An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia

by Seward, Desmond

  From 1500–24 Bari was ruled by the Duchess Isabella Sforza, who was the daughter of Alfonso II of Naples and the widow of Gian Galeazzo II of Milan. She hated the French for chasing the Sforza out of Milan and for taking her young son by Galeazzo a prisoner to France, where they forced him into becoming a monk. She never saw him again, signing herself “Isabella, unique in misfortune.” A poetess and an accomplished musician, she lived in splendour at the castle, devoting herself to her daughter Bona. But in 1517, in a dress of blue studded with golden bees, Bona was married by proxy to King Sigismund of Poland.

  After Isabella’s death, Bona governed Bari from Poland. When Sigismund died in 1548, she took a lover, her luxurious court at Cracow corrupting even the clergy. She was on bad terms with her son, Sigismund II, hating her daughters-in-law; the first died in childbirth, the second within days of being crowned, and it was widely believed that Bona had poisoned them. After a final quarrel with her son, in 1555 she returned to Bari, taking so much treasure with her that, at their coronation, future Kings of Poland had to swear to recover it. She died two years later.

  Bona may have brought one or two Protestants with her from tolerant Poland, for during the latter half of the sixteenth century, “a foreigner from a distant land” appeared in Bari, teaching philosophy. When it was discovered that he was “a perfidious Calvinist”, who cast doubt on the doctrine of Transubstantiation, Archbishop Puteo ordered his arrest. He fled to Trani, but was caught and sent to Rome, where he was burned at the stake.

  Since the Turkish conquest of the Balkans, the city had been increasingly threatened by Muslim pirates, Baresi notables being captured and held to ransom on their way to greet Bona at Venice when she was returning from Poland. The situation became so serious that the duomo’s bell-tower was used as a look-out post, a permanent watch being kept for the sails of Turkish or North African raiders. Inland, brigands frequently intercepted wagon-loads of food en route to Bari.

  In 1579 Camillo Porzio wrote of the Terra di Bari, “this province is famous for corn, oil, cotton, wine, saffron and... whole woods of almond trees.” Rich Baresi often owned a masseria in the country or a share in one, where olives were pressed, but many of the city’s palazzi contained presses that could handle several hundred-weight. Grapes were pressed in the country, the must brought in to the palazzi to ferment. A palazzo generally had two storeys and a roof-terrace, the owner’s apartments being on the first floor, store-rooms and cisterns on the ground floor; if more storage space was needed the courtyard would be covered with sail-cloth. Five hundred Venetian merchants came regularly to buy wine and wheat.

  As elsewhere, savage taxation caused a popular rising in 1647. Plague broke out in 1656, killing 12,000 Baresi out of 15,000. Brigandage grew even worse, pirates more active, so that the walls had to be rebuilt at great expense. With not enough labour to work them, the price of arable land, olive groves and vineyards slumped; by the 1670s they were almost unsaleable. There was famine in 1672, another outbreak of plague in 1690–92.

  Yet the Abate Pacichelli, visiting Bari in the 1680s, calls it the “Crown of the Province and Jewel of Cities”. He liked the people, whom he says are good looking, fine men of business, honest, hardworking and kind-hearted, and make good soldiers – Arditi nelle Guerre.

  As a result of the War of the Spanish Succession, Austrian rule replaced Spanish from 1707 to 1738. In his journal George Berkeley describes Bari at this time. It “hath inhabitants 18,000; moles old and new, port shallow, not admitting ships of any burden.” He says of two friaries outside the walls, “pleasantly situated, cool cloisters, orange and lemon groves in them, fine views, delicious living.” He adds that the outskirts abound in cornfields, vineyards and orchards, and admires the extremely delightful small white houses. But he also tells us, “The gentry of Bari dare not lie during summer in their villas for fear of the Turk.”

  In 1738 the kingdom of the Two Sicilies became independent once more under Charles VII of Bourbon, the first of the Borbone dynasty, who revived Southern Italy’s prosperity, building count-less roads. In 1740 he spent three days at Bari to thank St Nicholas for the birth of a son and heir, presenting the basilica with a silver baldacchino (canopy of state).

  The composer Nicolo Piccini was born here in 1728. His first success was at Naples; the opera “La Cecchina: la Buona figliuola”, with a plot inspired by Richardson’s novel “Pamela” about the trials of a virtuous servant girl. Piccini later went to Paris, to become the unwilling rival of Gluck. When he died in 1800, he had written more than 150 long forgotten operas. “La Cecchina” was revived some years ago, at the Val d’ Itria festival.

