An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia (8 page)

“I was told that every morning, at daybreak, over ten thousand labourers leave Andria, many of them mounted on donkeys, mules or horses, as their fields are miles away”, Janet Ross recorded after her visit in 1888: “The shepherds drive their flocks of goats and sheep and the herdsmen their cattle through the streets, making sleep impossible.” She did not realise that the mounted labourers were going out as sweated labour in work gangs, that many of the city’s population were dying of hunger. She was puzzled that there was no inn of any kind here despite the 40,000 inhabitants, and wondered why the very few shops were so poor.

During the year after Mrs. Ross’s visit to Andria, Colonel Caracciolo, who commanded the local
carabinieri
, reported, “Entire families have had no food for several days. They wander through the streets and are a horrifying sight. Any description of them might seem to exaggerate. Yet many go so hungry that they cannot stand and have to stay in bed.” Eighty per cent of the male population were landless labourers, all too frequently unemployed and totally penniless. They lived in slum-dwellings or ‘grottoes’, four out of five being illiterate. It was a very long time before their condition improved. In 1914 Edward Hutton observed, “the place is like a vast peasant city, the like of which no other province of Italy knows.”

Today, however, Andria is a pleasant, prosperous little city with charming inhabitants. They have regained all their ancient spirit. “Most cultivated and with the finest manners are the Andriesi”, commented Pacichelli in the seventeenth century. The modern Andriesi are just as amiable.

Andria is certainly one of the best places to go looking for the Emperor Frederick’s ghost, especially its cathedral and the landscape around the city. Together with Castel del Monte, this is the heart of the Hohenstaufen country.

11

Fair was he, handsome, and of noble air

Dante, “Purgatorio, III”

THE OTHER ROYAL GHOST of Apulia is Frederick’s son, Manfred. Like his father, he loved Apulia, where he was born, hunting there whenever possible. “The peasants still speak with pride and affection of ‘our great Emperor’, and of his son, ‘our King Manfred’, so that the chivalrous figure of the ‘Bello e biondo’ (handsome and fair-haired) son of Frederick seemed to haunt me at every turn”, Janet Ross wrote. She was obsessed with him, calling her book on Apulia “The Land of Manfred”.

He was born in the castle of Venosa in 1231, one of Frederick’s bastard children by Bianca Lancia, his father making him Count of Monte Sant’Angelo and Prince of Tàranto. When Frederick lay dying in 1250, he named him regent of the kingdom since his half-brother, Emperor Conrad IV, was away in Germany. When Conrad died four years later – poisoned with powdered diamonds by Manfred, according to his enemies – he seized the throne, even though Conrad had left an heir, the baby Conradin. In 1258 he was crowned King of Sicily, soon controlling not only the
Mezzogiorno
but much of central Italy.

The following year he married a Greek princess, Helena, daughter of Michael Angelus, Despot of Epirus. Her dowry was Corfu together with several towns across the Adriatic. The marriage seems to have been a happy one, and there were three sons and a daughter.

Had Manfred been content with his southern kingdom, he might have founded a lasting dynasty, but he wanted to rule all Italy and the Papacy was implacably hostile, terrified of being hemmed in by the Hohenstaufen north and south. Successive popes did their best to destroy “the sultan of Lucera”, offering his crown to a son of Henry III of England, without success. But in 1263 it was accepted by the ruthless Charles of Anjou, brother of the French king, St Louis.

Manfred ignored the threat and spent all his time hunting in Apulia. When the eagle-faced Charles arrived at the head of a French army in February 1266, Manfred met him outside Benevento, with heavily armoured German knights, Saracens and the barons of Apulia. The king sent in his Germans, his crack troops, too soon, their charge was beaten off and the Apulian barons rode away. Manfred, who might have saved himself, died fighting. Pope Clement IV wrote, “Our dear son Charles is in peaceful possession of the whole realm, having in his hands the putrid corpse of that pestilential man, his wife, his children and his treasure.”

An Apulian Dominican recorded that “on 28 February news arrived that King Manfred and his army had been routed near Benevento... After a few days it was learnt that King Manfred had been found dead on the battlefield. Queen Helena, waiting for news at Lucera, fainted from grief. The poor young woman did not know what to do, since all the barons and courtiers left, as they usually do in such cases.”

