An Armchair Traveller's History Of Apulia Part 12

A peasant himself, during the famine he tried to help the starving country people. He wrote to the mayor of Foggia, demanding that ma.s.sari leave nearly harvested fields to be gleaned as formerly, instead of grazing animals on them. Otherwise, he threatened he would burn everything that belonged to the landowners.

Throughout the French occupation, brigands had regularly lain in ambush in the vital Bovino pa.s.s, eluding all attempts to hunt them down. When they had not been heard of for months, they would suddenly strike, attacking the royal mail coach especially when it had bullion on board, or holding travellers to ransom. The Vardarelli appear to have joined the bands which preyed on the pa.s.s.

"I pa.s.sed by the Ponte di Bovino early in the year 1816, when the mere mention of its name caused fear and trembling", recalled Macfarlane: The pa.s.s is in general steep, and in some points very narrow; a deep ravine, through which froths and roars a mountain stream in the winter season, is on one side of the road hills covered with trees or underwood lie on the other. In its whole length, which may be about fifteen miles, there are no habitations, save some curious caves cut in the face of the rock, a post-house, and a most villainous-looking taverna... And then, as regards security, who would follow the experienced robber through the mountain-wood, or down the ravine, or be able to trace him to the hiding-places in the rocks that abound there? Across the mountains he has a wide range of savage country, without roads without a path; on the other side of the chasm the localities are equally favourable; here he can, if hard pressed... throw himself into the impenetrable forests of Mount Garga.n.u.s, or into the not less remote and safe recesses of Monte Vulture.

Macfarlane tells us that a journey by coach from Apulia to Nap-les, the capital, was "to the peaceful inhabitants (always, be it said, rather timid travellers) an undertaking of solemn importance and peril; before embarking on which, not only were tapers burning under every saint of the calendar, and every Madonna that could show a portrait, but wills were made, and such tearful adieus, that one might have thought the Val de Bovino the real valley of death".

As for escorts, "four miserable-looking gendarmes pied, with their carbines slung over their shoulders, got up in front of our still more miserable-looking vettura for our protection", Macfarlane recalled. Travellers who were ambushed were forced to lie on the ground to shouts of Faccia in terra (Face to the ground), brigands holding guns to their heads while others rifled their pockets. "Of one thing I was quite sure that the soldiers, in case the robbers condescended to a.s.sault us, would be the first to run away, or per-form the Faccia in terra movement."

General Church met Gaetano as soon as he arrived in Apulia. Spending the night in a ma.s.seria just outside Cerignola, with only his ADC and his batman and, learning that the Vardarelli comitiva by now over a hundred strong was nearby, he boldly sent an order for them to present themselves: "Am I not King of Apulia?", boasted Don Gaetano, when he came. "Have I not beaten three of your sovereign's generals? The troops in Apulia are on my side, the civil inhabitants do what I tell them. I can take as many travellers' purses as I please. All the aristocracy, the entire middle cla.s.ses, fear me. You know very well, Your Excellency, that (King) Ferdinand can do nothing against me".

Church rather liked the brigand chief and his band, recalling years later, "They hara.s.sed the provinces, fought the troops, robbed right and left, but seldom if ever committed murder in cold blood."

A treaty signed by King Ferdinand in July 1817 enrolled the Vardarelli comitiva as highly paid auxiliary troops in the royal army, with the job of clearing the brigands out of the Bovino valley. Don Gaetano performed his new duties admirably, but he had made too many enemies. In September 1817 he was ordered to leave the Capitanata for the Molise. He obeyed very reluctantly, only leaving in February the following year. At Ururi, just inside the Molise, during a morning inspection of his men, he and his brothers were shot from the balcony of a nearby palazzo. Their killer was Don Nicola Grimani, a landowner whose sister Gaetano had raped he bathed his face and hands in Vardarelli blood, shouting "I am avenged."

About forty of the comitiva escaped. In April 1818 they rode into Foggia, reporting to the district commander, General Amato, who ordered them to go to Lucera. They objected so strongly that, after a long argument, shots were exchanged and one of the band fell dead. Some galloped off, firing as they went, while the remainder barricaded themselves in a cellar. Four who surrendered were sent in to tell them they would be smoked out, and were promptly murdered. Sporadic shooting came from the cellar, killing a soldier. Bales of straw were lit and pushed through its entrance, which was then blocked by huge stones. After two hours soldiers went in, to find seventeen men dead or dying; several had stabbed each other. Once the citizens realised the danger was over, the dead brigands became objects of pity, the general being blamed for the tragedy.

