An Armchair Traveller's History Of Apulia Part 4

In 1920, labourers from Cerignola occupied the land of a young ex-army officer, Giuseppe Cardona, burning his grain and smashing his wine vats. In response he set up a Fascist cell, recruiting veterans from the trenches. Union activists were beaten up, forced to drink quarts of castor oil or chained naked to trees while their offices were burned down. The authorities openly supported Cardona and by 1922 he controlled all the provice of Foggia. The unions had been broken. Overseers on the Tavoliere now wore black-shirts and the latifondi would survive until Mussolini's land reforms of the later 1920s and the 1930s.

Part IV.

The Adriatic Sh.o.r.e.

16.

Cathedral Cities on the Coast.

English travellers nearly always play at follow the leader, and there are probably not two hundred living who have explored the characteristic cathedrals of Apulia.

Augustus Hare, "Cities of Southern Italy and Sicily"

ONE OF THE REASONS for Apulia's fascination is the fact that its landscape has changed so little. Despite motorways and container lorries, despite light industry and high-rise flats, in the old city centres and on the roads between the cities, often you can still see the same buildings generally in a much better state of repair and the same countryside that the early travellers saw. Sadly this is no longer true when you are following the sh.o.r.e of the Adriatic southward. The coast and the hinterland from Barletta down to Bari have one of the most remarkable concentrations of medieval architecture in Europe cathedrals and churches built in a distinctive style known as Apulian Romanesque, combining the Norman Romanesque of Jumieges and the Burgundian Romanesque of Vezelay, with Byzantine and even Arab elements but the countryside, particularly between Barletta and Trani, has been covered with factories and stone-yards.

Before the Norman conquest, the coastal towns of Apulia were merchant communes trading very profitably with the Byzantine Empire and Egypt. Later they prospered spectacularly during the Crusades, as the ports from which pilgrims, soldiers and supplies could most quickly reach the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. How-ever, the Black Death caused a crippling fall in their populations, while political instability put them in the hands of feudal overlords; there were also attempts to absorb them into the Venetian empire that lasted until the sixteenth century. The long regime of the Spanish viceroys was a period of stagnation and decline, eventually brought to an end by the re-emergence of an independent Southern Italy under the Borbone monarchy in the first half of the eighteenth century.

Going south through the Terra di Bari, the first of these beautiful little cities is Barletta. It became important under the Normans, who gave it a castle and a cathedral. In the seventeenth century Pacich.e.l.li described it as "one of those fine cities of the realm which may truly be called royal." Swinburne, who came a hundred years later, gave it qualified if scarcely less flattering praise. "Barletta has, from without, a ruinous aspect; its walls tumbling down, and its ditches filled with rubbish. But the inside of the city is magnificently built, though thinly peopled. It conveys the idea of the capital of some mighty state reduced to the condition of a conquered province, or depopulated by a raging pestilence... the port is at present a mere labyrinth, consisting of several irregular piers, where ships are moored; but without any shelter from the north wind which sweeps the whole bason [sic]". He gives a typically Pugliese explanation for Barletta's origin it had begun "as no more than a tower or drinking house, on the road to Cannae, which had for its sign a barrel, 'barilletta'. " In 1805 Major Courier found that although it was a port, fish was un.o.btainable because its fishermen never put to sea, frightened of being kidnapped by North African slavers.

After the Risorgimento, Barletta went into a decline and in 1883 Augustus Hare saw "filthy streets" and "innumerable beggars." Six years later, Janet Ross wrote of "another milk-white town whose dirty streets do not correspond to one's first impression of gaiety and brightness." She was very upset by her cabman, who "insisted on taking us to the church of the 'Teatini' to see 'bella roba' (beautiful things), which turned out to be horrible mummified bodies in the crypt." Even so, Hare admired the cathedral, part Romanesque and part Gothic. "Marvellous marble monsters adorn its doors," he tells us, noting its n.o.ble campanile and twelfth century west front, and the pierced marble windows which he thought "quite Saracenic". The sinister King Ferrante was crowned here in 1459.

