An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia

by Seward, Desmond

  Eventually the Gravinesi emerged from their caverns for good and built their present city. Although clearly a prosperous commercial town with a population of over 40,000 and possessing some fine buildings – Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neo-Classical – whole streets in its medieval quarter are deserted, especially those that lead down into the ravine. From above, you can see the entrances to countless caves, nearly all difficult to reach, as was intended by those who dug them.

  A Greek bishopric dependent on Òtranto, Gravina fell to the Normans in 1042, becoming a county held by Humphrey of Hauteville. It was acquired by the Aleramo family during the twelfth century and then by the De Say. A cathedral above ground was begun in 1092, while Frederick II built a luxurious hunting lodge a mile away from the city, which became the counts’ residence.

  John, Count of Gravina (d. 1335) was a younger brother of King Robert and of Philip, Prince of Tàranto – titular Latin Emperor of the East – and in 1318 married Mahaut of Hainault, Princess of Achaea (the Peloponnese). Finding she had secretly married an obscure knight, he divorced Mahaut, imprisoning her for life, but was invested as Prince of Achaea. After a single, futile campaign against the Byzantines, he went home to Gravina, exchanging Achaea for the Duchy of Durazzo on the Albanian coast, and the empty title of King of Albania. However ineffectual it may have been, his career illustrates Apulia’s indestructible ties with the far side of the Adriatic.

  The Romanesque cathedral was burned down in the fifteenth century and the present duomo, from a comparatively rare period in Apulian architecture – yet among the region’s loveliest – dates from 1482.

  After Gravina had been briefly held by Raimondello del Balzo Orsini, Queen Giovanna II gave it to his kinsman Francesco Orsini, Prefect of Rome, the county being made into a duchy. One of the great Roman princely houses – a family that produced two Popes – the Orsini held the Duchy of Gravina for four centuries, although not always with ease. At the end of the fifteenth century Duke Francesco vainly sought the hand of Lucrezia Borgia. In 1502 he rashly opposed her sinister brother’s ambitions, whereupon he and his friends were lured into visiting Cesare Borgia, separated from their troops and arrested. Next year Francesco was discreetly strangled. The story is told by Machiavelli in “The Prince”. His son, Duke Ferdinando, built the magnificent Palazzo Gravina at Naples.

  When at home in Apulia the Dukes of Gravina lived no less opulently, in contrast to their subjects underground. Ferdinando III (1645–58) was the most interesting because of his taste and patronage, well supported by his Apulian wife, Giovanna Frangipane della Tolfa, the Count of Grumo’s daughter. Abandoning the Hohenstaufen castello, they built a small but elegant palace in the centre of the city, today a ramshackle tenement divided into flats.

  The church of Santa Maria dei Morti, renamed the Purgatorio, which they began building in 1644 has two horrible stone skeletons grinning over its main door. Many Apulian churches built between the mid-seventeenth century and the 1730s are dedicated to Purgatory, the plagues of 1656 and 1730 having made men more aware of mortality. Inside there are some fine paintings by Francesco Guarino, an “Assumption” and a “Madonna among the Holy Souls in Purgatory”.

  Bernardo De Dominici, chronicler of the artists of Baroque Naples, says Guarino made “ornaments and pictures” for the ducal palace at Gravina. Unfortunately, Guarino fell in love with a beautiful lady of the city whose husband told her to respond, then murdered her. The painter literally pined away, dying of self-starvation in 1654 at the age of thirty-nine “to the great displeasure of the Duke”, and was buried in the cathedral.

  His patron survived him by four years, to be killed at Naples by the plague. The Duchess erected a life-sized statue of her husband in the Purgatorio, with an epitaph describing him as “A most cultivated spouse with a heart inclined to love”, and went on adding to their collection – including works by Caravaggio, Ribera, Carlo Rosa, Olivieri, Altobello, Fracanzano and Miglionico. The collection, by then famous, was broken up at the start of the eighteenth century. During a visit to Venice when he was still only sixteen, her eldest son Pier Francesco II, ran away to become a Dominican friar, renouncing the duchy in favour of his brother, Domenico. As Cardinal Orsini, he gave Gravina’s cathedral its splendid campanile.

