An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia (25 page)

In 1594, the traveller Fynes Moryson had been told of the hunted, wolfish existence led by such men all over Southern Italy. He was aware that many brigands had killed comrades for the sake of head-money and a pardon: “they are so jelous one of another, and so affrighted with the horror of their owne Consciences, as they both eat and sleep armed, and uppon the least noyse or shaking of a leafe, have their hands uppon their Armes, ready to defend themselves.”

Other brigand
comitive
(groups) were active in Apulia at the turn of the sixteenth century, especially in the Terra d’Òtranto, if not so well organised as Marco’s. The peasants often helped them, regarding the Spanish soldiers as robbers and murderers – with good reason. The Benedictine monks of a priory near Troia not only gave shelter to brigands but helped to dispose of their plunder.

The most dangerous
comitive
, usually about thirty strong, were those around Cisternino and Martina Franca: those in the Lecce area led by the Lubelli brothers, and those near Ceglie Messapico under Cataldo and Nunzio, whose other hunting ground was the Monopoli district. For many years Antonio Rovito of Ugento was popularly known as “King of the Brigands” in his neighbourhood, while in 1608, Stefano Calò was wanted in Ostuni for more than twenty murders. Two years later the authorities congratulated themselves on having rid Apulia of
banditi
, which was clearly wishful thinking.

Sometimes the
comitive
were led by local noblemen, like Giovan Vincenzo Dominiroberto, Baron of Palascianello, who once escaped from prison in the basket in which his food had been delivered. In 1631 the baron was finally run to ground in a church at Serracapriola, dragged out from sanctuary and beheaded, despite the local bishop’s protests; presumably his head was sent off to obtain the head-money, while his four quarters were hung from roadside trees.

In the 1630s magnates began recruiting small armies of
banditi
, to enforce their dominion over the peasants and cow the commons in the towns. “Never before had Southern Italian brigandage... been so closely linked with the barons’ activities and interests”, comments Villari. The wool merchants grew frightened of doing business in the
dogana
at Foggia where the magnates’ new henchmen bullied them into paying robbers’ prices. Feudal privilege enabled barons to give their brigands virtual impunity, although many were hunted down by revengeful peasants during the revolt of 1647.

Later in the century the authorities almost eradicated brigandage, but it revived during the 1760s. The
comitiva
of Nicola Spinosa, or ‘
Scanna Cornacchia
’ (‘Carrion Crow’) as he was popularly known, a murderer and escaped convict from Castellana, became a useful political tool for Count Giulio Antonio IV of Conversano, who protected its members in return for favourable results in the elections to his city’s commune. He regularly received the ‘Carrion Crow’ after dark at his hunting-lodge of Marchione outside Conversano, turning a very blind eye to murder, robbery, rape and extortion.

Giulio Antonio was also Count of Castellana, where ‘
Scanna Cornacchia
’ was no less active. In 1782 its people petitioned King Ferdinand, imploring him to save them from the ‘Carrion Crow’, and explaining that the
comitiva
was under their feudal lord’s protection. In response, the count was ordered to hand the
comitiva
over to justice within a month; otherwise, His Majesty would put in train “certain steps of an economic nature.” Giulio Antonio thereupon bribed Gregorio Matarrese, whom he knew was in their confidence, to murder them and gave him guns. The
comitiva
was planning to rob the King’s Messenger near Tàranto so Matarrese laid a lethal ambush. Most of its members were killed or captured, but the ‘Carrion Crow’ escaped into the woods. He went to ground with his mistress, Domenica Pugliese – ‘
La Falcona di Putignano
’ in a
masseria
near Putignano, where the couple were at last tracked down by a company of Swiss soldiers. Realising he had no hope of escape, the ‘Carrion Crow’ ordered his mistress to kill him, the ‘Falcon’ shooting him in the neck. Stuck on a lance, his head was paraded through Castellana.