The city has another superb medieval church, San Sepolcro, built by the Templars during the thirteenth century, where Crusaders kept vigil on the night before they sailed to the Holy Land. It houses a relic of the True Cross that locals credit with many miracles. Around the reliquary hangs a gold chain and a gold medal with a Maltese cross in enamel; both church and relic had been acquired by the Knights of Malta, whose prior gave the medal he wore round his neck to serve as an adornment in 1759, in thanksgiving for a miracle. Pacich.e.l.li says that the Knights' Priory at Barletta was particularly opulent and luxurious.

Outside San Sepolcro stands a bronze statue sixteen feet tall, a Roman centurion holding an orb and a cross. Probably the Emperor Valentinian (36475), it was once thought to be Heraclius, which is why it is known locally as 'Are'. Once considered to have been looted at the sack of Constantinople in 1204, and ship-wrecked here on its way to Venice, recent forensic research has proved it was never immersed in sea water. It is now thought to have been sent from Ravenna by Frederick II to be set up at Melfi but arrived after his death in 1250 and remained in Barletta. The hands and feet of the statue were barbarously chopped off, to be recast as bells for a friary in Manfredonia, but were replaced by new ones in 1494.

The castle of Barletta was a favourite residence of King Manfred, who roamed the streets at night, dressed in green and singing to a lute. After holding his coronation banquet here in 1459, Ferrante made it one of the strongest fortresses in Italy. Fearful of Turkish invasion, Emperor Charles V made it even stronger, siting huge rectangular bastions packed with earth at each corner; the gun-turrets inside, with vents for smoke to escape, antic.i.p.ate those of a dreadnought battleship. There are huge guardrooms, halls, store rooms, cellars and an unusually deep moat. When attacked by Suleiman the Magnificent's fleet in 1537 the castle proved to be impregnable, and it was still able to stand up to sh.e.l.ling by the Austro-Hungarian battleship Helgoland during the First World War.

In the Piazza della Disfida is the gloomy Cantina della Disfida, the ground floor of a medieval palace turned into a tavern. This was where the Italians met on 13 February, 1503 before going off to fight in the Disfida (Challenge) of Barletta. During the war between France and Spain over who should rule the Two Sicilies, when the Italo-Spanish army under General Gonsalvo de Cordoba was besieged in the city, a French captain, Guy de la Motte was taken prisoner in a sortie. He told his captors scornfully that Italians would never face Frenchmen in open combat. Gonsalvo gave the boast wide circulation, after which thirteen Italian men-at-arms, led by Ettore Fieramosca, met thirteen French men-at-arms led by de la Motte in an olive grove between Barletta and Andria. They had agreed that the vanquished should forfeit horse and armour, besides paying a hundred gold ducats in ransom. Watched by a huge crowd, after six hours they had fought each other to a standstill, the ground being dyed red with blood and littered with broken lances and discarded armour. The sixteenth century historian Guicciardini, who had spoken to eyewitnesses, says the spectators watched in "a wonderful silence." The Italians finally won, killing one of the Frenchmen, which made the others limp off. "It was almost unbelievable how their victory discouraged the French army and put new heart into the Spaniards", comments Guicciardini.

While travelling from Barletta to Trani, Swinburne noticed the huts in nearly every field, built with stones picked out of the soil when digging. "These conical towers serve as watch houses for the persons that attend before vintage, to prevent the depredations of quadruped and biped pilferers; when old and overgrown with climbing weeds and fig-trees, they become very romantic objects, and appear like so many ancient mausolea. The shape of these piles of rude stones, covered with moss and brambles, has deceived a writer of travels [Riedesel] into a belief of their being Roman tombs." Octavian Blewitt tells us that in his day the hut roofs were used to dry figs, "which are arranged on a ledge on the outside, winding round the buildings to the summit." Sadly on this stretch of the road they are no longer visible, hidden by shoe factories and stone-yards, although many remain elsewhere.

