An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia (7 page)

He displayed considerable learning in his own, less controversial book, the elegant “De Arte Venandi cum Avibus” (“The Art of Hunting with Birds”). Based partly on Arab treatises on falconry, but written largely from personal observation, this reveals the author’s deep love and understanding of hawks; significantly, the mews that housed them at Castel del Monte could only be reached through his bedroom. Sultans competed to present him with young Arabian birds of prey while he sent all the way to Iceland to buy his favourite gyrfalcons. He was the first European ruler to introduce a close season for game.

Frederick liked to hunt in the woods around Castel del Monte, using hounds or even cheetahs for ground game, although he usually preferred to fly his falcons. He was accompanied by his bastard sons and by scions of royal or noble families from all over Europe and the Middle East. During the winter he did not return until dusk, not stopping to eat since he took only one meal a day. In the evenings, he and his courtiers discussed the nature of the soul and the universe, listened to readings from Aristotle, or sang poems to music of their own composition.

After the death of the Emperor’s son, King Manfred, the rulers of the
Regno
seldom if ever came to Castel del Monte, although it was in working order as late as 1459. Then it was abandoned, and the great bronze doors removed. For centuries farmers were allowed to stable their animals there, brigands hiding in the towers. At last the Italian government bought the castle from the Carafa family in 1876 and a trickle of tourists began to visit it, including Augustus Hare and Janet Ross.

“It is a three hours drive (carriage with 3 horses, 20 francs) across the fruit-covered plain, sprinkled with small domed towers, upon which the figs are dried upon tiers of masonry round the domes”, reported Hare, who was staying at Trani. “From the point where the carriage-road comes to an end, it is an hour’s walk, over a wilderness covered with stones, where the sheep find scant subsistence in the short grass between the great tufts of lilies.” But for years few tourists came here.

An old custodian, living in a hut nearby, told Mrs. Ross how delighted he was to see her, “and said his life was very lonely, and that if it were not for Vigilante (his dog) he should not be able to bear it.” He dismissed tales of the place being haunted at night by the great Emperor as “only fit for poor peasants.”

Even so, “what recalled Frederick II vividly to my mind were the hawks, sailing about and shrieking sharply as they flew in and out of their nests in the walls of the castle”, wrote Janet. She admired the view from the roof, where she could see the entire coast from the Gargano down to Monopoli, with the white towns of Barletta, Trani and Bisceglie. Inland, she could see Andria, Corato and Ruvo: “We understood why the peasants call Castle del Monte ‘La Spia delle Puglie’ (the spy-hole of Puglia).”

Although the Emperor had many other homes in Apulia, Castel del Monte best preserves his brooding, brilliant majesty.

10

...her burghers are still proud of the preference shown by the

great Emperor of the middle ages for his faithful town.

Janet Ross, “The Land of Manfred”

IN 1818 THE DISTANT OUTLINE of Andria’s three
campanili
appeared to Keppel Craven “like the minarets of a Turkish mosque”. After a pleasant visit to the city, he included it among the Apulian cities that were famous for “the hospitable, polished character of their inhabitants”. In Roman times it was a staging post on the Via Traiana. Since it was the nearest important city to Castel del Monte, only eight miles to the north, Frederick II appears to have spent a good deal of time at Andria.

Janet Ross drove here from Trani and gives us a vivid idea of what the neighbouring landscape looked like during the 1880s:

rich but dull country, teeming with corn, almond trees and olives, the large fields divided by rough stone walls. It is singular to see such vast stretches of country without any cottages or farm-houses. The ground was splendidly tilled, seemingly by invisible hands, for it was a holiday, so we saw no peasants about, and look in vain for their houses. Large cisterns for collecting rain-water were dotted about, and the only living creatures we saw were the men engaged in hauling water for their animals... On approaching Andria we crossed a “
Tratturo
”, one of the broad grass-grown highways which since time immemorial have served for the yearly emigration of the immense herds and flocks of Apulia to their summer pastures in the mountains of Calabria and Abruzzi.

She goes on to account, accurately enough, for the strange lack of human habitation:

In former times all this country was subject to perpetual inroads from the Turks, and the general insecurity was so great that the peasants were forced to live in large towns. This custom still prevails, and explains the size of Apulian towns...

The Emperor Frederick was obviously very fond of the elegant little city, presumably because of its unswerving loyalty. When the Pope tried to turn Southern Italy against him in 1228, while he was on crusade in the Holy Land, unlike all too many Apulian cities it stayed faithful. According to tradition, Andria gave Frederick an emotional welcome at his triumphant return from Palestine, “five youths of noble family” chanting verses in his honour. He rewarded the city with valuable privileges.

The Porta Sant’ Andrea, known in Frederick’s day as the Porta Imperatore, still bears the inscription that he ordered to be placed above it, beginning “ANDREA FELIX NOSTER”. The Teutonic Knights, no less loyal than the citizens to the Emperor, built a church near here, Sant’ Agostino, where the remains of beautiful thirteenth century frescoes have been uncovered from beneath the Baroque plasterwork.

Somewhere in the crypt of the
duomo
(cathedral church) lie the coffins of two of Frederick’s empresses, Yolande of Jerusalem and Isabella of England. Heiress to the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem and a queen in her own right, Yolande is said to have been marvel-lously beautiful, but she died at only sixteen. Her successor, King John’s daughter and an old maid of twenty when the Emperor married her by proxy at the palace of Westminster in 1234, pleased him by her wit and her learning. She too died young, however, after a mere seven years of marriage. The lives of these two young ladies cannot have been particularly happy, since both of them must swiftly have disappeared into their husband’s harem, described by a contemporary chronicler in a chilling phrase as “the labyrinth of his Gomorrah”.

Unlike Castel del Monte, Andria’s importance did not end with the Hohenstaufen. At the end of the fourteenth century it became a duchy, created for the del Balzo, who built a castle in the city centre to ensure obedience. During her visit here, Mrs. Ross met one of them when she inspected the church of San Domenico that they had built in 1398:

“An old man who lived in the refectory of the deserted convent asked us whether we had seen the tomb of the Duke, and on our answering in the negative, led us into a chapel out of the picturesque cloister. With pride he pointed to a rudely painted board let into the wall, on which was inscribed ‘
Hic jacet Corpus Serenissimi ducis Domini Francisci di Baucio fundatoris huius conventus 1482, aet 72
’; and proceeded to unhook it. We then saw a long hole in the wall, in which was placed an open coffin with glass on the side facing us. In this lay a brown mummy, and a few white hairs still remaining on the head, and one leg slightly drawn up as though the Duke had died in great pain. To our horror, the old man laid hold of the mummy, and danced it up and down in the coffin; he was quite disappointed at my refusing to feel how light it was, and explained that this was one of the ‘divertimenti’ (amusements) that Andria could offer to strangers.” (The duke’s mummy is still there).

Born in 1410, the Duke had fought for Aragon against Anjou in the struggle for the throne of the Two Sicilies. A family who claimed Visigoth royal blood, the del Balzo’s ancestral castle of Les Baux (or Balthasar) in Provence had belonged to them for so long that they were convinced they descended from one of the Three Kings and bore a Star in the East for their coat-of-arms. They first arrived in the
Regno
in 1264 as henchmen of Charles of Anjou.

King Ferrante’s second son Federigo, who was to be the last Aragonese ruler of Naples from 1496–1504, originally bore the title of Duke of Andria, since the heir to the throne of the
Regno
was always the Duke of Calabria. The most likeable of his dynasty, Federigo’s reign ended in tragedy, his entire kingdom being taken from him by the King of Spain. Cesare Borgia was briefly Duke, but it seems very unlikely that he ever came here.

Like most Apulian cities, Andria was ruled by feudal lords until the Napoleonic invasion, passing in 1525 to a branch of the Carafa family, who besides being Dukes of Andria were Dukes of Noja, Counts of Ruvo and Lords of Corato and Castel del Monte. They built a great palace on the site of the old Del Balzo fortress, which Pacichelli found most congenial; he writes of a luxuriant roof garden and “a noble and numerous ducal court”.

In October 1590 Fabrizio Carafa, the handsome young Duke of Andria, was murdered in Venosa, just a day’s ride from Andria, in one of sixteenth century Italy’s most notorious crimes of passion. He was conducting an affair with the beautiful but neglected Donna Maria d’Avalos, wife of the homosexual Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, famous for his eerie motets and madrigals. Re-turning to Venosa unexpectedly from a hunting trip, Gesualdo was infuriated by the flagrant affront to his honour. He broke down the door of the bed-chamber and killed the pair as they lay in bed, shooting the duke with an arquebus, then finishing him off with a halberd, before stabbing Donna Maria repeatedly with a stiletto. Despite the Carafa family’s fury, he escaped scot-free – at this date a full scale military campaign would have been needed to bring an Apulian magnate to justice.

Just outside Andria is the celebrated shrine of Santa Maria dei Miracoli. In 1576 a carpenter from the city, Giannantonio Tucchio, saw the Virgin in a dream, who told him to go to a cave in a ravine and light a candle before her image. An old man, he was nervous about visiting such a desolate place, but after she appeared twice more, went with a young friend, the lawyer Annibale Palombino. They found a picture on a wall and left a lamp burning before it. When they returned a week later, they found the lamp still burning, miraculously refilled with overflowing oil. Then Palombino’s mare went lame; every remedy failing, he tried the lamp oil and she was immediately healed. After this, humans began to be cured of diseases and pilgrims came flocking. In 1617 a magnificent Baroque church and a Benedictine monastery were built over the grotto by the great architect Cosimo Fanzago. A tablet records that in 1859 King Ferdinand II, very much at one with his subjects in matters of religion, came here and prayed for a cure. The shrine is now served by friars, crowds still descending the fifty-two steps into the grotto to pray before an ancient fresco on the wall of what was once a Byzantine cave chapel.

Ettore Carafa, Count of Ruvo and heir to the duchy of Andria, can be seen either as a patriot or as a quisling. Visiting Paris during the French Revolution, he became a fanatical revolutionary, wearing a tri-coloured waistcoat and distributing copies of the “Declaration of the Rights of Man” when he went home. As soon as the Neapolitan Republic was proclaimed, he raised a troop of like-minded volunteers to help the French subdue Apulia. In March 1799 he led his men in the storming of Andria, his birthplace. Its citizens, who had erected an enormous crucifix in the main square to protect them, fought desperately, pouring boiling oil from their windows. The besiegers put the city to the sword, and by Carafa’s own account the casualties on both sides amounted to 4,000. The usual looting took place; later a dragoon was arrested in Barletta nearby for trying to sell the dress of Andria’s statue of the Madonna del Carmine. Ironically, after being captured and condemned to death, Carafa, that enemy of privilege, demanded to be beheaded instead of hanged, as was his privilege as a noble; he also insisted on dying face upward. The King commented, “so the little duke has gone on playing the hard man [
guapo
] till the very end.” The request was granted, Ettore’s head being removed with a saw in place of the customary axe.

The Carafa palace still stands at Andria, a huge dilapidated building of dingy brick. During the nineteenth century it was re-furbished by the Spagnoletti, formerly the ducal stewards, who had bought out their masters; eventually they were to rank among Apulia’s biggest landowners and wine-producers, acquiring a papal title. They have long since deserted this forlorn barrack.

The dying King Ferdinand II stayed at Andria in January 1859, apparently in the Carafa palace. He was on his way to Bari, inspecting Apulia for the last time, and came here to see the San Ferdinando agricultural colony. Very much a benevolent despot, the king had established the colony over twenty years before as a refuge for labourers whom he had forcibly evicted from the Barletta salt-marshes, to save them from the lethal malaria. In contrast to Ferdinand’s paternal approach, the
Risorgimento
would bring poverty and despair.