An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia

by Seward, Desmond

  For once, however, Norman Douglas sounds a note of caution. “But whether this at San Gervasio is the actual fountain hymned by Horace – ah, that is quite another affair. Few poets have clung more tenaciously to the memories of their childhood than did he and Virgil... and yet, the whole scene may be a figment of his imagination... Here at San Gervasio I prefer to think only of the Roman singer, so sanely jovial, and of these waters as they flowed limpid and cool.”

  30

  Life at Altamura

  Situated among gentle hills, surrounded by strong high walls...

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

  ALTAMURA IS ANOTHER CITY on the Appian Way, 1500 feet above sea level, among the hills of the Murge. Its name, derived from its “high walls”, has taken on a new and unpleasing significance in recent times, because of the bleak grey apartment blocks that have arisen on the outskirts.

  Called Sub Lupatia under the Romans, Altamura was destroyed by the Saracens and lay deserted for centuries before Frederick II re-founded it in 1230, specifying that its inhabitants must include Catholics, Greeks and Jews in equal numbers. The Greek rite survived at the church of San Nicola dei Greci until 1601 and a synagogue till the sixteenth century. He gave the city a castle, and also a cathedral that King Robert the Wise began to rebuild in 1316, placing his coat-of-arms over the main doorway; heavily restored in the 19th century, it lacks charm. The castle, a typical Hohenstaufen fortress, together with the high city walls, was demolished during the nineteenth century. It stood in what is now Piazza Metteoti.

  In the 1360s one of the naughty Giovanna I’s four husbands, the faithful Otto, Duke of Brunswick, was imprisoned at Altamura by the enemies who later murdered her. During the same century Giovanni Pipino, Count of Minervino and Lord of Altamura, was considered so intolerably overbearing that he suffered the ultimate indignity of being hanged from the city walls by his own vassals.

  In 1463 the fabulously rich Gianantonio del Balzo Orsini, having grown very old, was secretly done to death in the castle by royal command. Prince of Tàranto and Altamura, most of Gianantonio’s life had been spent in civil war and king-making.

  In 1482 another over-mighty magnate, Pirro del Balzo, was created Grand Constable of the Regno and Prince of Altamura, only to perish miserably a few years after. During King Ferrante’s gruesome reprisals for the ‘Barons’ Plot’, del Balzo was strangled in a Neapolitan dungeon and his body thrown into the sea in a sack. The doomed Federigo of Aragon, last of his dynasty, was briefly Prince of Altamura before becoming King of Naples in 1496, but the French and Spaniards soon came and conquered his kingdom.

  During the eighteenth century the city become very prosperous, with a population of 24,000. It established a short lived ‘studio’ or university and called itself the ‘Athens of Apulia’. Unfortunately for the Altamuresi, its academics adopted the ideas of the French Revolution.

  Early in 1799, the dons at the university rallied Altamura to the new Neapolitan Republic. However, Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo landed in Calabria, raising a royalist army from his family’s tenants. The Sanfedisti (Christian Army of the Holy Faith) included not just loyal gentry but a number of brigands who killed and plundered as they went. When they reached Altamura on 9 May, its citizens ran out of ammunition after only a day. They fled the same night, the men going first, followed by the women and children, to hide in the dank grottoes of the Murgia like their ancestors. Entering Altamura, the Sanfedisti found a vault full of dead royalists, some buried alive, and any citizens who had stayed were massacred and the houses sacked. Men from Matera and Gioia del Colle joined in, bringing carts, while every sheep and cow, every horse, pig and chicken in the surrounding countryside was stolen, the Gioiesi alone making off with 3000 sheep. After a fortnight the Sanfedisti allowed the starving Altamuresi to creep back from the ravines into a city where their goods were still being sold in the market place. They had to ask permission to enter their own houses and 130 were arrested as known Jacobins. It took decades for Altamura to recover.