  Henry Swinburne visited Bari at the end of the 1770s, finding its streets “narrow, crooked and dirty”, but enjoyed the prospect from the harbour wall – “at every turn you catch a different view of the sea and the coast, stretching from the mountains of Garganus to the hills of Ostuni.” His reaction to the shrine of St Nicholas was typical of his period: “a dirty, dark, subterranean chapel... Underneath its altar is a hole through which devout and curious persons thrust their heads, to behold a bone or two swimming below in water; this liquid is drawn up by the priests in a silver bucket, and distributed under the name of Manna, as an infallible cure for sore eyes and disordered stomachs.”

  In 1798 Ferdinand IV gave the city’s borghesi equality with its nobles. By then everyone agreed that Bari should be expanded. Huddling behind crumbling walls, it still covered no more ground than in medieval times, with too many ruinous houses and horribly inadequate sewage. Already, in 1790 two engineers, Viti and Palenzia, had produced a plan for a new city. But the plan had to be postponed, although King Ferdinand had approved it.

  At the beginning of 1799 the French invaded Southern Italy, chasing out King Ferdinand and inviting their sympathisers to set up the “Parthenopean (Neapolitan) Republic”. In February the Baresi joined it, planting a Tree of Liberty in their city with great ceremony. Early in the summer, however, Bari was reoccupied by Borbone troops. Later, the Risorgimento would canonise the Southern Revolutionaries as “Patriots of ’99”, although their regime was incapable of surviving without foreign bayonets. It was not a good moment to begin rebuilding.

  When the French invaded the Regno again in 1806, Napoleon’s parasitical brother, Joseph Bonaparte, was placed on the throne of Naples as ‘King Giuseppe Napoleone I’. Remembering how pro-French Bari had been in 1799, the new monarch decided to make it the Apulian capital. The royal favour continued when in turn the Emperor’s flamboyant brother-in-law, Marshal Joachim Murat, became “King Gioacchino Napoleone I”. He gave his regal approval to Viti and Palenzia’s plan for Bari, the first stone of the New City being laid in April, 1813.

  21

  Bari, 1647 – Revolution

  ...an unequivocal social revolution, from which the reactionary class

  of seigneurs emerged triumphant. The nobility had won for years to

  come...

  Fernand Braudel, “Le Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen”

  SURPRISINGLY, THE CITY had experienced a genuine people’s revolt well over a hundred years before the French Revolution. Admittedly, it did not begin there. But in 1647 the initially successful rising at Naples led by Masaniello, the ‘Fisherman King’, had spread like wildfire all over Apulia, inspiring popular anti-Spanish and anti-feudal revolts of the same sort. They included a particularly serious one at Bari.

  As the seventeenth century went by, life had become increasingly difficult for the Baresi of every class, especially for the poor. Like the rest of the Mediterranean, trade was suffering from Atlantic competition while at the same time there was a long running agricultural depression. All this was made worse by Spanish taxation. Fighting to keep their dominion over Western Europe, the Spaniards had run out of money and were draining dry what should have been the richest kingdom in their empire. During the later stages of the Thirty Years’ War Spanish troops were paid almost entirely from Southern Italian revenue
s.

  The Regno’s public debt was astronomical, and everybody in Bari was in debt too: city, nobility and borghesi. So were the barons in the countryside of the Terra di Bari. The value of agricultural land, a large part of the capital of even Baresi merchants, fell steadily. However, the burden of taxation was born by the poorer classes.

  The little city was governed by its nobles from the Palazzo dei Sedile in Piazza Maggiore. The sociable Abate Pacichelli carefully records some of their names: Affaitati, Boccapianoli, Cassamassimi, Doppoli, Gerundi, Izzinosi and Taurisani, “& altri”. They were largely exempt from taxation or service in the Spanish army, and often owned their own bakeries, avoiding the levies on public ba-keries. Despite the recession, life cannot have been too bad for most of them in their small but imposing palazzi – there were excellent shops where they could buy luxuries.

