An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia (2 page)

In our book we link Apulia’s history to its topography. We know the terrain well and we write from personal experience – besides living in a small Apulian town for several months we have made many visits over the years, systematically tracing the footsteps of early travellers. We would like to share not only our fascination with this beautiful land and its history, but also our admiration for its people.

1

The Early Travellers

In the past, Apulia was largely avoided by sight-seeing travellers. In 1883 Augustus Hare wrote that “the bareness and filth of the inns, the roughness of the natives, the torment of
zinzare
(mosquitoes), the terror of earthquakes, the insecurity of the roads from brigands, and the far more serious risk of malarial or typhoid fever from bad water, are natural causes which have hitherto frightened strangers away from the south.” None the less, a few came, and some of these recorded their impressions.

The
Abate Giovanni Battista Pacichelli
(1641–95), born in Rome though by origin from Pistoia, was an indefatigable traveller who went as far as Ireland. During the 1680s he visited every town in Apulia, however small, describing each with gusto in “Il Regno di Napoli in Prospettiva”, which was not published until 1703. Antiquary, jurist, theologian, hagiographer, letter writer and a member of the Royal Society at London, Pacichelli seems to have been the only priest for whom Norman Douglas ever felt any sympathy. “I like this amiable and loquacious creature, restlessly gad-ding about Europe, gloriously complacent, hopelessly absorbed in trivialities, and credulous beyond belief,” he wrote. No doubt, the Abate’s obvious love of wine was one of the reasons that endeared him.

For over a century the literary visitors who followed Pacichelli came in search of Roman remains, presumably inspired by Livy’s account of the battle of Cannae or by Horace’s journey to Brìndisi. The first was an Anglo-Irishman,
Bishop George Berkeley
(1683–1753), then Dean of Derry, later famous for his ‘immaterialist’ philosophy – that matter exists only in so far as it is perceived – which Dr Johnson ridiculed by kicking a stone. He came here in the course of an extended Grand Tour in 1734, when he was companion to the Bishop of Clogher’s son, writing down his impressions of Apulia in terse notes, very different from his usual stately prose. He also sent letters to his friend Sir John Percival, enthusing over Lecce, which he considered the most beautiful city in Italy, amazed to come across such impressive architecture in so remote an area. He says that he has seen in a single day five fine cities built in marble “whereof the names are not known to Englishmen.”

The next visitor to put pen to paper was an Englishman,
Henry Swinburne
(1743–1803), the son of Sir John Swinburne of Capheaton in Northumberland. “A little genteel young man”, was how he struck the philanthropist Hannah More: “He is modest and agreeable; not wise and heavy like his books.” This is unfair – even if his “Travels in the Two Sicilies” is strong on facts, it is written with a caustic wit and a keen sense of the ridiculous.

No other British travellers of this sort visited Apulia during the eighteenth century. The Swiss
Baron von Riedesel
, who came in 1767, looking for classical remains, was sometimes unintentionally comical – as when he thought
trulli
were Roman tombs or mistook quarries for ancient baths. Another Swiss,
Count Charles Ulysses de Salis Marschalins
, who toured the region in 1789 was a friend of Giuseppe Capecelatro, the free-thinking Archbishop of Tàranto. Capecelatro organised de Salis’s tour, providing him with a guide and accompanying him from Naples to Tàranto. The resulting book gives a vivid picture of Pugliese rural life.

Jean-Claude Richard, Abbé de Saint-Non
, who visited Apulia during the 1770s, had not much to say but commissioned a number of famous artists to illustrate his sumptuous “Voyages pittor-esques ou descriptions du Royaume de Naples et de Sicile”, published in 1781–86. The beautiful plates show how comparatively little Apulia has changed. Another Frenchman, the mysterious
Paul-Louis Courier
, who was afterwards murdered by his game-keeper, was garrisoned at Foggia and Lecce as a gunner officer from 1805–7. Although brief, his letters convey the bloodthirsty mood of the period.