Many of the travellers found Trani so interesting, and had so much to say about it, that we have given this elegant city, which lies next along the coast, a chapter to itself.

Bisceglie's medieval streets lead down to a port below the castle. The cathedral is a fine piece of Apulian Romanesque, a basilica with three aisles and a splendid thirteenth century faade. Alfonso d'Aragona, a b.a.s.t.a.r.d son of Alfonso II of Naples, was created Duke of Bisceglie and in 1498 married Lucrezia Borgia; despite being a most amiable young man, he fell foul of his brother-in-law, Cesare, who had him garrotted. The Abate Pacich.e.l.li called Bisceglie "a joyful city", writing of "a handsome theatre for staging comedies and tragedies in turn, which has not its like in the realm."

Molfetta, on the other hand, in the eyes of the travellers, lacked charm although impressive from a distance. Count de Salis visited it with Archbishop Capecelatro of Taranto. While admiring its past glories as one of the most important trading ports in Apulia, he found it "filthy, ugly and badly built." It is full of unhappy memories; in 1902, for example, thousands of starving men and women besieged the munic.i.p.ality and the carabinieri's (national military police) barracks, then looted the flour mills. To some ex-tent the city is redeemed by the duomo vecchio, the former cathedral, begun in 1150 and as much Byzantine as Romanesque, whose twin white towers dominate the harbour.

In the eighteenth century travel by land between these cities was not always easy. According to de Salis, the road between Molfetta and Giovinazzo, the next port, was "the worst I have every traversed in my whole life, so cluttered up with stones, that the mules were obliged to leap like goats, from one heap to the next; so that at a certain point we were obliged to leave the carriage and make our way on foot."

At Giovinazzo, once known as Iuvenis Netium by the Romans, a forgotten mosaic floor from the early Middle Ages slowly emerged before the cathedral's high altar during a recent restoration. "The view of the sea and the symmetry of its architecture, including that of its suburbs, make it delicious" was Pacich.e.l.li's flattering opinion of Giovinazzo, whose enthusiasm may have been prompted by admiration for its feudal lord, the Duke Giudice, "n.o.ble from the dignity of the purple and splendour of the toga, and from sagacity."

Keppel Craven ate an excellent dinner at Giovinazzo, washed down with a good local red wine. Afterwards he took a stroll, before retiring to a bed at the inn spread with clean linen, entering "possession of it with the prospect of a comfortable night's rest. But in this I greatly erred; for the bed and all its alluring appendages contained 'that within which pa.s.seth outward show', a most numerous and lively population." At the end of the nineteenth century, however, Janet Ross did not need to worry so much about bed bugs, although at least one Apulian inn-keeper mistook her travelling bath for "some novel musical instrument."

17.

King Ferrante's Coronation at Barletta, 1459

Whether it was his blood or the plots formed against his life by the barons which embittered and darkened his nature, it is certain that he was equalled in ferocity by none among the princes of his time.

Jacob Burckhkardt, "The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy"

AS WELL AS the Emperor Frederick and King Manfred another royal ghost haunts this landscape, even if no Pugliese would ever wish to call King Ferrante an Apulian. "Besides hunting," says Burckhardt, "his pleasures were of two kinds: he liked to have his opponents near him, either alive in well-guarded prisons, or dead and embalmed, dressed in the costume they wore in their lifetime. He would chuckle in talking of the captives with his friends, and made no secret whatever of the museum of mummies." He is also credited with feeding prisoners to a pet crocodile, which he kept in a dungeon.

Ferrante's coronation as King of mainland 'Sicily' (Naples) took place in the cathedral at Barletta on 4 February, 1459. In the know-ledge that everyone present was aware of his illegitimacy and being challenged for the crown by a rival, he made heralds throw silver coins into the crowd with an inscription stating that his cause was just; they had been minted out of reliquaries stolen from Monte Sant' Angelo. A coronation banquet followed, in the hall of the great Hohenstaufen castle by the sea.

