An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia (29 page)

The Baroque architecture they used here until late in the eighteenth century was religious in origin, an exuberant glorification of Catholicism. “Leccese Baroque” is a highly distinctive form, however, warmly admired by some, but fiercely condemned by others. The local stone, a pale honey colour, is very easily carved and purists object to what they regard as wildly extravagant ornamentation.

Anthony Blunt (in “Baroque and Rococo”), however, queries the very existence of the Baroque in Lecce:

The phrase Barocco Leccese appears in every Italian text-book on architecture, and the concept is to be found in most English works that mention the architecture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in South Italy, but it can be argued that there is not a single building in Lecce or the surrounding district – the Salento – which can properly be described as Baroque... Both the façades and the altarpieces of the churches show a richness and gaiety of decoration which have perhaps no parallel, save in Sicily. The decorative motifs employed are, however, mainly derived from a sixteenth century vocabulary which had long been out of date in Rome or even Naples... Leccese architects must have relied primarily on decorative engravings or pattern books and it seems that they continued to use those published in the late sixteenth or seventeenth centuries long after they had been abandoned elsewhere.

He also points out that not even the design of the churches was remotely Baroque, Romanesque rose windows continuing to be employed even in new buildings.

The most typically
Leccese Baroque
buildings are the group around the Piazza del Duomo. Bernard Berenson thought the cathedral the most beautiful in Italy, but few people can agree with him. It was designed and built between 1659 and 1670 by a local architect, Giuseppe Zimbalo, popularly known as ‘Lo Zingarello’, The Little Gypsy. The
campanile
is 270 feet high. (“In the good old times when corsairs ruled the sea, the high
campanili
all over this country were used as watch towers”, Mrs Ross tells us. “In the one at Lecce was a bell, which a sentinel struck in a peculiar way, to give the alarm if he saw suspicious vessels on either sea.”) Another good example of Zimbalo’s work is the former convent of the Celestines, now known as the Governor’s Palace, which Edward Hutton sums up rather well – “the amazing baroque façade, with its appalling general design.”

There are countless Baroque
palazzi
in Lecce, often surprisingly small but no less embellished than the churches. The pompous coat-of-arms at their corners or over the doorways enthral students of Italian heraldry.

Pacichelli liked the style, commenting how suitable the local stone was for “Venetian windows, cornices and other gallant ornament.” The
duomo
was “new and likewise superb.” He admired the long, wide street, the gardens with orange trees, and the low cost of food. Less cheerfully, he records how the plague of 1679 had reduced the population to 9,000 souls, although among them were “Patrician families living in great splendour and divers Barons, some of whom have feudal rights, and many doctors and magistrates.” But in 1734 the sober Bishop Berkeley thought the “gusto too rich and luxuriant, occasioned without doubt by the facility of their working their stone.” He found the people “civil and polite, and so far as we had dealings, honest and reliable.” The Abbé de Saint-Non commissioned an etching of the cloister in the Dominican convent, which he found restful after the façade’s wearying extravagance. Of Lecce as a whole he says, “This modern town would be one of the most beautiful in existence had it been built with a little taste; for the beauty of the stone and the materials employed give an appearance of grandeur, but the method is de-testable; all the edifices are covered with the worst and most useless sculpture.”

Both Swinburne and Riedesel were impressed by the citizens’ skills in dancing and making music. The former comments, “Music is here cultivated with a degree of enthusiasm. Many of the nobility are good performers, and proud of exhibiting their skill on solemn festivals. The Leccian music has a very plaintive character, peculiar to itself.”

“I enquired throughout Italy at what place boys were chiefly qualified for singing by castration”, Dr Burney relates delicately. He was told:

the young castrati come from Lecce in Puglia; but before the operation is performed, they are brought to a Conservatorio to be tried as to the probability of voice, and then are taken home by their parents for this barbarous purpose. It is said, however, to be death by the laws to all those who perform the operation and excommunication to everyone concerned in it, unless it is so done, as is presented, upon account of some disorders, which may be supposed to require it, and with the consent of the boy.

Burney particularly admired Leccese folk songs he had heard sung at Naples.

In 1797 Lecce received a visit from the King and Queen of the Two Sicilies, Ferdinand and Maria Carolina, who stayed in the Bishop’s Palace. If the Leccesi liked the amiable, long nosed king, they must have found the tiny, haughty queen – Marie Antoinette’s sister – somewhat forbidding. Six years later, the king would be distressed by the news that slave-raiders had abducted 164 people from the province of Lecce.

In 1805 Major Courier of the newly installed French garrison at Lecce reported to his colonel that Captain Tela had been murdered by Don Giuseppe Rao on whom he had been billeted. Seeing his wife going into the captain’s room, Don Giuseppe stabbed her and the captain to death with a stiletto. There had been no affair – she was delivering his laundry – while her husband took little interest in her. But, according to Courier, Don Giuseppe lived in dread of being called a
becco cornuto
, a cuckold. “In this part of Italy it is the most sensitive point of honour”, says Courier. “Here “
Becco cornuto
” is the most terrible of all insults, worse than thief, murderer, swindler, blasphemer or parricide.” He adds that the towns-people were saying they would never catch the murderer, however hard they might look.

Lecce had a resident British governor from 1817 to 1820, Gen-eral Sir Richard Church, given the job of putting down the brigands who terrorised Apulia. He liked “the bright little capital with its white houses, and the little streams running through the streets”, and soon got rid of the brigands. The general gave a ball every other week, alternating with one given by the
intendente
(revenue officer).

Keppel Craven spent a week here in 1818, enjoying “the friendly hospitality of General Church”, but found the streets oddly deserted. The city “would commodiously admit a population of 30,000 souls, whereas the present amounts to no more than 14,000.” As for the architecture: “extravagant and almost incredible bad taste is exemplified in every building of consequence.” Even so, the snuff was excellent, and the people “renowned for their courteous, polished manners.”

