Keppel Craven had a bizarre experience here. Visiting the seven-teenth century church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, to his surprise he was invited into the convent. The nuns were convinced he was the Crown Prince of Bavaria, travelling incognito. Seated on a red and gold chair surmounted by a crown, he was plied with coffee, cakes and rosolio (rose petal liqueur), while the convent’s most precious relics were shown to him. “Among the relics which were named to me, I remember some fragments of the veil and shift of the Virgin Mary, a thumb of St Athanasius, a tooth of the prophet Jeremiah, and some of the coals which were used to roast St Lorenzo.” The nuns filled his pockets with presents, oranges and lemons, “among which I afterwards discovered, to my great consternation, a pair of cotton stockings, and two of woollen gloves.”
Like Swinburne, Craven admired the castle at Brìndisi, considering it to be one of the most beautiful he had ever seen. By then it had become “a prison for malefactors: I heard one hundred and eighty of these wretches clanging their irons in time to the most discordant melodies that ever struck the human ear, the melancholy monotony of which was only broken by vehement appeals to the charity of the stranger.”
After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1870, the port became a staging-post on the new, fast route to India, bringing many British. Even so, Janet Ross did not like it very much in the 1880s, although she had enjoyed Tàranto. She could not find a cab at the station: “We were evidently not going to India; the mail steamer left two days ago. What could we want a cab for? Besides, it was raining; the harness would be spoiled, and the driver would get fever.” The city could “vaunt an unenviable superiority over most places in the shape of dirt and bad smells”, sniffs a ruffled Mrs. Ross, “It needed all the classical reminiscences we could conjure up to make our two hours’ pilgrimage bearable.”
During the Second World War Brìndisi had a brief moment of importance when for a few months it became the Italian capital. King Victor Emmanuel III and his government took refuge here in September 1943, before moving to Salerno the following February. After the War the port was kept busy by ferry services to Corfu and to mainland Greece, besides exporting farm produce from the Salento, which ensured a certain atmosphere of bustle. Some years ago, however, the port departed to a new location outside, a move that has been described as taking away the city’s heart and soul.
Yet the port’s departure was not such a bad thing for the nostal-gically minded tourist, for nothing can ever deprive Brìndisi of its ancient memories of splendour. Regardless of decline, the Emperor Trajan’s solitary column still broods at the top of a flight of majestic steps, looking out over the Adriatic Sea and you do not need too much imagination to marvel at what it must have seen.
Part X
Lecce and the Baroque
43
Lecce
To walk once more through the streets of Lecce, gazing up at the great
golden bouquets of stone flowers which adorn its palaces and churches.
Sir Osbert Sitwell, “Winter of Content”
FORMERLY THE REGNO’S SECOND MAINLAND CITY, outranking even Bari, Lecce is the capital of the Terra d’Òtranto. Although farmed meticulously since ancient times, the area around the city has never known sheep-ranching or wheat-growing on the massive scale seen in the Tavoliere, and a large percentage of smallholdings has meant less discontent among the country people than elsewhere in Apulia. Founded by Messapians, from the start Lecce owed its importance to being in the centre of the Salentine peninsula, equidistant from Òtranto, Brìndisi and Gallipoli.
The Romans knew it as Lupiae. There is a legend that Christianity was introduced here by St Paul’s landlord at Corinth, where the Apostle had lodged with Justus, “whose house is hard by the Synagogue.” Justus came to Lupiae, says the legend, staying with a local patrician called Publius Orontius, whom he converted and who was later made bishop by St Paul – both Justus and Oronzo being subsequently martyred under Nero. Clearly Roman Lecce grew extremely prosperous, as can be seen from the magnificent amphitheatre in Piazza Oronzo, built by Emperor Hadrian.
Destroyed by the Goths and then rebuilt, Lecce suffered the usual horrors at the hands of the Saracens, but stayed under Byzantine rule until captured by the Normans in 1053. Tancred, Count of Lecce became the last Norman King of Sicily in 1189, entertaining Richard Coeur-de-Lion on his way from England to the Holy Land. Under the Angevins the county of Lecce was inherited by the Enghien family, descended from the Dukes of Athens.
When Count Pirro died in 1384, he was succeeded by his seven-teen year old sister, the beautiful Maria d’Enghien, who became Countess of Lecce in her own right. According to Janet Ross, even in the 1880s La nostra Maria was still remembered affectionately as the best ruler in the city’s entire history. As we have recounted, her first husband was Raimondello del Balzo Orsini, her second King Ladislao of Naples. After Ladislao’s death in 1413, she went home to Lecce where she spent the rest of her life, dying at nearly ninety. Maria was famous for her kind laws; the old and the helpless being exempt from taxes, while strangers who settled in the city need not pay any for three years.
The ruler who has left the most visible mark on Lecce, however, is the Emperor Charles V. He had the huge castle rebuilt in 1539–49, to guard against the Turks, employing a Salentine architect, Gian Giacomo Dell’ Acaja, who erected diamond-shaped bastions and palatial apartments on top of the old Norman fortress. Charles also gave the city unusually massive walls, with four great gates. The walls were demolished well over a hundred years ago, but the majestic Porta Napoli (or Arco di Trionfo) survives, still bearing the Imperial coat-of-arms.
Although the eclipse of Òtranto ensured Lecce’s eventual predominance over the Salento, during the sixteenth century the city had to endure a long lasting economic slump that bankrupted even Salentine magnates, while a population boom forced up food prices. In 1647 the anti-Spanish, anti-feudal revolt spread from Naples, and the combined forces of the viceroy and the nobles had difficulty in putting it down, shedding plenty of blood. Then came the 1656 plague when a quarter of the population died. However, towards the end of the century Lecce started to prosper again, with a surplus of corn, wine, oil, almonds and fruit; tobacco began to be grown, producing excellent snuff, while a famous race of mules was bred. And, as the region’s principal city, Lecce attracted legal and administrative business, besides becoming the centre of the Salentine nobility’s social life. In consequence, there was a steady demand for new palazzi and churches.
The Baroque architecture they used here until late in the eighteenth century was religious in origin, an exuberant glorification of Catholicism. “Leccese Baroque” is a highly distinctive form, however, warmly admired by some, but fiercely condemned by others. The local stone, a pale honey colour, is very easily carved and purists object to what they regard as wildly extravagant ornamentation.
Anthony Blunt (in “Baroque and Rococo”), however, queries the very existence of the Baroque in Lecce:
The phrase Barocco Leccese appears in every Italian text-book on architecture, and the concept is to be found in most English works that mention the architecture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in South Italy, but it can be argued that there is not a single building in Lecce or the surrounding district – the Salento – which can properly be described as Baroque... Both the façades and the altarpieces of the churches show a richness and gaiety of decoration which have perhaps no parallel, save in Sicily. The decorative motifs employed are, however, mainly derived from a sixteenth century vocabulary which had long been out of date in Rome or even Naples... Leccese architects must have relied primarily on decorative engravings or pattern books and it seems that they continued to use those published in the late sixteenth or seventeenth centuries long after they had been abandoned elsewhere.
He also points out that not even the design of the churches was remotely Baroque, Romanesque rose windows continuing to be employed even in new buildings.
The most typically Lecc
ese Baroque buildings are the group around the Piazza del Duomo. Bernard Berenson thought the cathedral the most beautiful in Italy, but few people can agree with him. It was designed and built between 1659 and 1670 by a local architect, Giuseppe Zimbalo, popularly known as ‘Lo Zingarello’, The Little Gypsy. The campanile is 270 feet high. (“In the good old times when corsairs ruled the sea, the high campanili all over this country were used as watch towers”, Mrs Ross tells us. “In the one at Lecce was a bell, which a sentinel struck in a peculiar way, to give the alarm if he saw suspicious vessels on either sea.”) Another good example of Zimbalo’s work is the former convent of the Celestines, now known as the Governor’s Palace, which Edward Hutton sums up rather well – “the amazing baroque façade, with its appalling general design.”
