An Armchair Traveller's History Of Apulia Part 11

Lecce and the Baroque.

43.

Lecce.

To walk once more through the streets of Lecce, gazing up at the great golden bouquets of stone flowers which adorn its palaces and churches.

Sir Osbert Sitwell, "Winter of Content"

FORMERLY THE REGNO'S SECOND MAINLAND CITY, outranking even Bari, Lecce is the capital of the Terra d'Otranto. Although farmed meticulously since ancient times, the area around the city has never known sheep-ranching or wheat-growing on the ma.s.sive scale seen in the Tavoliere, and a large percentage of smallholdings has meant less discontent among the country people than elsewhere in Apulia. Founded by Messapians, from the start Lecce owed its importance to being in the centre of the Salentine peninsula, equidistant from Otranto, Brindisi and Gallipoli.

The Romans knew it as Lupiae. There is a legend that Christianity was introduced here by St Paul's landlord at Corinth, where the Apostle had lodged with Justus, "whose house is hard by the Synagogue." Justus came to Lupiae, says the legend, staying with a local patrician called Publius Orontius, whom he converted and who was later made bishop by St Paul both Justus and Oronzo being subsequently martyred under Nero. Clearly Roman Lecce grew extremely prosperous, as can be seen from the magnificent amphitheatre in Piazza Oronzo, built by Emperor Hadrian.

Destroyed by the Goths and then rebuilt, Lecce suffered the usual horrors at the hands of the Saracens, but stayed under Byzantine rule until captured by the Normans in 1053. Tancred, Count of Lecce became the last Norman King of Sicily in 1189, entertaining Richard Coeur-de-Lion on his way from England to the Holy Land. Under the Angevins the county of Lecce was inherited by the Enghien family, descended from the Dukes of Athens.

When Count Pirro died in 1384, he was succeeded by his seven-teen year old sister, the beautiful Maria d'Enghien, who became Countess of Lecce in her own right. According to Janet Ross, even in the 1880s La nostra Maria was still remembered affectionately as the best ruler in the city's entire history. As we have recounted, her first husband was Raimondello del Balzo Orsini, her second King Ladislao of Naples. After Ladislao's death in 1413, she went home to Lecce where she spent the rest of her life, dying at nearly ninety. Maria was famous for her kind laws; the old and the helpless being exempt from taxes, while strangers who settled in the city need not pay any for three years.

The ruler who has left the most visible mark on Lecce, however, is the Emperor Charles V. He had the huge castle rebuilt in 153949, to guard against the Turks, employing a Salentine architect, Gian Giacomo Dell' Acaja, who erected diamond-shaped bastions and palatial apartments on top of the old Norman fortress. Charles also gave the city unusually ma.s.sive walls, with four great gates. The walls were demolished well over a hundred years ago, but the majestic Porta Napoli (or Arco di Trionfo) survives, still bearing the Imperial coat-of-arms.

Although the eclipse of Otranto ensured Lecce's eventual predominance over the Salento, during the sixteenth century the city had to endure a long lasting economic slump that bankrupted even Salentine magnates, while a population boom forced up food prices. In 1647 the anti-Spanish, anti-feudal revolt spread from Naples, and the combined forces of the viceroy and the n.o.bles had difficulty in putting it down, shedding plenty of blood. Then came the 1656 plague when a quarter of the population died. However, towards the end of the century Lecce started to prosper again, with a surplus of corn, wine, oil, almonds and fruit; tobacco began to be grown, producing excellent snuff, while a famous race of mules was bred. And, as the region's princ.i.p.al city, Lecce attracted legal and administrative business, besides becoming the centre of the Salentine n.o.bility's social life. In consequence, there was a steady demand for new palazzi and churches.

The Baroque architecture they used here until late in the eighteenth century was religious in origin, an exuberant glorification of Catholicism. "Leccese Baroque" is a highly distinctive form, however, warmly admired by some, but fiercely condemned by others. The local stone, a pale honey colour, is very easily carved and purists object to what they regard as wildly extravagant ornamentation.

Anthony Blunt (in "Baroque and Rococo"), however, queries the very existence of the Baroque in Lecce: The phrase Barocco Leccese appears in every Italian text-book on architecture, and the concept is to be found in most English works that mention the architecture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in South Italy, but it can be argued that there is not a single building in Lecce or the surrounding district the Salento which can properly be described as Baroque... Both the faades and the altarpieces of the churches show a richness and gaiety of decoration which have perhaps no parallel, save in Sicily. The decorative motifs employed are, however, mainly derived from a sixteenth century vocabulary which had long been out of date in Rome or even Naples... Leccese architects must have relied primarily on decorative engravings or pattern books and it seems that they continued to use those published in the late sixteenth or seventeenth centuries long after they had been abandoned elsewhere.