  Elected Pope in 1724 and taking the name Benedict XIII, Domenico turned out to be a disaster as pontiff. Leaving all business to his corrupt secretary, Niccolò Coscia, he lived like some village abate in a tiny white-washed room in the Vatican, visiting the sick, sitting for hours on end in the confessional, teaching the catechism to children and trying – unsuccessfully – to revive public penance for adulterers, while Coscia busily sold offices and benefices to the highest bidder. There is a ludicrously incongruous statue of Papa Orsini dressed as a Roman Emperor in the Cortile del Belvedere at Rome.

  Pacichelli liked what he saw of the city in the last quarter of the seventeenth century: “Its streets are wide if ill-paved, and its houses are commodious, among them the palace of the Duke Orsini.” He was struck by the number of mules and horses, also of storks. He comments on the local pottery “majolica in the fashion of faience”. Above all, he was amused by a punning inscription over the main gate, “Grana dat, et Vina clara Vrbs Gravina” (“Gravina gives Grain and fine Wine”).

  Sadly, when Papa Orsini’s young nephew, Filippo Berualdo I, became Duke in 1705, he turned out to be obsessed with hunting, taking little interest in his city. At the same time, relations between the Orsini and the Gravinesi grew unpleasantly strained because of the wrangling over taxes and feudal dues that bedevilled every Apulian magnate.

  George Berkeley arrived at Gravina from Matera on 2 June 1734. “Vines left, corn, pasture”, he noted: “The same hilly country continued in the night; a world of shining flies.” Although a careful traveller, he had somehow taken the wrong road. “Lost our way; arrived after much wandering afoot at a Franciscan convent without the walls of Gravina at 11 in the night, dark.” It was still a walled city and, because of the danger from brigands, the gates were shut at dusk until well into the nineteenth century.

  Berkeley was let in next morning, his impression being “well paved with white marble; situated among naked green hills; 5 convents of men and 3 of women; unhealthy air in wet weather.” He adds, “Duke a wretch; princes obliged by del Carpio to give their own or the heads of the banditti with whom they went sharers.” This is a reference to a former Spanish Viceroy’s attempt to destroy the secret understanding between magnates and brigands. The Austrians, whose rule was about to end, governed no less firmly. “Bishop of Gravina dead these two years, since which no bishop in the town, the Viceroy not admitting the person made bishop by the Pope as being a foreigner”, we learn from Berkeley’s journal.

  After only a few hours, Berkeley left Gravina. In his staccato yet extraordinarily vivid prose he preserves, as if in a snapshot, a landscape which even today is almost unchanged:

  open green fields and hills mostly covered with corn backwarder than in the plain; corn the commodity of the country. Here and there rocky; some trees on our right thinly scattered; a small brook; pasture and little corn. 11[am], great scene opening, long chain of barren mountains about 3 miles on the right, thistles left; for half an hour passed a green vale of pasture bounded with green risings right between our road and the stony mountains. 11. 40, vast plain, corn, the greater part pasture between ridges of mountains; Appenine on the left, old Vultur on the right; hardly a mountain. 1.20[pm], a deep vale, diversified with rising hills reaching to the mountains on left. 1.25 Poggio Ursini [Poggiorsini], where we dined; chaplain lent us his chamber in the Duke of Gravina’s masseria; dirty; the Duke spends some time there in hunting.

  When the ducal “wretch” died the following year, his son moved to Rome. The Orsini connection with Gravina was almost severed, but did not end till Duke Filippo Berualdo II formally renounced his feudal rights in 1816. However, the family still use the title “Duke of Gravina.”

  Gravina in
terested de Salis as a source of saltpetre, among the Regno’s most important products. He found few inhabitable houses when he came in 1789, most of the population of 10,000 living in “subterranean hovels.” The streets and the people on them were filthy, only the clergy seeming to thrive. Every 20 April there was a livestock fair, “little more salubrious than a swamp; and as the concourse of strangers is immense, all the convents become hotels.” Jewellers came from Naples to sell shoddy trinkets to the “half-savage beauties who flock down from the surrounding mountains, and who then return in triumph to their nests hidden in the rocks, to arouse the envy of their poorer friends and relations.”

