An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia (5 page)

Born into a family of poor peasants at Benevento in 1887, Padre Pio entered the Capuchins as a young man, joining the friary at San Giovanni Rotondo during the Great War and then became seriously ill with tuberculosis. In 1918 he collapsed in choir and was discovered to have the same stigmata as St Francis of Assisi – constantly bleeding wounds in the palms of his hands. He nonetheless managed to live a comparatively normal if invalid existence here for the next fifty years, wearing mittens to hide the wounds on his hands.

‘Normal’ is not quite the right word. His struggles with the Fiend recall St Anthony in the desert, and in his letters he tells of onslaughts by the Devil and demons from Hell, of a mind filled with hallucinations and despair, of being beaten. Often he thought he would die or go mad, sometimes he was bruised all over, spitting blood. The noise was so loud that it could be heard by other friars passing his cell.

He is said to have told the then Archbishop of Cracow that he would be Pope. Carol Wojtyla had come to San Giovanni Rotondo dressed as a simple priest, but Padre Pio picked him out from among a huge crowd. (The Vatican refuses to confirm or deny the story.) He cured very many people, healing not only physical ailments such as blindness, but alcoholism and personality disorders. Tens of thousands of men and women visited him, while he received 600 letters a day. He had the gift of “bilocation”, the ability to be in two places at the same time; when bedridden at San Giovanni Rotondo, he was seen at Rome on five occasions, his explanation being that it was done by “a prolongation of personality.” He smelt of roses, violets or incense and, although he died forty years ago, people think he still visits them, recognising the scent. His relics continue to heal.

His most spectacular miracle was for a pilot whose plane blew up at high altitude. The man woke up on a beach near Naples with an unopened parachute – at the time of the explosion his mother had a vision of a bearded friar telling her in dialect not to worry about her son. Usually, however, his interventions were less dramatic, advice full of earthy common sense. A widow asked him whether she should marry again. “So far, you’ve wept with one eye”, he told her. “If you remarry, you’ll cry with both.”

He raised vast sums of money, sufficient to build not only a new basilica for the pilgrims, flanking the friary’s nice little Baroque church, but also a large hospital and a centre for handicapped children. Some people who remember him say he looked “like every-body’s favourite grandfather”, but others who claim to have seen his ghost in the friary church or the new basilica describe a man of about thirty-five. As a man devoted to poverty, he would have hated the gilded statue of himself that stands outside the basilica.

The nails went through Christ’s wrists, not through the palms, and a friar who nursed Padre Pio on his deathbed once told us the wounds began to close within ten minutes of his dying. But this does not detract from his sanctity and it seems strange that it took so long to canonise him. Some have suggested that his “bilocation” encouraged the local witches, inspiring them to attempt similar feats. The real reason, however, is more prosaic: The Vatican needed time to read the letters he had sent to all the men and women who had written to him asking for advice. When his steel coffin was opened, his body was found to be uncorrupted. He was beatified in 1999, the first step towards being made a saint, then canonised in 2002. For several months in 2008, his body – still in a remarkable state of preservation, with a silicone mask round the face – was put on display for veneration in a glass casket at the fri-ary in San Giovanni Rotondo.

This mysterious friar is more like some figure from the Middle Ages than a man who died only in 1968, and many people alive today owe Padre Pio their physical or mental well-being, and some-times both. With St Michael, he has become part of the Gargano.

6

Behold me again launched on a small sailing

boat on the waters of the Adriatic.

Crauford Tait Ramage, “The Nooks and By-ways of Italy”

ALTHOUGH EVEN TODAY the Gargano remains secret and mysterious inland, it has become a very different story on the coast, where in summer the lonely beaches and the little fishing towns of former times are now overrun by tourists. Yet these places too are often very ancient, most of them with colourful and dramatic histories. If possible, it is best to explore them from a boat, as Crauford Tait Ramage did in 1828.

Manfredonia lies at the foot of Monte Sant’ Angelo and is the most important port in the Gargano. It was founded by King Manfred in 1260 to replace nearby Siponto, destroyed a few years before by earthquakes and malaria. After consulting famous astrologers specially imported from Sicily and Milan to advise him when and where he should lay the foundation stone, according to the Abate Pacichelli the Hohenstaufen king “provided for it most nobly, with walls, towers and a castle, and also a jetty that could accommodate any number of big ships.” It was said that Manfred had such enormous quantities of stone, sand, lime and timber brought to the site that every ox and mule in Apulia was in a state of collapse.

