An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia (13 page)

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
.

The rain had stopped, so after arriving at the sister’s house, they went out onto the balcony to admire the view of the harbour. Going back into the room, Juliette Figuier found their hostess raiding their trunk. “The old woman had a hard, glaring stare, pale lips and a false, cruel face.” She ran up to Mme Figuier, raised her veil and cried with a hideous laugh, “What no earrings, no necklace, no jewels? My sister must be mad. Here’s a guest who’s not worth strangling, not even worth the price of the cord.”

Juliette was so frightened that she ran out into the street, to see dark blotches on the paving stones which she fancied were blood-stains. Telling the cabmen to retrieve their trunk, she and M. Figuier just managed to catch the 3.00 pm train back to Foggia, the last that day. On the journey they tried to eat the chicken, unsuccessfully, deciding that when a fowl was killed in Apulia it was always the oldest member of the flock.

Twenty years later, no one tried to strangle the formidable Janet Ross when she arrived with her timid protégé, the painter Carlo Orsi. She was amused by the ill-feeling between Trani and Andria. “At Trani they told us that the people of Andria were all thieves and assassins, uncivil to strangers, and perfect savages; while at Andria we were informed that Trani was a nest of robbers, and its inhabitants ‘
maleducati e gente di nessuna fede
’ (ill-bred and untrustworthy)”. There were certainly some unusual members of the medical profession in Trani. In a dirty back street Janet Ross found an advertisement posted up outside the house of a Professor Rica:

The said Professor Rica will buy, for making his salves, live snakes and big serpents, wolves, bears, monkeys, marmots, weasels, and may other kinds of wild animal, alive and in good condition.

But Mrs. Ross met only politeness in the town, even if the people were amazed by her courage in walking about alone. They were equally astonished at her wearing a hat instead of a shawl over her head. “‘Are you a man that you wear a hat?’ asked a small boy. Some nice-looking young men at once reproved him and asked me to excuse the bad manners of an
ignorante
[uneducated]. They then offered to show us the way to the cathedral and made way for us through the crowd.” To be fair to the little boy, there was clearly something unmistakably masculine about Janet Ross, judging from photographs.

The cathedral, with its tall
campanile
and its magic setting by the sea, was largely built between 1159 and 1186 although only completed in the thirteenth century. A recent restoration has re-moved the Baroque ornament disliked by Swinburne, revamping the interior in twilight twentieth century style. The effect is unspeakably bleak, that of a soulless barn, even the local clergy comparing the bishop’s new throne to a dentist’s chair.

On the evening of Holy Saturday, Mrs. Ross returned to the cathedral, to find out just what was meant by the
abbavescio di Cristo
:

As the clock struck eleven a great curtain which hid the high altar fell, and the noise which followed was frightful. The whole congregation shouted, knocked their sticks on the pavement and dashed chairs against the walls, while the bells rang all over the town. This was the
abbavescio
which I discovered meant the resurrection of Christ... The noise outside was even worse. Crackers, paper bombs and rockets were exploding all over the place, and on the pavement in front of every house were lines of little brown-paper parcels full of gunpowder, which went off with a deafening effect. This was the
batteria di Gesù
(the battery of Jesus), a demonstration of joy at His rising from the tomb.

What she did not appreciate was that the
abbavescio
was a survival from Byzantine Apulia, from the Greek Orthodox celebration of Easter.

She thought the public gardens “wildly picturesque”, and her description shows that they still remain much as they were a century ago. They are next to the seawall, adjoining the little semi-circular harbour, which reminded her of Venice.

Part V

19

It was at Bari that the Byzantine troops made their last stand; it was

Bari that remained capital of the Theme of Italy until the very end.

Jules Gay, “L’Italie méridionale et l’empire byzantine”

IN 1071 The LAST
CATAPAN
, Stephen Pateranos, was freed by the Normans and allowed to sail home to Constantinople. He had been taken prisoner when Bari fell to Robert Guiscard after a siege of nearly three years. Besides trying to assassinate Guiscard (with a poisoned javelin as he sat at dinner in his tent), the Byzantines had made desperate attempts to relieve the doomed city – only that winter Stephen had slipped in through the Norman blockade on his return from the Imperial capital, where he had gone to make a frantic appeal for more troops. In April, however, weakened by treachery, the garrison surrendered. Stephen’s departure meant the end of Byzantine Italy.

Originally Bari was Peucetian, then Greek and then Roman. However the city was unimportant in ancient times. Horace enjoyed the fish here, seemingly the sole distinction to be recorded in classical literature.