  In contrast, crushing taxation on food was making life almost intolerable for the poor. An added misery was the press-ganging of young men for the Spanish armies while, at the same time, there was constant friction with the castle’s underpaid Spanish garrison, always prone to rob and rape. In 1641 riots had broken out in Bari against conscription, followed by riots against the price of food, mobs marching through the narrow streets and assaulting the better off. During the summer of 1647 it became clear that there was going to be a very bad harvest, which meant still higher prices for bread, at a moment when new taxes on food had just been introduced.

  Even a hundred and fifty years later, the poorer Baresi normally lived in a single, smoke-filled basement room dug out of the rock, whose only light came from a small window at street level or from the door through which one stepped down, a dwelling shared with hens and a pig or sheep, sometimes with a horse or donkey as well. It was people inhabiting dens like these who bore most of the tax burden. The majority worked in the surrounding countryside beyond the walls, but this was becoming a very dangerous place indeed, since the barons were employing brigands as enforcers, and they were getting out of hand, robbing all and sundry.

  To a limited extent the Baresi poor looked to the borghesi, who also had to pay swingeing taxes, for leadership. The borghesi had their own piazza or assembly of commoners, who argued endlessly with the nobles in Piazza Maggiore. But the nobles stayed in control of the city – for the moment. Meanwhile, the viceroy’s authority was collapsing. Some of the great magnates toyed with the idea of inviting the French to invade the Regno and free them from the by now detested Spanish regime. But then, sparked off by yet another new tax, on fruit, Masaniello’s rebellion broke out at Naples in July 1647.

  Within days, a revolt had broken out at Bari. Led by a sailor called Paolo di Ribeco, mobs surged through the streets, attacking the palazzi of nobles and rich merchants, looting and setting fire to them. The Spanish garrison did nothing and within a short time Ribeco and the people were masters of the entire city save for the castle. They insisted on being represented in the assemblies of nobles and borghesi, and on the abolition of the most hated taxes. Al-though, as at Naples, the revolt was as much against the nobles and their privileges as against the Spaniards, the attack on Bari’s nobility seems to have been fairly restrained. It was different outside the city walls. There, the collapse of authority came just after an explosion of brigandage throughout the Terra di Bari and the peas-ants, driven beyond endurance, rose up savagely against brigands and barons.

  In response, the Apulian nobles quickly forgot their resentment of Spanish rule, rallying to the viceroy. They were lucky in possessing two formidable soldiers in Giangirolamo, Count of Conversano and Fra’ Giovan Battista Caracciolo, Prior of the Knights of Malta at Bari. Within weeks their army of Spanish troops and baronial levies routed the main body of Apulian rebels near Foggia, though not without some vicious fighting. Meanwhile, borghesi who had supported the revolt at Bari lost their nerve amid the an-archy and bloodshed, surrendering the city to government forces as soon as they heard of the defeat at Foggia. Paolo di Ribeco died on the gallows.

  Not much is known about what really happened inside Bari during the revolt (despite the efforts of that magnificent historian Rosario Villari). Even so, it seems obvious that the revolt never had any hope of succeeding. What we know for certain is that taxes were re-imposed at the old level, and that the city’s nobles regained their privileges.

  The story of Paolo di Ribeco and his forgotten rising ought to be remembered by anyone who wants to understand the Baresi. They have always been rebels by temperament, as they would show again and again, not just in 1799, but in 1922 and in 1943.

  22

  New Bari

  Bari, not long ago, consisted of a dark and tortuous old town...

  It now has its glaring New Quarter.

  Norman Douglas, “Old Calabria”

  NEW BARI’S CITIZENS are said to have inherited all the distinctive qualities of the Old Baresi. They are no less wily and money-minded than their ancestors. At least, that is what every Apulian who comes from outside the city will insist on telling you.

  Little change could be seen when Keppel Craven visited Bari during the spring of 1818, although he conceded that trade with Trieste and the Dalmatian ports gave “an appearance of animation, ease and opulence.” But the first house had already been built in 1816 in what is still the New City’s main street, the Corso Ferdinando (later renamed Corso Vittorio Emmanuele). The public buildings were begun in the 1820s, the entire New City being paved in 1830. Soon there was a railway station, and work started on a new harbour. An opera house, the Teatro Piccini, opened in 1854 with Donizzetti’s Poliuto. This pioneer phase coincided with the last days of the Borbone monarchy.