“Many abandon their wretched way of life and turn to robbery”, Galanti wrote of the
Regno
’s peasants in the 1790s, yet when de Salis visited the Terra d’Òtranto at this time he noticed that guards were not needed – although their presence was a help in dealing with extortionate innkeepers. By then the authorities seldom executed brigands since they were useful as convict labour.

However, in 1806, Joseph Bonaparte became king, succeeded by Marshal Murat two years later, and brigandage broke out all over Southern Italy. ‘
Il Pennacchio
’ (‘the Plumed One’) stormed through the Gargano, claiming he was under orders from the exiled King Ferdinand, killing French supporters and plundering their property. In 1808, Major Courier reported that the area around Foggia was a land of thieves: “They hold up travellers and have their way with the girls. They rob, rape and murder.”

During Joseph’s reign they terrorised the Bovino valley, along which ran the main road from Naples. Charles Macfarlane writes, “rarely could a company of travellers pass without being stopped; a Government officer, a Government mail, or the revenue from the province, never without a little army for an escort. And all these troops were at times unable to afford protection, but were themselves beaten off, or slaughtered by the brigands.” They even dreamt of capturing Joseph and taking him prisoner to King Ferdinand in Sicily. However, Murat eventually brought the situation under control.

The most notorious
comitiva
was led by Gaetano Vardarelli and his brothers. After deserting from Murat’s army in 1809, Gaetano harried northern Apulia with 300 horsemen, one of his bases being the Bovino valley. He and his band encouraged the country people not to pay taxes, burning conscription lists. Since salt was a government monopoly, they broke into state warehouses and handed out the salt. They lived off the land, raiding
masserie
; if resisted, they set fire to the buildings and the crops, driving off the livestock. When the hunt finally grew too hot, many of the
comitiva
fled to Sicily, including Gaetano, who became a sergeant in King Ferdinand’s guards. But Apulia had not heard the last of Don Gaetano Vardarelli.

Part IX

38

Taranto is in many ways the most remarkable city left to us in all

Magna Graecia... The ancient city spread itself out over the mainland

eastward, its acropolis alone occupying the peninsula, which is now

an island.

Edward Hutton, “Naples and Southern Italy”

THE TWO GREAT PORTS of southern Apulia are Tàranto and Brìndisi, on the Ionian Sea and the Adriatic. Since the third century BC they have been linked across the Heel of Italy by the Via Appia. Famous in Antiquity, they fascinated the travellers, who had read about them in Polybius or Livy. To understand how they saw these venerable cities and what they hoped to find there, you have to look at the history of Taras and Brentesion.

According to legend, Tàranto – in Greek, Taras – was founded by a divinity of that name, son of Poseidon, the god of the Mediterranean, and of the nymph Saturia, who was a daughter of Minos of Crete. She had set out for Italy from Crete with Iapyx (ancestor of the Messapians), but en route she had been raped by Poseidon. Taras arrived in Apulia on a dolphin, having ridden over the sea from Cape Matapan. He was worshipped as a demi-god by the Tarentines, who put him on their coins, and even today he appears on the city arms, riding on his dolphin.

The Cretan elements in the story, however fantastic, are probably significant. Minoan ships could well have visited the Gulf of Tàranto. Strabo says that the Cretans were here before the Spartans while Herodotus thinks that the Messapians came from Crete. (Although Herodotus admits that he is not infallible – “my job is to write down what has been said, but I don’t have to believe it.”) In reality, the Messapians came from the other side of the Adriatic; their pottery, unique in Italy, is relatively common in the Balkans. Yet there were undoubtedly Greek links from a very early date, with a small Mycenean trading colony on a site at Scoglio del Tonno – near today’s railway station – which flourished from about 1400–1200 BC. Even after the collapse of Mycenae, when most of the West lost contact, the Messapians kept in touch with Greece.