Keppel Craven had arrived in Foggia at the moment when the firing started. He was taken into the ground floor of his inn, with his guide, servants and horses, and not allowed to emerge for several hours. That evening, he was shown the corpses at the prison: They had been stript of every article save the reliquaries or consecrated images, which the lower cla.s.ses in Italy invariably wear around their neck, and which now rested on the ghastly wounds that disfigured their bodies, some of which were also blackened by smoke.

There were other Apulian comitive besides those of Gaetano Vardarelli. When Craven went on to Cerignola he was informed that a band had kidnapped the sindaco. (As ransom, its members were demanding 1,200 ducats, 100 yards of pantaloon velveteen and silver buckles.) A raid described to Janet Ross seventy years later by the old inn-keeper at Manfredonia, Don Michele Rosari di Tosquez, a 'baron' from Troia who had lost everything at the hands of brigands, may have been by a Bovino comitiva. "'My ancestors were Spaniards and I was born at Troia; but when I was a small child the brigands came, burnt the ma.s.seria, hung my father from the pigeon tower, and killed my two elder brothers. My mother died of fright. Curse them,' he exclaimed, bringing his fist heavily down on the table, 'that ruined us.'"

While General Church was able to put down brigandage and secret societies in the Terra d'Otranto, he failed to crush the Carbonari revolutionaries, who were demanding a const.i.tution. In 1820 they marched on Naples. General Nugent fled and King Ferdinand reluctantly granted a const.i.tution. Church was briefly imprisoned in the Castel del' Ovo and, on being released, continued to serve the king until 1825. Two years later he was persuaded by Theodore Colocotrones, a former bandit and member of the Duke of York's Greek Light Infantry, to fight in the Greek War of Independence. Sadly his career in Greece was undistinguished at Pireus and the Siege of the Acropolis he never left the safety of his yacht.

In 1824, when staying with the Prince of Ischitella at Peschici in the Gargano, Macfarlane met a survivor from the Vardarelli comitiva called 'Pa.s.so di Lupo', who described the reality of brigand life. Most of the loot was taken by the guappi (bullies) while Pa.s.so di Lupo could not go into a town to spend his small share; often he could not even buy pasta or wine. Stolen sheep were roasted whole in their wool, sometimes eaten raw. Since they were without doctors or medical supplies, wounds were left to fester, so that many of them were covered in sores. For years after ceasing to be a brigand, Pa.s.so di Lupo "could never enjoy a sound sleep in his bed, but... was constantly starting up convulsively, and shrieking out his former companion's names."

When Macfarlane last visited the bridge at Ponte di Bovino in 1824, "General del Caretto has decorated it with the heads and mangled quarters of some half dozen of more modern, but less conspicuous brigands." He adds that even when there were not organised comitive, the locals lay in wait in the pa.s.s: "In some places the hill and the wood, or concealing thicket, is so close to the road on the one hand, and the ravine on the other, that it is really enticing. A shot from the one, and the man's business is done and there yawns a dark capacious grave, to receive his body when deprived of what it is worth."

Ramage came across brigands four years later, but he was unmolested since they were only interested in rich landowners who could pay a big ransom. Nevertheless, when in 1836 Saverio Mercadante from Altamura wrote the opera "I Briganti", its theme still remained unpleasantly familiar to Apulians.

47.

Tarantismo

St Vitus's dance and that other one which cured, they say, the bite of the Tarentine spider.

Norman Douglas, "Old Calabria"

DESPITE TELEVISION and consumer society, a very old Apulia lingers on secretly, with amazing tenacity. Tarantismo is a dramatic example of pagan survival in this ultra-conservative land. An ancient form of therapeutic magic, no doubt familiar to the shamans during the Stone Age, it is popularly supposed to be a cure for the bite of the venomous tarantula. In reality, tarantism is a form of exorcism, a means of healing mental disturbance.

Because one of its churches is dedicated to St Paul, Galatina is said to be free from snakes and poisonous spiders, although surrounded by mile upon mile of vineyards. Throughout Southern Italy the Apostle Paul is invoked against venomous creatures, since he was unharmed by the viper that bit his hand when he was washed ash.o.r.e at Malta. This is why the church of S.Paolo at Galatina is a place of thanksgiving for those cured by tarantism.

