An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia (22 page)

open green fields and hills mostly covered with corn backwarder than in the plain; corn the commodity of the country. Here and there rocky; some trees on our right thinly scattered; a small brook; pasture and little corn. 11[am], great scene opening, long chain of barren mountains about 3 miles on the right, thistles left; for half an hour passed a green vale of pasture bounded with green risings right between our road and the stony mountains. 11. 40, vast plain, corn, the greater part pasture between ridges of mountains; Appenine on the left, old Vultur on the right; hardly a mountain. 1.20[pm], a deep vale, diversified with rising hills reaching to the mountains on left. 1.25 Poggio Ursini [Poggiorsini], where we dined; chaplain lent us his chamber in the Duke of Gravina’s masseria; dirty; the Duke spends some time there in hunting.

When the ducal “wretch” died the following year, his son moved to Rome. The Orsini connection with Gravina was almost severed, but did not end till Duke Filippo Berualdo II formally renounced his feudal rights in 1816. However, the family still use the title “Duke of Gravina.”

Gravina interested de Salis as a source of saltpetre, among the
Regno
’s most important products. He found few inhabitable houses when he came in 1789, most of the population of 10,000 living in “subterranean hovels.” The streets and the people on them were filthy, only the clergy seeming to thrive. Every 20 April there was a livestock fair, “little more salubrious than a swamp; and as the concourse of strangers is immense, all the convents become hotels.” Jewellers came from Naples to sell shoddy trinkets to the “half-savage beauties who flock down from the surrounding mountains, and who then return in triumph to their nests hidden in the rocks, to arouse the envy of their poorer friends and relations.”

“The city is surrounded with strong walls and towers, probably not older than the 16th century”, recorded Octavian Blewitt in 1853. He adds, “It is a dirty place although it is remarkable for the number of its fountains.” He also noted that “the common people live... in caverns excavated in the tufa.”

After the
Risorgimento
, Gravina had to endure the horrors of
latifondismo
, with labour gangs and almost total corruption. An official report of 1888 admits to “the crudest and most squalid poverty.” The “shelter for the homeless” consisted of some foul cellars whose occupants were starving, while the orphanage served as a source of recruitment for brothels.

Gravinesi were known to feed and shelter brigands. Even the clergy were suspected of being hand-in-hand with the
banditi
(bandits), like a chaplain at the Purgatorio, Don Matteo Abruzzese, who in the 1860s was charged with helping to kidnap a local landowner’s son. A local historian, Don Carlo Caputo, one of Gravina’s parish priests, wrote that “Banditry became a normal weapon in the vendetta against [Northern] oppressors.”

In September 1943 during a raid on German headquarters at Gravina, Colonel Penkovsky, who commanded a reconnaissance force operating behind the enemy lines, captured a document that listed German troop dispositions in southern Apulia. There were 3,500 in total, including 92 officers and 755 men at Gioia del Colle, 83 officers and 629 men at Altamura, and 75 officers and 140 men at Gravina. However, very few of them were fighting troops, most being administrative personnel hastily evacuated from the coast after the Allied landing.

Many of the rock churches here, Gravina’s most interesting feature, have crumbled away, their frescoes lost for ever. Decay has been compounded by vandalism. The beauty of the frescoes in the grotto chapel of San Vito Vecchio deeply impressed Henri Berthaux when he saw them at the end of the nineteenth century. Fortunately these were removed from the ravine in 1956 and taken to Rome for restoration. They returned to Gravina in 1968, to be displayed in a replica of San Vito Vecchio, built on the ground floor of the Museo Pomarici Santomasi. Dating from the end of the thirteenth century, it is thought they are by an Apulian artist who had worked in either Cyprus or Palestine. They are certainly among the best surviving examples of Byzantine art in Apulia.

33

No one has come to this land except as an enemy, a conqueror,

or a visitor devoid of understanding.

Carlo Levi, “Christ Stopped at Eboli”

ALTHOUGH TECHNICALLY IN BASILICATA, Matera was once part of Apulia. We have included it not only for this reason, however, but also because its caves were inhabited and in working order until the 1950s, and shed an invaluable light on life in the Apulian cave cities.

While scarcely any frescoes survive in the grotto churches of Gravina-in-Puglia, Matera retains a fair number since far more churches were tunnelled into the rock, over a hundred in and around the great ravines known as the
Sassi
that sheltered the old troglodyte community. After the destruction by the Saracens of a large city above ground towards the end of the ninth century, its people returned to the ravines, where they carved out new dwellings for themselves on a more ambitious scale than anywhere else in Apulia. Matera fell to the Normans in 1042, but never the less remained a city completely beneath the earth until the thirteenth century, when the cathedral and the church of San Giovanni were built on top. Other buildings followed, yet even today the place’s fascination lies underground.

As in many Apulian ravines, besides hermits, there were several flourishing communities of Basilian monks. Some of them were founded soon after the terrible devastation that accompanied Belisarius’s reconquest of Italy from the Goths for the Emperor Justinian and Byzantium. It was the monks of these communities who were mainly responsible for constructing Matera’s underground churches. The churches date from the sixth century to the thirteenth, their frescoes from the twelfth to the sixteenth. The most important frescoes are in the Sasso Caveoso and the Sasso Barisano; in the churches of Santa Lucia alle Malve, Madonna della Croce, Santa Barbara and Madonna della Virtù. There are also entire monasteries, the largest
Laura
being the Convicinio di Sant’ Antonio which has four chapels dating from the late twelfth century, cells with beds carved out of the tufa, and even tufa wine-presses.