  George Berkeley had commented on the openness of the country in the region between Altamura and Gravina, and on the vast flocks of sheep:

  not a tree in view; some corn, some scrub, much the greater part stony pasture; a small brook, no cattle or houses, except one or two cottages, occur in this simple space; sheep fed here in winter, in the summer in the Abruzzo, grass here being dried up in the summer, and a fresh crop in September... those who own the sheep mentioned are men of the Abruzzo, many of them, very rich, and drive a great trade, sending their wool to Manfredonia, and so by sea to Venice; their cheese to Naples, and elsewhere up and down the kingdom; they nevertheless live meanly like other peasants, and many with bags of money shan’t have a coat worth a groat.

  But this sort of sheep ranching created a landscape like the Scottish Highlands after the clearances, driving many peasants to despair. Some joined the brigands, others forced their daughters into prostitution in the towns. Sons with good voices were castrated and sold to choirs – if discovered, their parents claimed that the boy had fallen asleep in the fields and a pig had bitten off his testicles. The Risorgimeno brought even more misery.

  Just as on the Tavoliere, the sheep runs of the western Terra di Bari became latifondi. Shepherds and dairymen were thrown out of work and common land was ruthlessly enclosed. By the late 1860s, it was said at Altamura that there were only two sorts of people, carriage folk and the rest. An Altamuran bureaucrat reported how the masses “openly display their hatred for landlords and officials”. Their distrust of officialdom was justified, corruption being rampant and every charity maladministered. Former Borbone soldiers turned brigand, establishing hideouts in the region called the Graviscella, full of small ravines and caves, from where they emerged at night to find food and money at gun-point. More than a few landowners or priests sheltered them out of dislike for the new Northern regime and for its alien, arrogant Piedmontese troops and administrators.

  Most Altamuresi, however, had no stomach for an outlaw’s hunted life, accepting an equally lethal if less dramatic sub-existence in a labour gang. By 1901 eighty per cent were day labourers whose misery was aggravated by the uncertainty of being employed at all. In 1920, when drought made the ground too hard to dig, one in five went without employment, the lucky seldom working a three day week. There were government hand-outs of flour, but it was mouldy or adulterated; the officials at Altamura would only give women ration-tickets in exchange for sexual favours. With such widespread resentment, the situation was explosive, kept in check solely by fear of a nearby Fascist cell at Minervino Murge.

  When the Germans abandoned Bari in the autumn of 1943, they established a new headquarters base at Altamura. Up in the Murge, it was ideally placed for directing a stand against the Allies. However, Field Marshal Kesselring – ‘Smiling Albert’ as his soldiers called him – needed every man he could find, to try and beat back the Allied landing at Salerno, and simply did not have enough troops to hold Apulia. No doubt, his decision to withdraw was helped by the all pervading misery of life in the little city in those days.

  Horace must have driven along the Via Appia through Altamura – or, at any rate, Sub-Lupatia – on his way to Tàranto. Nearly two millenia after he had passed by here so cheerfully, most of its inhabitants were worse off under King Victor Emmanuel III than their Roman ancestors had been under the Emperor Augustus.

  Part VII

  The Cave Dwellers

  31

  The Cave Dwellers

  Remember, O Lord, those in the deserts and mountains,

  and in dens and caves of the earth...

  “The Greek Liturgy”

  ONE OF THE STRANGEST FEATURES of the old Apulian landscape was the cave-city, originally a hiding-place from Goths and Saracens, but lasting long after the danger had ceased. Whereas grotto-churches existed almost everywhere, Apulia’s cave-cities were restricted to an area bounded by Grottaglie in the east, and by Gravina-in-Puglia an
d Tàranto in the north and west. The majority were abandoned during the late Middle Ages, although Mrs Ross saw people living in grottoes at Massafra and Statte during the late nineteenth century, while the underground cities at Gravina-in-Puglia and Matera (the latter now in Basilicata) were inhabited until the 1950s. Matera is the best known, thanks to Carlo Levi’s “Christ Stopped at Eboli”.