He also points out that not even the design of the churches was remotely Baroque, Romanesque rose windows continuing to be employed even in new buildings.

The most typically Leccese Baroque buildings are the group around the Piazza del Duomo. Bernard Berenson thought the cathedral the most beautiful in Italy, but few people can agree with him. It was designed and built between 1659 and 1670 by a local architect, Giuseppe Zimbalo, popularly known as 'Lo Zingarello', The Little Gypsy. The campanile is 270 feet high. ("In the good old times when corsairs ruled the sea, the high campanili all over this country were used as watch towers", Mrs Ross tells us. "In the one at Lecce was a bell, which a sentinel struck in a peculiar way, to give the alarm if he saw suspicious vessels on either sea.") Another good example of Zimbalo's work is the former convent of the Celestines, now known as the Governor's Palace, which Edward Hutton sums up rather well "the amazing baroque faade, with its appalling general design."

There are countless Baroque palazzi in Lecce, often surprisingly small but no less embellished than the churches. The pompous coat-of-arms at their corners or over the doorways enthral students of Italian heraldry.

Pacich.e.l.li liked the style, commenting how suitable the local stone was for "Venetian windows, cornices and other gallant ornament." The duomo was "new and likewise superb." He admired the long, wide street, the gardens with orange trees, and the low cost of food. Less cheerfully, he records how the plague of 1679 had reduced the population to 9,000 souls, although among them were "Patrician families living in great splendour and divers Barons, some of whom have feudal rights, and many doctors and magistrates." But in 1734 the sober Bishop Berkeley thought the "gusto too rich and luxuriant, occasioned without doubt by the facility of their working their stone." He found the people "civil and polite, and so far as we had dealings, honest and reliable." The Abbe de Saint-Non commissioned an etching of the cloister in the Dominican convent, which he found restful after the faade's wearying extravagance. Of Lecce as a whole he says, "This modern town would be one of the most beautiful in existence had it been built with a little taste; for the beauty of the stone and the materials employed give an appearance of grandeur, but the method is de-testable; all the edifices are covered with the worst and most useless sculpture."

Both Swinburne and Riedesel were impressed by the citizens' skills in dancing and making music. The former comments, "Music is here cultivated with a degree of enthusiasm. Many of the n.o.bility are good performers, and proud of exhibiting their skill on solemn festivals. The Leccian music has a very plaintive character, peculiar to itself."

"I enquired throughout Italy at what place boys were chiefly qualified for singing by castration", Dr Burney relates delicately. He was told: the young castrati come from Lecce in Puglia; but before the operation is performed, they are brought to a Conservatorio to be tried as to the probability of voice, and then are taken home by their parents for this barbarous purpose. It is said, however, to be death by the laws to all those who perform the operation and excommunication to everyone concerned in it, unless it is so done, as is presented, upon account of some disorders, which may be supposed to require it, and with the consent of the boy.

Burney particularly admired Leccese folk songs he had heard sung at Naples.

In 1797 Lecce received a visit from the King and Queen of the Two Sicilies, Ferdinand and Maria Carolina, who stayed in the Bishop's Palace. If the Leccesi liked the amiable, long nosed king, they must have found the tiny, haughty queen Marie Antoinette's sister somewhat forbidding. Six years later, the king would be distressed by the news that slave-raiders had abducted 164 people from the province of Lecce.

In 1805 Major Courier of the newly installed French garrison at Lecce reported to his colonel that Captain Tela had been murdered by Don Giuseppe Rao on whom he had been billeted. Seeing his wife going into the captain's room, Don Giuseppe stabbed her and the captain to death with a stiletto. There had been no affair she was delivering his laundry while her husband took little interest in her. But, according to Courier, Don Giuseppe lived in dread of being called a becco cornuto, a cuckold. "In this part of Italy it is the most sensitive point of honour", says Courier. "Here "Becco cornuto" is the most terrible of all insults, worse than thief, murderer, swindler, blasphemer or parricide." He adds that the towns-people were saying they would never catch the murderer, however hard they might look.

Lecce had a resident British governor from 1817 to 1820, Gen-eral Sir Richard Church, given the job of putting down the brigands who terrorised Apulia. He liked "the bright little capital with its white houses, and the little streams running through the streets", and soon got rid of the brigands. The general gave a ball every other week, alternating with one given by the intendente (revenue officer).