During the eighth century BC, a band of young Spartans left home because their countrymen refused to treat them as equals. They were bastards, born to women whose husbands had been away at war for nineteen years. The legend is that, led by Phalanthus – another dolphin rider – the youths sailed northwest into the Ionian Sea and founded Taras. What is certain is that Spartans established a colony here at about this time, administered by a ‘nomarch’. Trading with the Messapians, they were no doubt attracted by the marvellous harbour and beautiful coastline. “The landscape, vegetation and intensity of light all recalled Greece”, Francois Lenormant points out: “The first colonists from Hellas must have thought they were still in their own country... Here you enter a new land... which really does deserve the name ‘Greater Greece’.”

Predictably, there was unending war between colonists and natives. Yet there must also have been cultural exchange since the Messapians adopted the newcomers’ alphabet. This was realised in 2003 when archaeologists unearthed a ‘map’ on a shard of black-glazed terracotta, which is the size of a large postage stamp and dates from about 500 BC. The oldest example of western cartography, it shows thirteen towns including Òtranto, Soleto, Ugento, Leuca (Santa Maria di Leuca) and Taras. Save for Taras their names are in Messapian, but written in ancient Greek script.

Until the fifth century Taras was governed by kings. Like all Greek colonies its citizens frequently faced extermination by the natives; as late as 474 BC they suffered a terrible defeat. However, they won a decisive victory in 460 at Carbina, when, as Hutton puts it, “the Messapian women were outraged upon the altars of their gods with such refinements of lust that one must suppose an extraordinary corruption of manners among the Tarantines.” Carbina is modern Carovigno.

During the fourth century BC, its most prosperous period, Taras had a population of 300,000 and covered much the same area as modern Tàranto. Its first citadel was an acropolis, on a rock on what was then an island, but is now the peninsula occupied by the Old Town, guarding the entrance to the Mare Piccolo. The chamber tombs were the most magnificent in Magna Graecia. Later, elegant suburbs with wide streets, theatres and baths were laid out on the site of today’s New Town.

Tarantine pottery was more florid than any in mainland Greece, while Tanagra figurines originated here, being afterwards copied at Tanagra in Boeotia. The city’s craftsmen made enchanting gold jewellery – wreaths, bracelets, earrings – some of which have been recovered from graves at Mottola and Ginosa, where the richer Tarantines had summer villas. (There are superb examples in the museum.) The coins were among the most elegant in the entire ancient world; the silver staters show Taras or Phalanthus riding on a dolphin, while the reverse usually has either a horse, Tarantines being renowned for their horsemanship, or a murex shell.

All this wealth came from orchards, fisheries, sheep and the famous Tarantine purple dye. Each spiny-shelled murex (or rock-whelk) exudes a few drops from which a dye can be extracted, varying between dark purple and pale rose; since no other fast dye for these colours was then available, it was much prized, Tarantine purple costing only less than Tyrian. The merchants of Taras had depots all along the Adriatic coast besides close links with the Greek traders further east.

Janet Ross was told the legend of the dye’s discovery; one day the hero Hercules’s dog had found a murex on the beach and, crunching it between his teeth, it had stained his jaws purple for life. She also heard the theory that the citizens of Taras had been the first Europeans to keep domestic cats. Previously, like other Greeks, they seem to have used tame ‘weasels’ – probably pine martens – for keeping down rats and mice. Some Tarantine coins of the fifth and fourth centuries have a youth on the reverse holding a bird, with a cat climbing up his leg to catch it, while one or two vases show cats hunting birds. Presumably they were imported from Egypt or Persia.

The later Tarantines grew so effete and unwarlike that in retrospect Horace gave their city the damning name
molle Tarentum
(soft Tàranto). Perhaps their decline was due to drinking a little too much of their good wine, which the poet compared favourably with his famous Falernian. Despite walls ten miles in circumference, they lived in daily fear of the Messapians and Lucanians, depending for protection on mercenaries who were not always victorious. The Romans became steadily more threatening, and in 280 BC Taras sought help from King Pyrrhus of Epirus.