  The plateau of the Murge, especially at the edges, is divided by ravines (gravine), formed by long-vanished rivers slicing through the tufa. The Apulians either moved into caves already existing in a ravine, some of which had been occupied in prehistoric times, or carved out new ones, their animals living with them. From even a short distance away, in wooded country, many cave-cities were invisible, the caves frequently concealed by dense vegetation and their access ladders pulled up each night.

  A cave-house was generally divided into a living room and a bedroom, the beds being skins on platforms cut in the rock. At one side there was a tiny kitchen, with a ring carved in the ceiling to hang a cooking pot and a hole to let out smoke. Cisterns were dug in the floor, with channels for collecting rain-water; others covered by wooden trapdoors contained corn or oil, and niches in the walls held provisions and household implements. Where an underground city survived into the sixteenth century, as at Gravina-in-Puglia or Matera, the caves were often disguised by a façade of dressed stone so that outside they looked like proper houses.

  Grotto-churches are known technically as rupestrian churches, meaning hollowed into a bank – from the Latin word for a cliff, rupis. These eerie places of worship resembled the better-known rock-chapels of Cappadocia, even if the terrain was totally different. Although sometimes no more than a chapel with an altar, frequently they were complete churches with pillars, aisles and apses. Occasionally, they were even full scale monasteries on several floors, possessing not only a chapel, but a dormitory, refectory and library. Their most attractive feature was the Byzantine frescoes that the monks painted on the plastered rock-face. Tragically neglected, these must rank among the most haunting and least appreciated art-treasures in Western Europe.

  None of the travellers seem to have visited any of the smaller under-ground cities, such as Laterza and Ginosa. In both places the cave dwellings, including one or two churches containing faded remnants of frescoes, were abandoned long ago. The ravine at Laterza is very impressive, but the most interesting church here is not a grotto in its steep sides, but one dug out of the floor. Now the crypt of the Santuario della Mater Domini, this has some fine twelfth century frescoes, especially a beautiful Santa Ciriaca, who has the long, thin nose and enormous eyes of a true Byzantine saint. There is a fifteenth century marble fountain at the bottom of the ravine where, as in the cave-dwellers’ time, flocks still drink in the evening and clothes are washed in water gushing from the mouths of grotesques.

  Ginosa has little to offer sightseers, except on the night of Holy Saturday when a Passion play is staged in its ravine, a thoroughly effective revival that makes admirable use of microphones and modern lighting. Before it starts, city dignitaries and religious confraternities escort the cast of actors and children in a procession through the city and along the ravine, which is brightly lit by flares. The audience follows, trooping down the dark, twisting streets to a natural amphitheatre opposite the old cave settlement. They sit on the ground, hissing and booing when Judas betrays Christ, and cheering when he hangs himself from a wild fig-tree.

  An ugly incident at Ginosa in 1908 reminds one that, even after the inhabitants had left their caves, they still lacked water. During one of the worse droughts in living memory, a large band of parched and starving children went to the church, shouting at the priest that he must pray for rain. Instead of praying, he threw two buckets of precious water over the children, two of whom were trampled to death in the ensuing panic. A thousand labourers returning from the fields rushed to the church to lynch the priest, who was saved by the carabinieri only just in time.

  Inspired by Lenormant, who was the first to recognise the merit of Apulia’s Byzantine frescoes, Charles Diehl visited Mottola. Perched on top of a hill, the little city has a splendid view of the plain beneath, of the sea, and of the mountains of Basilicata and Calabria. It has been inhabited since prehistoric times and in 274 BC King Pyrrhus of Epirus was routed by the Romans in a skirmish just below the city. Sacked by the Saracens in 846, it was re-fortified by the Byzantines, but those inhabitants who had not been slaughtered or dragged off into slavery preferred to live in the deep ravine that lies to the south, as did their descendants for several centuries.

  You cannot see the ravine from the road, only the tops of a line of tall Aleppo pines marking where the land suddenly drops for hundreds of feet. Choked by vegetation, a narrow path leads down to the bottom, joining the caves to each other. A landslide has destroyed part of the settlement, including the main church, yet even so, it remains possible to gain a vivid impression of what an underground Apulian city must have looked like during the early Middle Ages.