Some writers believe tarantismo is a relic of the Bacchic rites but most think it is caused by a bite from a tarantula. In the early eighteenth century Maximilien Misson was fascinated by the affliction: The true tarantula resembles a spider and lives in the fields. There are many, it is said, in the Abruzzi and in Calabria, and they are also found in some parts of Tuscany. When bitten by this accursed insect one takes a hundred postures at once dancing, vomiting, trembling, laughing, turning pale, swooning and one suffers very greatly. Finally, without help, death follows in a few days. Sweatings and antidotes relieve the sufferer, but the best and only remedy is music.

Bishop Berkeley records: The P. Vicario [Superior of the Theatines at Barletta] tells us of the tarantula, he cured several with the tongue of the serpente impetrito, found in Malta, and steeped in wine and drunk after the ninth or last dance, there being 3 dances a day for three days; on the death of the tarantula the malady ceases; it is communicated by eating fruit bit by a tarantula. He thinks it is not a fiction, having cured among others a Capuchin, whom he could not think would feign for the sake of dancing.

There was some confusion about the precise definition of a tarantula. Sandys, in his "Relation of a Iourney begun in An. Dom, 1610", says it is: a serpent peculiar to this country; and taking that name from the city of Tarentum. Some hold them to be of the kind of spiders, others of effts; but they are greater than the one, and lesse than the other, and (if it were a Tarantula which I have seen) not greatly resembling either. For the head of this was small, the legs slender and knottie, and the body light, the taile spiny, and the colour dun, intermixed with spots of sullied white. They lurke in sinks and privies, and abroad in the slimy filth betweene furrows; for which cause the country people do reap in bootes.

Sandys appears to have seen a scorpion.

Misson (who did not visit Apulia) wrote in 1722 to a certain Domenico Sangenito of Lucera, asking for information. He was told: "They vary in colour and I have seen ashy ones and those of a dark tawny hue, like a flea, and with markings which look like little stars. We have them in the mountains as well as in furthest Apulia, but however their bite does no harm." Sangenito was apparently referring to a spider. Yet it is likely that the spider exists only in the sufferer's imagination and is an illusion caused by hysteria.

"In the seventeenth century the belief in the tarantula bites began to subside, and nothing now remains of tarantismo", Hare declared in 1882. But two reliable witnesses told us that during the 1980s they had been to Galatina and seen women, and on one occasion a man, dancing to relieve the malady. The tarantolata, or supposed sufferer from the bite, believes the cure can only work if she is surrounded by the right colours and the right tune is played. Red, green, yellow or black are most likely to suit a spider and the music must match its mood, happy or sad. The musicians, who play the violin or guitar battente accompanied by cymbals and an accordian, need a large repertoire to find the right tune, as well as the stamina to go on playing for hours on end. The dancing generally takes place in a room, occasionally in the street. A sheet with a portrait of St Paul is spread on the floor and the tarantolata starts to move in imitation of a spider, while the musicians try various tunes for her. When they find the right one she begins to dance, not alone, but with anyone among her friends who is wearing the spider's colour. She dances for a few minutes, then takes another partner. At first she dances lethargically, but after a few hours becomes increasingly elated, ending in a state of ecstasy.

Perhaps half a dozen tarantolate go secretly each year to the church of S.Paolo, to imitate a spider, crawling and running, flinging themselves on the altar. Their torn stockings are left hanging up as votive offerings. The decline in tarantismo seems to be due to fewer people working in the fields, rather than disbelief in the spider's bite. (One should not confuse the colourful dancing displays for tourists with the real thing.) No one has ever been able to give a really convincing explanation. The travellers disagree on the details, if not on the importance of colour and music. Some describe the woman as dancing in front of mirrors, others with a drawn sword in her hand. Keppel Craven says she dresses in white and is decked in "ribands, vine leaves and trinkets of all kinds." He considers the whole thing an excuse for a party: While she rests at times, the guests invited relieve her by dancing by turns after the fas.h.i.+on of the country; and when overcome by restless la.s.situde and faintness she determines to give over for the day, she takes a pail or jar of water, and pours its contents entirely over her person, from the head downwards. This is a signal for her friends to undress and convey her to bed; after which the rest of the company endeavour to further her recovery by devouring a substantial repast which is always prepared on the occasion.

Janet Ross heard a story which should be a warning for anyone inclined to be sceptical. There was a master mason living near Taranto, who: got new-fangled ideas into his head and mocked at the idea of a spider's bite being venomous, threatening to beat any of his female belongings who dared to try the dancing cure in case they were bitten by a "Tarantola". As ill-luck or San Cataldo would have it, he was himself bitten, and after suffering great pain and being in a high fever for several days, at last sent for the musicians, after carefully locking the door and closing the windows of his house. But the frenzy was too strong, and to the malicious delight of all who believed in "Tarantismo", he tore open the door and was soon seen jumping about in the middle of the street, shrieking, "Hanno ragion' le femine! Hanno ragion' le femine!" (The women are right! The women are right!)

Part XI.

Greek Apulia.

48.

The Byzantine Terra d'Otranto.

...that abode of Greeks, that unrea.s.suring land.

Virgil, "Aeneid"

THE TERRA D'OTRANO was the last part of Apulia to be conquered by the Normans and still has something unmistakably Greek about it. After losing Ravenna in the eighth century, Byzantine Italy, re-organised as the Theme of Lombardy, was ruled from here by a strategos (or general) until 975 when the catapanate was established at Bari. The strategos worked closely with the archbishop, who sometimes represented him. In the tenth century Archbishop Vlattus of Otranto led an emba.s.sy to the Zirid sultan at Mahdia in Tunis to buy the freedom of Apulian slaves inspired by his sister being in the sultan's harem but when he returned privately to redeem more of them he was put to death.

The navy of Nicephorus Phocas (96369) routed the Arabs. "I alone command the seas", claimed the Emperor, who began the Greek colonisation of southern Italy, settlers flooding in under Basil Boiannes during the next century. Discreet contact with Constantinople lingered on until the Turkish conquest of Greece, while Ma.s.s was said in the Greek rite up to the Counter Reformation. Even today, although the language has almost ceased to be spoken, certain Greek customs survive south of a line from Ostuni to Taranto . The most obvious example is harvesting olives in the Greek way. The trees are barely pruned so they grow very high and the ripe fruit is left to drop into nets spread on the ground below instead of being picked by hand as in the Terra di Bari.

The underground churches contain some of the Byzantine frescoes that are among Apulia's greatest treasures. During the eighth century Byzantium forbade celibacy and the veneration of icons. When monks were ordered to marry or lose their eyes, 30,000 fled to Italy, founding small monasteries in caves, especially in Calabria and the Terra d'Otranto. Sicilian monks, refugees from Islam, joined them in the ninth century. They decorated the churches they carved into the rock with frescoes of Christ, the Virgin and the Saints. The tradition continued for centuries.

The grotto church of San Biagio near San Vito dei Normanni owes its preservation to an enlightened landowner putting a door over the entrance. This was the church of a group of hermits and, judging from its size over forty feet long served a large community. Signed by the artist Daniel with the date 1197, the frescoes are unmistakably Byzantine, and Charles Diehl thought that, to-gether with the magnificent Archangel Michael at San Giovanni nearby, they were the most important in the Terra d'Otranto. He blamed the destruction of many other frescoes on the navvies who built the railways. Using the cave churches as shelters where they could light fires, they seem to have taken a fiendish enjoyment in disembowelling the painted saints or gouging their eyes out. San Biagio had a lucky escape.

Converted to the Latin rite during the seventeenth century, few surface (as opposed to underground) churches in Apulia retain any traces of their Byzantine past. The exquisite little church of San Pietro at Otranto is an exception, with drums and cupolas, and some of the Greek cycle of frescoes the Last Supper and the Harrowing of h.e.l.l. The fifth century church at Casarano has been enlarged and its walls redecorated with Western frescoes, but the brilliantly coloured Byzantine mosaics are still in the dome and chancel, the dome dotted with stars. There is also the Romanesque abbey of Santa Maria di Cerrate, south of Brindisi, which although built by Normans belonged to the Eastern rite, as you can see from its frescoes and from an altar inscribed in Greek.

