NORMAN DOUGLAS decided he did not care for the Murge, which he dismissed as "that shapeless and dismal range of limestone hills." He never saw them properly, however, only glimpsing the western Murgia from the train, on a wretched journey by night from Venosa to Taranto.

The Murge form the plateaux seventy miles by ten that covers most of the Terra di Bari. From the coast it rises almost imperceptibly till in the south-west it is a good 1,500 feet above sea level. In the north east, where the limestone has been heavily eroded, the rich red soil is very fertile indeed; inland from Bari vines are grown, while climbing towards Gioia del Colle, olives and fruit trees take over. By contrast, in the south-west the Alta Murgia is bleak, rocky downland, providing only a small amount of poor quality arable and some scanty grazing, a landscape that was known in Roman times as Apulia Petrosa. Partly because they were unafflicted by malaria, from the eighteenth century until the Risorgimento the Murge's little cities were generally much more flourishing than those on the Adriatic coast, although they seem to have been visited by comparatively few of the early travellers.

The River Ofanto marks the boundary between the Capitanata and Terra di Bari. In the mountains behind Melfi, which the poet Horace knew well, this can be a boiling torrent in winter, but here the Ofanto is no more than a sluggish trickle, almost dry in summer, the "stagnant Aufidus" of the ancient writers. The last river in Apulia as you go south, it is a reminder of just how little water there was until recent times.

In February 1817 the eighteen-year-old Charles Macfarlane explored the banks of the Ofanto, to see the battlefield of Cannae where Hannibal had defeated the Romans: "I had no companion, except the Calabrian pony that carried me, and a rough haired Scotch terrier." Whatever scholarly conclusions Macfarlane may have reached about the battle, he has left us a fascinating glimpse of a long vanished way of life that had been lived on the desolate uplands of the Murge for centuries before the coming of the Romans.

The young traveller met some shepherds, who invited him to spend the night in their tugurio, a long, low hut, where he was given a meal; an omelette, fat bacon, maize bread and ricotta, with a gla.s.s of rough wine.

When all the pastoral society was a.s.sembled, the patriarchal chief shepherd taking the lead, they repeated aloud, and with well modulated cadences, the evening prayers, or the Catholic service of "Ave Maria". A boy then lit a ma.s.sy old bra.s.s lamp, that looked as it if had been dug out of Pompeii, and on producing it said "Santa notte a tutta la compagnia" (a holy night to all the company). The shepherds then took their supper, which was very frugal, consisting princ.i.p.ally of Indian corn-bread and raw onions with a little wine....

The hut was just a single room with no chimney, smoke finding its way out through crannies in the roof. The beds were made of sheepskins and dried maize leaves.

Several of the huge dogs lay dreaming with their faces to the fire... Soon, however, the flames died on the hearth, the embers merely smouldered, and all was darkness, but not all silence, for the men snored most sonorously; the wind, that swept across the wide open plain, howled round the house, and occasionally the dogs joined in the chorus.

Macfarlane says that the shepherds were going to stay here until the middle of the spring, when they would slowly make their way to the Abruzzi, returning to the Pianura di Puglia at the approach of winter.

Even in the bleak south-west, however, most of the Murge's peasants lived a very different sort of existence, going out daily from the little cities to scratch a living from the stony soil, ploughing with oxen if they were lucky but more often using mattocks or digging-sticks, by night sheltering their beasts from brigands near some fortified ma.s.seria. Life was still more dissimilar in the fertile north-eastern Murge, a rich land of olive groves, vineyards, and almond and cherry orchards, that in autumn swarmed with huge gangs of fruit-pickers, men and women who camped in the ma.s.serie's courtyards. There were also dense forests, more than one of whose clearings contained a famous horse-stud.

The roads of the north-eastern Murge frequently go for miles through grove upon grove of olive trees, their gaunt branches trimmed in the Italian way as opposed to the Greek method used in the Salento, reaching up to the sky in a witches' ballet. "They are pruned into the form of a cup, by cutting out the centric upright branches, in the same manner as gardeners trim gooseberry bushes", noted the ever observant Swinburne. "This treatment lets in an equal share of the sun and ventilation to every part, and brings on a universal maturity."