  “The city is surrounded with strong walls and towers, probably not older than the 16th century”, recorded Octavian Blewitt in 1853. He adds, “It is a dirty place although it is remarkable for the number of its fountains.” He also noted that “the common people live... in caverns excavated in the tufa.”

  After the Risorgimento, Gravina had to endure the horrors of latifondismo, with labour gangs and almost total corruption. An official report of 1888 admits to “the crudest and most squalid poverty.” The “shelter for the homeless” consisted of some foul cellars whose occupants were starving, while the orphanage served as a source of recruitment for brothels.

  Gravinesi were known to feed and shelter brigands. Even the clergy were suspected of being hand-in-hand with the banditi (bandits), like a chaplain at the Purgatorio, Don Matteo Abruzzese, who in the 1860s was charged with helping to kidnap a local landowner’s son. A local historian, Don Carlo Caputo, one of Gravina’s parish priests, wrote that “Banditry became a normal weapon in the vendetta against [Northern] oppressors.”

  In September 1943 during a raid on German headquarters at Gravina, Colonel Penkovsky, who commanded a reconnaissance force operating behind the enemy lines, captured a document that listed German troop dispositions in southern Apulia. There were 3,500 in total, including 92 officers and 755 men at Gioia del Colle, 83 officers and 629 men at Altamura, and 75 officers and 140 men at Gravina. However, very few of them were fighting troops, most being administrative personnel hastily evacuated from the coast after the Allied landing.

  Many of the rock churches here, Gravina’s most interesting feature, have crumbled away, their frescoes lost for ever. Decay has been compounded by vandalism. The beauty of the frescoes in the grotto chapel of San Vito Vecchio deeply impressed Henri Berthaux when he saw them at the end of the nineteenth century. Fortunately these were removed from the ravine in 1956 and taken to Rome for restoration. They returned to Gravina in 1968, to be displayed in a replica of San Vito Vecchio, built on the ground floor of the Museo Pomarici Santomasi. Dating from the end of the thirteenth century, it is thought they are by an Apulian artist who had worked in either Cyprus or Palestine. They are certainly among the best surviving examples of Byzantine art in Apulia.

  33

  Matera

  No one has come to this land except as an enemy, a conqueror,

  or a visitor devoid of understanding.

  Carlo Levi, “Christ Stopped at Eboli”

  ALTHOUGH TECHNICALLY IN BASILICATA, Matera was once part of Apulia. We have included it not only for this reason, however, but also because its caves were inhabited and in working order until the 1950s, and shed an invaluable light on life in the Apulian cave cities.

  While scarcely any frescoes survive in the grotto churches of Gravina-in-Puglia, Matera retains a fair number since far more churches were tunnelled into the rock, over a hundred in and around the great ravines known as the Sassi that sheltered the old troglodyte community. After the destruction by the Saracens of a large city above ground towards the end of the ninth century, its people returned to the ravines, where they carved out new dwellings for themselves on a more ambitious scale than anywhere else in Apulia. Matera fell to the Normans in 1042, but never the less remained a city completely beneath the earth until the thirteenth century, when the cathedral and the church of San Giovanni were built on top. Other buildings followed, yet even today the place’s fascination lies underground.

  As in many Apulian ravines, besides hermits, there were several flourishing communities of Basilian monks. Some of them were founded soon after the terrible devastation that accompanied Belisarius’s reconquest of Italy from the Goths for the Emperor Justinian and Byzantium. It was the monks of these communities who were mainly responsible for constructing Matera’s underground churches. The churches date from the sixth century to the thirteenth, their frescoes from the twelfth to the sixteenth. The most important frescoes are in the Sasso Caveoso and the Sasso Barisano; in the churches of Santa Lucia alle Malve, Madonna della Croce, Santa Barbara and Madonna della Virtù. There are also entire monasteries, the largest Laura being the Convicinio di Sant’ Antonio which has four chapels dating from the late twelfth century, cells with beds carved out of the tufa, and even tufa wine-presses.