Meanwhile the Neapolitan Wars of the Roses dragged on. Ferrante's father Alfonso of Aragon had routed his rival, Rene of Anjou but Rene's son, the Duke of Calabria, and the Angevin party remained extremely dangerous. In the circ.u.mstances Barletta was a good place for a coronation since it was near the Tavoliere, enabling Ferrante to get his hands on the revenue from the grazing tolls. He needed money desperately. John of Calabria had the support of France, and the French occupied Genoa, controlling its formidable fleet. He knew that the Regno's haughty barons despised Ferrante as a young Catalan b.a.s.t.a.r.d who was widely rumoured to be the son of a Moorish slave. He also knew that the king's brother-in-law, the Prince of Rossano, hated him for having committed incest with his sister. Even Ferrante's uncle by marriage, the Prince of Taranto, the greatest magnate in Apulia, was in close touch with the Angevins.

In autumn 1459 the Duke of Calabria landed north of Naples and many barons rose in rebellion. Even so, within a year Ferrante had almost beaten off the challenge, but then his army was unexpectedly defeated at the mouth of the River Sarno near Naples, and he fled with only twenty men-at-arms. He continued the struggle from Apulia, where in 1461 he suffered a fresh disaster, when large numbers of his troops and horses perished from thirst during a dreadful, waterless march across the Gargano. He took refuge in Barletta. Save for Trani, the rest of Apulia belonged to his enemies.

Both sides employed mercenaries, Iacopo Piccinino fighting for the Angevins, Alessandro Sforza for the king. By mid-summer 1461 the Prince of Taranto occupied Andria, Giovinazzo and even Trani, while the Duke of Calabria held the Gargano. The tide soon turned, however, when Ferrante's ally, George Castriota Skanderbeg, brought 800 tough Albanian veterans from across the Adriatic. In August the king besieged the castle of Orsara di Puglia near Troia. Calabria tried to relieve it, a skirmish turned into a pitched battle and suddenly the Angevins were routed beyond hope of recovery. The barons, including Taranto and Rossano, changed sides. The rebellion was over.

"No one could ever tell what King Ferrante was thinking", re-cords the French statesman Commynes. "Smiling in a friendly way, he would seize and destroy men... His kinsmen and close acquaintances have told me he knew neither mercy nor compa.s.sion." After a show of reconciliation he had the Prince of Taranto strangled and flung the Prince of Rossano into a dungeon, to await a nightmare death for a quarter of a century. He lured another old enemy, Iacopo Piccinino, to Naples, welcomed him like a brother, wined and dined him for a month, and then had him murdered thrown from a window.

"Where money was concerned, he never showed pity or compa.s.sion for his people," writes Commynes. He bred horses and pigs on a huge scale, his subjects being made to pasture his horses, lend him stallions and fatten his pigs. In oil-producing areas like Apulia, he bought the oil cheap, then forced the price up and compelled the public to buy it. He used the same method with corn. Loans were ruthlessly extracted from every rich n.o.bleman.

Ferrante's private life was equally swinish, especially after the death of his beautiful, highly intelligent queen, Isabella Chiaramonte. According to Commynes, " he raped several women savagely."

A paranoiac, he became as frightened of Turkish invasion as he was of revolts by his barons, and he added cannon-proof bastions to every castle on the Apulian coast. From his friend Skanderbeg, he realised that what had happened to Serbia and Albania might all too easily happen to Southern Italy, especially after the Turkish occupation of Otranto in 1480.

The barons were terrified of his heir, the future King Alfonso II, who was even crueller than Ferrante. In 1485 a plot, the famous Congiura de' Baroni (conspiracy of the barons), attracted many of the kingdom's great dignitaries; they wanted Ferrante to be succeeded by his second son, the gentle Federigo. There was sporadic fighting during 148586, some of it in Apulia, and then the king made a peace which the plotters foolishly took at face-value.

