An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia (17 page)

First settled by Peucetians, Ruvo di Puglia became a staging-post on the Via Traiana, Horace’s Rubi. An attractive little town, perched on the edge of the Murge 732 feet above sea-level, its few visitors are charmed by an exquisite Apulian-Romanesque cathedral on top of a Paleo-Christian predecessor, itself over a Roman house-church. The
campanile
is a Byzantine watch-tower, while Frederick II built the castle of which only a solitary, crumbling bastion survives.

Ruvo’s other attraction is the Museo Jatta, containing Greek and Apulian ceramics dating from the 6th to the 3rd century BC Giovanni Jatta bought vast estates round Ruvo from the Carafa family in 1806 and began to collect Attic and Apulian artefacts discovered in graves on his land. The city had had close links with Greece in the 5th century BC, importing quantities of kraters, vases and cups and then in the following century Greek artisans to found a factory. This local ware, admittedly of far less beauty then the Attic, was usually destroyed when found, until the beginning of the nineteenth century when it suddenly became immensely sought after. His son became an archaeologist, adding to what would be-come one of the greatest collections of Apulian ware in Italy.

Janet Ross tried to see the Museo Jatta in 1889, without success. “Signor Jatta has gone to Bari, bearing the keys of the museum in his pocket”, she was told. “Some of the streets are exceeding pictur-esque; all are dirty”, observed Mrs. Ross. “The people were very civil, but evidently unused to strangers.” No one explained to her what had paid for the kraters. It was sweated labour, most of the town’s male population being day labourers on the enormous
latifondi
owned by the Jatta and Cotugno families. In 1907 a general strike was broken by 200 armed peasants from the Jatta estates, who fought a pitched battle with the strikers, hunting them through the streets with knives and guns.

Bitonto was once an important Roman city on the Via Traiana, retaken for Byzantium in 975 by the Catapan Zacharias. In a purple-draped litter, Frederick II’s body passed through in 1250 on its way to Tàranto to take ship for Sicily, escorted by barons in black and weeping Saracen bodyguards. The citizens are unlikely to have wept – the Emperor had put an inscription over their main gate reading “
Gens bitutina, totia bestia et assinina
” (the people of Bitonto are all beasts and fools).

The castle’s round towers date from Bitonto’s expansion in the fourteenth century. Unlike Apulian ports, it prospered under the Spaniards, famous for its oil, still the best in Apulia. In 1734, Charles of Bourbon routed the Austrians outside the city, restoring the
Regno
’s independence and founding the Borbone monarchy. Augustus Hare calls Bitonto’s cathedral “the noblest in Southern Italy”. The ultimate example of Apulian Romanesque, inspired by the church of San Nicola at Bari, it dates from the first half of the thirteenth century and was built with unusual speed, probably within twenty-five years, so in style it is all of a piece. A white mar-ble pulpit dated 1229 has a panel portraying Frederick II and three of his sons, with the name of the priest who carved it, “
Nicolaus sacerdos et magister
” (Nicholas priest and teacher).

Swinburne thought Bitonto’s inhabitants “more polished and improved in their manners than those that dwell along the coast”, commenting on “an air of affluence”. Yet, Hare says it was impossible for him to sketch in Bitonto because of “the violence of the half savage crowd in every lowest stage of beggary and filth.” Decline had set in, partly due to large scale planting of vines during the 1870s and 1890s, followed by the ravages of phylloxera which appeared in the Salento in 1889 and had almost destroyed the entire Apulian wine industry by 1919. There were bloody riots in 1920, the town hall being stormed and food shops looted. A few years before, Edward Hutton had sensed the misery here, writing of “a curiously lonely city”.

Although undistinguished at first sight, the little city of Gioia del Colle has a certain charm. Significantly, on certain Sundays since time immemorial, generations of Gioiesi have picnicked together on a low hill to the north-east, Monte Sannace, the site of the city of their Peucetian ancestors. Gioia became an important Norman fief in 1089, its first lord being Robert Guiscard’s brother, Richard the Seneschal, who built the castle. The Emperor Frederick II rebuilt it when he returned from Jerusalem, giving it an appearance that is half Teutonic and half Arab. A Gioiese legend claims his bastard son Manfred was born in the castle, together with his other children by Bianca Lancia. The castle was a key Hohenstaufen fortress, guarding the road across the “heel of Italy” from Bari to Tàranto. Trapezoidal in plan, it has two huge square towers, the Torre de Rossi and the Torre Imperatrice. Frederick II used it as a hunting-lodge since in his time, and for long after, Gioia was surrounded by dense wood-land. Pacichelli calls it “a sumptuous and ornate palace with a gallery of choice pictures and a theatre”, adding reverently that the Princes of Acquaviva often stayed here, accompanied by their court. Made into a county, during the seventeenth century Gioia del Colle was bought, together with the principality of Acquaviva nearby, by the Genoese moneylender Carlo De Mari, who henceforward referred to his “
stato di Acquaviva e Gioia
” (state of Acquaviva and Gioia). His tombstone at Gioia styles him “Prince of Acquaviva, Patrician of Genoa and Knight of Naples”, but he began his career behind a counter. The castle was lived in until not so very long ago, by Donna Maria Emanuela Carafa from 1806–68, and by Marchese Luca De Resta into the twentieth century. It now houses the Museum.

“Nothing else worth seeing remains in this busy city of peas-ants”, says Edward Hutton, yet the Baroque façade of the Franciscan friary that dominates the main square, built in 1633 at public expense, surely deserves at least a glance. So does the little neo-Classical Teatro Rossini, built in 1832, bombed during the Second War but triumphantly brought back into use in 1997, and also the seventeenth century Dominican monastery which houses the
Municipio
(town hall).

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

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.”