There are countless Baroque palazzi in Lecce, often surprisingly small but no less embellished than the churches. The pompous coat-of-arms at their corners or over the doorways enthral students of Italian heraldry.
Pacichelli liked the style, commenting how suitable the local stone was for “Venetian windows, cornices and other gallant ornament.” The duomo was “new and likewise superb.” He admired the long, wide street, the gardens with orange trees, and the low cost of food. Less cheerfully, he records how the plague of 1679 had reduced the population to 9,000 souls, although among them were “Patrician families living in great splendour and divers Barons, some of whom have feudal rights, and many doctors and magistrates.” But in 1734 the sober Bishop Berkeley thought the “gusto too rich and luxuriant, occasioned without doubt by the facility of their working their stone.” He found the people “civil and polite, and so far as we had dealings, honest and reliable.” The Abbé de Saint-Non commissioned an etching of the cloister in the Dominican convent, which he found restful after the façade’s wearying extravagance. Of Lecce as a whole he says, “This modern town would be one of the most beautiful in existence had it been built with a little taste; for the beauty of the stone and the materials employed give an appearance of grandeur, but the method is de-testable; all the edifices are covered with the worst and most useless sculpture.”
Both Swinburne and Riedesel were impressed by the citizens’ skills in dancing and making music. The former comments, “Music is here cultivated with a degree of enthusiasm. Many of the nobility are good performers, and proud of exhibiting their skill on solemn festivals. The Leccian music has a very plaintive character, peculiar to itself.”
“I enquired throughout Italy at what place boys were chiefly qualified for singing by castration”, Dr Burney relates delicately. He was told:
the young castrati come from Lecce in Puglia; but before the operation is performed, they are brought to a Conservatorio to be tried as to the probability of voice, and then are taken home by their parents for this barbarous purpose. It is said, however, to be death by the laws to all those who perform the operation and excommunication to everyone concerned in it, unless it is so done, as is presented, upon account of some disorders, which may be supposed to require it, and with the consent of the boy.
Burney particularly admired Leccese folk songs he had heard sung at Naples.
In 1797 Lecce received a visit from the King and Queen of the Two Sicilies, Ferdinand and Maria Carolina, who stayed in the Bishop’s Palace. If the Leccesi liked the amiable, long nosed king, they must have found the tiny, haughty queen – Marie Antoinette’s sister – somewhat forbidding. Six years later, the king would be distressed by the news that slave-raiders had abducted 164 people from the province of Lecce.
In 1805 Major Courier of the newly installed French garrison at Lecce reported to his colonel that Captain Tela had been murdered by Don Giuseppe Rao on whom he had been billeted. Seeing his wife going into the captain’s room, Don Giuseppe stabbed her and the captain to death with a stiletto. There had been no affair – she was delivering his laundry – while her husband took little interest in her. But, according to Courier, Don Giuseppe lived in dread of being called a becco cornuto, a cuckold. “In this part of Italy it is the most sensitive point of honour”, says Courier. “Here “Becco cornuto” is the most terrible of all insults, worse than thief, murderer, swindler, blasphemer or parricide.” He adds that the towns-people were saying they would never catch the murderer, however hard they might look.
Lecce had a resident British governor from 1817 to 1820, Gen-eral Sir Richard Church, given the job of putting down the brigands who terrorised Apulia. He liked “the bright little capital with its white houses, and the little streams running through the streets”, and soon got rid of the brigands. The general gave a ball every other week, alternating with one given by the intendente (revenue officer).