One of the plot's leaders was an Apulian baron, Francesco Coppolo from Gallipoli, Ferrante's financial adviser, whom he had made Count of Sarno. The king invited several people involved in the plot to the marriage at Naples of Sarno's son Marco to his own granddaughter. During the celebrations in the Castel Nuovo, all of them were arrested and beheaded soon after. A few months later several other magnates were seized, none of whom was ever seen again; according to Giannone, "it was generally believed that they had been strangled, put in sacks and thrown into the sea." Among the victims were Ferrante's brother-in-law, the Prince of Rossano, who had spent twenty-three years in prison, and Pirro del Balzo, Prince of Altamura.

Surprisingly, King Ferrante died a natural death in his own bed in 1494, after a stroke. He did so knowing that the French were about to invade the Regno and that his dynasty was doomed. The Apulians do not care to remember him, even if he was crowned at Barletta.

18.

Trani

...the whole town is so gracious in spite of modern improvements that a whole day is not too much to give it, lingering in the old churches, or about the harbour, or lounging in the pretty public gardens by the sea.

Edward Hutton, "Naples and Southern Italy"

MANY PEOPLE THINK TRANI is the most beautiful of all Apulian cities. It has a long history and its famous maritime code, the Ordinamenta Maris, dates from 1063 when it was part of the Byzantine Empire. Under the Normans countless Crusaders embarked for the Holy Land from Trani, after a night spent in vigil at the church of Ognissanti.

Facing the sea, its deep moat filled with seawater, Trani Castle is one of the few Hohenstaufen castles to retain its original geometric pattern. The Emperor Frederick, who built it, hanged Pietro Tiepolo, the Doge of Venice's son, from its walls in full view of the Venetian fleet cruising outside, in revenge for Venetian raids on the Apulian coast. The Via Giudea commemorates the Jewish quarter at Trani, to whose community the Emperor gave a monopoly of the city's silk trade, and the little thirteenth century churches of Scuolanuova and Sant' Anna began as synagogues.

It is King Manfred, however, who has the most dramatic a.s.sociations with Trani. In 1259 an anonymous Dominican chronicler, from the friary next to the harbour, watched the arrival of Manfred's Byzantine queen, Helena Comnena: On 2 June eight galleys brought to Apulia the bride of King Manfred, Helena, daughter of the Despot of Epirus, accompanied by many lords and ladies of our realm and from her father's. She landed at the port of Trani where the King was waiting for her. When the lady landed from her galley, he warmly embraced and kissed her. After leading her all the way through the city to everybody's applause, he took her to the castle where there was feasting and dancing, while during that evening there were so many illuminations, with beacons in every town in the land, that it seemed just like day-time.... the said queen is most agreeable, with a kindly manner, far more beautiful than the King's first wife, and people say that she is only seventeen.

In 1496, King Ferrantino p.a.w.ned Trani to the Venetians, who remained here for thirteen years. They occupied it again in 1529, but were driven out by the Spaniards. Some palazzi have a distinctly Venetian air. The city then declined steadily under Spanish rule, the harbour being deliberately left to silt up, to make it uncompet.i.tive.

When the tireless Abate Pacich.e.l.li visited Trani at the end of the seventeenth century, he was distressed to find it so decayed. Many fine houses had been allowed to fall down while its s.p.a.cious squares were deserted. This was partly due to the plague of 1656, in which "more than a hundred of the best families had been extinguished." He noticed and, uncharacteristically, queried an inscription over a gate, claiming that the name Trani combined those of Diomedes's son Tyrrhenius, who founded it, and of the Emperor Trajan who restored it.

Bishop Berkeley enjoyed the wine here in 1734. "N.B. The muscat of Trani excellent," he recorded. As usual, his notes are as vivid as they are terse: "This city, as Barletta, paved and built almost entirely out of white marble; n.o.ble cathedral, Gothic, of white marble... port stopped and choked." He adds "piracies of the Turks make it unsafe travelling by night." By "Turks" he meant North Africans or Albanians, who generally arrived in fast boats, abducted a few women and animals, and then vanished as swiftly as they had come. The last raid of this sort on Apulia took place in 1836.

During the mid-eighteenth century Charles VII briefly made Trani the political and administrative centre of Apulia, siting all the law courts here. He dredged the harbour, enabling its merchants to export wool, grain and olive oil. However, it soon silted up again.

Swinburne had a low opinion of the wine, and of the cathedral too "in very mean taste, the ornament preposterous." The interior had suffered from Baroque "improvements". Nor did this dour Northumbrian care much for the inhabitants: Our evening was spent with the archbishop, a worthy conversable prelate. He told us he had taken great pains to introduce a taste for study and literature into his diocese, but hitherto without much success as the Tranians were a very merry race, gente molto allegra, but unfortunately born with an unconquerable antipathy to application. The collegians, though under his immediate inspection, were above his hand, and often, when he thought the whole seminary buried in silence, wrapped up in studious contemplation, or lucubrations, he had been surprised, on entering the quadrangle, to find all ring again, with gigs and tarantellas. We were satisfied that he spoke without exaggeration, for never did we hear such incessant chattering, and so stunning a din as was kept up the whole day under our windows. It is a rule established by the custom of time immemorial, that no work shall be done in Trani during dinner; the whole afternoon is to be spent in dozing, chattering or sauntering: we could not prevail upon the blacksmith to shoe one of our horses in the evening.

The ancient custom of the siesta still infuriates Northern tourists in Apulia. Even the most famous churches are firmly shut in the afternoon. According to J.J. Blunt, writing in his book of 1823, "Vestiges of Ancient Manners and Customs discoverable in Modern Italy and Sicily", this comes from the old pagan practice of closing temples at noon for several hours so that the G.o.ds may sleep. "Hence the goatherd in Theocritus ventures not to play upon his pipe at noon, for fear of awakening Pan."

In 1799, the common people of Trani rose for the King when the munic.i.p.ality proclaimed the Neapolitan Republic, hoisting the white Borbone standard and taking control of the administration. Sailors, fishermen and labourers, they defended the city heroically for several days against the troops of General Broussier and Ettore Carafa, the revolutionary Count of Ruvo. In the end, the besiegers stormed it at the point of the bayonet, reducing the buildings to ruins and the population to mounds of corpses.

During the nineteenth century, Ferdinand II was so proud of the city that he made his second son Count of Trani. He dredged the harbour once again, this time for good, finally restoring prosperity. The depots near the cathedral, inscribed "AMSTERDAM", "DANIMARCO", "LONDON" AND "SVEZZIA", all date from his reign.

In 1865 Mme. Figuier and her husband, eager to escape from the chambre d'horreur and the restaurant nauseabond at Foggia, looked forward to seeing Trani. They expected to eat better, even if they prudently brought a basket with a cold chicken and a bottle of wine. When they arrived in the rain, however, they both thought the town uglier and unhealthier than Foggia, with dark, narrow, winding streets, badly paved and crowded by wretched looking houses, although the population of sailors and traders seemed bustling by comparison. Out of the seething mob that fought for their custom at the station, they hired a driver and his a.s.sistant: "One was a peevish old man with red eyes and hair like a hedgehog, only half-dressed in tatters, and the other was a squat, one-eyed youth in rags." These two drove them in search of a room. In the first locanda they tried, they were puzzled at seeing six pillows on each of the four beds in the camera d'onore till informed that six persons slept in a bed one being reserved for women. The next hostelry was a complex of huge pa.s.sages opening into each other, window-less and doorless, faintly lit by night-lights. The beds were smaller, flanked by jars of foul-smelling oil. There was a knife on every bed. "My locanda is for merchants who carry a lot of money when they come here", the proprietress explained proudly. "So they like to sleep with a knife handy." She suggested the couple might lodge with her sister, the widow of a sea-faring man, where they could have a proper chambre bourgeoise.

The rain had stopped, so after arriving at the sister's house, they went out onto the balcony to admire the view of the harbour. Going back into the room, Juliette Figuier found their hostess raiding their trunk. "The old woman had a hard, glaring stare, pale lips and a false, cruel face." She ran up to Mme Figuier, raised her veil and cried with a hideous laugh, "What no earrings, no necklace, no jewels? My sister must be mad. Here's a guest who's not worth strangling, not even worth the price of the cord."

Juliette was so frightened that she ran out into the street, to see dark blotches on the paving stones which she fancied were blood-stains. Telling the cabmen to retrieve their trunk, she and M. Figuier just managed to catch the 3.00 pm train back to Foggia, the last that day. On the journey they tried to eat the chicken, unsuccessfully, deciding that when a fowl was killed in Apulia it was always the oldest member of the flock.

Twenty years later, no one tried to strangle the formidable Janet Ross when she arrived with her timid protege, the painter Carlo Orsi. She was amused by the ill-feeling between Trani and Andria. "At Trani they told us that the people of Andria were all thieves and a.s.sa.s.sins, uncivil to strangers, and perfect savages; while at Andria we were informed that Trani was a nest of robbers, and its inhabitants 'maleducati e gente di nessuna fede' (ill-bred and untrustworthy)". There were certainly some unusual members of the medical profession in Trani. In a dirty back street Janet Ross found an advertis.e.m.e.nt posted up outside the house of a Professor Rica: The said Professor Rica will buy, for making his salves, live snakes and big serpents, wolves, bears, monkeys, marmots, weasels, and may other kinds of wild animal, alive and in good condition.

But Mrs. Ross met only politeness in the town, even if the people were amazed by her courage in walking about alone. They were equally astonished at her wearing a hat instead of a shawl over her head. "'Are you a man that you wear a hat?' asked a small boy. Some nice-looking young men at once reproved him and asked me to excuse the bad manners of an ignorante [uneducated]. They then offered to show us the way to the cathedral and made way for us through the crowd." To be fair to the little boy, there was clearly something unmistakably masculine about Janet Ross, judging from photographs.

The cathedral, with its tall campanile and its magic setting by the sea, was largely built between 1159 and 1186 although only completed in the thirteenth century. A recent restoration has re-moved the Baroque ornament disliked by Swinburne, revamping the interior in twilight twentieth century style. The effect is unspeakably bleak, that of a soulless barn, even the local clergy comparing the bishop's new throne to a dentist's chair.

On the evening of Holy Sat.u.r.day, Mrs. Ross returned to the cathedral, to find out just what was meant by the abbavescio di Cristo: As the clock struck eleven a great curtain which hid the high altar fell, and the noise which followed was frightful. The whole congregation shouted, knocked their sticks on the pavement and dashed chairs against the walls, while the bells rang all over the town. This was the abbavescio which I discovered meant the resurrection of Christ... The noise outside was even worse. Crackers, paper bombs and rockets were exploding all over the place, and on the pavement in front of every house were lines of little brown-paper parcels full of gunpowder, which went off with a deafening effect. This was the batteria di Ges (the battery of Jesus), a demonstration of joy at His rising from the tomb.

What she did not appreciate was that the abbavescio was a survival from Byzantine Apulia, from the Greek Orthodox celebration of Easter.

She thought the public gardens "wildly picturesque", and her description shows that they still remain much as they were a century ago. They are next to the seawall, adjoining the little semi-circular harbour, which reminded her of Venice.

Part V.

Bari.

19.

The Catapans.

It was at Bari that the Byzantine troops made their last stand; it was Bari that remained capital of the Theme of Italy until the very end.

Jules Gay, "L'Italie meridionale et l'empire byzantine"

IN 1071 The LAST CATAPAN, Stephen Pateranos, was freed by the Normans and allowed to sail home to Constantinople. He had been taken prisoner when Bari fell to Robert Guiscard after a siege of nearly three years. Besides trying to a.s.sa.s.sinate Guiscard (with a poisoned javelin as he sat at dinner in his tent), the Byzantines had made desperate attempts to relieve the doomed city only that winter Stephen had slipped in through the Norman blockade on his return from the Imperial capital, where he had gone to make a frantic appeal for more troops. In April, however, weakened by treachery, the garrison surrendered. Stephen's departure meant the end of Byzantine Italy.

Originally Bari was Peucetian, then Greek and then Roman. However the city was unimportant in ancient times. Horace enjoyed the fish here, seemingly the sole distinction to be recorded in cla.s.sical literature.

Bari's Byzantine period began in the mid-sixth century, when it was one of the first places recaptured from the Goths for Justinian. Shortly after the Emperor's death it was occupied by Lombards and, together with most of Apulia, governed by the Lombard Dukes of Benevento under Byzantine suzerainty. What was left of Imperial Apulia, the Salento, was administered by a Strategos (general) at Otranto, who took his orders from the Emperor's viceroy in Italy, the exarch of Ravenna further up the Adriatic coast. They kept in touch by sea, until Ravenna fell to the Lombards in 752, after which the Strategos received his instructions direct from Constantinople.

Despite the Lombard occupation, one can safely a.s.sume that Bari kept its links with Byzantium, the greatest trading centre in the world, the last bastion of cla.s.sical civilization and the only source of luxuries.

During the early ninth century Italy began to be attacked by Saracens, Berber Aghlabids from North Africa, who sacked Rome and conquered Sicily. In 847 Bari was captured by Khalfun, once a mercenary in the service of the Lombard prince Radelchis. He evicted its Lombard governor Siconolfo and established the first and only fully-fledged Moslem state in mainland Italy. By 860, Khalfun and his successors Mufarrag ibn-Sallam and Sawdan had added Orta and Matera to their territory, using them as for-ward bases from which to plunder far and wide, and sending count-less Apulian men, women and children to the African slave markets.

According to Bernard the Monk their city was defended by a double wall, while they gave it mosques and minarets. Despite being a great sacker of monasteries, Sawdan, the third emir, was no mere pirate but a scholar who obtained formal recognition of his emirate from the Caliph of Baghdad. Up to a point, he even tolerated Christians. In 867, on his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Bernard had no difficulty in obtaining a pa.s.sport at Bari and finding a pas-sage to Egypt although he saw shiploads of Christian slaves bound for Africa. However, in 871 the Western Emperor Louis II retook the city, capturing Sawdan.

After Louis' death in 875 the Carolingians were too busy with troubles in France and Germany to intervene in Italy, and three years later the Strategos Gregorios marched up from Otranto to reoccupy Bari in the Eastern Emperor's name. It should be realised, however, that outside the Salentine peninsula which was governed from Otranto, held by Constantinople since the sixth century, there was no continuous Byzantine presence. Even after Greek settlers began arriving at the end of the ninth century, most Byzantines in Apulia were soldiers or officials apart from a handful of monks, who had first arrived a hundred years before, fleeing from iconoclastic persecution.

In 975 the Byzantines commenced a long campaign of reconquest. Bari replaced Otranto as their Italian capital while the Stratagos was given the new t.i.tle of Catapan, which meant becoming a viceroy with full military and civil powers over the 'Theme of Lombardy'. In 1011 the Catapan Basil Mesonardonites built a kastron (town) here. After Basil Boiannes ablest of the catapans had established Imperial rule over all Apulia, Greek settlers poured into Apulia, most of whose rock-churches date from this time. Had another brilliant Emperor followed Basil II (the 'Bulgar Slayer'), who died in 1025, the Byzantines might have succeeded in re-creating Magna Graecia.