  Among the cave churches around Mottola is San Nicola, dug discreetly into the side of a secluded lama or miniature ravine, filled with prickly pear, acanthus and loquats. Here are some of the best twelfth and thirteenth century frescoes in Apulia. Despite an iron gate to protect them from vandals, on one occasion thieves broke in and cut out the heads, removing the Child from the Virgin’s lap. The head of the Archangel Michael was found in the lama while the Child and the heads of St Parasceva and other saints were recovered at Castellaneta.

  Not far from San Nicola, at the Masseria Casalrotto, is the grotto chapel of Santa Margherita. Originally Byzantine, as can be seen from the frescoes of St Demetrius and the Archangel Michael, it was repainted in a Latin style during the fourteenth century, when the Greek rite was going out of favour. The Archangel escaped repainting through being on the far side of a pillar and less in view of the congregation.

  Massafra, teetering on the extreme edge of the Murgia and divided into an old town and a new by a handsome ravine, was visited by Janet Ross in 1888. She found it “very dirty and extraordinarily picturesque”, the poor living in “prehistoric cave dwellings”. She watched the festa (festival) of the Madonna della Scala, brought in procession from the great church at the far end of the ravine to the Benedictine convent that is the statue’s home for the rest of the year. The Madonna, clad in gold-embroidered white robes, ready to be hung with jewels on her feast day, is kept in a glass case at the convent.

  The story of the discovery of Massafra’s miraculous icon, which hangs over the high altar in the church of the Madonna della Scala, seems to change with every sacristan. In 1888 it was said that a simple peasant, lured on by unearthly music and a mysterious light, had dug it up in the ravine. A century later we are told a far more colourful tale; a huntsman had seen it in a dream, on the antlers of a deer that ran down a ladder into a cave. Out with his hounds next morning, he saw a stag disappear down a rough flight of steps into a grotto and, chasing after it, found the icon. Beside the church is the partially destroyed cave chapel of the Buona Nuova, the original home of the Madonna who, after her finding, was reverently cut out from the wall and taken into the new church. As with other Apulian “icons”, she must have begun as a fresco painted by a Greek hermit.

  The Madonna della Scala has performed many miracles. The most dramatic was for a poor girl who gathered herbs in the ravine by night; she was going to be burned as a witch when the Madonna appeared to her terrified tormentors and saved her life. In gratitude, the girl carved out a flight of steps from the church to the top of the ravine, the scala.

  Mrs Ross also inspected another rock-hewn church here, Santa Maria della Candalora, “well worth the climb down into the gravina.” Charles Diehl considered it to be the most important Byzantine church in Massafra, and it contains a superb fresco of the Presentation in the Temple, with a wonderful white-bearded St Simeon. This part of the ravine is full of grottoes once used as cells by a hermit community. Here too, is “T
he Dispensary of the Sorcerer Gregorius”, a complex of inaccessible caves where the hermits kept their medicines and potions.

  32

  Gravina-in-Puglia

  It is built on caves that can be lived in...

  G B Pachicelli, “Il Regno di Napoli in Prospettiva”

  THE CITY OF GRAVINA-IN-PUGLIA lies on the undulating plateau of Apulia Petrosa, the stony Alta Murgia of western Apulia, not far from the border with Basilicata. Its dramatic setting, on the edge of the giant ravine from which it derives its name, is very impressive. When the Roman city here was destroyed in the fifth century during the Barbarian invasions, its citizens took refuge in the ravine, excavating a troglodyte town with grotto churches, while attempting to rebuild their city on the surface. Four hundred years later, they tried to hide in it from the Saracens, but in 983 the Infidels massacred over a thousand of them. The victims’ bones may still be seen in the cave church of San Michele dei Grotti, once the chiesa madre of Gravina, where Mass continues to be said on the feast-days of St Michael.