An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia (21 page)

An ugly incident at Ginosa in 1908 reminds one that, even after the inhabitants had left their caves, they still lacked water. During one of the worse droughts in living memory, a large band of parched and starving children went to the church, shouting at the priest that he must pray for rain. Instead of praying, he threw two buckets of precious water over the children, two of whom were trampled to death in the ensuing panic. A thousand labourers returning from the fields rushed to the church to lynch the priest, who was saved by the
carabinieri
only just in time.

Inspired by Lenormant, who was the first to recognise the merit of Apulia’s Byzantine frescoes, Charles Diehl visited Mottola. Perched on top of a hill, the little city has a splendid view of the plain beneath, of the sea, and of the mountains of Basilicata and Calabria. It has been inhabited since prehistoric times and in 274 BC King Pyrrhus of Epirus was routed by the Romans in a skirmish just below the city. Sacked by the Saracens in 846, it was re-fortified by the Byzantines, but those inhabitants who had not been slaughtered or dragged off into slavery preferred to live in the deep ravine that lies to the south, as did their descendants for several centuries.

You cannot see the ravine from the road, only the tops of a line of tall Aleppo pines marking where the land suddenly drops for hundreds of feet. Choked by vegetation, a narrow path leads down to the bottom, joining the caves to each other. A landslide has destroyed part of the settlement, including the main church, yet even so, it remains possible to gain a vivid impression of what an underground Apulian city must have looked like during the early Middle Ages.

Among the cave churches around Mottola is San Nicola, dug discreetly into the side of a secluded
lama
or miniature ravine, filled with prickly pear, acanthus and loquats. Here are some of the best twelfth and thirteenth century frescoes in Apulia. Despite an iron gate to protect them from vandals, on one occasion thieves broke in and cut out the heads, removing the Child from the Virgin’s lap. The head of the Archangel Michael was found in the
lama
while the Child and the heads of St Parasceva and other saints were recovered at Castellaneta.

Not far from San Nicola, at the Masseria Casalrotto, is the grotto chapel of Santa Margherita. Originally Byzantine, as can be seen from the frescoes of St Demetrius and the Archangel Michael, it was repainted in a Latin style during the fourteenth century, when the Greek rite was going out of favour. The Archangel escaped repainting through being on the far side of a pillar and less in view of the congregation.

Massafra, teetering on the extreme edge of the Murgia and divided into an old town and a new by a handsome ravine, was visited by Janet Ross in 1888. She found it “very dirty and extraordinarily picturesque”, the poor living in “prehistoric cave dwellings”. She watched the
festa
(festival) of the Madonna della Scala, brought in procession from the great church at the far end of the ravine to the Benedictine convent that is the statue’s home for the rest of the year. The Madonna, clad in gold-embroidered white robes, ready to be hung with jewels on her feast day, is kept in a glass case at the convent.

The story of the discovery of Massafra’s miraculous icon, which hangs over the high altar in the church of the Madonna della Scala, seems to change with every sacristan. In 1888 it was said that a simple peasant, lured on by unearthly music and a mysterious light, had dug it up in the ravine. A century later we are told a far more colourful tale; a huntsman had seen it in a dream, on the antlers of a deer that ran down a ladder into a cave. Out with his hounds next morning, he saw a stag disappear down a rough flight of steps into a grotto and, chasing after it, found the icon. Beside the church is the partially destroyed cave chapel of the Buona Nuova, the original home of the Madonna who, after her finding, was reverently cut out from the wall and taken into the new church. As with other Apulian “icons”, she must have begun as a fresco painted by a Greek hermit.

The Madonna della Scala has performed many miracles. The most dramatic was for a poor girl who gathered herbs in the ravine by night; she was going to be burned as a witch when the Madonna appeared to her terrified tormentors and saved her life. In gratitude, the girl carved out a flight of steps from the church to the top of the ravine, the
scala
.