Keppel Craven spent a week here in 1818, enjoying “the friendly hospitality of General Church”, but found the streets oddly deserted. The city “would commodiously admit a population of 30,000 souls, whereas the present amounts to no more than 14,000.” As for the architecture: “extravagant and almost incredible bad taste is exemplified in every building of consequence.” Even so, the snuff was excellent, and the people “renowned for their courteous, polished manners.”
On a snowy January morning in 1859, Ferdinand II, his queen and his eldest son Francis entered Lecce on their way to meet Francis’s bride at Bari; their carriage preceded by four mounted carabinieri bearing torches and followed by six with drawn sabres. In the afternoon the king went to the duomo for a sermon by the bishop, a Te Deum being sung. In the evening he attended a performance by a popular comedian at the Teatro Paisiello, after which there was a banquet and fireworks. (The theatre, built in 1768, is still standing). But Ferdinand was ill, dying from a mysterious disease that had begun after an assassin’s attempt to bayonet him two years before. He had to remain at Lecce, in the Governor’s Palace, for nearly a fortnight. Characteristically, he summoned up enough energy to order the demolition of the medieval walls. This was the last visit to the city by a Borbone sovereign, although during his brief reign Francis II gave orders to extend the Naples rail-way to Lecce by way of Brìndisi.
Charles Yriarte went to a reception at the prefecture in 1876, finding:
Elegant, amiable, cultivated people, well informed on every subject, everybody speaking French fluently – which is unusual on the coast farther down than Ravenna – learned archaeologists, distinguished naturalists, administrators, rich landowners from the area around Naples on holiday, glittering officers and, finally, smart women in the latest Paris fashions without the overdressing that is so common among Southern Italians, who gave me plenty of serious, scholarly conversation, with all the amiable courtesy and friendly outspokenness which is typical of Italy.
“I was told several times, ‘Oh Lecce is so gay, the very name calls up a smile; and the Leccese are so civil and pleasant.’ All of which we found quite true” observes Janet Ross. But while her hotel, the Risorgimento (still there) was comfortable and clean, the host was put out by her ordering boiled eggs, bread and butter, and coffee with milk at nine every morning: “The idea was so novel, and the mixture so extraordinary, that we always had to wait half an hour. ‘Why did we not have a cup of black coffee in bed like other people, and then breakfast properly at mid-day?’ ” She did not like the architecture – “very ugly”, “a very orgy of baroque rococo, quite overpowering in the excess of ornamentation.”
“Every night during our stay at Lecce we saw rockets, Bengal fire, &c.” she records. After one of these displays,
I insisted on going into a booth with a large doll hanging outside, to see marionettes as done for the people, not for the gentlefolk. We paid a halfpenny each and clambered up a rickety ladder into the “posti distinti”, where our appearance created quite a sensation.
The play was Samson and Delilah: “When Delila came on, with that queer, spasmodic, irresponsible walk belonging to a marionette, and sheared Samson of his mass of hair with an enormous pair of scissors, the audience applauded vigorously, ‘Well done’, ‘She’s the hairdresser for me’.”
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br /> The highlight of Mrs Ross’s visit was meeting a hero of the Risorgimento, the Duke Sigismondo Castromediano. He lived at his castle of Cavallino some miles outside Lecce and came in to show her the city museum. “A very tall half-blind, courteous old man, leaning on the arm of his secretary and surrounded by various professors, some of whom had put on tail-coats and white gloves in honour of the visit of a learned lady.” He told her of his life as a political prisoner under the Borboni, “among convicts of the lowest description, imbued with every vice, the refuse of humanity.” His health had been broken and he was very poor, reduced to living in one room of his castle. Something of a showman, he had left instructions that his fetters and convict’s red jacket should be placed on his coffin at his funeral. He recalled how touched Mr Gladstone had been to hear about his sufferings, especially “the killing out of sheer spite by the gaolers, of a pet nightingale which the poor prisoners had tamed.” The Duke told Janet that “nothing gave him such pleasure as to see an Englishwoman” and asked permission to embrace her, after which he kissed her on both cheeks.
An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia Page 21
