An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia (16 page)

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

23

...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

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.