An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia (28 page)

Even today, Tàranto’s fishermen rarely face the perils of the open sea, fish of every description flooding into the Mare Piccolo. Their old method of farming mussels is documented as far back as the twelfth century, but probably dates from long before the founding of Taras. Row upon row of pales are stuck in the shallow water, with ropes slung between. From these ropes are suspended others in rings, to which the baby shellfish cling in colonies, reaching maturity within a few months.

The ropes have, however, been replaced by plastic netting. In the past, garlands of mussels were brought to the market, where a housewife could choose the ones she wanted, but nowadays, with the advent of plastic, it is easier to sell them strips of netting. From the housewife’s point of view, this is cheating since she has to pay for many too small to eat; from the mussels’ it is infanticide and possibly, in the long term, genocide.

42

That Brentesion of the Greeks where Virgil died, that Brundisium

of the medieval chronicles where Frederick II married the beautiful

Yolande of Jerusalem.

Paul Bourget, “Sensations d’Italie”

IF BRÌNDISI CANNOT CLAIM so glittering a past as Tàranto, it has had moments of glory. One of the few sheltered harbours on the Italian Adriatic, Brentesion, as the Greeks called it, has been an important port since at least the sixth century BC. The Messapians, who founded it, traded with their kinsmen in the Balkans. Later a dependency of Taras, it was conquered by Rome and became a Roman colony, remaining loyal despite Hannibal’s seeming invincibility. As a reward, it was made a
municipium
. Its name comes from the Messapian word for a deer’s head,
brunda
, so-called because of the shape of the harbour, and its coat-of-arms is still a stag’s head.

Julius Caesar fought Pompey here in 49 BC, blockading his rival’s fleet in the port. He filled the narrow harbour entrance with huge rafts, building a causeway over them, but Pompey escaped. (Piles sunk into the sea bed during the operation led to the gradual silting up of the harbour.)

Julius’s nephew Octavius took the title ‘Caesar’, when he and Mark Antony divided the Roman world between them at the Treaty of Brundisium. However, in 32 BC, Octavius Caesar, the future Emperor Augustus, assembled his fleet here for the campaign which would destroy Mark Antony and Cleopatra. Shakespeare makes Mark Antony say:

Is’t not strange, Canidius,

That from Tarentum and Brundisium,

He could so quickly cut the Ionian Sea...?

Virgil died here aged fifty-one, in 19 BC. After spending ten years writing the “Aeneid”, on his deathbed he gave instructions that his work should be destroyed as unworthy, but the Emperor Augustus countermanded them. Augustus Hare was another admirer, suggesting that throughout Apulia:

the traveller will be perpetually reminded of the Latin poets, especially of Virgil’s “Georgics”, which may well be taken as his companion. Fields are still covered with lupin – the “tristis Lupinus”, and the peasants still in cloudy weather, tell the hour by the position of the flower, which, like the sunflower, turns, as Pliny describes, with the sun. The wood of the plough is still elm... and the oxen still drag back the inverted plough... and the wild fig-tree still splits the rocks with its evil strength.

Despite the damage done by Julius Caesar, Brìndisi remained a principal port for both Roman warships and merchantmen. A scene on Trajan’s column at Rome shows him leaving from Brundisium to conquer the Dacians. He erected two lesser columns in the port to mark the end of the Via Traiana and the Via Appia. (One was moved to Lecce in the seventeenth century.) Every July, Brundisium was full of ships being loaded with Apulian wool.

Sacked and razed to the ground by the Saracens, Brundisium was rebuilt by the Byzantine Lupos Protospata, who had his name carved on the great pillar marking the end of the Appian Way. The city surrendered to the Normans in 1071, and ten years later was used against its former masters, when Robert Guiscard tried to make himself Emperor of Byzantium, assembling a fleet here. In the twelfth century Anna Comnena spoke of Brundisium as “the sea-port with the finest harbour in the whole of Iapygia.” It was still capable of taking ships that could carry a thousand pilgrims.

Countless crusaders sailed from this secure harbour, then the main port for the Holy Land. Many Apulians were among them, not just potentates like Bohemond, who had made himself Prince of Tàranto, but humble people who formed a large proportion of the settlers in the new Kingdom of Jerusalem. Knights Templar, Knights Hospitaller and Teutonic Knights were constantly travelling to and fro between Brìndisi and Acre.