Bari’s Byzantine period began in the mid-sixth century, when it was one of the first places recaptured from the Goths for Justinian. Shortly after the Emperor’s death it was occupied by Lombards and, together with most of Apulia, governed by the Lombard Dukes of Benevento under Byzantine suzerainty. What was left of Imperial Apulia, the Salento, was administered by a
Strategos
(general) at Òtranto, who took his orders from the Emperor’s viceroy in Italy, the exarch of Ravenna further up the Adriatic coast. They kept in touch by sea, until Ravenna fell to the Lombards in 752, after which the
Strategos
received his instructions direct from Constantinople.

Despite the Lombard occupation, one can safely assume that Bari kept its links with Byzantium, the greatest trading centre in the world, the last bastion of classical civilization and the only source of luxuries.

During the early ninth century Italy began to be attacked by Saracens, Berber Aghlabids from North Africa, who sacked Rome and conquered Sicily. In 847 Bari was captured by Khalfun, once a mercenary in the service of the Lombard prince Radelchis. He evicted its Lombard governor Siconolfo and established the first and only fully-fledged Moslem state in mainland Italy. By 860, Khalfun and his successors – Mufarrag ibn-Sallam and Sawdan – had added Orta and Matera to their territory, using them as for-ward bases from which to plunder far and wide, and sending count-less Apulian men, women and children to the African slave markets.

According to Bernard the Monk their city was defended by a double wall, while they gave it mosques and minarets. Despite being a great sacker of monasteries, Sawdan, the third emir, was no mere pirate but a scholar who obtained formal recognition of his emirate from the Caliph of Baghdad. Up to a point, he even tolerated Christians. In 867, on his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Bernard had no difficulty in obtaining a passport at Bari and finding a pas-sage to Egypt – although he saw shiploads of Christian slaves bound for Africa. However, in 871 the Western Emperor Louis II retook the city, capturing Sawdan.

After Louis’ death in 875 the Carolingians were too busy with troubles in France and Germany to intervene in Italy, and three years later the
Strategos
Gregorios marched up from Òtranto to reoccupy Bari in the Eastern Emperor’s name. It should be realised, however, that outside the Salentine peninsula which was governed from Òtranto, held by Constantinople since the sixth century, there was no continuous Byzantine presence. Even after Greek settlers began arriving at the end of the ninth century, most Byzantines in Apulia were soldiers or officials – apart from a handful of monks, who had first arrived a hundred years before, fleeing from iconoclastic persecution.

In 975 the Byzantines commenced a long campaign of reconquest. Bari replaced Òtranto as their Italian capital while the
Stratagos
was given the new title of
Catapan
, which meant becoming a viceroy with full military and civil powers over the ‘Theme of Lombardy’. In 1011 the
Catapan
Basil Mesonardonites built a
kastron
(town) here. After Basil Boiannes – ablest of the
catapans
– had established Imperial rule over all Apulia, Greek settlers poured into Apulia, most of whose rock-churches date from this time. Had another brilliant Emperor followed Basil II (the ‘Bulgar Slayer’), who died in 1025, the Byzantines might have succeeded in re-creating Magna Graecia.

“Among the many perverse notions of which we are now rid-ding ourselves is this – that Byzantinism in south Italy was a period of decay and torpid dreamings”, wrote Norman Douglas with considerable justice in 1915. “There was no lethargy in their social and political ambitions, in their military achievements, which held the land against overwhelming numbers of Saracens, Lombards and other intruders.”

Yet only in the Salento were Apulia’s Greeks in a majority and only there was Greek universally spoken. North of Brindisi, the population in most coastal cities as well as inland was dominated by ‘Lombards’. Latin speaking by now despite their Germanic names, intermarriage had turned them into a caste rather than a race, a caste which differed from its neighbours merely in laws and customs. Chronically short of men and money yet having to extract taxes and raise troops, the catapans handled the Lombards with Byzantine subtlety, carefully respecting their customs and allowing them to live under their own laws with their own magistrates.

Nonetheless, the Byzantine Emperors set the utmost value on Bari. Ever since the Moslem period the city on the promontory had been so well fortified that its possession was vital for control of the southern Adriatic. As in other Apulian ports, its inhabitants were an exotic mixture of Lombards, Latins, Greeks, Armenians, Jews and Moslems, governed by Byzantine officials. The city grew rich from importing the gold, spices, silks and luxury goods that could only be obtained at Constantinople, in return exporting oil, almonds, wine, salted fish and slaves. Prosperous citizens enjoyed luxuries unknown in most of Western Europe, Lombard nobles dressing like Byzantines in silk robes and fantastic head-dresses.