Mrs Ross also inspected another rock-hewn church here, Santa Maria della Candalora, “well worth the climb down into the
gravina
.” Charles Diehl considered it to be the most important Byzantine church in Massafra, and it contains a superb fresco of the Presentation in the Temple, with a wonderful white-bearded St Simeon. This part of the ravine is full of grottoes once used as cells by a hermit community. Here too, is “The Dispensary of the Sorcerer Gregorius”, a complex of inaccessible caves where the hermits kept their medicines and potions.

32

It is built on caves that can be lived in...

G B Pachicelli, “Il Regno di Napoli in Prospettiva”

THE CITY OF GRAVINA-IN-PUGLIA lies on the undulating plateau of Apulia Petrosa, the stony Alta Murgia of western Apulia, not far from the border with Basilicata. Its dramatic setting, on the edge of the giant ravine from which it derives its name, is very impressive. When the Roman city here was destroyed in the fifth century during the Barbarian invasions, its citizens took refuge in the ravine, excavating a troglodyte town with grotto churches, while attempting to rebuild their city on the surface. Four hundred years later, they tried to hide in it from the Saracens, but in 983 the Infidels massacred over a thousand of them. The victims’ bones may still be seen in the cave church of San Michele dei Grotti, once the
chiesa madre
of Gravina, where Mass continues to be said on the feast-days of St Michael.

Eventually the Gravinesi emerged from their caverns for good and built their present city. Although clearly a prosperous commercial town with a population of over 40,000 and possessing some fine buildings – Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neo-Classical – whole streets in its medieval quarter are deserted, especially those that lead down into the ravine. From above, you can see the entrances to countless caves, nearly all difficult to reach, as was intended by those who dug them.

A Greek bishopric dependent on Òtranto, Gravina fell to the Normans in 1042, becoming a county held by Humphrey of Hauteville. It was acquired by the Aleramo family during the twelfth century and then by the De Say. A cathedral above ground was begun in 1092, while Frederick II built a luxurious hunting lodge a mile away from the city, which became the counts’ residence.

John, Count of Gravina (d. 1335) was a younger brother of King Robert and of Philip, Prince of Tàranto – titular Latin Emperor of the East – and in 1318 married Mahaut of Hainault, Princess of Achaea (the Peloponnese). Finding she had secretly married an obscure knight, he divorced Mahaut, imprisoning her for life, but was invested as Prince of Achaea. After a single, futile campaign against the Byzantines, he went home to Gravina, exchanging Achaea for the Duchy of Durazzo on the Albanian coast, and the empty title of King of Albania. However ineffectual it may have been, his career illustrates Apulia’s indestructible ties with the far side of the Adriatic.

The Romanesque cathedral was burned down in the fifteenth century and the present
duomo
, from a comparatively rare period in Apulian architecture – yet among the region’s loveliest – dates from 1482.

After Gravina had been briefly held by Raimondello del Balzo Orsini, Queen Giovanna II gave it to his kinsman Francesco Orsini, Prefect of Rome, the county being made into a duchy. One of the great Roman princely houses – a family that produced two Popes – the Orsini held the Duchy of Gravina for four centuries, although not always with ease. At the end of the fifteenth century Duke Francesco vainly sought the hand of Lucrezia Borgia. In 1502 he rashly opposed her sinister brother’s ambitions, whereupon he and his friends were lured into visiting Cesare Borgia, separated from their troops and arrested. Next year Francesco was discreetly strangled. The story is told by Machiavelli in “The Prince”. His son, Duke Ferdinando, built the magnificent Palazzo Gravina at Naples.

When at home in Apulia the Dukes of Gravina lived no less opulently, in contrast to their subjects underground. Ferdinando III (1645–58) was the most interesting because of his taste and patronage, well supported by his Apulian wife, Giovanna Frangipane della Tolfa, the Count of Grumo’s daughter. Abandoning the Hohenstaufen
castello
, they built a small but elegant palace in the centre of the city, today a ramshackle tenement divided into flats.