In 1225 Emperor Frederick II married the heiress to the throne of Jerusalem, the fourteen year old Queen Yolande. After a wedding by proxy at Acre, she sailed to Brìndisi for a second ceremony in the cathedral. The Emperor ignored her on her wedding night, seducing her cousin with whom he fell passionately in love. Immured in his harem, Yolande lasted long enough to give him an heir, Conrad, dying in childbirth. Frederick wrote the poem “Oi lasso non pensai” for her cousin whom he calls “The Flower of Syria”.

Two years later, the nobles of Germany and Italy rode down to Brìndisi, summoned by the Emperor to join him on a Crusade. Soon there were too many in the camps outside the city, bad weather, poor hygiene and lack of food causing an epidemic which decimated them. Both the Emperor and his second-in-command, the Margrave of Thuringia, caught it, although their head-quarters were on the island of Sant’ Andrea in the outer harbour. Frederick set sail, but the margrave was dying so he put in at Òtranto. The Emperor abandoned the Crusade to recuperate, and was promptly excommunicated by Pope Gregory IX.

Frederick finally left for the Holy Land in 1228, from Barletta. After recovering Jerusalem, he was informed that hostile Papal troops had entered Apulia. He returned to Brìndisi as fast as he could, driving out the invaders, and sacking towns such as Troia which had welcomed them.

During the late Middle Ages Brìndisi entered a long decline. In the fourteenth century it was sacked by Hungarians while a hundred years later Gianantonio del Balzo Orsini jammed the harbour entrance by sinking boats in it. The city’s misery was compounded by an earthquake in 1458. For three centuries the port remained blocked, from fear of the Turks.

Swinburne was amused by a privilege granted by Frederick that still existed at the time of his visit – the cathedral canons could have “handmaids” free of tax, so long as they were old and ugly and no threat to celibacy. When he came, the city was ruinous and half empty, the only decent building being Frederick’s castle next to the port, by now a malarial swamp. However, work had started in 1775 on a canal to reopen the outer harbour, and galley slaves were refacing the quays with stone from a medieval palace. He was more impressed by the hunting: “a few miles from the town, there is a good deal of woodland, where sportsmen find very good diversion. Gentlemen hunt hare, fox and sometimes wild boar, with hounds or lurchers, and sometimes with both. In autumn, fowlers use nets, springs or birdlime; in winter, guns. All the country is free to who-ever buys the King’s licence, except some few enclosures where the Barons endeavour to preserve the game.”

Keppel Craven had a bizarre experience here. Visiting the seven-teenth century church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, to his surprise he was invited into the convent. The nuns were convinced he was the Crown Prince of Bavaria, travelling incognito. Seated on a red and gold chair surmounted by a crown, he was plied with coffee, cakes and
rosolio
(rose petal liqueur), while the convent’s most precious relics were shown to him. “Among the relics which were named to me, I remember some fragments of the veil and shift of the Virgin Mary, a thumb of St Athanasius, a tooth of the prophet Jeremiah, and some of the coals which were used to roast St Lorenzo.” The nuns filled his pockets with presents, oranges and lemons, “among which I afterwards discovered, to my great consternation, a pair of cotton stockings, and two of woollen gloves.”

Like Swinburne, Craven admired the castle at Brìndisi, considering it to be one of the most beautiful he had ever seen. By then it had become “a prison for malefactors: I heard one hundred and eighty of these wretches clanging their irons in time to the most discordant melodies that ever struck the human ear, the melancholy monotony of which was only broken by vehement appeals to the charity of the stranger.”

After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1870, the port became a staging-post on the new, fast route to India, bringing many British. Even so, Janet Ross did not like it very much in the 1880s, although she had enjoyed Tàranto. She could not find a cab at the station: “We were evidently not going to India; the mail steamer left two days ago. What could we want a cab for? Besides, it was raining; the harness would be spoiled, and the driver would get fever.” The city could “vaunt an unenviable superiority over most places in the shape of dirt and bad smells”, sniffs a ruffled Mrs. Ross, “It needed all the classical reminiscences we could conjure up to make our two hours’ pilgrimage bearable.”