The absence of tall trees throughout the Murge dates only from the late nineteenth century. Formerly whole areas were thickly wooded, very like the Forest Umbra in the Gargano. Full of game, these had been the primeval forests through which Frederick II had once hunted with such pleasure. After the Risorgimento, however, laws specifically designed for clearing useless dwarf oak and chestnut from the lower slopes of Piedmont's mountains, were cynically distorted on behalf of the new, ruthless speculator landowners. They systematically cut down all the great oak and beech trees, stripping the entire Murge of its woodland, and transforming its landscape.

24.

Cities of the Murge

The Apulians... are strong bodied with fine complexions and white skins, energetic in matters of business, faithful, highly intelligent, and very kind hearted.

G.B. Pacich.e.l.li, "Il Regno di Napoli in Prospettiva"

One reason why early travellers seldom visited the Murge was that there were no mail-coaches. Carriages had to be engaged by the day, the worst in Italy, according to Octavian Blewitt in 1850. If they were unavailable you had to hire horses instead, "one of which, as the sumpter horse, will carry portmanteaus, and enable the padrone, who generally travels on foot, to get a lift occasionally." Yet Blewitt was impressed by the roads, built "by the present King Ferdinand II, who has done more in twenty years to improve the internal communications of the kingdom than his ancestors in many centuries." After the fall of the Borbone monarchy, no new major roads were built in Apulia for nearly another hundred years.

Canosa attracted travellers, being close to Cannae. A Greek colony founded by Diomedes of the Great War Cry, its coins bore Greek inscriptions while its people remained bilingual until the time of Augustus. The oldest diocese in Apulia, founded in the fourth century, then wrecked by the Goths, it recovered only to be sacked by the Saracens, after which the Byzantines moved the archbishopric to Bari. In 1734 Bishop Berkeley thought Canosa "a poor town on a low hill", although he was intrigued by its pre-Christian tombs. A century later Ramage echoed Horace's grumble that its bread was full of sand. "I find that the traveller still has the same complaint to make, owing to the soft nature of the rock from which their millstones are made." Today modern Canosa has bound the medieval town in a ring of high-rise flats.

The body of the Norman hero Bohemond lies at Canosa in a tomb reminiscent of an Arab turbeh (mausoleum). During his colourful career he twice defeated the Byzantine emperor and played a key role in the First Crusade, becoming Prince of Antioch. He then spent two years as a Saracen prisoner before being ransomed, returning to Europe and marrying the King of France's daughter. The Byzantine chronicler Anna Comnena says that Bohemond was just like his father, Robert Guiscard, and she had met both, "Father and son resembled locusts, Robert's child devouring anything missed by his father." His tomb just outside the cathedral is a small, square building of white marble with an octagonal cupola, an inscription on its Byzantine bronze and silver doors telling of his bravery. Inside, a flagstone bears a single word in Lombardic script: BOAMUNDUS.

In 1712 Canosa was acquired as a princ.i.p.ality by the Capece Minutolo. Their ancestors may have known Bohemond, who died in 1111, since they were at the coronation of the first Norman king, just a few years later. Their name was originally 'Caca Pece', pitch-s.h.i.tter, from having thrown pitch at enemies besieging their castle; each branch of the Capece took an extra name, Minutolo meaning dwarf. The most famous Capece Minutolo was Prince Antonio, Minister of Police in 1821, who had the Carbonari revolutionaries flogged. "He regarded the French Revolution as the fatal result of renouncing medieval inst.i.tutions and beliefs, which could still, if revived, produce a generation of Galahads", writes Sir Harold Acton. But the Prince of Canosa's private life was not quite that of a Galahad he fathered three b.a.s.t.a.r.ds by a rag-picker's daughter.

First settled by Peucetians, Ruvo di Puglia became a staging-post on the Via Traiana, Horace's Rubi. An attractive little town, perched on the edge of the Murge 732 feet above sea-level, its few visitors are charmed by an exquisite Apulian-Romanesque cathedral on top of a Paleo-Christian predecessor, itself over a Roman house-church. The campanile is a Byzantine watch-tower, while Frederick II built the castle of which only a solitary, crumbling bastion survives.

Ruvo's other attraction is the Museo Jatta, containing Greek and Apulian ceramics dating from the 6th to the 3rd century BC Giovanni Jatta bought vast estates round Ruvo from the Carafa family in 1806 and began to collect Attic and Apulian artefacts discovered in graves on his land. The city had had close links with Greece in the 5th century BC, importing quant.i.ties of kraters, vases and cups and then in the following century Greek artisans to found a factory. This local ware, admittedly of far less beauty then the Attic, was usually destroyed when found, until the beginning of the nineteenth century when it suddenly became immensely sought after. His son became an archaeologist, adding to what would be-come one of the greatest collections of Apulian ware in Italy.

Janet Ross tried to see the Museo Jatta in 1889, without success. "Signor Jatta has gone to Bari, bearing the keys of the museum in his pocket", she was told. "Some of the streets are exceeding pictur-esque; all are dirty", observed Mrs. Ross. "The people were very civil, but evidently unused to strangers." No one explained to her what had paid for the kraters. It was sweated labour, most of the town's male population being day labourers on the enormous latifondi owned by the Jatta and Cotugno families. In 1907 a general strike was broken by 200 armed peasants from the Jatta estates, who fought a pitched battle with the strikers, hunting them through the streets with knives and guns.

Bitonto was once an important Roman city on the Via Traiana, retaken for Byzantium in 975 by the Catapan Zacharias. In a purple-draped litter, Frederick II's body pa.s.sed through in 1250 on its way to Taranto to take ship for Sicily, escorted by barons in black and weeping Saracen bodyguards. The citizens are unlikely to have wept the Emperor had put an inscription over their main gate reading "Gens bitutina, totia bestia et a.s.sinina" (the people of Bitonto are all beasts and fools).

The castle's round towers date from Bitonto's expansion in the fourteenth century. Unlike Apulian ports, it prospered under the Spaniards, famous for its oil, still the best in Apulia. In 1734, Charles of Bourbon routed the Austrians outside the city, restoring the Regno's independence and founding the Borbone monarchy. Augustus Hare calls Bitonto's cathedral "the n.o.blest in Southern Italy". The ultimate example of Apulian Romanesque, inspired by the church of San Nicola at Bari, it dates from the first half of the thirteenth century and was built with unusual speed, probably within twenty-five years, so in style it is all of a piece. A white mar-ble pulpit dated 1229 has a panel portraying Frederick II and three of his sons, with the name of the priest who carved it, "Nicolaus sacerdos et magister" (Nicholas priest and teacher).

Swinburne thought Bitonto's inhabitants "more polished and improved in their manners than those that dwell along the coast", commenting on "an air of affluence". Yet, Hare says it was impossible for him to sketch in Bitonto because of "the violence of the half savage crowd in every lowest stage of beggary and filth." Decline had set in, partly due to large scale planting of vines during the 1870s and 1890s, followed by the ravages of phylloxera which appeared in the Salento in 1889 and had almost destroyed the entire Apulian wine industry by 1919. There were b.l.o.o.d.y riots in 1920, the town hall being stormed and food shops looted. A few years before, Edward Hutton had sensed the misery here, writing of "a curiously lonely city".

Although undistinguished at first sight, the little city of Gioia del Colle has a certain charm. Significantly, on certain Sundays since time immemorial, generations of Gioiesi have picnicked together on a low hill to the north-east, Monte Sannace, the site of the city of their Peucetian ancestors. Gioia became an important Norman fief in 1089, its first lord being Robert Guiscard's brother, Richard the Seneschal, who built the castle. The Emperor Frederick II rebuilt it when he returned from Jerusalem, giving it an appearance that is half Teutonic and half Arab. A Gioiese legend claims his b.a.s.t.a.r.d son Manfred was born in the castle, together with his other children by Bianca Lancia. The castle was a key Hohenstaufen fortress, guarding the road across the "heel of Italy" from Bari to Taranto. Trapezoidal in plan, it has two huge square towers, the Torre de Rossi and the Torre Imperatrice. Frederick II used it as a hunting-lodge since in his time, and for long after, Gioia was surrounded by dense wood-land. Pacich.e.l.li calls it "a sumptuous and ornate palace with a gallery of choice pictures and a theatre", adding reverently that the Princes of Acquaviva often stayed here, accompanied by their court. Made into a county, during the seventeenth century Gioia del Colle was bought, together with the princ.i.p.ality of Acquaviva nearby, by the Genoese moneylender Carlo De Mari, who henceforward referred to his "stato di Acquaviva e Gioia" (state of Acquaviva and Gioia). His tombstone at Gioia styles him "Prince of Acquaviva, Patrician of Genoa and Knight of Naples", but he began his career behind a counter. The castle was lived in until not so very long ago, by Donna Maria Emanuela Carafa from 180668, and by Marchese Luca De Resta into the twentieth century. It now houses the Museum.

"Nothing else worth seeing remains in this busy city of peas-ants", says Edward Hutton, yet the Baroque faade of the Franciscan friary that dominates the main square, built in 1633 at public expense, surely deserves at least a glance. So does the little neo-Cla.s.sical Teatro Rossini, built in 1832, bombed during the Second War but triumphantly brought back into use in 1997, and also the seventeenth century Dominican monastery which houses the Municipio (town hall).

During the spring of 1809 the brigand Antonio Mirabella informed the commune of Gioia that he was "Prince Leopoldo di Borbone" and had surrounded the city with 1,500 Calabrians equipped with cannon. Terrified, the commune let him into the city, and after a Te Deum (hymn of praise) in the chiesa madre (mother church) to celebrate the restoration of Borbone authority, he and his army were given a banquet in the friary. When they sat down, however, the 'Prince' looked suspiciously unregal while his 'troops' were a mere handful of ragam.u.f.fins, clearly intent on getting drunk as quickly as possible. Armed men were called in and several brigands were killed, but Mirabella escaped to the woods.

The friary was later turned into a police barracks, part being set aside as the Unione, a club for the city's elite. Nicola De Bellis of unhappy memory once held court here. During the agricultural disturbances of the early 1900s, Gioia suffered miserably, De Bellis, who was its mayor as well as its deputy, ensuring that the landlords' overseers had police help in breaking strikes. At elections no-one dared to vote against the "King, Tsar and G.o.d of Gioia del Colle", police and gangsters with revolvers patrolling the streets to see that the hostile or uncommitted stayed at home. On one occasion the city voted unanimously for De Bellis. In 1920 mounted estate guards rode down a hundred striking field-hands just outside the city, killing ten labourers and wounding another thirty.

Until quite recently, after funerals at Gioia the coffins were taken from the church-door to the graveyard on a hea.r.s.e drawn by black-plumed, red-hooded horses. This could often be seen en route, sometimes bound for a funeral in Ma.s.safra, Noci or Santeramo, or returning at night to Gioia. Once there was an accident in the dark, a car killing two of the lead horses, but the service was soon resumed, to meet popular demand.

Gioia del Colle acquired a brief notoriety in 1999 during the Kosovo war, when planes flew from a NATO aerodrome outside the city to drop bombs from a safe alt.i.tude onto the Serbs, and pound them into submission.

There is not much to bring a sightseeing traveller to San Michele, apart from the Museum of Country Life in an otherwise uninteresting castle. This has a fine collection of ploughs, olive-wood presses for wine or oil, pruning-knives for olive-trees, short-handled mattocks that deformed a man before he was fifty and yokes for the oxen that were used until the Second World War. What look like lacrosse-sticks were nets for catching small birds by night. Preserved in jars of wine and bay-leaves for feast days, these birds were often the only meat ever tasted by labourers and their families.

At Capurso the Royal Basilica of the Madonna of the Well houses yet another miraculous icon. Together with the gigantic Franciscan friary that once served it, the basilica was built by King Charles VII in 1740, his son Ferdinand IV adding its majestic Baroque faade thirty years later. Rooms at the side contain ex-votos (trusses, corsets, sticks, splints, crutches, wooden limbs, wedding-dresses and baby-clothes) while a gallery of crude paintings shows the Madonna saving suppliant donors. In 1705 she appeared in a vision to a priest of Capurso, Don Domenico Tanzella, who had been diagnosed as incurably ill, and told him to drink the water from a nearby cistern. After being completely cured, he explored the cistern and found the icon. Pilgrims still toil down the long stairs below the basilica to drink the healing water.

The cistern here began as a grotto chapel for Basilian monks, who painted a fresco of the Virgin on the rockface the icon. Like so many other Apulian shrines, Capurso is Byzantine in origin.

25.

The Battle of Cannae, 216 BC

Nearly the whole army met their death here...

Livy, "The History of Rome"

HANNIBAL'S TRIUMPH over the Romans at Cannae is one of the world's great victories. A foreign army consisting mainly of mercenaries annihilated a well-led, well-equipped, much bigger force fighting for its homeland. Down the centuries soldiers have been fascinated by the battle and, even if Apulia were known for nothing else, it would still be famous because of Cannae.

Hannibal's strategy was to beat the Romans so often that their allies in the Roman Confederation would eventually abandon them as a lost cause. He had already destroyed two Roman armies, in 218 BC at the River Trebia and in 217 at Lake Trasimene. Nevertheless, the Romans remained convinced that their legions were invincible.

He had wintered his troops in Apulia, at Gereonium near Lucera, and during the summer seized the town of Cannae to provide himself with a base from where he could devastate all Southern Italy. The Romans decided that they had to engage and eliminate him at all costs.

The battle took place on 2 August not far from Cannae, at the foot of the Murge and on the banks of the River Aufidus, today known as the Ofanto. The consuls Emilius Paulus and Terentius Varro, one cautious and the other rash, who according to custom commanded on alternate days, had 80,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry. Hannibal had 40,000 foot-soldiers, Gaulish and Spanish swordsmen, Libyan spearmen and Balearic slingers, together with 10,000 Gaulish, Spanish and Numidian cavalry. It was the turn of Varro, the rash consul, to command and despite their inferiority in cavalry, the Romans marched across the flat Apulian plain to attack Hannibal.

On his right, next to the river, Varro placed his armoured hors.e.m.e.n, volunteer Roman citizens, putting the more effective allied cavalry on his left towards the plain. His infantry was in the centre, legionaries in armour with shields, short swords and javelins. They marched in unusually deep formation, to give them maximum impact so that they would smash through the opposing centre. A screen of light troops, archers, slingers and javelin men ran ahead of the legionaries as they advanced. When the Romans got near, they saw that Hannibal's infantry in the centre was in a very odd formation, his swordsmen bowed outwards in an arc, with the Libyan spearmen on their flanks. More conventionally, on his left, next to the river and facing the Roman heavy cavalry, he had put his own heavy cavalry, while on his right the Numidian hors.e.m.e.n were placed opposite the Roman allies' horse.

As the Romans grew closer, Hannibal's screen of Balearic slingers, the best in the Mediterranean, opened fire. Their sling-shots inflicted many casualties, smashing the arm of one of the Roman consuls, Emilius Paulus. Then Hasdrubal, Hannibal's chief engineer, led his mounted Celts in a charge against the Roman heavy cavalry, routing them, after which he brought his men across the field to help the Numidians break the allied cavalry. But about 500 Numidians surrendered, throwing down their shields and javelins, and were taken to the Romans' rear.

Meanwhile, in the centre the Roman legions were pressing for-ward steadily, pushing back the Gaulish and Spanish swordsmen so that the arc-shaped formation was reversed, becoming concave. But as the closely packed Romans advanced, the Libyan spearmen began to outflank them, attacking from each side. Suddenly the Numidian 'prisoners' behind drew swords from beneath their cloaks, picked up shields from the fallen and started slashing the Romans' backs and legs. Having sent the other Numidians in pursuit of the Roman and allied cavalry, to ensure it did not return, Hasdrubal now brought his hors.e.m.e.n back and charged the Roman legions from the rear.

Surrounded on all sides, they were annihilated. By the end of the day, out of 86,000 Romans, 70,000 had been killed and another 4,500 taken prisoner. The dead included the consul Emilius Paulus, twenty-nine tribunes and eighty senators. Among the few who escaped, fleeing to Canosa or Lucera, was the consul Varro. Many thought that this shattering defeat meant the end of the Republic.

Despite centuries of pa.s.sionate debate, it is not possible to re-construct the battle with complete accuracy, since the River Ofanto has altered course. Livy says the Romans were defeated as much by Hannibal's brilliant use of ground as by his troops: "a wind that got up, locally known as the 'Volturnus', hampered the Romans by throwing dust in their eyes." Ramage asked his guide "if he had ever seen this phenomenon, and he said that it was not uncommon in autumn, after the stubble had been burnt, and the land exposed to the air, for clouds of dust to be driven along the plain."

Like Ramage, most of the travellers had been brought up to read Livy, and in consequence Cannae was a place of pilgrimage for them, one of the main reasons for visiting Apulia.

Not only early travellers were fascinated by the battle. At the end of the nineteenth century, Cannae became an obsession with the chief of the German Imperial General Staff, Count Alfred von Schlieffen, who wrote a book about it Hannibal's tactics inspiring his plan for the next war against France. He hoped to tempt the French into invading Germany and then attack their flank with overwhelming strength through Belgium. In 1914, however, the infallible Schlieffen Plan went off at half-c.o.c.k because the German commander, Field-Marshal von Moltke, lost his nerve when the Russians advanced with unexpected speed into East Prussia, and brought too many troops back to Germany.

26.

Maundy Thursday at Noicattaro

Whosoever doth not bear his cross and come after me, cannot be my disciple...

"Gospel of St John"

MOST MODERN VISITORS TO APULIA, seduced by the blue of the Adriatic, confine themselves to the beautiful cities of the coast or the Baroque splendour of Lecce. If they bother to adventure inland into the Murge, it is usually to inspect such showpieces as Ruvo or Alberobello, or to wander over the battlefield of Cannae. They miss a lot that is well worth seeing.

Noicattaro is among the Murge's quieter little cities, and at first sight does not look very interesting, save for a good Romanesque chiesa madre from the thirteenth century. Formerly its name was Noja, only becoming Noicattaro in 1863. All that Pacich.e.l.li could find to say about the city was that it was "the seat of the Duchy of Noja of the Lords Carafa, set amid fertile fields". And full of "commodious houses, palaces and convents."

The abate does not mention an incident that occurred some years before his visit. In 1676 a servant of the Count of Conversano was caught poaching in the forest which then surrounded the city and resisted arrest so violently that the Duke of Noja sent him home minus ears and nose. Shortly after, Count Giulio Acquaviva came to Noja at dead of night with 300 armed men, broke into the ducal palazzo, dragged the duke out of bed, bound him and threatened to amputate his features in the same way. Only the tears of his d.u.c.h.ess and of his mother the dowager saved the Lord Carafa.

As has been seen, there was a bloodthirsty streak in this branch of the Carafa family who were also Dukes of Andria, and the unfortunate citizens had to put up with some occasionally savage misrule. Adjoining the main piazza at Noicattaro are the battered remnants of what was once the Carafa's palace, where a heartfelt inscription on a worn tablet hails "the breaking of the feudal yoke."

In November 1815 bubonic plague broke out at Noja, probably imported from Albania. For a month the citizens refused to believe it. Then the entire city was put into quarantine for a year, three trenches being dug around the walls and cannon mounted at the gates, to prevent anybody leaving; if a man tried to jump over the trenches, he was shot by the guard of the cordon sanitaire (quarantine barrier). Three bored soldiers who used a pack of cards thrown to them by someone inside the city went in front of a firing squad. The carnival became a Dance of Death, when out of fifty celebrating the days before Ash Wednesday forty-five were dead within a week. No less than two thirds of the population died of the plague, the last in June 1816.

When Keppel Craven came two years later, he found a ghost town: "The whole was untenanted, the habitations having been unroofed at the time that the general purification took place; this consisted in repeatedly burning all suspected clothes, goods and furniture, and in renewed ablutions and fumigations, followed by a sc.r.a.ping of the walls and universal white-washing." The chiesa madre was white-washed too, when the first victims were buried there in a communal tomb inscribed: Sepolcro di Appestati Pena di morte a chi osa aprirlo (Tomb of the plague-stricken Who dares open does so on pain of death) Most, however, were buried in a plague-pit next to the Augus-tinian priory on the edge of the city, which had been converted into a plague-hospital.

The drama of Maundy Thursday at Noicattaro rivals anything that takes place in Italy during Holy Week. After a white-hooded confraternity, a doleful band and finally the sindaco (mayor) in tri-coloured sash have pa.s.sed, there seems little point in staying. Then, dimly lit by small red lamps on every balcony, people are seen to be gazing intently at something outside one of the lesser churches. Suddenly a huge cross rises from the ground, borne by a figure in black, shrouded from hooded head to ankles, hands black-gloved, feet bare; an iron chain with links an inch thick is tied to one ankle.

