An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia

by Seward, Desmond

  The massive remnants of the Messapians’ double walls, five miles in circumference, are often over fifteen feet thick and some-times nearly twenty high. They were built during the fifth century BC as a defence against the Tarantines. Almost as striking are the dozens of rectangular graves carved out of the rock, and the elaborate chamber tombs that contain frescoes and have rafters painted on their ceilings. A couplet in the Aeneid (Book VI) gives us some idea of the after-life that they hoped to live in such tombs:

  They lie below, on golden beds displayed;

  And genial feasts with regal pomp are made...

  The Messapians spoke an extinct Indo-European tongue, probably akin to modern Albanian, which was written in a script derived from Greek. The language ceased to be spoken shortly after the birth of Christ, but its intonation lingers in the stressed first syllable of place-names such as Tàranto, Òtranto and Brìndisi.

  “There is a fine palazzo, which belonged to the Princes of Francavilla”, Mrs. Ross noted, when she could spare the time from inspecting the Messapian remains. Begun in 1719 by Prince Michele II, with its long balcony of iron scroll-work and its row of tall windows, this has a distinctly Spanish appearance. It was still unfin-ished when Swinburne visited “Caselnuovo” nearly sixty years later. He commented,

  The suite of apartments is grand, but the situation uncomfortable without garden or prospect. Nearby lie the remnants of a ghetto from which the Jews were expelled at the end of the seventeenth century; some of the houses, one dated 1602, have curious windows whose heavy tracery is designed to conceal the occupants from being seen by passers-by in the street below.

  Janet Ross visited Manduria while staying at Leucaspide near Tàranto as the guest of her friend Sir James Lacaita. A notary born in Manduria, he had become legal adviser to the British legation at Naples. After giving information about political prisoners to Mr Gladstone, who then described the Borbone regime as “the negation of God,” Lacaita fled to England. Here he failed to become Librarian of the London Library, but was employed as secretary by Lord Lansdowne, acquiring many influential friends, including the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell; he was knighted in 1858 for organising Gladstone’s mission to the Ionian Islands. In 1860, in desperation, the Neapolitan government asked him to become its ambassador in London and persuade the British to stop Garibaldi invading the mainland from Sicily. As he afterwards admitted, it took him three days to decide, but he refused, helping to destroy the old Regno.

  No Apulian profited more from the Risorgimento. A director of Italian Lands Ltd., a London based firm formed in 1864 to handle the sale of all Neapolitan crown and church lands for the new regime, he quickly amassed a large fortune, and in 1868 bought Leucaspide with other former monastic property. Certainly the best known Pugliese in Victorian England (not excepting the Duke of Castromediano), he entertained English visitors lavishly. A small man with simian features, lowering eyebrows and bushy side-whiskers, despite his charm and scholarship, he had a slightly unsavoury air, even if it was not apparent to Mrs. Ross.

  She was escorted from Massafra station to Leucaspide by a guard “with a big pistol stuck in his belt and a gun slung over his shoulder.” The drive was lined by agaves, tall as small trees. Behind the house her host had planted a ravine with bushes in imitation of an English shrubbery, rosemary and cistus covering its sides. There was a view of olive groves sweeping down to the Gulf of Tàranto with, far off, the rugged Calabrian mountains. “We were never tired of looking down from the loggia or arcade, which ran all along the south-west front of the “impostura” (“imposter”), as Sir James laughingly called Leucaspide, so imposing in its dazzling whiteness from a little distance, and giving itself the airs of a large palazzo”, Mrs. Ross recalled. “From the garden below came the scent of lemon and orange trees, laden with fruit.”

  In 1988, exactly a century after her visit, we went to Leucaspide. Lacaita’s son had left it to his agent, a descendant of whom lived in a small house behind the villa, empty for twenty years. A nervous German shepherd dog patrolled its vast, flat roof. Yet white roses clambered up the loggia, which seemed as if sleeping, waiting for the labour gangs to dance for the guests. We might even have fancied that the ghost of Janet Ross was sitting on the terrace in her Turkish trousers, smoking one of her infamous cheroots. But on the far side of the ravine and to the south of the farm buildings, loomed the sprawl of the Italsider steel-works, coming nearer and nearer. We have not been back.

