An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia (27 page)

Ladislao died in 1414, killed by a mistress after his enemies had told her to anoint her private parts with poison, pretending that it was an aphrodisiac. His sister and successor Giovanna II imprisoned Maria, but she soon escaped with her children. Among them was Gianantonio del Balzo Orsini, born in 1385; the new Prince of Tàranto.

A childless widow of forty-five, Giovanna was only interested in handsome lovers, leaving affairs of state to her favourites. Civil war broke out from time to time, since Alfonso V, King of Aragon and Sicily, and Louis II, Duke of Anjou were busily competing for the succession. The regime tried to buy Gianantonio’s loyalty, making him Prince of Altamura as well as Tàranto in 1431, but two years later he fell out with the queen. Led by Louis of Anjou, a group of courtiers besieged him at Tàranto in 1434, hoping to seize his estates. Fortunately Louis suddenly died of a fever.

Queen Giovanna herself died in 1434, leaving her throne to Réné of Anjou, Louis’s younger brother. During the same year, fighting for Alfonso, Gianantonio was captured by Réné’s Genoese allies in a sea-battle off the isle of Ponza. When released, he went home to raise the Apulian barons against Réné in a long war that involved all the other states of Italy. Alfonso only survived because of the Prince of Tàranto and his Apulians.

Alfonso finally won in 1442, a parliament recognising him as the first King of the Two Sicilies; but Gianantonio refused to ride in his ‘Roman triumph’ into Naples, saying that the place assigned to him was too low for the man who had made it possible. Even so, he was appointed Grand Constable and given the Duchy of Bari. In 1444, the King married his son Ferrante to Gianantonio’s favourite niece, Isabella Chiaramonte, and although he rarely left his lands he attended the wedding. It was his last appearance at court.

Alfonso dared not antagonise Prince Gianantonio, however. He was too powerful, lord of seven cities with archbishops, of thirty cities with bishops and of more than 300 castles. Not only did he control the entire heel of Italy, but large areas of Basilicata and the Neapolitan Campagna.

Gianantonio respected the brave, chivalrous and learned King Alfonso, but resented the greedy Catalans who now ran the
Regno
. Nor did he care for the King’s false, cruel son, Ferrante. When Alfonso died in 1458, from malaria caught while hunting in Apulia, Gianantonio welcomed the Angevin pretender the Duke of Calabria, who came and defeated Ferrante at the River Sarno.

Luckily for Ferrante, his beautiful, high-spirited queen, Isabella Chiaramonte, raised money to equip another army for him, tramping the streets of Naples with a begging box. Disguised as a Franciscan friar, and accompanied only by her chaplain, she went to Tàranto and pleaded with her uncle, who, after the battle at the Sarno, had occupied the royal cities of Andria, Trani and Giovinazzo. She found a sympathetic listener, for by now Gianantonio had begun to dislike the arrogant Duke of Calabria. He sat on the fence, giving the duke deliberately bad advice, and refusing to lend him money or troops. When the king routed Calabria at Troia in 1462, Gianantonio openly joined Ferrante, dooming the Angevin cause.

He died in his castle at Altamura in November 1463, rumour claiming that King Ferrante had bribed the old prince’s servants to strangle him in his bed. Gianantonio was childless and, ignoring his will and his widow’s protests, the king seized everything he left. Besides vast estates and huge flocks, there were a million ducats in cash and warehouses filled with merchandise. Ferrante became the richest ruler in Christendom.

You can gain an idea of what Raimondello and Gianantonio del Balzo Orsini looked like from their effigies in the church of Santa Caterina at Galatina where both are buried. Kneeling in prayer, Raimondello wears the courtly clothes he wore during his life, red and white; another effigy below shows him in a Franciscan habit. Dressed as a friar, Gianantonio lies under a canopy in an octagonal chapel; below are painted the words, “From perfect and gentle deeds a noble spirit never recoils”, an ironic epitaph for so cynical a career. Beneath the friar’s hood his face, with its huge, hooked nose, appears surprisingly gentle.