On the other hand, there are Greek grotto churches throughout the stony hinterland of the Salentine peninsula, secret, haunted places that are often very hard to find, sometimes underground, sometimes dug into a bank or the side of a cliff. They stretch in a diagonal band twenty-five miles wide from Roca Vecchia in the north to Poggiardo and Ugento in the south. Some are locked, the key kept by a seemingly mythical custodian, while others have frescoes that are visible only by the light of a powerful torch. Often it is difficult to recognise them as churches or chapels, especially when they are used as cattle-byres or tool-sheds. Among the most important are those at Vaste, Giurdignano and Supersano. The earliest frescoes, from the tenth century, are in the church of Sante Marina e Cristina at Carpignano Salento, while the most beautiful are in a small museum in the public gardens at Poggiardo having been taken from the nearby grotto chapel of Santa Maria under the town centre, discovered when a lorry fell into it in 1929.

You can best see the slow transition from Byzantine to Western above ground, however, at Soleto, near Galatina, where the tiny chapel of Santo Stefano is filled with frescoes, mostly from the mid-fourteenth century. The Last Judgement was obviously done by a Greek, but others could have been painted by some obscure follower of Giotto. The Byzantine saints are westernised St Nicholas, St George, and St Onophrius with his loin-cloth and long white beard.

In contrast, the campanile of the chiesa madre at Soleto, built in about 1400 for Raimondello del Balzo Orsini, is totally Latin. Although Raimondello had been all-powerful here, Janet Ross was told that his campanile was the tomb of "some great king, whose name is not known, he died so long ago." She thought Soleto "so eastern-looking with its one-storied, flat-roofed, white houses, that I expected the people to speak Arabic."

Early Greek settlers from Taranto called Gallipoli on the Ionian coast the 'beautiful city' and it still has enormous charm. It fell to the Normans in 1071 but was not totally subjugated for another sixty years, the Greek rite being used in its churches until the sixteenth century. It rose against Charles of Anjou in 1268, 34 rebellious barons being besieged in its castle for six months and hanged as soon as they surrendered. It beat off the Turks in 1481 but was occupied by the Venetians four years later, although briefly. The Spaniards gave the castle four great round bastions; mounting heavy cannon, these guarded the harbour and the landward side of the island on which the city is built. The last siege was in 1809, when the castle stood up to a bombardment by the British Navy.

"Here are fish and exquisite meat of every sort," we are told by Abate Pacich.e.l.li, who says that English and Dutch s.h.i.+ps put in to Gallipoli every day to buy olive oil. According to de Salis, in the eighteenth century the streets were narrow and dirty, and harbour facilities virtually non-existent, although the port was a centre for exporting oil from all over Apulia, stored in rock cisterns. Keppel Craven thought it "the most opulent and gayest town upon the coast. The inhabitants do not succeed six thousand in number; but they are easy in their circ.u.mstances, lively and merry, and in general well informed." However, "Consumptions and spitting of blood are rather frequent here, occasioned by the great subtlety of the air, which is ventilated from every quarter." He liked the pleasant suburbs on the mainland, now under ugly modern buildings, their gardens reminding him of "those so often seen round English ornamented cottages", with "plants that will scarcely live out of a hothouse in our climate."

Craven also noticed good paintings in Gallipoli's churches. The cathedral still has a fine collection of pictures by a local artist, Giovanni Andrea Coppola (15971659), whose work was admired by Riedesel. Coppola's house can be seen in Via Nicetti, a yellow corner building with an ornate doorway, which Riedesel visited to see more of his paintings.

Gallipoli is joined to the mainland by a bridge built in 1603, fifty years after cutting the isthmus to make the city impregnable. It is possible to drive round the old walls, but better to walk since it is no more than a mile and the view marvellous. You can see the island of Sant' Andrea and, on a clear day, the Calabrian mountains across the Gulf of Taranto.

In the triangle formed by Gallipoli, Otranto and Lecce, Griko is spoken at a few places. Greek visitors have difficulty in understanding this Italiot Greek, which is really a separate language of its own, with many Italian words. It has no literature although poems and songs are sometimes published, printed in the Latin alphabet. As late as the 1970s, 20,000 people spoke it at Calimera and the surrounding villages. It is odd to hear young women talking Griko in the early twenty-first century.