  Ferdinand II and the royal family came to Bari in 1859, to greet Maria Sophia of Wittelsbach, who had just married by proxy the heir to the throne, the Duke of Calabria. A cheering mob dragged the King’s carriage through the streets to the castle. Harold Acton describes the occasion:

  On February 3, a spring like day, the bride’s approach was announced by repeated cannon fire at ten in the morning. The Queen as well as the Duke of Calabria climbed on board the frigate which had brought her from Trieste, and there was a rapid exchange of greetings and embraces. The Duke clasped both his bride’s hands and kissed her forehead; they spoke to each other in halting French, she a little pale from the sea voyage, he abashed by the beauty of his Bavarian bride.

  Already a dying man, King Ferdinand burst into tears when she visited him in his bedroom. Yet on the same day he found enough strength to approve a plan “to encourage the city’s growth, prestige and dignity.” They were to be two huge new squares, a state boarding school and a nautical institute.

  Ferdinand died in May. An abler man than his nervous young successor, Francis II, was needed to save the tottering Regno. First Garibaldi and then the Piedmontese invaded the Two Sicilies, the last Borbone king sailing into exile early in 1861.

  The handful of Apulians who fought for the Risorgimento cannot have foreseen its consequences. Peasants left the land in droves to escape from speculators’ work-gangs; in 1861 the population of Bari was 23,000 while ten years later it was nearly 51,000. Augustus Hare thought the city had “all the characteristics of the meanest part of Naples – flat roofs, dilapidated, whitewashed houses, and a swarming, noisy, begging, brutalised population. Two modern streets intersect with formal dismalness the labyrinths of old houses and narrow alleys”, “Begging is unfortunately still a national industry” says Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Southern Italy of 1878: “The best way to get rid of the nuisance is to give it a very minute coin.” The “nuisance” included middle-aged men too broken by work to toil on in the fields, monks and nuns thrown out of their convents, and the rank and file of the former Borbone army turned off without pensions.

  During the economic crisis that afflicted Europe in the 1870s, the situation was made worse by protectionist measures designed for the North. If it helped new industries in Piedmont and Lombardy, the tariff of 1878 on mechanical products and tex
tiles caused many bankruptcies, driving capital northwards and encouraging the flight from the land. All this made life still more miser-able in Bari – as it did in every other Apulian city.

  Old Bari, more ruinous than ever, was packed with unemployed labourers, crammed into dirty rookeries and cellars, riddled with tuberculosis, pneumonia, arthritis and syphilis, even leprosy. Murder was commonplace in both the Old and the New Towns; “A betrayed husband generally kills”, observed the chairman of Bari’s Chamber of Labour. In 1898 cholera and famine led to savage riots; a mob trying to storm the municipality was dispersed by troops with much bloodshed. In 1903 deaths in the province of Bari were 29.30 per thousand, the second highest rate in Italy and nearly twice that in England and Wales. A large proportion of the deaths were in Bari itself, which seethed with discontent and class hatred. Understandably, there was massive emigration, mostly to the United States, Argentina or Venezuela, or to Libya after its acquisition by Italy in 1912.

  New Bari continued to grow remorselessly, buildings going up every year. Another opera house was built in 1903, the Petruzzelli – affectionately known as La Perla di Bari (the pearl of Bari)– which saw many memorable productions. (In 1991 it was completely destroyed during a fire started by rival claques, but was eventually restored and re-opened in 2008.) The expansion surged on until the Great War of 1915.

  Inflation went up by fifty per cent in 1918–20, unemployment rocketing as men came home from the Front. In the ‘Red Years’ after the War, Bari seemed to be on the brink of a Russian-style revolution. There were countless strikes and demonstrations, well-dressed people were jostled, army officers booed. The Left was encouraged by news from all over Apulia of riots, of town-halls stormed and police stations stoned. But at the end of 1920 Giuseppe Caradonna set up a Fascist cell at Cerignola which was so effective that it earned him the name ‘Duke of Cerignola’. Soon Fascist squadristi (blackshirts) were smashing labour unions and breaking strikes throughout the province. The blackshirts made ready to stem “the rising Bolshevik tide”. Organised by the fire-brand Giuseppe di Vittorio, the Left bought as many ex-army rifles and revolvers as it could. On 1 August, 1922, it rose in a carefully planned revolt, a vicious struggle raging between armed workers on one side and troops, carabinieri and blackshirts on the other. Women threw stones or burning oil. But after three days the Red Baresi were broken and would give no more trouble.