  Most of the grottoes at the top of the ravine opposite Matera were oratories and never served a monastic community. Some are still places of pilgrimage but any medieval frescoes they may have contained were obliterated by others who painted over them during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

  Diehl records a legend told to him at Matera, an explanation, he believes, for much of the vandalism suffered by grotto churches. After being defeated by the Saracens, Frederick Barbarossa fled with his treasure to Matera where he hid in one of the grottoes, which closed over him. “He is still seen today”, says Diehl, “and the mountain shepherds, whose greed is aroused by the treasure of the Swabian monarch, have more than once known the emperor emerge and chase them along the ravine when they went too near his eternal abode.” In 1880 memories of this story set off a species of gold rush after a grave containing a hoard of Venetian coins was discovered in San Nicola at Palagianello.

  Over the underground city stands the imposing but unfinished castle built by the hated Count Tramontana, Lord of Matera, who was murdered by the cave dwellers in 1514. The city was part of the Terra d’Òtranto from 1500 to 1633, but then became the capital of Basilicata until it lost its status to Potenza in 1806. Still, there are other fine buildings above ground in the upper town from the days when Matera was a provincial capital.

  Viewed from the far side of the ravine, Matera does not look like a troglodyte city. The caves are faced with stone walls that have windows and doors, many with extensions under tiled roofs, all of which gives the appearance of a normal town. But a closer inspection reveals the sheer squalor of the caves, crawling with vermin when they were lived in. Often the inhabitants ran the risk of falling to their deaths, according to de Salis:

  I visited many of the grottoes, and not without danger, because at the least false step, I could have fallen from the precipice and dashed myself on the rocks below; and in clambering up I could not but tremble at the thought that thousands and thousands of people for many, many years were exposed to a similar danger.

  He paints a picture of unutterable degradation, of hideous, filthy savages, the women so liable to commit crimes that the prisons were always overflowing. He attributes it to bad landlords, bad government, bad roads, bad sanitation – and bad health. Under-nourished and deformed, crazy enough to believe unquestioningly in werewolves and incubi, they were completely under the thumb of the ignorant clergy whom they thought could protect them from such horrors, and led a life no better than the animals with whom they shared their cave. Often it was an abandoned laura – Diehl describes the Cripta di Cascione as being used as a stable.

  “It is not difficult to see in the summer many men and women, so-called Tarantolati, covered with wine-shoots and red ribbons, dancing continuously in the street with no one to stop them,” de Salis comments, citing other forms of madness at Matera:

  All these illnesses are usually preceded by profound melancholy, and are caused not so much by the hot climate as by the way of life and the normal diet in these villages. The excessive consumption of rancid salt pork, the absolute lack
of cleanliness in the habitations, a life spent in dark and damp caverns, the continuous evaporation of open sewers, and the mountains of dung and filth left to decay in the streets, are the actual causes of these disorders and sad illnesses, which usually end in the most horrible manner.

  Werewolves were a common phenomenon in these mountain districts. De Salis describes them as howling like wolves, “rolling in the mud and filth, and hurling themselves upon anyone unfortunate enough to find himself in their path.” “So wild and barbarous are many of the inhabitants of the caverns in the valley that they have obtained by their howlings at night and the desperate nature of their attacks, the name of Lupi Mannari”, wrote Octavian Blewitt. Taken for granted by other peasants, men known to change into wolves at night were treated with respect. Although, they were never seen in such a shape by their womenfolk. Carlo Levi was told by his housekeeper – a witch – that when a husband of this sort came home it was essential to keep the door locked, not only to give him time to regain his human form, but for him to forget he had been with his lupine brethren.

  According to Carlo Levi, things had not improved by the Second World War. His sister Luisa, a doctor, visited the city in 1936 and described it to him. She had never met with poverty like this before, nor illnesses such as trachoma and what she took to be black fever, normally confined to Africa. Some caves had no proper entrance, merely a hole in the ground with a trapdoor and ladder. Children lay on filthy rags, their teeth chattering from fever, sharing their dens with dogs, sheep, goats and pigs: