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
The Tavoliere: Lucera, Troia and Cerignola
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.
He seems to have had not the slightest inkling that for all too many Apulians the ‘transformation’ had made life on the Tavoliere very nearly as wretched, painful and lethal as a battlefield.
14
Life on the Old Tavoliere
The northern plains of Apulia are still, as in the time of
Strabo and Pliny, famous for the rearing of sheep...
Augustus Hare, “Cities of Southern Italy and Sicily”
WHEN HARE WROTE this in the early 1880s, sheep farming had been giving place to wheat on the Tavoliere for nearly twenty years. The traditional way of life had almost gone for ever, and he was lucky to see it.
Each autumn the ancient Samnites had brought their flocks down to the low ground of Apulia, returning to the Abruzzi for the summer grass. Ramage was told at Ascoli Satriano that “during the later ages of the Roman Empire a tax was levied on all sorts of cattle and sheep thus migrating.” The system was known to Frederick II, who ordered compensation for anyone whose trees or crops were damaged by the animals: his laws were not enforced, resulting in the loss of great tracts of Apulian woodland, since the trees’ self-seeding was annihilated by goats. In 1442, not only did King Alfonso make the shepherds pay tolls for grazing their sheep here, but also for selling their flocks and skins, wool or cheese, solely at Foggia. Taxes per hundred sheep had to be paid to the Foggia customs house, the Dogana delle Pecore, while the king guaranteed protection and drove-roads for the flocks. Over the centuries the drove-roads, the tratturi, came to form a bewilderingly complex network known as the Draio.
Wild animals were attracted by the grazing. When King Ferrante rode out from Barletta in 1462 to fight the Duke of Calabria, he saw a cloud of dust so big that he thought it was a huge enemy army and fled back to Barletta. Later he realised that it had only been a herd of deer.
Landowners were forced to give up land for several months a year, to provide the enormous tracts needed for grazing, expanded as the number of sheep increased. Pasturage eventually included not only the Tavoliere but the Murge, part of the Salento and the lower slopes of the Gargano, causing widespread destruction of arable and the disappearance of whole villages, unable to grow the vegetables that formed their diet. In the fifteenth century there were 600,000 sheep, by the seventeenth four and a half million. The Dogana delle Pecore at Foggia was such a source of wealth that, during the brief period when the French and Spanish divided Southern Italy between them, they agreed to share the Dogana’s extremely lucrative revenues from tolls and taxes.
Each flock of sheep was accompanied by a shepherd, a dairyman and a cheese-maker, all dressed in sheepskins, living on coarse bread, oil, salt, sheep’s milk and cheese, sleeping on sheepskins in a sheep-skin tent. Two white Abruzzesi dogs, with spiked collars for protection against wolves, guarded each flock, a mule carrying the tent and the cheese-making utensils. Every flock of three or four hundred was part of a large flock of ten thousand, known as the punta that was supervised by a head shepherd, an under-shepherd and a head dairyman. Sometimes the wives stayed in the mountains, spinning or looking after the crops, but very often they and their children came too, on horses and donkeys. François Lenormant compared this once familiar spectacle to a folk migration.
The unusually white-wooled sheep nearly always belonged to a breed known in Apulia as the pecora gentile. Some said that the breed had been introduced from Spain by King Alfonso, but more probably it was indigenous. (Tarantine sheep were famous in antiquity and wore coats to keep their white fleeces clean). Shorn twice a year, completely in the spring but only half in the summer, these sheep were particularly valued for their excellent cheese, which made up an important part of the Tavoliere’s diet and was worth more than the wool, earning the owners of the flocks a great deal of money.
There was a long-developed art in making the cheeses and an experienced shepherd could tell from their taste on what sort of grass and in which month the sheep had been feeding when milked – a skill that, even now, is not quite extinct at certain masserie on the Murge. In years of drought he would proudly prefer to let his flock die rather than feed it on wheat in place of grass.
The punte met annually at the Foggia sheep fair, their shepherds solemnly leading them in a ceremonial review before the chief tax-man, ‘Il Magnifico Doganiere’, who wore a special robe of office. This splendid dignitary ranked as a magistrate and had his own tribunal. The fair took place in May, when the pilgrims were re-turning through the city from the feast days of the Madonna, the Archangel Michael and St Nicholas that had replaced the old pagan spring festivals. “On this occasion Foggia becomes a place of great resort and gaiety, even for the Neapolitan nobility”, Henry Swinburne observed in 1780. “They come here to exercise their dexterity at play upon the less expert country gentlemen, whom they commonly send home stripped of the savings of a whole year.”
Some farmers began to lease more land than they needed for pasture, sowing corn from which they made a hefty profit because of the low price they paid for the lease. In consequence, during the early eighteenth century, a considerable amount of wheat was being grown on the Tavoliere. Such crops were of course technically illegal and in emergencies, Swinburne tells us, the authorities enforced the letter of the law ruthlessly. “In the famine of 1764, instead o
f encouraging the farmers of Puglia to throw a reasonable supply of corn into Naples by the offer of a good price and speedy payment, the ministry sent soldiers into the province to take it by force, and drive the owners before them, like beasts of burden, laden with their own property. Such as were unwilling to part with it, by compulsion and upon such hard terms, carried their corn up into the hills and buried it. If they were detected in these practises, they were hanged.”
This period saw the start of emigration to America, if on a comparatively small scale. Henry Swinburne tells us that Apulian labourers were crossing the Atlantic during the eighteenth century, returning home after a few years. Others found seasonal work in France, Germany and the Low Countries, including musicians, who when not playing their fiddles or bag-pipes, dug ditches. A fair number of these came from the Tavoliere.
Another eighteenth century development was the authorities’ concern about the enormous amount of Tavoliere land that belonged to the Church, two thirds of the total and increasing daily. One reason for this was the notorious ‘soul-will’ or ‘testamento dell’ anima’, the words “I bequeath my lands to the Church” muttered on a death-bed, that needed no written proof and merely the witness of the priest and his sacristan. Once it belonged to the clergy, land could neither be sold nor taxed. Despite tithes, the abbeys usually had a fairly good relationship with the peasants, and were often model farmers, but the system was costing the Crown large sums in lost revenue. During the 1760s the government made soul-wills illegal, abolished tithes and dissolved several monasteries.
An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia Page 7
