An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia (32 page)

When Macfarlane last visited the bridge at Ponte di Bovino in 1824, “General del Caretto has decorated it with the heads and mangled quarters of some half dozen of more modern, but less conspicuous brigands.” He adds that even when there were not organised
comitive
, the locals lay in wait in the pass: “In some places the hill and the wood, or concealing thicket, is so close to the road on the one hand, and the ravine on the other, that it is really enticing. A shot from the one, and the man’s business is done – and there yawns a dark capacious grave, to receive his body when deprived of what it is worth.”

Ramage came across brigands four years later, but he was unmolested since they were only interested in rich landowners who could pay a big ransom. Nevertheless, when in 1836 Saverio Mercadante from Altamura wrote the opera “I Briganti”, its theme still remained unpleasantly familiar to Apulians.

47

St Vitus’s dance and that other one which cured,

they say, the bite of the Tarentine spider.

Norman Douglas, “Old Calabria”

DESPITE TELEVISION and consumer society, a very old Apulia lingers on secretly, with amazing tenacity.
Tarantismo
is a dramatic example of pagan survival in this ultra-conservative land. An ancient form of therapeutic magic, no doubt familiar to the shamans during the Stone Age, it is popularly supposed to be a cure for the bite of the venomous tarantula. In reality, tarantism is a form of exorcism, a means of healing mental disturbance.

Because one of its churches is dedicated to St Paul, Galatina is said to be free from snakes and poisonous spiders, although surrounded by mile upon mile of vineyards. Throughout Southern Italy the Apostle Paul is invoked against venomous creatures, since he was unharmed by the viper that bit his hand when he was washed ashore at Malta. This is why the church of S.Paolo at Galatina is a place of thanksgiving for those cured by tarantism.

Some writers believe
tarantismo
is a relic of the Bacchic rites but most think it is caused by a bite from a tarantula. In the early eighteenth century Maximilien Misson was fascinated by the affliction:

The true tarantula resembles a spider and lives in the fields. There are many, it is said, in the Abruzzi and in Calabria, and they are also found in some parts of Tuscany. When bitten by this accursed insect one takes a hundred postures at once – dancing, vomiting, trembling, laughing, turning pale, swooning – and one suffers very greatly. Finally, without help, death follows in a few days. Sweatings and antidotes relieve the sufferer, but the best and only remedy is music.

Bishop Berkeley records:

The P. Vicario [Superior of the Theatines at Barletta] tells us of the tarantula, he cured several with the tongue of the serpente impetrito, found in Malta, and steeped in wine and drunk after the ninth or last dance, there being 3 dances a day for three days; on the death of the tarantula the malady ceases; it is communicated by eating fruit bit by a tarantula. He thinks it is not a fiction, having cured among others a Capuchin, whom he could not think would feign for the sake of dancing.

There was some confusion about the precise definition of a tarantula. Sandys, in his “Relation of a Iourney begun in An. Dom, 1610”, says it is:

a serpent peculiar to this country; and taking that name from the city of Tarentum. Some hold them to be of the kind of spiders, others of effts; but they are greater than the one, and lesse than the other, and (if it were a Tarantula which I have seen) not greatly resembling either. For the head of this was small, the legs slender and knottie, and the body light, the taile spiny, and the colour dun, intermixed with spots of sullied white. They lurke in sinks and privies, and abroad in the slimy filth betweene furrows; for which cause the country people do reap in bootes.

Sandys appears to have seen a scorpion.

Misson (who did not visit Apulia) wrote in 1722 to a certain Domenico Sangenito of Lucera, asking for information. He was told: “They vary in colour and I have seen ashy ones and those of a dark tawny hue, like a flea, and with markings which look like little stars. We have them in the mountains as well as in furthest Apulia, but however their bite does no harm.” Sangenito was apparently referring to a spider. Yet it is likely that the spider exists only in the sufferer’s imagination and is an illusion caused by hysteria.

“In the seventeenth century the belief in the tarantula bites began to subside, and nothing now remains of
tarantismo
”, Hare declared in 1882. But two reliable witnesses told us that during the 1980s they had been to Galatina and seen women, and on one occasion a man, dancing to relieve the malady. The
tarantolata
, or supposed sufferer from the bite, believes the cure can only work if she is surrounded by the right colours and the right tune is played. Red, green, yellow or black are most likely to suit a spider and the music must match its mood, happy or sad. The musicians, who play the violin or guitar
battente
accompanied by cymbals and an accordian, need a large repertoire to find the right tune, as well as the stamina to go on playing for hours on end. The dancing generally takes place in a room, occasionally in the street. A sheet with a portrait of St Paul is spread on the floor and the
tarantolata
starts to move in imitation of a spider, while the musicians try various tunes for her. When they find the right one she begins to dance, not alone, but with anyone among her friends who is wearing the spider’s colour. She dances for a few minutes, then takes another partner. At first she dances lethargically, but after a few hours becomes increasingly elated, ending in a state of ecstasy.

Perhaps half a dozen
tarantolate
go secretly each year to the church of S.Paolo, to imitate a spider, crawling and running, flinging themselves on the altar. Their torn stockings are left hanging up as votive offerings. The decline in
tarantismo
seems to be due to fewer people working in the fields, rather than disbelief in the spider’s bite. (One should not confuse the colourful dancing displays for tourists with the real thing.)