During the Second World War Brìndisi had a brief moment of importance when for a few months it became the Italian capital. King Victor Emmanuel III and his government took refuge here in September 1943, before moving to Salerno the following February. After the War the port was kept busy by ferry services to Corfu and to mainland Greece, besides exporting farm produce from the Salento, which ensured a certain atmosphere of bustle. Some years ago, however, the port departed to a new location outside, a move that has been described as taking away the city’s heart and soul.

Yet the port’s departure was not such a bad thing for the nostal-gically minded tourist, for nothing can ever deprive Brìndisi of its ancient memories of splendour. Regardless of decline, the Emperor Trajan’s solitary column still broods at the top of a flight of majestic steps, looking out over the Adriatic Sea and you do not need too much imagination to marvel at what it must have seen.

Part X

43

To walk once more through the streets of Lecce, gazing up at the great

golden bouquets of stone flowers which adorn its palaces and churches.

Sir Osbert Sitwell, “Winter of Content”

FORMERLY THE
REGNO
’S SECOND MAINLAND CITY, outranking even Bari, Lecce is the capital of the Terra d’Òtranto. Although farmed meticulously since ancient times, the area around the city has never known sheep-ranching or wheat-growing on the massive scale seen in the Tavoliere, and a large percentage of smallholdings has meant less discontent among the country people than elsewhere in Apulia. Founded by Messapians, from the start Lecce owed its importance to being in the centre of the Salentine peninsula, equidistant from Òtranto, Brìndisi and Gallipoli.

The Romans knew it as Lupiae. There is a legend that Christianity was introduced here by St Paul’s landlord at Corinth, where the Apostle had lodged with Justus, “whose house is hard by the Synagogue.” Justus came to Lupiae, says the legend, staying with a local patrician called Publius Orontius, whom he converted and who was later made bishop by St Paul – both Justus and Oronzo being subsequently martyred under Nero. Clearly Roman Lecce grew extremely prosperous, as can be seen from the magnificent amphitheatre in Piazza Oronzo, built by Emperor Hadrian.

Destroyed by the Goths and then rebuilt, Lecce suffered the usual horrors at the hands of the Saracens, but stayed under Byzantine rule until captured by the Normans in 1053. Tancred, Count of Lecce became the last Norman King of Sicily in 1189, entertaining Richard Coeur-de-Lion on his way from England to the Holy Land. Under the Angevins the county of Lecce was inherited by the Enghien family, descended from the Dukes of Athens.

When Count Pirro died in 1384, he was succeeded by his seven-teen year old sister, the beautiful Maria d’Enghien, who became Countess of Lecce in her own right. According to Janet Ross, even in the 1880s
La nostra Maria
was still remembered affectionately as the best ruler in the city’s entire history. As we have recounted, her first husband was Raimondello del Balzo Orsini, her second King Ladislao of Naples. After Ladislao’s death in 1413, she went home to Lecce where she spent the rest of her life, dying at nearly ninety. Maria was famous for her kind laws; the old and the helpless being exempt from taxes, while strangers who settled in the city need not pay any for three years.

The ruler who has left the most visible mark on Lecce, however, is the Emperor Charles V. He had the huge castle rebuilt in 1539–49, to guard against the Turks, employing a Salentine architect, Gian Giacomo Dell’ Acaja, who erected diamond-shaped bastions and palatial apartments on top of the old Norman fortress. Charles also gave the city unusually massive walls, with four great gates. The walls were demolished well over a hundred years ago, but the majestic Porta Napoli (or Arco di Trionfo) survives, still bearing the Imperial coat-of-arms.

Although the eclipse of Òtranto ensured Lecce’s eventual predominance over the Salento, during the sixteenth century the city had to endure a long lasting economic slump that bankrupted even Salentine magnates, while a population boom forced up food prices. In 1647 the anti-Spanish, anti-feudal revolt spread from Naples, and the combined forces of the viceroy and the nobles had difficulty in putting it down, shedding plenty of blood. Then came the 1656 plague when a quarter of the population died. However, towards the end of the century Lecce started to prosper again, with a surplus of corn, wine, oil, almonds and fruit; tobacco began to be grown, producing excellent snuff, while a famous race of mules was bred. And, as the region’s principal city, Lecce attracted legal and administrative business, besides becoming the centre of the Salentine nobility’s social life. In consequence, there was a steady demand for new
palazzi
and churches.