  Apulians are a superstitious race, a trait sometimes exploited for political ends. During the revolutionary troubles of 1799, the Mandurian royalists, using a belief that on 2 November the dead come out of their tombs and walk the streets, staged a procession of “ghosts” chanting “Be calm, be faithful to Ferdinand!” Apparently the ruse worked.

  Many travellers describe seeing votive offerings at churches, like the round stones hung outside the sanctuary of the Archangel at Monte Sant’ Angelo. Some years ago, at the rupestrian chapel of San Pietro Mandurino, we saw the skin of a fox stuck on a tree just outside the door. A Mandurian said it was a thanks-offering to St Peter for saving a hen from the jaws of death. But Janet Ross heard that the skin of an animal always hung on the great walnut tree of Benevento, a meeting place for witches. Inside the church there were intricate circles of pebbles in front of the altar. When we asked a friend in Gioia about what we had seen, he laughed: “I don’t take that stuff seriously.” But then he changed colour, adding “It’s very dangerous, like using cards to get control of someone’s soul.”

  Shortly after, we read in Norman Lewis’s “Naples ’44” that he had come across fox-magic at Sagranella, up in the hills behind Benevento. “This village seems hardly to have moved out of the Bronze Age,” he writes. “I am told it has a fox-cult, and every year a fox is captured and burned to death, and its tail is hung, like a banner, from a pole at the village’s entrance.” Benevento was neither Greek nor Messapian territory but Samnite. Even so, we feel sure that the Messapians would have had no difficulty in explaining the significance of our Mandurian fox hanging in a tree.

  Part XII

  Three Little Courts

  51

  Conversano

  Supported by a vast following, that included many kinsmen together

  with large bands of unruly retainers, magnates like the Count of

  Conversano... were able to bloody their hands with crimes against

  their vassals.

  Rosario Villari, “La rivolta antispagnola a Napoli”

  FEUDALISM SURVIVED IN APULIA until the French invasion of 1806, even if “vassals” no longer went out to battle. Sometimes the feudal lords were tyrants, oppressing their vassals and levying their dues mercilessly, like the notorious Count Giangirolamo II of Conversano. There is a lurid legend that he claimed the jus primae noctis (Law of the First Night) and had every peasant girl from his estates on her wedding night, or else gave her to one of his cronies.

  In the midst of cherry orchards, Conversano is up on the Murgia dei Trulli, between Bari and Martina Franca, with beautiful views out to sea. Crouched almost menacingly above what are now the public gardens, despite an elegant Baroque gateway and apartments, the counts’ massive castle keeps its Angevin towers and ramparts, a polygonal bastion from Aragonese days bearing the coat of arms of the Acquaviva. The Acquaviva were one of the ‘Seven Families of the Kingdom of Naples’, the others being Aquino, Ruffo, Sanseverino, Del Balzo, Celano and Piccolomini, to whom the county came through the marriage of Giulio Antonio Acquaviva to Caterina del Balzo Orsini in 1456; its territory then included Bitetto, Gioia del Colle and Noci, with several other towns. Count Giulio Antonio I was killed by the Turks in 1481, during the campaign to retake Òtranto, his horse galloping back to his tent with his decapitated body. His head had been stuck on a Turkish pike, but eventually the corpse was reassembled and brought home to Conversano. His family were consoled with the right to use the royal arms and name of Aragon.

  His son, Count Andrea M
atteo Acquaviva d’Aragona, a leader of the pro-French party, advised the French to seize Bari, and in consequence spent two years in a dungeon at Naples after the Spanish victory in 1503. Learned in both letters and the military arts, he installed a printing press at Conversano, and printed a book of Plutarch’s “Moralia”, which he had himself translated from Greek into Latin. He also completed the nearby church of Madonna dell’ Isola, which had been begun by his father, commissioning a monument of painted stone by an Apulian sculptor, Nuzzo Barba of Galatina; beneath it lie the recumbent effigies of Giulio Antonio I and his countess, their son kneeling next to them in full armour.

  By the seventeenth century, like all great noblemen in Apulia, the Counts of Conversano were facing ruin, they were victims of an unending recession, owing vast sums to money-lenders at Naples. The ruthless exploitation of feudal dues meant the difference between survival and bankruptcy.