No one has ever been able to give a really convincing explanation. The travellers disagree on the details, if not on the importance of colour and music. Some describe the woman as dancing in front of mirrors, others with a drawn sword in her hand. Keppel Craven says she dresses in white and is decked in “ribands, vine leaves and trinkets of all kinds.” He considers the whole thing an excuse for a party:

While she rests at times, the guests invited relieve her by dancing by turns after the fashion of the country; and when overcome by restless lassitude and faintness she determines to give over for the day, she takes a pail or jar of water, and pours its contents entirely over her person, from the head downwards. This is a signal for her friends to undress and convey her to bed; after which the rest of the company endeavour to further her recovery by devouring a substantial repast which is always prepared on the occasion.

Janet Ross heard a story which should be a warning for anyone inclined to be sceptical. There was a master mason living near Taranto, who:

got new-fangled ideas into his head and mocked at the idea of a spider’s bite being venomous, threatening to beat any of his female belongings who dared to try the dancing cure in case they were bitten by a “Tarantola”. As ill-luck or San Cataldo would have it, he was himself bitten, and after suffering great pain and being in a high fever for several days, at last sent for the musicians, after carefully locking the door and closing the windows of his house. But the frenzy was too strong, and to the malicious delight of all who believed in “Tarantismo”, he tore open the door and was soon seen jumping about in the middle of the street, shrieking, “
Hanno ragion’ le femine! Hanno ragion’ le femine!
” (The women are right! The women are right!)

Part XI

48

...that abode of Greeks, that unreassuring land.

Virgil, “Aeneid”

THE TERRA D’ÒTRANO was the last part of Apulia to be conquered by the Normans and still has something unmistakably Greek about it. After losing Ravenna in the eighth century, Byzantine Italy, re-organised as the Theme of Lombardy, was ruled from here by a
strategos
(or general) until 975 when the
catapanate
was established at Bari. The strategos worked closely with the archbishop, who sometimes represented him. In the tenth century Archbishop Vlattus of Òtranto led an embassy to the Zirid sultan at Mahdia in Tunis to buy the freedom of Apulian slaves – inspired by his sister being in the sultan’s harem – but when he returned privately to redeem more of them he was put to death.

The navy of Nicephorus Phocas (963–69) routed the Arabs. “I alone command the seas”, claimed the Emperor, who began the Greek colonisation of southern Italy, settlers flooding in under Basil Boiannes during the next century. Discreet contact with Constantinople lingered on until the Turkish conquest of Greece, while Mass was said in the Greek rite up to the Counter Reformation. Even today, although the language has almost ceased to be spoken, certain Greek customs survive south of a line from Ostuni to Tàranto . The most obvious example is harvesting olives in the Greek way. The trees are barely pruned so they grow very high and the ripe fruit is left to drop into nets spread on the ground below instead of being picked by hand as in the Terra di Bari.

The underground churches contain some of the Byzantine frescoes that are among Apulia’s greatest treasures. During the eighth century Byzantium forbade celibacy and the veneration of icons. When monks were ordered to marry or lose their eyes, 30,000 fled to Italy, founding small monasteries in caves, especially in Calabria and the Terra d’Òtranto. Sicilian monks, refugees from Islam, joined them in the ninth century. They decorated the churches they carved into the rock with frescoes of Christ, the Virgin and the Saints. The tradition continued for centuries.

The grotto church of San Biagio near San Vito dei Normanni owes its preservation to an enlightened landowner putting a door over the entrance. This was the church of a group of hermits and, judging from its size – over forty feet long – served a large community. Signed by the artist Daniel with the date 1197, the frescoes are unmistakably Byzantine, and Charles Diehl thought that, to-gether with the magnificent Archangel Michael at San Giovanni nearby, they were the most important in the Terra d’Òtranto. He blamed the destruction of many other frescoes on the navvies who built the railways. Using the cave churches as shelters where they could light fires, they seem to have taken a fiendish enjoyment in disembowelling the painted saints or gouging their eyes out. San Biagio had a lucky escape.

Converted to the Latin rite during the seventeenth century, few surface (as opposed to underground) churches in Apulia retain any traces of their Byzantine past. The exquisite little church of San Pietro at Òtranto is an exception, with drums and cupolas, and some of the Greek cycle of frescoes – the Last Supper and the Harrowing of Hell. The fifth century church at Casarano has been enlarged and its walls redecorated with Western frescoes, but the brilliantly coloured Byzantine mosaics are still in the dome and chancel, the dome dotted with stars. There is also the Romanesque abbey of Santa Maria di Cerrate, south of Brìndisi, which although built by Normans belonged to the Eastern rite, as you can see from its frescoes and from an altar inscribed in Greek.

On the other hand, there are Greek grotto churches throughout the stony hinterland of the Salentine peninsula, secret, haunted places that are often very hard to find, sometimes underground, sometimes dug into a bank or the side of a cliff. They stretch in a diagonal band twenty-five miles wide from Roca Vecchia in the north to Poggiardo and Ugento in the south. Some are locked, the key kept by a seemingly mythical custodian, while others have frescoes that are visible only by the light of a powerful torch. Often it is difficult to recognise them as churches or chapels, especially when they are used as cattle-byres or tool-sheds. Among the most important are those at Vaste, Giurdignano and Supersano. The earliest frescoes, from the tenth century, are in the church of Sante Marina e Cristina at Carpignano Salento, while the most beautiful are in a small museum in the public gardens at Poggiardo – having been taken from the nearby grotto chapel of Santa Maria under the town centre, discovered when a lorry fell into it in 1929.