The only people who did not abandon her were some citizens of Trani – Messer Monualdo and his wife and a Messer Amerusio. They advised her to go to their city and sail for Epirus with her children, Amerusio sending a message to get a galley ready. “They reached Trani on the night of 3 March but could not sail because the wind was wrong”, continues the friar. “Queen Helena and Amerusio hid in the castle, where they had been warmly welcomed by the castellan.” But agents of Pope Clement discovered they were there, forcing the castellan to arrest them and raise the drawbridge. On 7 March King Charles’s men-at-arms came for the queen, “and they took her and her four children with all their treasure away by night, no one knows where.”

Two years later, Manfred’s nephew, Conradin of Hohenstaufen (Emperor Conrad’s son) marched down from Germany. Many supporters were waiting for him in Apulia, where Manfred’s Saracens still held out at Lucera. But Charles intercepted Conradin’s army, capturing and beheading the sixteen year old king.

Meanwhile, Manfred’s wife and children had been imprisoned at Nocera, where Queen Helena died in 1271. The girl was rescued after eighteen years, but the boys remained in prison for the rest of their lives, King Charles’s successor considerately ordering their chains to be removed in 1295. One at least was still alive in 1309, the very last Hohenstaufen.

Manfred left a no less abiding memory than Frederick II. “
Biondo era e bello e di gentile aspetto
” (“golden hair, and noble dignity his features show’d”), wrote Dante, born the year before he died, who placed him in Purgatory – with the certainty of going to Heaven after he had purged his sins. This impression of the fair-haired king’s good looks and charm was echoed by the Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani, Dante’s near contemporary, although he had some unpleasant things to say about him:

Manfred was beautiful in person, and very like his father, but even more dissolute in every way; a musician and singer, he loved having jesters, minstrels and beautiful whores around him, and always dressed in green. He was unusually generous, courteous and amiable, and as a result much loved and popular; yet his entire way of life was given up to sensuality, as he cared for neither God nor the saints, only for fleshly pleasures.

It has to be admitted, too, that the king also had a slightly sinister reputation; for instance, that he owned a magic ring that could summon up demons.

You are just as close to King Manfred at Castel del Monte or Andria as you are to the Emperor Frederick, and his name is commemorated all over Apulia, although he built (or rebuilt) fewer castles than his father. Like Frederick, he loved Puglia, whose people have never forgotten him. Janet Ross had every reason to call it “The Land of Manfred.”

Part III

12

In a dry summer at Foggia water costs more than wine; it is brought

by train, and the station is besieged by people with pails, jugs, basins

and bottles, who buy it by the litre.

Janet Ross, “The Fourth Generation”

WHEN AUGUSTUS HARE visited Apulia early in the 1880s he came by rail from Naples to Foggia, through the mountains to the Tavoliere. “We have now entered a part of Italy which is behind-hand in civilisation to a degree which will only be credible to those who have tried it”, he sniffed. “
All
sanitary arrangements after leaving Foggia are almost unknown. The filth even of the railway stations is indescribable.” In those days there was simply not enough water to clean them properly.

Many travellers remarked on the bare, endless expanse of the flat Tavoliere, with not a house in sight, the only notable feature being the giant fennel lining the trackways. Flocks of sheep were everywhere, guarded by milk-white dogs as intelligent as they were fierce – the beautiful
Abruzzesi
, whose descendants can still be seen.

Nothing could be more different from the mountainous Gargano than this vast plain in the southern Capitanata, whose centre is Foggia. The name ‘Capitanata’ (land of the
catapan
) is a memory of the Byzantine governors who ruled for the Emperors at Constantinople. Under the Romans the Tavoliere had been farmed by veterans of the Punic Wars, before they and their small-holdings were displaced by sheep ranches. From the second century AD until the
Risorgimento
the land was dominated by sheep, driven up into the Abruzzi during summer when the Apulian grass was parched, but returning in the autumn.

By Apulian standards Foggia is a late-comer as a city, founded in the eleventh century around a spot where a miraculous icon of the Virgin had been discovered, the “Icona Vetere”, now hanging be-hind a curtain in the cathedral. No other town then existed in the area, only hamlets peopled by refugees from the old city of Arpi, destroyed by Saracens. The Normans fortified Foggia, which became important in the thirteenth century when Frederick II made it his administrative headquarters, because of the good roads to Naples, Bari and Tàranto.