  Because of a cast in one eye, ‘a singular mark of the Fiend’, Count Giangirolamo II was nicknamed ‘Il Guercio di Puglia’ (‘the Apulian Squinter’). Born in 1600, at seventeen he led 300 horse-men from Conversano to help repel a Turkish attack on Andria. As soon as he became Count in 1626, hiring an army of brigands he extorted his dues mercilessly – tolls, levies on grain, oil and wine, compulsory use of his mills and ovens, of his wine and olive presses. Every non-noble landowner in the county of Conversano and the duchy of Nardò (inherited from his mother) suffered, whether peasants or borghesi. The mayor of Nardò tried to stop him, so in 1639 he arranged for the mayor to be strangled, and then, to conceal his involvement, had the murderer throttled in the church where the murder took place. Later, he was accused of twenty other murders. He was greatly respected by fellow magnates.

  In 1640, encouraged by a heavily indebted Viceroy, the richest banker in Naples, Bartolomeo d’Aquino, who was “of a dirty and mean appearance in keeping with his birth”, tried to marry Il Guercio’s sister, Anna, offering to pay 40,000 ducats. Having just been accused of the mayor’s murder and in sanctuary in the friary of San Lorenzo at Naples, Giangirolamo could not intervene. But he summoned his friends, who rode to the palace where the girl was staying, beat off the Viceroy’s guard, and escorted her at sword-point to a convent in Benevento outside the Viceroy’s reach. He then gave his sister a more acceptable husband and a dowry of 9,000 ducats.

  Although he escaped prosecution over the mayor, he was arrested in 1643 for involvement in a pro-French plot and sent to Madrid. When the news reached Nardò, its delighted citizens wanted a Te Deum sung, but a priest, Don Ottavio Sambiase, told them an exorcism was more fitting, making everyone repeat, “O Lord, may you hurl the Count of Conversano down to Hell!”. However, at Madrid both Philip IV and Il Guercio were charmed by each other, the king sending Giangirolamo home in 1645 as Captain-General of Nardò with even stronger powers over his vassals.

  He was zealous in crushing the 1647 rebellion, which was as much against feudal magnates as against Spain, his equally ferocious wife, Isabella Filomarino, selling her jewels to pay for troops. Raising eighty cavalry and 300 foot-soldiers, within a few months he had pacified Apulia, where every town except Manfredonia and Lucera had joined the rebellion. There had been peasant revolts everywhere; as Rosario Villari writes in “La rivolta antispagnola a Napoli”, it was “basically a peasant war, the biggest and most dramatic in Western Europe during the seventeenth century.” Giangirolamo commanded only a few troops and a handful of nobles with their retainers, but fought a very effective campaign, even if his son Don Giulio was shot dead at his side. In 1648 he won a decisive victory at Foggia, whose citizens opened their gates in abject surrender, and another at Lecce. Generally he pardoned the towns-men, merely fining them.

  During the previous summer Giangirolamo’s city of Nardò had declared that it no longer owed allegiance to him as feudal lord, only to the King of Spain. But there was no resistance when he entered with his soldiers in 1648 and its citizens renewed their allegiance. Scarcely had he left the city, however, when they rebelled again, besieging the garrison of a hundred men he had left in the castle, who were joined by citizens supporting him. The count-duke returned swiftly, investing the city’s twenty-four towers with 400 troops, directing operations from his masseria of Lo Stanzio. After the rebels had fought for two days and nights, inflicting heavy casualties, the castle garrison routed them in a surprise attack. Giangirolamo then promised a general pardon, whereupon they laid down their arms.

  As soon as Giangirolamo’s men entered the city a reign of terror began, ‘traitors’ being tortured and hanged. The septuagenarian Baron Sambiase was hung up to die by dangling from one foot, the mayor, who had fled to Gallipoli, was pursued and killed, while four canons were shot and beheaded; their heads, wearing birettas, were nailed over their choir-stalls in the cathedral; it was rumoured that their bodies were flayed and the skins used to cover chairs in the gran salone (grand gallery) at Conversano. The houses of many other rebels were razed to the ground. Il Guercio’s governor continued the hangings for several months. Count Giangirolamo was arrested for a second time in 1651 and once more taken to Spain. He never saw Conversano or Nardò again, dying in 1655 when about to sail home. It was probably a stroke, but popular legend claims that the Spaniards had him torn to pieces by wild horses.