In the winter of 1816–17 a young Scot rode alone through Apulia, which he later revisited with his friend the Prince of Ischitella, who had estates in the Gargano.
Charles Macfarlane
is described by the “Dictionary of National Biography” as “a miscellaneous writer”; in 1856 he lamented that “literature no longer affords me the ample income I derived from it during more than quarter of a century” and he died as a Poor Brother of the Charter-house. If clumsily written, Macfarlane’s accounts of shepherds and brigands in “The Lives and Exploits of Banditti and Robbers” (1833) are of considerable interest.

As a young man, the
Hon Richard Keppel Craven
settled in Naples, where he was famous for coloured waistcoats and his hospitality at the Palazzo Craven. “A Tour through the Southern Provinces of Italy” recounts his adventures in Apulia in 1818 with ponderous humour. Ten years later the extraordinary
Crauford Tait Ramage
, tutor to the sons of the British Consul at Naples, walked or rode a mule through the region, travelling along the coast by felucca; he wore a white frock-coat and shoes, and carried an umbrella for protection from the sun and rain. His “Nooks and By-ways of Italy” (subtitled “Wanderings in Search of its Ancient Remains and Modern Superstitions”) was not published until 1868, a classic of travel admired by Norman Douglas and Harold Acton.
Edward Lear
confined himself to the western border during his painting tour of 1848 but his description of Venosa, in “Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria and the Kingdom of Naples” is well worth reading. He also composed a limerick:

There was an Old Man of Apulia,

Whose conduct was very peculiar;

He fed twenty sons

Upon nothing but buns,

That whimsical Man of Apulia.

This appears to be the only English verse inspired by the region.

“A Handbook for Travellers in Southern Italy being a guide to the continental portion of the Two Sicilies” appeared in 1853. Not very much is known about the author,
Octavian Blewitt
, save that for many years he was Secretary to the Royal Literary Fund (the charity for indigent writers) and catalogued its archives. He spent the 1830s wandering through Greece, the Levant, and Italy, often returning to the
Mezzogiorno
, and certainly knew his history besides having a good eye for topography. Published by John Murray, his pioneering study went into many editions, being heavily plagiarised by Augustus Hare.

That odd figure
Charles Yriarte
went to the Capitanata with the Piedmontese army in 1861, going on to Lecce and Òtranto fifteen years later. A journalist and painter, he was inspector of France’s lunatic asylums and then of the Paris Opera while contributing articles to the Press under such pseudonyms as “Marquis de Villemer”, illustrating the
Monde Illustrée
, and writing a life of Cesare Borgia. From “Les Bords de I’Adriatique et de Montenegro” (1878) he obviously liked the Pugliesi.

Mme Louis Figuier
, born Juliette Bouscarren at Montpellier, was the first woman to record her impressions. She also wrote novels and plays, with titles such as “La dame aux lilas blancs”, which enjoyed modest success. Escorted by her husband, a distinguished scientist, she paid a brief visit to Apulia during the winter of 1864–65, at the end of the Brigands’ War, seeing only Foggia and Trani. Throughout, the couple appear to have been terrified. In “L’Italie d’ après nature” she gives a gruesome account of the sheer horror of Apulian inns, which goes a long way towards explaining why the region had so few visitors.

The magisterial author of lengthy studies of the Emperor Hadrian, Pope Urban VIII and Lucrezia Borgia,
Ferdinand Gregorovius
- a Prussian with a square head, shovel beard and pince-nez - rode over all Apulia during 1874–75, on a series of expeditions which he describes with Teutonic thoroughness in “Wanderjahre in Italien”.

Augustus Hare
travelled by rail at the end of the 1870s when researching here for his “Cities of Southern Italy and Sicily”. Acid about Apulia’s beggars and discomfort, the fussy old bachelor was warmly enthusiastic about its “wonderful old cities” and even pitied the labour gangs slaving in the fields. He complained bitterly about his accommodation, however: at Manfredonia, “Inn,
Locanda di Donna Pepina
, very miserable”; at Bari, “
Hotel del Risorgimento
, clean and tolerable but very dear”; and at Tàranto, “
Albergo di Roma
, poor and dirty, but endurable.”