In the dusk, carrying the great cross, the faceless penitent staggers down the road, preceded by boys cracking wooden rattles and followed by a growing crowd. There is no sound other than rattles and dragging chain. The figure falls heavily three times, in memory of Christ's Pa.s.sion. It leaves the cross at the main door of the chiesa madre, to kneel at the high altar; a dull, repeated thudding is heard, the penitent scourging itself with the chain. Rising from its knees, it goes out into the moonlight to pick up the cross (which weighs 60 kgs) and slowly continues its painful way down the road to the church of the Carmine. Again, it falls heavily three times. The silent crowd follows. Now and then, someone runs forward to touch the cross. A further scourging takes place before the high altar of the Carmine, above which hangs a text: AS THE PELICAN IN THE DESERT WOUNDS HERSELF AND DIES SO THAT HER BROOD MAY ENDURE AND LIVE, SO CHRIST GAVE HIS BODY AND BLOOD FOR OUR SALVATION THAT WE MIGHT LIVE.

The rapt crowd has entered the church in the penitent's wake, watching mutely. Suddenly, a second figure in black appears, crawling up the aisle on its knees. On reaching the altar, it gives itself another thirty blows with its chain. Some of the community of brown-habited Carmelite friars, sitting mummified in the crypt below, have heard similar blows every Lent for over two hundred years.

On that Maundy Thursday night you will see at least a dozen other hooded figures in black carrying huge crosses to every church in Noicattaro. Despite bleeding feet they will go on doing so until dawn breaks. They are the confraternity of the Addolorato, men and women whose ident.i.ties are known only to the confraternity's chaplain, doing penance not just for their sins but for those of the entire community.

On Good Friday, in almost every Apulian city a black-robed statue of the Madonna Dolorosa, a silver dagger piercing her heart, is borne through the streets, escorted by a mournful town band, hooded confraternities and hundreds of women in black. At Molfetta a nineteenth century Neapolitan statue of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane is carried on the shoulders of the oldest confraternity in Apulia, the Arciconfraternita di Santo Stefano; at His feet lies a reliquary containing a fragment of the True Cross. At San Marco in Lamis the sorrowful Madonna is preceded by fracchie, huge wooden cones that are drawn at the head of the procession and then set on fire.

On Easter Sunday, together with a life-sized statue of the Risen Christ, a doll representing Lent is paraded in some places. Stuffed with fireworks, the doll is thrown onto a flaming bonfire while the crowd cheers. These ancient processions derive from the old pagan spring festivals but the form they take is a legacy of Spanish rule, and Apulians from all walks of life take part in them.

27.

The Ma.s.serie

The word is not rendered by 'farm house', which gives but an inadequate idea of the ma.s.seria.

Charles Macfarlane, "The Lives and Exploits of Banditti and Robbers"

ON THE MURGE you never see a house of any antiquity outside the cities, apart from the odd castle or ma.s.seria. One or two of the ma.s.serie have been converted into small hotels whose guests wrongly a.s.sume that they were manor houses, but in reality the n.o.bles who owned them preferred to inhabit a castle or a palazzo in the local city, rarely visiting the ma.s.seria and then merely to hunt. They were not so much farmhouses as fortified depots for agricultural produce that at certain times of the year lambing, sowing, reaping, pruning, fruit-picking, wine-making, etc took on the role of villages. Strongholds with battlements and cannon, defended by armed guards, they sheltered communities of farm workers who otherwise lived in the cities.

Built as protection against slave-raiders or brigands, the surviving ma.s.serie (which are not confined to the Murge) generally date from between the sixteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, although their origin is far older. Sometimes they have rueful names, for example Spina, Petrose, Scaserba, Campi Distrutti or della Femina Morta, that hint at the harsh existence of the old Apulian countryside. Most are deserted, crumbling into ruin; bleak monuments to a way of life that ended only a little over seventy years ago and is still remembered by a handful of very aged men and women. A few have been modernised, serving as ordinary farm houses.