The palace which Frederick built was destroyed by Papal troops, who used its stones to strengthen their entrenchments while fighting Manfred. Contemporary descriptions give some idea of it, “rich in marble, with statues and pillars or verd-antique, with marble lions and basins.” Part of the extensive gardens was set aside for aviaries and the Imperial menagerie.

A royal menagerie was fashionable throughout the Middles Ages. Frederick’s is the best recorded, perhaps because it always travelled with him and was seen by thousands of his subjects. The Sultan of Cairo sent an elephant, complete with howdah, which led his procession from town to town, and a giraffe – the first in Europe. Hunting leopards and baggage camels came from Tunisia where there was a Sicilian consul. Frederick’s hosts must have dreaded his visits. At Padua he spent many months at the monastery of Santa Justina with the elephant, five leopards and twenty-four camels.

Although personally abstemious, the Emperor entertained foreign princes on a lavish scale, both here and at Lucera. A contemporary chronicler gives us this picture of life at court: “Every sort of festive joy was there united. The alternation of choirs, the purple garments of the musicians evoked a festal mood. A number of guests were knighted, other adorned with signs of special honour. The whole day was spent in merriment, and as the darkness fell, flaming torches were kindled here and there and turned night into day for the contests of the players.”

The ladies of the court, on the whole excluded from the hunting boxes of Castel del Monte and Gravina, lived a normal life at Foggia. Appropriately for such an Eastern kingdom they dressed very like their sisters across the Adriatic, with Byzantine coronets, and veils to preserve their complexions.

Old Foggia disappeared in an earthquake in 1731, and only the lower part remains of the cathedral where King Manfred married Helena of Epirus. The Baroque church of the Calvary has survived, however, memorable for five domed chapels, once seven, which stand on the path to the church – walking beside them, the faithful were meant to reflect on the Seven Deadly Sins.

After the city centre’s restoration in the 1770s, Swinburne described it as having two or three streets and a handsome customs house (the Dogana delle Pecore), “neatly built of white stone”. Forty years on, Keppel Craven found Foggia more prosperous than anywhere else in Southern Italy except Naples, while in 1828 Ramage remarked on its handsome, comfortable houses, some of which escaped the bombing in 1943, and its “numerously attended” theatre. The theatre has since changed its name in honour of Foggia’s favourite son, Umberto Giordano, composer of “André Chenier” and “Fedora”.

There were no trains in Octavian Blewitt’s day (1850), but Foggia could be reached by coach, the mail leaving Naples at midnight every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday. The fare was six ducats, a sovereign. The road went through the narrow defile of the Val de Bovino, where until recently brigands had often lain in ambush. En route, Blewitt saw from his coach window the Tavoliere as it was before the
Risorgimento
, covered with sheep in winter and spring, the flocks on their way to the Abruzzi in summer.

In 1865 Juliette Figuier decided that while Foggia might have a theatre, a hospital, a museum and public gardens, it felt like a village. “We didn’t see a single
borghese
[noble man or woman]”, she tells us. Pigs and chickens roamed the streets while the men wore cloaks slung over their shoulders and wide-brimmed hats with pointed crowns, even when eating their meals – “They could have been mistaken for Moslems.” Only some children serving in a restaurant showed any sign of cheerfulness; otherwise people seemed old before their time, weakened by malnutrition. “You can have no idea of the wretchedness, listlessness and apathy of this slothful population”, she wrote. But she liked the plays at the theatre, simple, unpretentious comedies.

“We would have quite enjoyed our time at Foggia, it if hadn’t been for the uncontrollable revulsion we felt for our
locanda
”, explains Mme Figuier. She and her husband slept in what was called the
camera d’onore
[chamber of honour], for which she thought “chamber of horror” would be a good translation. They realised they were lucky not to have to share it. White-washed, furnished with four huge beds and two rickety chairs, it was without curtains, chamberpots or wash stand – save for a small salad-bowl of water in a corner, and they had great difficulty in persuading the servant to replace this precious commodity each morning. The only lighting was a candle-end a centimetre high. It was bitterly cold, yet there was no heating, not even when it snowed. They were kept awake by the chill, and by the noise of mice chewing the straw in their mattresses.