The church of Santa Maria dei Morti, renamed the Purgatorio, which they began building in 1644 has two horrible stone skeletons grinning over its main door. Many Apulian churches built between the mid-seventeenth century and the 1730s are dedicated to Purgatory, the plagues of 1656 and 1730 having made men more aware of mortality. Inside there are some fine paintings by Francesco Guarino, an “Assumption” and a “Madonna among the Holy Souls in Purgatory”.

Bernardo De Dominici, chronicler of the artists of Baroque Naples, says Guarino made “ornaments and pictures” for the ducal palace at Gravina. Unfortunately, Guarino fell in love with a beautiful lady of the city whose husband told her to respond, then murdered her. The painter literally pined away, dying of self-starvation in 1654 at the age of thirty-nine “to the great displeasure of the Duke”, and was buried in the cathedral.

His patron survived him by four years, to be killed at Naples by the plague. The Duchess erected a life-sized statue of her husband in the Purgatorio, with an epitaph describing him as “A most cultivated spouse with a heart inclined to love”, and went on adding to their collection – including works by Caravaggio, Ribera, Carlo Rosa, Olivieri, Altobello, Fracanzano and Miglionico. The collection, by then famous, was broken up at the start of the eighteenth century. During a visit to Venice when he was still only sixteen, her eldest son Pier Francesco II, ran away to become a Dominican friar, renouncing the duchy in favour of his brother, Domenico. As Cardinal Orsini, he gave Gravina’s cathedral its splendid
campanile
.

Elected Pope in 1724 and taking the name Benedict XIII, Domenico turned out to be a disaster as pontiff. Leaving all business to his corrupt secretary, Niccolò Coscia, he lived like some village
abate
in a tiny white-washed room in the Vatican, visiting the sick, sitting for hours on end in the confessional, teaching the catechism to children and trying – unsuccessfully – to revive public penance for adulterers, while Coscia busily sold offices and benefices to the highest bidder. There is a ludicrously incongruous statue of Papa Orsini dressed as a Roman Emperor in the Cortile del Belvedere at Rome.

Pacichelli liked what he saw of the city in the last quarter of the seventeenth century: “Its streets are wide if ill-paved, and its houses are commodious, among them the palace of the Duke Orsini.” He was struck by the number of mules and horses, also of storks. He comments on the local pottery “majolica in the fashion of faience”. Above all, he was amused by a punning inscription over the main gate, “
Grana dat, et Vina clara Vrbs Gravina
” (“Gravina gives Grain and fine Wine”).

Sadly, when Papa Orsini’s young nephew, Filippo Berualdo I, became Duke in 1705, he turned out to be obsessed with hunting, taking little interest in his city. At the same time, relations between the Orsini and the Gravinesi grew unpleasantly strained because of the wrangling over taxes and feudal dues that bedevilled every Apulian magnate.

George Berkeley arrived at Gravina from Matera on 2 June 1734. “Vines left, corn, pasture”, he noted: “The same hilly country continued in the night; a world of shining flies.” Although a careful traveller, he had somehow taken the wrong road. “Lost our way; arrived after much wandering afoot at a Franciscan convent without the walls of Gravina at 11 in the night, dark.” It was still a walled city and, because of the danger from brigands, the gates were shut at dusk until well into the nineteenth century.

Berkeley was let in next morning, his impression being “well paved with white marble; situated among naked green hills; 5 convents of men and 3 of women; unhealthy air in wet weather.” He adds, “Duke a wretch; princes obliged by del Carpio to give their own or the heads of the banditti with whom they went sharers.” This is a reference to a former Spanish Viceroy’s attempt to destroy the secret understanding between magnates and brigands. The Austrians, whose rule was about to end, governed no less firmly. “Bishop of Gravina dead these two years, since which no bishop in the town, the Viceroy not admitting the person made bishop by the Pope as being a foreigner”, we learn from Berkeley’s journal.

After only a few hours, Berkeley left Gravina. In his staccato yet extraordinarily vivid prose he preserves, as if in a snapshot, a landscape which even today is almost unchanged: