An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia (9 page)

Augustus Hare found Foggia “a handsome town”, yet only a little later Janet Ross thought it “dirty and mean, and the dust is worse than Egypt”. She was astonished by the lack of water, especially in summer. This was old Apulia’s perennial problem and explained why the region often seemed so dirty to the travellers. In Mrs Ross’s day bottled water from Venosa was available, for those who could afford it.

“There would be no object in lingering at Foggia if it were not for the excursions”, Hare tells us. One of these was a visit to the sanctuary of the Madonna dell’ Incoronata, about six miles south of the city: “It is the oak wood in which Manfred, flying from his enemies in 1254, worn out with fatigue, and frozen by icy rain, lighted in terror the fire which he feared would betray him; and where, five years after, as a victorious king, he illuminated the forest with wax lights, and invited 12,000 people to a banquet in commemoration of his escape.”

During the Middle Ages, much of the Tavoliere was covered by the same sort of dense woodland you can still see in the Gargano, and Frederick II had extended the Forest of the Incoronata, planting both oak and elm. The Hohenstaufen held some famous hunting parties in this forest, one of King Manfred’s continuing for several days and involving fifteen hundred people. Hunting went on here as late as the eighteenth century. “The Puglian sportsmen run down hare with greyhounds, and pursue the wild boar with one large lurcher, and two or three mastiffs”, writes Swinburne. “The hunters ride with a lance and a pair of pistols.”

Very little of the Hohenstaufen’s woodland remains, and nowadays the Incoronata is best known as a place of pilgrimage. In the eleventh century a herdsman discovered a statue of the Virgin in the branches of an oak tree, after his cows had knelt down reverently around it. A chapel was built on the spot and later the original statue was replaced by a thirteenth century one of blackened wood, a Madonna and Child. Janet Ross watched pilgrims dragging themselves towards the altar on their knees. “Some women were flat on their stomachs licking the filthy pavement as they wriggled along”, she writes: “Their faces were soon such a mass of dirt that they no longer saw where they were going, and a relation led them by a handkerchief held in one hand. Near the altar the pavement was streaked with blood, and it was revolting to see the swollen, cut tongues of the wretched, panting creatures, sobbing hysterically as they tried to call upon the Madonna to help them.”

Today’s pilgrims are no less devout, if more restrained. In the past they arrived on foot or in the high-wheeled Apulian carts; now most come by coach or car, although some continue the tradition of walking between Monte Sant’ Angelo, Bari and the Incoronata for their respective saint’s days, all of which fall in May. The Sanctuary of the Incoronata is now a large modern church, quite unlike that seen by Janet Ross. During the service for the robing of the Virgin and Child the women’s ceaseless chanting is led by someone with a peculiarly harsh yet musical voice, their refrain being “Evviva Maria! Evviva Maria!” After an hour or so of chanting, the Madonna and Child appear above the altar to rapturous applause. Slowly the black wooden statue descends on the platform, winched down by a boy feverishly turning a handle at the side. Once safely installed on the altar there is more clapping and renewed shouts of “Evviva Maria!” (the bishop’s sermon is applauded with no less enthusiasm). The Virgin and Child are now taken to one side; last year’s robes and crowns are removed and the statue is re-dressed in gorgeous new ones. Then, accompanied by civic dignitaries and a police escort, they process slowly round the large church and back to the altar.

The Incoronata preserves something of the Tavoliere of long ago. Augustus Hare claimed that “at all times the place is worth a visit to those who can admire flat scenery, and the... Cuyp-like effects of the oxen and horses and groups of pilgrims (for some are here always) seen against the delicate aerial mountain distances; and in the beautiful colouring of the plain, pink with asphodel in spring, or golden with fenocchio.”

During the Second World War large airfields were built near Foggia, from which the Regia Aeronautica took off to bomb Greece, and then Malta and British shipping in the Mediterranean. When Italy changed sides in 1943 the Luftwaffe operated from here, trying to stem the Allied advance. The German troops on the ground were too few in number to put up much of a defence, how-ever, and the airfields’ capture in the autumn of the same year enabled the Allies to bomb not only Austria and Southern Germany but also the vital oil wells of Romania.