In addition to the descendants of the Greek colonists of the tenth and eleventh centuries and of the refugees from northern Apulia in Norman times, Greek speaking Albanians settled on the vast estates in the south granted by King Ferrante in 1460 to their leader, George Castriota Skanderbeg. A street in Gallipoli is still named after his soldiers, Via Stradiotti the famous 'stradiots' or Albanian light cavalry.

49.

The Castle of Otranto

...send for the chaplain, and have the chapel exorcised, for, for certain, it is enchanted.

Horace Walpole, "The Castle of Otranto"

ONE REASON WHY early travellers came to the Salentine peninsula was to see Otranto, because they had read Horace Walpole's "Castle of Otranto". Published in 1764, the first "Gothick" novel, full of ghosts and horror, for many years it was enormously popular, translated into fourteen languages. But its author had never been to Apulia, let alone to Otranto.

In his preface, Walpole says, "The following work was found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England. It was printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529." The t.i.tle page claims it is "A story translated by William Marshall, Gent. From the Original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St Nicholas at Otranto." Yet while there was a church of St Nicholas here, it was staffed by monks, not by canons, and Onofrio Muralto never existed. Finding the name "Otranto" in an atlas in his library, Walpole decided that if the second syllable were stressed, wrongly, it would sound nice as a t.i.tle. His "castle" was modelled on Strawberry Hill, his house at Twickenham.

"The Castle of Otranto, a name calculated to awaken feelings of pleasing recollections in an English mind, is far from realising the expectations created," grumbled Keppel Craven. Even so, the castle's real history was hair-raising enough on more than one occasion.

The Normans occupied Otranto in 1071, Isaac Contostephanos, Grand Duke of the Fleet, unsuccessfully trying to retake it for Byzantium a few years later. It was an important port throughout the Crusades for all those preferring to stay on land as much as possible when they travelled to Palestine. The Byzantine citadel was replaced with a castle by Frederick II, who waited there with Queen Yolande while his fleet was at Brindisi during the abortive Crusade of 1227. King Ferrante rebuilt the castle, much as it looks today, after his son had recovered it from the Turks. A dry moat filled with wild chrysanthemums lies behind the ma.s.sive walls.

Consecrated in 1188, the cathedral has a splendid Norman crypt with forty-two columns, each with a different capital; Cla.s.sical, Byzantine, Egyptian and even Persian. A capital with four birds that Riedesel thought were harpies probably symbolised Mahomet's ascent into heaven.

The cathedral's Norman floor is the most important mosaic in Apulia, its theme the struggle between good and evil. A Tree of Life starts at the door, filling the whole nave. In its branches are animals representing virtues and vices, with figures from the Old Testament. King Arthur is here too, clean-shaven like a Norman and riding on a goat, the earliest pictures of him since the floor dates from 116366. So is Alexander the Great, in a chariot drawn by two griffins. The middle part of the floor has the signs of the Zodiac with each month's activities. The farmers of Otranto kept sheep, goats and pigs, worked in vineyards and cornfields, ploughed with oxen and apparently spent March picking their feet with an iron sc.r.a.per normally used for cleaning hoes.

The ruins of the church of San Nicola de Casole are on a hill south of the city. Bohemond, Prince of Taranto and Lord of the coast between Bari and Otranto, rebuilt the monastery here, destroyed in 1032 by Saracens. Its monks followed the rule of St Basil, growing corn and vegetables, fis.h.i.+ng in the bay below, or working in the famous library. Scholars came from all over Italy to study Greek. Although their rule and their liturgy were Byzantine, they accepted the Pope's authority, which gave them unusual influence after the schism between East and West. When Pope Gregory IX contemplated compulsory rebaptism of those baptised in the Greek rite, Abbot Nettorio dissuaded a tribunal of cardinals, while a later abbot went to the Council of Florence, trying to reconcile Catholics and Orthodox. However, the community was wiped out in 1480.

In July that year the Turkish Grand Vizier arrived before Otranto with a hundred s.h.i.+ps. Both castle and city fell after a fort-night, 12,000 out of a population of 22,000 peris.h.i.+ng during the sack. Among them were 800 men and women who refused to renounce Christianity, so impressing their executioner that he was converted and died with them. But Sultan Mehmet II died before he could invade Italy, and at the news of his death the Turkish garrison surrendered. They had converted the cathedral into a mosque, white-was.h.i.+ng the walls and using the campanile as a minaret. When it was reconsecrated the martyrs' bones were enshrined in a chapel. Hundreds remain in cupboards behind the altar, one near the entrance holding mummified feet and hands, shrivelled intestines, and skulls with eyelashes and sc.r.a.ps of hair.

