passed, there seems little point in staying. Then, dimly lit by small red lamps on every balcony, people are seen to be gazing intently at something outside one of the lesser churches. Suddenly a huge cross rises from the ground, borne by a figure in black, shrouded from hooded head to ankles, hands black-gloved, feet bare; an iron chain with links an inch thick is tied to one ankle.

  In the dusk, carrying the great cross, the faceless penitent staggers down the road, preceded by boys cracking wooden rattles and followed by a growing crowd. There is no sound other than rattles and dragging chain. The figure falls heavily three times, in memory of Christ’s Passion. It leaves the cross at the main door of the chiesa madre, to kneel at the high altar; a dull, repeated thudding is heard, the penitent scourging itself with the chain. Rising from its knees, it goes out into the moonlight to pick up the cross (which weighs 60 kgs) and slowly continues its painful way down the road to the church of the Carmine. Again, it falls heavily three times. The silent crowd follows. Now and then, someone runs forward to touch the cross. A further scourging takes place before the high altar of the Carmine, above which hangs a text:

  AS THE PELICAN IN THE DESERT WOUNDS HERSELF AND DIES SO THAT HER BROOD MAY ENDURE AND LIVE, SO CHRIST GAVE HIS BODY AND BLOOD FOR OUR SALVATION THAT WE MIGHT LIVE.

  The rapt crowd has entered the church in the penitent’s wake, watching mutely. Suddenly, a second figure in black appears, crawling up the aisle on its knees. On reaching the altar, it gives itself another thirty blows with its chain. Some of the community of brown-habited Carmelite friars, sitting mummified in the crypt below, have heard similar blows every Lent for over two hundred years.

  On that Maundy Thursday night you will see at least a dozen other hooded figures in black carrying huge crosses to every church in Noicattaro. Despite bleeding feet they will go on doing so until dawn breaks. They are the confraternity of the Addolorato, men and women whose identities are known only to the confraternity’s chaplain, doing penance not just for their sins but for those of the entire community.

  On Good Friday, in almost every Apulian city a black-robed statue of the Madonna Dolorosa, a silver dagger piercing her heart, is borne through the streets, escorted by a mournful town band, hooded confraternities and hundreds of women in black. At Molfetta a nineteenth century Neapolitan statue of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane is carried on the shoulders of the oldest confraternity in Apulia, the Arciconfraternità di Santo Stefano; at His feet lies a reliquary containing a fragment of the True Cross. At San Marco in Lamis the sorrowful Madonna is preceded by fracchie, huge wooden cones that are drawn at the head of the procession and then set on fire.

  On Easter Sunday, together with a life-sized statue of the Risen Christ, a doll representing Lent is paraded in some places. Stuffed with fireworks, the doll is thrown onto a flaming bonfire while the crowd cheers. These ancient processions derive from the old pagan spring festivals but the form they take is a legacy of Spanish rule, and Apulians from all walks of life take part in them.

  27

  The Masserie

  The word is not rendered by ‘farm house’, which gives but an

  inadequate idea of the masseria.

  Charles Macfarlane, “The Lives and Exploits of Banditti and Robbers”

  ON THE MURGE you never see a house of any antiquity outside the cities, apart from the odd castle or masseria. One or two of the masserie have been converted into small hotels whose guests wrongly assume that they were manor houses, but in reality the nobles who owned them preferred to inhabit a castle or a palazzo in the local city, rarely visiting the masseria and then merely to hunt. They were not so much farmhouses as fortified depots for agricultural produce that at cert
ain times of the year – lambing, sowing, reaping, pruning, fruit-picking, wine-making, etc – took on the role of villages. Strongholds with battlements and cannon, defended by armed guards, they sheltered communities of farm workers who otherwise lived in the cities.

  Built as protection against slave-raiders or brigands, the surviving masserie (which are not confined to the Murge) generally date from between the sixteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, although their origin is far older. Sometimes they have rueful names, for example Spina, Petrose, Scaserba, Campi Distrutti or della Femina Morta, that hint at the harsh existence of the old Apulian countryside. Most are deserted, crumbling into ruin; bleak monuments to a way of life that ended only a little over seventy years ago and is still remembered by a handful of very aged men and women. A few have been modernised, serving as ordinary farm houses.

  The construction of masserie all over Apulia from the late Middle Ages onward reflected not just a need to protect peasants but the increasing importance of olive farming, each masseria being equipped with a press and countless oil jars. A feature of Apulian life since the Messapian period, olive trees had begun to be grown commercially during the early thirteenth century, at first by the monasteries. Then the feudal lords copied the monks, so that eventually every big estate had its masseria and olive groves.