An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia (11 page)

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

16

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.

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.”