Yet the castle of Tàranto, properly known as the Castel Sant’ Angelo, is the best monument to the del Balzo Orsini, even if Ferrante made great changes. The chapel can still be seen, where in 1407 Raimondello’s widow, the beleaguered Countess Maria, married the priapic King Ladislao.

41

...we glide into the sunshine of Hellenic days when the wise Archytas,

sage and lawgiver, friend of Plato, ruled this ancient city of Tarentum.

Norman Douglas, “Old Calabria”

“TODAY IT IS MUCH REDUCED from its former expanse”, Pacichelli wrote of Tàranto after his visit here in 1687. He was impressed by St Cataldo’s life-sized silver statue in the cathedral, noting that it contained the saint’s skull, together with his tongue, “uncorrupted after a thousand years.” He also tells us that at Pontifical Masses in the cathedral the Epistle and Gospel were sung in Greek as well as in Latin, which suggests that at that date the Tarantines still remained partly Greek-speaking.

A century after Pacichelli, Swinburne commented: “The streets are remarkably dirty and narrow, especially the Marina, which runs along the Mare Piccolo, and is, without dispute, the most disgustful habitation of human beings in Europe, except, perhaps, the Jewish Ghetto in Rome.” But Swinburne enjoyed the sea-food, when he was a guest at a convent:

The prior received me with great politeness, and at supper treated me with the most varied service of shell-fish I ever sat down to. There were no less than fifteen sorts, all extremely fat and savoury, especially a small species of muscle (sic), the shell of which is covered with a velvet shag, and both inside and outside is tinged with the richest violet colour. I tasted of all, and plentifully of several sorts, without experiencing the least difficulty in the digestion.

The “muscle” sounds like a murex. Among the other shell-fish he ate would have been the sea-date, or dactylus, that according to Pliny shines in the dark. “In the mouth, even, while they are being eaten, they give forth their light, and the same too when in the hands.” Oysters, for which Tàranto has always been famous, would not have been included, the oyster season here lasting only from 5 November to Easter Sunday.

When Count de Salis returned from the Salento, his interest in agriculture resulted in an invitation to stay at the house of Giuseppe Capecelatro, Archbishop of Tàranto from 1778 to 1836. Sir William Hamilton was a fellow guest at the delightful Villa Santa Lucia on the shores of the Mare Piccolo, its gardens filled with pagan statuary and acacia, myrtle and every kind of rose; an inscription over the main gate read, “
Si Adam hic peccasset, Deus ignovisset
” (If Adam had sinned here, God would have forgiven him). A worldly prelate, who criticised clerical celibacy, Jesuits and the enclosure of nuns, he told his seminarians to forget theology and teach modern farming. He was on friendly terms with King Gustavus III of Sweden and Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo of Tuscany, corresponding with Catherine the Great, to whom he sent a collection of Tarentine shells. Another friend was Goethe. The Prussian scholar Herder wrote to his wife, “I have made the acquaintance of the Archbishop of Tàranto, the most discerning, high-spirited, learned, intelligent and likeable ecclesiastic I have ever met.”

In 1801 the Neapolitan government agreed to let the French garrison occupy certain ports, including Tàranto. In 1803, it looked as if the English would invade the Two Sicilies, so a French artillery general was sent to organise its defences. He was Choderlos de Laclos, author of “
Les Liaisons Dangéreuses
”, 63 years old and in poor health, but forced by poverty to resume his military career. Exhausted by the journey, he was struck down by dysentery as soon as he arrived. From his sick bed Choderlos wrote, “
Tarente est une assez vilaine ville dans un assez vilain pays
” (Taranto is a nasty city in a nasty country), commenting that the inhabitants ate nothing but fish. Two months after, he died and was buried under the tower on the off-shore island of San Pietro in the Gulf of Tàranto, his tomb being broken open and his bones scattered in 1815.