On a snowy January morning in 1859, Ferdinand II, his queen and his eldest son Francis entered Lecce on their way to meet Francis’s bride at Bari; their carriage preceded by four mounted carabinieri bearing torches and followed by six with drawn sabres. In the afternoon the king went to the
duomo
for a sermon by the bishop, a
Te Deum
being sung. In the evening he attended a performance by a popular comedian at the Teatro Paisiello, after which there was a banquet and fireworks. (The theatre, built in 1768, is still standing). But Ferdinand was ill, dying from a mysterious disease that had begun after an assassin’s attempt to bayonet him two years before. He had to remain at Lecce, in the Governor’s Palace, for nearly a fortnight. Characteristically, he summoned up enough energy to order the demolition of the medieval walls. This was the last visit to the city by a Borbone sovereign, although during his brief reign Francis II gave orders to extend the Naples rail-way to Lecce by way of Brìndisi.

Charles Yriarte went to a reception at the prefecture in 1876, finding:

Elegant, amiable, cultivated people, well informed on every subject, everybody speaking French fluently – which is unusual on the coast farther down than Ravenna – learned archaeologists, distinguished naturalists, administrators, rich landowners from the area around Naples on holiday, glittering officers and, finally, smart women in the latest Paris fashions without the overdressing that is so common among Southern Italians, who gave me plenty of serious, scholarly conversation, with all the amiable courtesy and friendly outspokenness which is typical of Italy.

“I was told several times, ‘Oh Lecce is so gay, the very name calls up a smile; and the Leccese are so civil and pleasant.’ All of which we found quite true” observes Janet Ross. But while her hotel, the
Risorgimento
(still there) was comfortable and clean, the host was put out by her ordering boiled eggs, bread and butter, and coffee with milk at nine every morning: “The idea was so novel, and the mixture so extraordinary, that we always had to wait half an hour. ‘Why did we not have a cup of black coffee in bed like other people, and then breakfast properly at mid-day?’ ” She did not like the architecture – “very ugly”, “a very orgy of baroque rococo, quite overpowering in the excess of ornamentation.”

“Every night during our stay at Lecce we saw rockets, Bengal fire, &c.” she records. After one of these displays,

I insisted on going into a booth with a large doll hanging outside, to see marionettes as done for the people, not for the gentlefolk. We paid a halfpenny each and clambered up a rickety ladder into the “
posti distinti
”, where our appearance created quite a sensation.

The play was Samson and Delilah: “When Delila came on, with that queer, spasmodic, irresponsible walk belonging to a marionette, and sheared Samson of his mass of hair with an enormous pair of scissors, the audience applauded vigorously, ‘Well done’, ‘She’s the hairdresser for me’.”

The highlight of Mrs Ross’s visit was meeting a hero of the
Risorgimento
, the Duke Sigismondo Castromediano. He lived at his castle of Cavallino some miles outside Lecce and came in to show her the city museum. “A very tall half-blind, courteous old man, leaning on the arm of his secretary and surrounded by various professors, some of whom had put on tail-coats and white gloves in honour of the visit of a learned lady.” He told her of his life as a political prisoner under the Borboni, “among convicts of the lowest description, imbued with every vice, the refuse of humanity.” His health had been broken and he was very poor, reduced to living in one room of his castle. Something of a showman, he had left instructions that his fetters and convict’s red jacket should be placed on his coffin at his funeral. He recalled how touched Mr Gladstone had been to hear about his sufferings, especially “the killing out of sheer spite by the gaolers, of a pet nightingale which the poor prisoners had tamed.” The Duke told Janet that “nothing gave him such pleasure as to see an Englishwoman” and asked permission to embrace her, after which he kissed her on both cheeks.

The Baroque was still unfashionable during the 1890s when Paul Bourget visited the city. “Here the bad taste is too intense, fancy carried to such extremes with such genius, that the term loses its meaning.”

However, in 1902 an architect called Martin Briggs “discovered” Lecce. Eight years later, he published a book, “In the Heel of Italy: a Study of an Unknown City”, calling Lecce “a veritable seventeenth century museum”, and claiming that here “Baroque architecture may perhaps be seen at its best.” Brigg’s book persuaded the Sitwells to visit Lecce in 1922, the city elders insisting on paying their bill since they were obviously so distinguished. Sir Osbert Sitwell admired the city even more extravagantly than Mar-tin Briggs: “Lecce, peer of any Italian city in loveliness”, was his verdict.

Its citizens are still passionately proud of Lecce. They tell strangers how until only recently the
palazzi
were occupied by
duchi
,
marchesi
,
conti
,
baroni
, and how they speak better Italian than the Florentines. They talk of Bari as a hideous, heathen place, inhabited by decadent Levantines who have vile manners.

44

...a robber by profession – an unholy wizard in the imagination of other

men – a devil in reality.

Charles Macfarlane, “The Lives and Exploits of Bandits and Robbers”

ONE WET, WINDY NIGHT in December 1814, a wayfarer hammered on the gate of the castle of Martano in the Terra d’Òtranto. Because of the torrential rain the old steward let him in, only to be shot down at once. Fifty horsemen galloped into the courtyard, then ran through the castle, murdering every single servant, including the chaplain and the housekeeper. The ‘wayfarer’, whose name was Don Cirò Annichiarico, burst into the bedroom of the Princess of Martano – twenty years old, famous for her beauty, a great heiress and still unmarried – demanding her strongbox and her jewel-chest. After finding in them 36,000 gold ducats with diamonds, rubies and pearls, he stabbed the princess and her maid to death, shouting, “Philosophers say that dead bitches don’t bite!”