The martyrs had died on the Hill of Minerva, once dedicated to Apulia's favourite G.o.ddess, their corpses rotting next to a pyramid of their skulls for a year until King Ferrante ordered their burial. A church on the summit has a tablet inscribed with their names and the name of the converted executioner, Berlabey. Every 14 August Otranto commemorates their death.

The stone cannon-b.a.l.l.s lining the city streets are reminders of the Turkish occupation. Janet Ross heard from the station master how memories of the ma.s.sacre lingered, mothers warning disobedient children that the Turks would come back and "get them". The city never recovered; by 1600 its population had dropped to 3,000 and by 1818 to 1,600. Every watch-tower along the coast had once had its own small settlement, but all were abandoned. The reason, however, was not so much "fear of the Turk" as malaria.

On a clear day, you can see Albania's snowy mountains from the Hill of Minerva. Eighteenth century travellers say that snow was brought to Otranto by Albanians and landed on the beach. Plague and cholera being common in the Balkans, payment was left on the sand to avoid physical contact. The snow was stored in cisterns in the tufa and used to cool medicines.

Visitors admired the country around the city for its gardens and citrus groves, but they have gone beneath modern housing or have been replaced by rough grazing for sheep and goats. Inland, there are forests of unusually tall olive trees, vineyards and plots of corn or tobacco. Many olive trees are so gnarled that it is easy to suspect they were alive in the days of the Caesars undoubtedly some of them witnessed the sack of Otranto.

South of Otranto, towards the Capo di Leuca or Finibus Terrae, the land is fertile and hilly. It has always been thickly populated despite the destruction of whole villages by Saracens and Turks, putting de Salis in mind of a garden, instead of the bare rock he had expected to find at the "End of the Earth." The tip of the Salentine peninsula, a dazzling white finger of low cliff, is topped by a church built over a temple to Minerva. The Sanctuary of Santa Maria di Leuca houses a Byzantine icon of the Virgin; a pilgrimage here has been considered a pa.s.sport to Heaven since pagan times those who do not come in their lifetime must do so after death. Capo di Leuca was thought by Ramage and Hare to be the harbour described by Virgil in the "Aeneid" when the Trojans sailed past the Terra d'Otranto on their way to found Rome. They did not land because it was "an abode of Greeks."

50.

Manduria

Manduria is a nice, clean town, very oriental looking with its flat-roofed houses, and the inhabitants seem well-to-do, old-fas.h.i.+oned people.

Janet Ross, "The Land of Manfred"

BETWEEN TRANTO AND GALLIPOLI, Manduria is one of the Terra d'Otranto's most interesting cities. In its great days, in Cla.s.sical times, the inhabitants were not Greeks but Messapians, who have left impressive remains. After being sacked by the Saracens, the city lay deserted for centuries until re-founded in the thirteenth century as "Casalnuova", only reverting to its ancient name in 1799.

Whether Manduria or Casalnuova, it was on every educated traveller's itinerary, as the site of Pliny's uncanny well. "In the Salentine, near the city of Manduria, there is a well full to the brim, whose water is never reduced by any quant.i.ty withdrawn nor ever increased by any added," says Pliny. Still in existence, this never runs dry, not even during the most blistering Apulian summer. Inside a grotto within the walls of the ancient Messapian city, the well seems to be just as it was when Bishop Berkeley, Swinburne, Keppel Craven, Ramage and Janet Ross saw it.

Swinburne was amused by the citizens' reputation as dog-eaters: Casalnuova contains about four thousand inhabitants, noted for nothing but their taste for dog's flesh, in which they have no compet.i.tors that I know of, except their neighbours at Lecce and the newly discovered voluptuaries of Otaheite (Tahiti). We did not see one animal of the canine species in the streets; and woe be to the poor cur that follows its master into this cannibal settlement. I could not prevail upon my conductor to own whether they had any flocks of puppies, as of sheep; or took any pains, by castration or particular food, to fatten or sweeten the dainty, before they brought it to the shambles.

He adds that dogs were kidnapped by tanners, their skins making fine "false Morocco" leather, their meat food for under-nourished workmen.