Significantly, despite King Manfred having been overthrown and killed by the Angevins, who were always infuriated by any reference to their Hohenstaufen predecessors, the city has kept the name he gave it. Manfred remains one of Apulia’s great heroes, even if he only became king of the
Regno
by pretending that the real heir to the throne, his half-brother’s infant son Conradin, had died in Germany.

The Turks captured Manfredonia in 1620, razing two thirds of the city to the ground. Although Manfred’s castle survived and a new cathedral was built in 1680, the city has never really recovered. Most of the travellers found it a dismal little place. In 1818 Keppel Craven was surprised to learn that its women were obsessively house-proud: “I was informed by the commandant... that they every morning made up their beds with a pair of fine sheets, which again being removed at night, were never destined to be slept in.” Ramage thought Manfredonia “not unlike the ‘lang toun of Kircaldy’, the main thoroughfare being a long and wide street from one gate to the other.” He says the inhabitants had a pale, unhealthy appearance, due to malaria.

Janet Ross met a fine old innkeeper here. “He held up the lamp to my face, then put it down, slapped me on the shoulder and said ‘
Tu mi piace
’ (Thou pleasest me). When Signor Cacciavillani asked him to prepare his famous fish soup, he rushed off to give the order, and waited upon us himself at dinner, producing a bottle of good old wine.” He insisted on her drinking from a silver mug, and presented an absurdly small bill. Such an establishment was untypical. Twenty years later, Sir George Sitwell was bitten by fleas eighty times on one arm between wrist and elbow during a single night at a Manfredonia inn.

Edward Hutton’s experiences in 1914 at “the miserable house in the main street which did duty for an inn” help to explain why there were so few foreign visitors. He describes the hostess as “something between Mrs. Gamp and Juliet’s nurse... so dirty that it was horrible to go near her.” When he decided to eat out, he declared “It would be impossible to find in a Tuscan village a place so wretched as the restaurant in Manfredonia... full of flies, even at night, even in the spring; chairs, tables, plates, glasses, forks, and spoons, all were filthy, and we could scarcely eat anything that it could provide: even the omelette was rancid because of bad oil.”

Once, nearby Siponto was the port serving the ancient city of Arpi, and the last safe anchorage before the dangerous waters of the Gargano coast. Hannibal captured it, while the Romans settled a colony of veterans here. King Manfred tore down what was left after a terrible earthquake, using the stone for Manfredonia. “The sea has retired from its old beach and half-wild cattle browse on the site of those lordly quays and palaces,” wrote Norman Douglas. “Not a stone is left. Malaria and desolation reign supreme.” Since then malaria has been eradicated, and there is now a holiday resort, the Lido di Siponto. One of the two buildings to escape Manfred’s demolition, the cathedral of Santa Maria Maggiore, standing forlornly next to the Foggia road, has an air of deep melancholy amid its pine trees. Built over a fifth century church – although Byzantine in proportion and feeling, especially the crypt with columns in the form of a Greek cross – it is nonetheless a Romanesque basilica from the eleventh century. The interior has been restored and tidied; all the votive offerings seen by Augustus Hare went long ago, “women’s hair, ball-dresses, and even a wedding-dress, which must have a strange story.” Yet you can still see what he meant when he said the interior had “the effect of a mosque.”

The other survival from medieval Siponto is the beautiful Romanesque church of San Leonardo, also on the main road to Foggia, with Byzantine vine-leaves on its capitals. It was part of the abbey of San Leonardo, given by King Manfred to the Teutonic Knights. Ferocious warrior-monks, always of German blood, their order was modelled on the Templars and founded in Palestine during the Crusades. So rich were the fourteen Apulian commanderies the Hohenstaufen gave the
Deutschritter
(command) that the revenues enabled them to wage their own Crusade on the Baltic, exterminating the heathen Old Prussians and setting up an independent state. The Iron Cross was modelled on the cross they wore on their white cloaks.