Most of the grottoes at the top of the ravine opposite Matera were oratories and never served a monastic community. Some are still places of pilgrimage but any medieval frescoes they may have contained were obliterated by others who painted over them during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Diehl records a legend told to him at Matera, an explanation, he believes, for much of the vandalism suffered by grotto churches. After being defeated by the Saracens, Frederick Barbarossa fled with his treasure to Matera where he hid in one of the grottoes, which closed over him. “He is still seen today”, says Diehl, “and the mountain shepherds, whose greed is aroused by the treasure of the Swabian monarch, have more than once known the emperor emerge and chase them along the ravine when they went too near his eternal abode.” In 1880 memories of this story set off a species of gold rush after a grave containing a hoard of Venetian coins was discovered in San Nicola at Palagianello.

Over the underground city stands the imposing but unfinished castle built by the hated Count Tramontana, Lord of Matera, who was murdered by the cave dwellers in 1514. The city was part of the Terra d’Òtranto from 1500 to 1633, but then became the capital of Basilicata until it lost its status to Potenza in 1806. Still, there are other fine buildings above ground in the upper town from the days when Matera was a provincial capital.

Viewed from the far side of the ravine, Matera does not look like a troglodyte city. The caves are faced with stone walls that have windows and doors, many with extensions under tiled roofs, all of which gives the appearance of a normal town. But a closer inspection reveals the sheer squalor of the caves, crawling with vermin when they were lived in. Often the inhabitants ran the risk of falling to their deaths, according to de Salis:

I visited many of the grottoes, and not without danger, because at the least false step, I could have fallen from the precipice and dashed myself on the rocks below; and in clambering up I could not but tremble at the thought that thousands and thousands of people for many, many years were exposed to a similar danger.

He paints a picture of unutterable degradation, of hideous, filthy savages, the women so liable to commit crimes that the prisons were always overflowing. He attributes it to bad landlords, bad government, bad roads, bad sanitation – and bad health. Under-nourished and deformed, crazy enough to believe unquestioningly in werewolves and incubi, they were completely under the thumb of the ignorant clergy whom they thought could protect them from such horrors, and led a life no better than the animals with whom they shared their cave. Often it was an abandoned
laura
– Diehl describes the Cripta di Cascione as being used as a stable.

“It is not difficult to see in the summer many men and women, so-called
Tarantolati
, covered with wine-shoots and red ribbons, dancing continuously in the street with no one to stop them,” de Salis comments, citing other forms of madness at Matera:

All these illnesses are usually preceded by profound melancholy, and are caused not so much by the hot climate as by the way of life and the normal diet in these villages. The excessive consumption of rancid salt pork, the absolute lack of cleanliness in the habitations, a life spent in dark and damp caverns, the continuous evaporation of open sewers, and the mountains of dung and filth left to decay in the streets, are the actual causes of these disorders and sad illnesses, which usually end in the most horrible manner.

Werewolves were a common phenomenon in these mountain districts. De Salis describes them as howling like wolves, “rolling in the mud and filth, and hurling themselves upon anyone unfortunate enough to find himself in their path.” “So wild and barbarous are many of the inhabitants of the caverns in the valley that they have obtained by their howlings at night and the desperate nature of their attacks, the name of Lupi Mannari”, wrote Octavian Blewitt. Taken for granted by other peasants, men known to change into wolves at night were treated with respect. Although, they were never seen in such a shape by their womenfolk. Carlo Levi was told by his housekeeper – a witch – that when a husband of this sort came home it was essential to keep the door locked, not only to give him time to regain his human form, but for him to forget he had been with his lupine brethren.

According to Carlo Levi, things had not improved by the Second World War. His sister Luisa, a doctor, visited the city in 1936 and described it to him. She had never met with poverty like this before, nor illnesses such as trachoma and what she took to be black fever, normally confined to Africa. Some caves had no proper entrance, merely a hole in the ground with a trapdoor and ladder. Children lay on filthy rags, their teeth chattering from fever, sharing their dens with dogs, sheep, goats and pigs:

I saw children with the faces of wizened old men, their bodies reduced by starvation almost to skeletons, their heads crawling with lice and covered with scabs. Most of them had enormous, dilated stomachs, and faces yellow and worn with malaria.

During the 1950s the Sassi’s inhabitants were rehoused on the plateau above, although a few stuck stubbornly to their old homes in the ravine.

Today these once verminous lairs have been re-invented as a tourist attraction and at least half-a-dozen have been converted into high-priced hotels. There have been plans to build an underground car park – supposedly adapting modern ways to old, but in practice undermining many of the old dwellings. Even so, the place has kept enough of its menacing atmosphere for Mel Gibson to use it as Jerusalem in his film, “The Passion of the Christ”. In 2004, locusts devoured every crop in the area, a plague that affected only a handful of farmers, but which, in former times, would have meant death by starvation for the entire population.

Part VIII