Keppel Craven spent a week here in 1818, enjoying "the friendly hospitality of General Church", but found the streets oddly deserted. The city "would commodiously admit a population of 30,000 souls, whereas the present amounts to no more than 14,000." As for the architecture: "extravagant and almost incredible bad taste is exemplified in every building of consequence." Even so, the snuff was excellent, and the people "renowned for their courteous, polished manners."

On a snowy January morning in 1859, Ferdinand II, his queen and his eldest son Francis entered Lecce on their way to meet Francis's bride at Bari; their carriage preceded by four mounted carabinieri bearing torches and followed by six with drawn sabres. In the afternoon the king went to the duomo for a sermon by the bishop, a Te Deum being sung. In the evening he attended a performance by a popular comedian at the Teatro Paisiello, after which there was a banquet and fireworks. (The theatre, built in 1768, is still standing). But Ferdinand was ill, dying from a mysterious disease that had begun after an a.s.sa.s.sin's attempt to bayonet him two years before. He had to remain at Lecce, in the Governor's Palace, for nearly a fortnight. Characteristically, he summoned up enough energy to order the demolition of the medieval walls. This was the last visit to the city by a Borbone sovereign, although during his brief reign Francis II gave orders to extend the Naples rail-way to Lecce by way of Brindisi.

Charles Yriarte went to a reception at the prefecture in 1876, finding: Elegant, amiable, cultivated people, well informed on every subject, everybody speaking French fluently which is unusual on the coast farther down than Ravenna learned archaeologists, distinguished naturalists, administrators, rich landowners from the area around Naples on holiday, glittering officers and, finally, smart women in the latest Paris fas.h.i.+ons without the overdressing that is so common among Southern Italians, who gave me plenty of serious, scholarly conversation, with all the amiable courtesy and friendly outspokenness which is typical of Italy.

"I was told several times, 'Oh Lecce is so gay, the very name calls up a smile; and the Leccese are so civil and pleasant.' All of which we found quite true" observes Janet Ross. But while her hotel, the Risorgimento (still there) was comfortable and clean, the host was put out by her ordering boiled eggs, bread and b.u.t.ter, and coffee with milk at nine every morning: "The idea was so novel, and the mixture so extraordinary, that we always had to wait half an hour. 'Why did we not have a cup of black coffee in bed like other people, and then breakfast properly at mid-day?' " She did not like the architecture "very ugly", "a very orgy of baroque rococo, quite overpowering in the excess of ornamentation."

"Every night during our stay at Lecce we saw rockets, Bengal fire, &c." she records. After one of these displays, I insisted on going into a booth with a large doll hanging outside, to see marionettes as done for the people, not for the gentlefolk. We paid a halfpenny each and clambered up a rickety ladder into the "posti distinti", where our appearance created quite a sensation.

The play was Samson and Delilah: "When Delila came on, with that queer, spasmodic, irresponsible walk belonging to a marionette, and sheared Samson of his ma.s.s of hair with an enormous pair of scissors, the audience applauded vigorously, 'Well done', 'She's the hairdresser for me'."

The highlight of Mrs Ross's visit was meeting a hero of the Risorgimento, the Duke Sigismondo Castromediano. He lived at his castle of Cavallino some miles outside Lecce and came in to show her the city museum. "A very tall half-blind, courteous old man, leaning on the arm of his secretary and surrounded by various professors, some of whom had put on tail-coats and white gloves in honour of the visit of a learned lady." He told her of his life as a political prisoner under the Borboni, "among convicts of the lowest description, imbued with every vice, the refuse of humanity." His health had been broken and he was very poor, reduced to living in one room of his castle. Something of a showman, he had left instructions that his fetters and convict's red jacket should be placed on his coffin at his funeral. He recalled how touched Mr Gladstone had been to hear about his sufferings, especially "the killing out of sheer spite by the gaolers, of a pet nightingale which the poor prisoners had tamed." The Duke told Janet that "nothing gave him such pleasure as to see an Englishwoman" and asked permission to embrace her, after which he kissed her on both cheeks.

The Baroque was still unfas.h.i.+onable during the 1890s when Paul Bourget visited the city. "Here the bad taste is too intense, fancy carried to such extremes with such genius, that the term loses its meaning."

However, in 1902 an architect called Martin Briggs "discovered" Lecce. Eight years later, he published a book, "In the Heel of Italy: a Study of an Unknown City", calling Lecce "a veritable seventeenth century museum", and claiming that here "Baroque architecture may perhaps be seen at its best." Brigg's book persuaded the Sitwells to visit Lecce in 1922, the city elders insisting on paying their bill since they were obviously so distinguished. Sir Osbert Sitwell admired the city even more extravagantly than Mar-tin Briggs: "Lecce, peer of any Italian city in loveliness", was his verdict.