  This bloodstained ogre was one of the greatest patrons of art in Apulian history. The church of SS. Cosma e Damiano, which he built at Conversano between 1636 and 1650, is a Baroque jewel-box. The most important artist he employed was Paolo Domenico Finoglio, born about 1590, who had made his reputation at Naples, helping Ribera and Artemisia Gentileschi decorate the Certosa of San Martino. He arrived at Conversano in 1635 with less than ten years to live, and, leaving the frescoes in SS. Cosma e Damiano to Fracanzano and Carlo Rosa, concentrated on painting the altar-pieces, together with a moving “Martyrdom of San Gennaro” in the cloister.

  Finoglio’s finest paintings have returned to Conversano after a long absence, restored to their glory, and may be seen again at the castle. These are ten scenes from Il Guercio’s favourite epic, Tasso’s “Gerusalemme Liberata”, a fantastic reconstruction in verse of the first Crusade; a world of jewelled grottoes, magic islands and enchanted forests, full of golden serpents and goblins with dragon-wings, inhabited by heroes (such as the Norman Godefroy de Bouillon), guardian angels, fiendish witches and ladies in armour, especially a dying Saracen sorceress of wonderful beauty who begs for baptism. The sub-plots are stories of love for unattainable heroines by knights errant driven out of their wits by spells. Holding a torch, the artist himself appears in “The Torture of Olindo and Sofronia”, with melancholy eyes, a huge fleshy nose and a cleft chin.

  One of Finoglio’s finest sacred paintings, “St Benedict and St Sabinus”, is in the nearby abbey church of San Benedetto. The Counts of Conversano certainly left their mark on this abbey, their preferred burial place. An ancient foundation, whose church dates in part from the eleventh century, it later became a convent of Cistercian nuns under a mitred abbess. The counts’ daughters supplied most of the haughty abbesses, who were a byword for truly staggering arrogance when they dealt with bishops, neighbouring magnates or anyone else, until the abbey was dissolved in 1809.

  Il Guercio had three sons, all men of the sword. Cosmo, (‘O Sfidante’), was slain in the duel at Ostuni, Giulio fell in battle, while Giantommaso took vows as a Knight of Malta. But Cosmo’s son prospered. “The ancient castle or palace is most majestic, newly refurbished as a splendid dwelling by Count Acquaviva, lord of the city and of the surrounding region”, wrote the Abate Pacichelli, who came to Conversano during the 1680s. He tells us reverently that the count’s courtiers are “all titled people”, admires his fine furniture with its gilt and embroidery, and is dazzled by “an almost unbelievable abundance of silver plate, mingled with vases of porcelain and rock crystal.” (This was the Count Giulio who threatened to cut off the Duke of Noja’s nose and ears.)

  The Counts of Conversano were famous for their mag
nificent horses. After the invention of firearms heavy mounts for carrying men in full armour had to be replaced by swift, athletic animals that were capable of taking evasive action when necessary. From the fifteenth century the Counts imported Andalusian and Arab stallions to cover local mares, and by the eighteenth their offspring were being offered to half the courts of Europe; Lippizaners trace some of their blood-lines to Conversano stallions. Cirò Annichiarico, the brigand priest, who had ridden some of the finest horses in Apulia, thought that Conversanos were faster than Andalusians.

  The Acquaviva d’Aragona’s final years were embittered by sordid wrangles over feudal dues. Even the brigands whom they had been employing as their enforcers were unable to help them after the crown’s draconian new measures against banditi. In 1801 Giulio Antonio IV, thirty-eighth Count of Conversano, left the city in disgust to live at Naples. Five years later, King Joseph Bonaparte abolished feudalism and the Acquaviva sold the castle soon after. They retained many of their Apulian estates, however, together with their lordly hunting-lodge of Marchione.

  Built about 1740 by Count Giulio Antonio III, between Conversano and Putignano, Marchione is unique in Apulia because the Apulian magnates normally stayed at a masseria when they went hunting. In design it is a beautiful little castle whose four squat towers are crowned by terraces, and whose elegant piano nobile (noble floor)has an arcaded loggia that is reached by ascending a majestic double staircase. Despite standing among almond and cherry orchards today, as a hunting-lodge it once stood in an oak forest and two sole surviving oak-trees are lovingly preserved in the grounds. The game hunted was wild boar.

  The last Acquaviva d’Aragona left Marchione to her son, the late Prince of Boiano (and Count of Conversano) who restored it. The house contains what must be the only surviving portrait of Il Guercio. Count Giangirolamo is shown as a stocky man with a Vandyck beard, a smiling face and a huge rapier – and no trace of a squint.