Sadly, during the brief German occupation of the airfields the city of Foggia was more heavily bombed than anywhere else in Apulia, losing a good deal of its Baroque architecture. Traces of the damage can be seen even today. Yet it still retains something of its charm and, above all, that glorious cathedral.

13

We are on a hill – a mere wave of ground; a kind of spur, rather, rising

up from the south – quite an absurd little hill, but sufficiently high to

dominate the wide Apulian plain.

Norman Douglas, “Old Calabria”

THE WESTERN SIDE of the Tavoliere is bounded by the foothills of the Appenines, on one side of which stands Lucera. A reasonably important city in ancient times, supposedly founded by the Homeric hero, Diomedes of the Great War Cry, there was a temple of Athene Ilias here, guarded by dogs, who, it was claimed, barked at the barbarous Daunians but fawned on Greeks. The Romans founded a colony of 20,000 veterans, giving the city a fine amphitheatre.

Lucera’s golden days, however, were in the thirteenth century under the Hohenstaufen, when Frederick II built the biggest and most luxurious of his fortress-palaces in the city, its curtain-walls large enough for a sizeable town, with twenty-four towers. “All round the outside of those turreted walls (they are nearly a mile in circumference; the enclosure, they say, held sixty thousand people) there runs a level space”, wrote Norman Douglas. “This is my promenade at all hours of the day. Falcons are fluttering with wild cries overhead; down below, a long, unimpeded vista of velvety green, flecked by a few trees and sullen streamlets and white farm-houses –the whole vision framed in a distant ring of Appenines.”

The Emperor installed a colony of 16,000 Saracens from Sicily in the enclosure and in the ruins of the old Roman town, and they created a new, Muslim, Lucera with a mosque and a souk. “No monarch has ever had more grateful or more loyal subjects than Frederick’s Saracens at Lucera”, comments the Prussian Gregorovius. “They formed his Praetorian Guard, his Zouaves, his Turcos, light cavalry with javelins and poisoned arrows, a crack corps.” The Emperor’s personal bodyguard was exclusively recruited from these Saracens so that enemies nicknamed him ‘The Sultan of Lucera’. His Muslim colonists included not only warriors but potters, forgers of Damascus steel, makers of war machines, Greek fire and poisoned arrows – some of their women made carpets, cushions and harnesses, while others were courtesans.

The custodian suspected Norman Douglas of being a treasure-hunter, probably because the Emperor was known to have kept his money at Lucera: “After a shower of compliments and apologies, he gave me to understand that it was his duty, among other things, to see that no one should endeavour to raise the treasure which was hidden under these ruins; several people, he explained, had already made the attempt by night.”

It was essential for King Manfred to gain the support of the Lucera garrison when his brother, Emperor Conrad, died in 1254. As soon as he arrived at the city the Saracens cheered him from the battlements, but their commander, John the Moor, “whose heart was as black as his face”, had gone off to pay homage to the Pope, leaving orders that the gates must be opened to no one. His lieutenant, Marchisio, refused to admit Manfred. The king was about to crawl through a culvert beneath the walls when the entire garrison except for Marchisio rushed to the main gate, threw it open, placed Manfred on a horse and led him into Lucera in triumph.

When the castle surrendered in 1269 to Manfred’s supplanter, Charles of Anjou, he left the Saracens in peace. However, in 1300 his son Charles II made them choose between death and conversion to Christianity. Some think that a secret, clannish people who lived at Troia until quite recently, the
Terrazani
(the Earthy Ones), are descended from the Lucera Saracens.

Much of Frederick’s palace survived until the eighteenth century, including a great octagonal tower, but then the stones were used to build new law courts at Lucera. When Janet Ross came and admired the castle’s “beautiful warm yellow-ochre colour” in the 1880s, she found an old woman, who had come from the Abruzzi for the winter with her family and 800 sheep. They lived in a crude shelter they had made inside the walls, a few planks covered with felt, sleeping on a pile of sheepskins.

On a low hill between Lucera and Torremaggiore lie the scanty ruins of another of the Emperor’s fortresses, Castel Fiorentino. Riding to Lucera, he fell ill from dysentery and rested here when too weak to go further. Astrologers had warned him he would die “among flowers” near an iron door, and all his life he had avoided Florence. Learning that there was an iron door behind a curtain near his bed, the Emperor muttered, “This is where, long ago, they said I would die, and God’s will must be done.” He died on 13 December 1250. His supporters claimed he did so in a monk’s habit, his enemies that he expired grinding his teeth with rage and refusing the Sacraments.

“The road... to Troia (
Inns
, most miserable) passes through a most desolate country which till lately was completely in the hands of brigands”, Augustus Hare tells us. “The town is situated on a lofty windstricken eminence, and occupies the site of the ancient Accas or Acca”. Utterly destroyed during the barbarian invasions, Aecae lay in ruins till 1018 when Basil Boiannes,
Catapan
of Bari, built a heavily fortified new town, which he filled with Greek settlers but called ‘Troy’. Norman Douglas writes of “Troia, wrapped in Byzantine slumber”, yet while it is certainly sleepy no one else can see anything remotely Byzantine about it.

Hare thought the Romanesque cathedral, begun in 1093 on the site of a Byzantine church, “the noblest in Apulia”, admiring “a great rose-window of marvellous beauty”, but adds “The exquisitely beautiful interior has suffered terribly from a recent wholesale ‘restoration’ at the hands of its bishop, by whom it has been bedaubed with paint and gilding in the worst taste”.

However, the city’s commanding position over the plain ensured that the cathedral would be heavily bombed in 1943, after which it returned to something like its Norman appearance. Two wonderful green bronze doors with lions, lambs, dogs and dragons, were made in Benevento in 1119.

A few miles south of Troia is the little town of Orsara di Puglia. In the thirteenth century the huge castle was a commandery of the Knights of Calatrava, Spanish warrior monks, but it began as a Norman keep. Later it became a
palazzo baronale
(baronial estate). During an attempt to relieve the besieged fortress in 1462, King Ferrante unexpectedly defeated his Angevin rival, the Duke of Calabria – a decisive victory which saved his crown.

The battle that decided if France or Spain would rule Southern Italy was fought at Cerignola, south-east of Foggia, in April 1503. A French army under the fire-eating Duc de Nemours had been marching towards Troia in search of the Spanish, mistaking giant stalks of fennel for enemy lancers, many dying from thirst because, this being the beginning of the Apulian summer, there was no water in the few rivers or streams. At dusk the French finally located the Spaniards near Cerignola, camped behind a shallow ditch and a bank of earth on a small, vine-covered hillock; they included some of the new arquebusiers. Convinced that his men-at-arms and pikemen could easily storm such a feeble earthwork, Nemours insisted on an immediate assault, which he led in person. Almost at once, he was killed in the ditch by an arquebus bullet through the head, all his officers being shot down with him. Leaderless, the French troops fled across the flat plain, pursued by Spanish light horse, who killed large numbers of them. The military significance of this brief engagement lies in it having been the first really important battle to be decided by small-arms fire.

Under the long and repressive government by viceroys sent from Spain which now began, these three little towns on the Tavoliere became somnolent backwaters. It has been said that the only benefits the Spaniards brought to Apulia were tomatoes and wrought-iron balconies, yet at least they were accompanied by two hundred years of peace.

Although Cerignola is one of the oldest cities in Apulia, it was totally devastated in 1731 by the same earthquake that destroyed Foggia. “To look upon it today one might think it a creation of our own time, even the cathedral being an entirely modern building” is Edward Hutton’s ponderous verdict. Designed in a style the guide-book calls “
goticheggiante
” (“gothic”), the neo-gothic cathedral houses the sole survival from the medieval city, a thirteenth century painting of the Virgin, the “Madonna di Ripalta” who is the city’s protectress. “The place is scarcely worth a visit, but it bears witness to the transformation of all this country by modern methods of agriculture which are fast turning the better and higher part of this ancient pasture land into vineyards and olive plantations”, writes Hutton.