In an area that suffered constantly from raids by North African or Turkish corsairs, there were few ports on the actual coast of the Gargano, notably Rodi, Peschici and Vieste on the north east. Rodi is the most ancient. Cretan in origin, by the eighth century BC it belonged to Rhodes, from where it takes its name. A maze of steep, narrow streets and glaring white, flat-roofed houses, Rodi’s greatest attraction lies in the light and the intense blue of the sea at its feet.

Flanked by handsome Aleppo pines, the road from Rodi to Peschici runs beside a long sandy beach, with orange and lemon groves inland, as Pacichelli observed. Life has always been easier here than in the rest of the Gargano, probably than in most of Apulia. A tiny walled town on a cliff, Peschici was founded by Slavs in the tenth century but, apart from being saved by St Elias from a plague of locusts, has little history.

Ramage visited the “miserable village” of Vieste by boat, and describes it as “standing on a kind of peninsula, and washed on three sides by the waters of the Adriatic.” It must have changed a good deal since 1828. Although catering increasingly for tourists, the medieval town on its rocky headland is charming, with a Romanesque cathedral and a Hohenstaufen castle. Near the cathedral is the
chianca
, a stone on which the corsair Dragut had several thou-sand of the inhabitants slaughtered in 1554 before dragging the rest off to slavery.

From the Gargano southwards along the Apulian coast, and along the coastline of the entire
Regno
at intervals of a mile stand squat, square forts which were designed to guard against raids of this sort, and are still called ‘Saracen Towers’. Although some of them date from the fifteenth century, most were built in a programme begun in the sixteenth by the Spanish viceroy Don Pedro de Toledo. Machiolated and crenellated, proof against naval gunnery, they offered shelter to anyone in the area, communicating by smoke-signals – when an enemy sail was sighted as far off as Sicily, the authorities at Naples knew within ten minutes.

In classical times the Tremiti Islands, 22 kilometres off the Gargano coast, were named the Diomedean Isles, after one of Homer’s heroes, “Diomedes of the Great War Cry”, who took eighty black warships to the siege of Troy. Shipwrecked on the coast of Daunia – northern Apulia – he became King of the Daunians. When he died, his companions mourned him so deeply that Zeus changed them into sea-birds – during the sixteenth century local monks told the Duke of Urbino that the birds, apparently great shear-waters, could often be heard talking among themselves. Augustus Caesar confined his granddaughter Julia here because of her notorious promiscuity. When friends tried to intercede for Julia’s mother, who was in prison for the same reason, the angry Emperor shouted at them, “May your own daughters be as lecherous and your wives as adulterous!”

According to legend, a church was founded on the largest of the three Tremiti islands, San Nicola, when Diomedes’s crown was discovered there in the fourth century after a vision of the Blessed Virgin. Benedictine monks were certainly on the island from the eighth, building the abbey “just like Monte Cassino rising from the sea.” Later it passed to Augustinian canons. Since Pacichelli was an Augustinian, he sailed over from the mainland to inspect the abbey. He says that it was heavily fortified, with a garrison of a hundred soldiers under six officers. He tells us too that the famous human birds looked like starlings and, always a gourmet, adds that they were “excellent, boiled or fried.”

The canons left in the eighteenth century, when the monastery became a prison. During the Fascist Era Mussolini used the Tremiti as a place of confinement for political opponents. It is hard to believe that somewhere so beautiful should hold such cruel memories.

7

Giannone... so celebrated for his useful history of Naples.

Voltaire, “Age of Louis XIV”

THE GARGANO has produced heretics as well as saints and holy men. The most famous is Pietro Giannone, author of a book read by many of the eighteenth century travellers to Apulia.

If you turn inland from Rodi and drive a short way up through the orange and lemon groves, you come to Ischitella, a tiny, very pretty hill-town, which has a wonderful view out to sea. After a wistful reference to “the exquisite eels” of Lake Varano nearby, the indefatigable Abate Pacichelli says “it is on a delightful hill looking over the Adriatic, with a sweet climate”, but he does not tell us very much else about the town except that it is a principality belonging to the Pinto y Mendoza family. Their palace still stands in the main piazza, a crenellated seventeenth century
palazzo
(a grand urban residence) with a medieval castle for its nucleus.