A blue-stocking virago rumoured to have the names of her lovers tattooed on her thighs,
Janet Ross
explored Apulia in 1888, collecting material for her book “The Land of Manfred”, which to some extent plagiarised de Salis-Marschlins. Her reminiscences, “The Fourth Generation” (1912) are better value. “Our Tuscan friends were much excited and rather alarmed at our daring to go to such an unknown region”, she recalls when describing how she first decided to visit Apulia. “I was advised by several people to leave my earrings and gold watch at home – ‘those
Meridionali
are all thieves and robbers, you may very likely be captured by brigands and murdered. It is a dangerous expedition on which you are bound.’ Few of them knew where Apulia was... The Northern Italians hardly regard them as fellow-countrymen.” She got to know the Apulians well and was impressed by their honesty and gaiety.

François Lenormant
, who saw Apulia shortly before Janet Ross, lectured on archaeology at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. His “À travers l’Apulie et la Lucanie” (1883) and “La Grande Grèce” (1881–84) not only emphasise the region’s Hellenistic links but are fiercely indignant at the plight of the miserable labourers on the
masserie
. The two books persuaded
Charles Diehl
to visit the Apulian grottoes in search of Byzantine frescoes, and then publish a pioneering study, “L’Art Byzantin dans I’Italie Méridionale” (1894). They aroused so much enthusiasm in that forgotten “psychological novelist”
Paul Bourget
that in 1890 he spent his honeymoon here, describing what he saw in “Sensations d’Italie”. A would-be disciple of Henry James, a fat, red-faced little man too fond of his food and wine, he fell genuinely in love with the Apulian landscape, urging that Lenormant’s books should be made compulsory reading in French schools.

Another novelist,
George Gissing
, stayed at Tàranto in 1897, but his “By the Ionian Sea” is disappointing. The eccentric, red-bearded Sir George Sitwell came down from his Tuscan castle to explore in the early 1900s, perhaps inspired by Mrs Ross’s “Land of Manfred” – there was a copy in his library at Montegufoni. He may have been the first to tell his sons Osbert and Sacheverell about Apulia, although they seem to have derived their passion for Lecce from
Martin Shaw
Briggs, a Leeds architect, who in 1910 published a glowing description of the city, “In the Heel of Italy”, which extolled its Baroque architecture. The brothers would often visit Lecce during the 1920s,
Sir Osbert Sitwell
praising it almost too extravagantly in “Discursions on Travel, Art and Life”.

Edward Hutton
was a minor Edwardian ‘man of letters’ (his preferred description of himself), and once well known for his Italian travel books. A young friend of Janet Ross, he came here just before the Great War. He did not particularly enjoy the experience, described in his pedestrian if still useful “Naples and Southern Italy” (1915). However,
Norman Douglas
’s “Old Calabria”, published the same year, contains some magnificent chapters on Apulia. The author was a deplorable figure, a sponger and a paedophile, but he was undeniably amusing and learned, his beautifully written books ranging from “South Wind” – surely the funniest novel about Capri – to a monograph on the lizards of Paestum.

Brought up to read the Greek and Latin historians, all our travellers took for granted a familiarity with Apulia in classical times (especially of the battle of Cannae, of Taras and Brundisium), which today’s visitors rarely possess. On the other hand, they had certain handicaps. They were unable to appreciate Byzantine art, considered barbarous before the twentieth century, and, apart from Diehl and Lenormant, did not bother to visit the grotto churches, if they were even aware of their existence. Only the very early and the very late comers among them admired Apulian architecture, Romanesque or Baroque. They also lacked the insights that have been provided by modern archaeology. All save a handful ignored the wretched life led by the poor, such horrors as the labour gangs in the fields and why there were so many beggars. Where possible, we have tried to illuminate any blind spots of this sort.

Part I

2

A strong people with simple customs live in these mountains...