In the Old Town, in Via Paisiello, a plaque on a modest seven-teenth century house commemorates the birth here in 1741 of Giovanni Paisiello, “reformer of music, who discovered in his heart a fount of harmony and channelled it into songs of love and grief, honoured by Kings and Emperors.” He composed many successful operas, such as “
L’Idole Cinese
”, and spent eight years in St Peters-burg at Catherine the Great’s court where he produced his master-piece, “Il Barbiere di Seviglia”. In 1803 he went to Paris to work for Napoleon, having caught his attention with a march for General Hoche’s funeral, but after only a year went back to Naples to serve Joseph Bonaparte and Murat, dying in 1815. Already his music had gone out of fashion, yet Beethoven admired the “Molinara”. His “Inno Reale”, a noble and melodious tune, remained the national anthem of the Two Sicilies until the end – at church parades it was played at the elevation of the Host, soldiers singing it on bended knee.

When Ferdinand Gregorovius came here, Paisiello’s house re-minded him of Mozart’s birthplace at Salzburg. Despite writing that “cultural life is dead in Tàranto”, he had been impressed by a scholarly booklet on the ancient city by a certain Francesco Sferra. He tracked down the sage with difficulty, eventually directed by a priest to Via Paisiello. Here, in what he calls a “Temple of Aesculapius” (a pharmacy), he found a sickly looking young man with a dirty towel round his head making pills. The chemist’s apprentice admitted that he was Sferra and immediately tried to sell Gregorovius another learned work.

Lenormant observed in 1880 that, because of the Tarantines’ fish diet, they suffered from rickets and even elephantiasis. Augustus Hare found a “miserable, filthy, scrofulous population, which has been confined in the narrow space occupied by the Acropolis of the Greek city since the eleventh century.” Yet he could not forget the legend that Plato had landed at the ancient bridge, to be welcomed by the Tarantine philosophers. He was also intrigued by the muslin produced from a shell-fish, the
lana-penna
, from the rocks around Punta Penna, its long, silky, golden-brown filaments being dyed purple and woven into a filmy gauze. (The veils of the dancing girls in the murals at Herculaneum were made of this material.) “Taranto has been compared to a ship”, observed Hare with his painter’s eye, “the castle at its east end representing the stern, its great church the mast, the tower of Raimondo Orsini the bowsprit, and the bridge the cable.”

Mrs. Ross believed the Tarantines “show their evident Greek descent by their shapely hands and ears and well-poised heads”, although this was wishful thinking. She thought the Old Town’s side alleys so narrow that they “seem built for shadows, not men”, but in the upper town “Some of the palaces are handsome in a baroque, rococo style, with balconies which bear witness to the Spanish rule, and are suggestive of serenades.” She says the fishermen dread moon-rays: “They carefully protect the fish from them when caught, and if they find a dead one on board after a night’s fishing, declare it is
allunato
, or moon-struck, and nothing will persuade them to eat it.”

“Old Taranto glimmers in lordly fashion across the tranquil waters”, observes Norman Douglas, “a sense of immemorial culture pervades this region of russet tilth, and olives, and golden corn.” He considered the cathedral “a jovial nightmare in stone”, but was fascinated by the fishermen’s huts on the banks of the inland sea, built of branches and grass-ropes. “There is a smack of the stone ages, of primeval lake-dwellings, about these shelters.” They must have been descendants of the fishermen’s huts Leonidas knew. Even so, “Hellenic traits have disappeared from Taranto”, Douglas comments: “It was completely Latinised under Augustus, and though Byzantines came... they have long ago become merged into the Italian temperament.”

Edward Hutton agreed that everything from ancient Greece had vanished:

Here in Taranto, the last city of Magna Graecia, let us confess the appalling change this whole country must have suffered from earthquake and neglect since classic times”, he wrote after his visit. “Everywhere it is a prey to malaria, because it has so long lacked a population which may pursue the art of agriculture in peace; everywhere, save for its noble outlines, its mountains and its sea, it is a bitter disappointment to those few fantastics who hold a memory of the ancient world dearer than any mechanic triumph of today. Magna Graecia is not here but in our hearts...

Visitors of a new and unpleasing sort came in November 1940 when Tàranto was attacked by British biplanes. Their bombs sank the warship “Conte de Cavour”, together with two other battle-ships and a cruiser, crippling the Italian Royal Navy. The damage was greater than that inflicted by the Grand Fleet at Jutland on the Germans in 1916, and far more decisive, changing the course of the war. But little damage was done to Tàranto itself.