Its citizens are still pa.s.sionately proud of Lecce. They tell strangers how until only recently the palazzi were occupied by duchi, marchesi, conti, baroni, and how they speak better Italian than the Florentines. They talk of Bari as a hideous, heathen place, inhabited by decadent Levantines who have vile manners.

44.

Don Cir, the Bandit Priest

...a robber by profession an unholy wizard in the imagination of other men a devil in reality.

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

ONE WET, WINDY NIGHT in December 1814, a wayfarer hammered on the gate of the castle of Martano in the Terra d'Otranto. Because of the torrential rain the old steward let him in, only to be shot down at once. Fifty hors.e.m.e.n galloped into the courtyard, then ran through the castle, murdering every single servant, including the chaplain and the housekeeper. The 'wayfarer', whose name was Don Cir Annichiarico, burst into the bedroom of the Princess of Martano twenty years old, famous for her beauty, a great heiress and still unmarried demanding her strongbox and her jewel-chest. After finding in them 36,000 gold ducats with diamonds, rubies and pearls, he stabbed the princess and her maid to death, shouting, "Philosophers say that dead b.i.t.c.hes don't bite!"

Then Don Cir and his followers banqueted in the castle hall, drinking the health of La bella principessa with her fine wines, before riding off into the night and the rain. The only person they left alive was the princess's eight year old cousin, who had hidden under a heavily draped table. But for this little boy, no one would ever have known who was responsible for the ma.s.sacre at Martano.

Brigands took full advantage of the confusion after Murat's fall in 1815. The harvest that year was the worst on record, causing famine and then starvation, followed by outbreaks of plague and scarlet fever; in the Terra d'Otranto 17,000 people would die from cerebro-spinal meningitis in 1817. Law and order collapsed, brigands raiding ware-houses and ambus.h.i.+ng grain-convoys, besides robbing and kidnapping. After unsuccessfully campaigning for five months against them in the Capitanata, Colonel del Caretto warned, "They are endangering the realm's food supplies since, as we all know, Apulia is its granary." The campaign that at last broke the brigands was directed from Lecce, by an Irishman.

The Neapolitan commander-in-chief, General Count Nugent (an Irishman formerly in the Austrian service) called in his old friend, Colonel Richard Church. Born in 1784 at Cork, during the Napoleonic Wars, Church had served in Egypt, Calabria and Capri, and in the Ionian Islands, where he commanded a regiment with the unlikely name of "The Duke of York's Greek Light Infantry". Military governor of the Terra di Bari and the Terra d'Otranto with the rank of General, he established his headquarters at Lecce in 1817, and brought the situation under control in less than two months, after a ruthless campaign of what would now be called counter-insurgency, with shrewd intelligence work and cynical bargaining.

Hunting down Cir Annichiarico was among his greatest successes. In retrospect one can see that Don Cir never had much chance of escaping General Church. Yet at the time it did not seem at all like that to the Leccesi, who feared the terrible Annichiarico more than any other living man.

Cir Annichiarico, the son of a prosperous farmer and nephew of a canon, was born in Grottaglie in 1773. At twenty he entered the Taranto seminary, studying under Archbishop Capecelatro and acquiring the prelate's revolutionary politics. But in 1803, by then a priest and choir-master, he committed a murder. Some reports say he killed a rival for the favours of a local beauty, or even the girl herself. The most likely version, however, is that Cir cut the throat of a certain Gisuseppe Mottolese because he refused to marry his sister after seducing her. Sentenced to fifteen years in the galleys, he spent four in an underground dungeon at Naples, before escaping with another prisoner, who introduced him to a secret society known as the Decisi (the Resolute).

At that date the Fratelli Decisi were a group of young men recruited by Pietro Gargano, a cavalry trooper who had deserted from Murat's army. Political outlaws and hardened criminals, they terrorised the Terra d'Otranto, while at the same time enjoying a certain amount of popular support. In order to join this organisation, whose real name was "The Society of Jupiter the Thunderer", the applicant had to commit at least two murders and then undergo tests of courage before his final acceptance. Senior members possessed the power of pa.s.sing death sentences on somebody they disliked. Writing to a victim selected for extortion, they would add four dots in blood to their signature to show they were serious. The society had some of the trappings of freemasonry, such as signs of recognition, pa.s.swords and far from empty threats of dire consequences if secrets were betrayed. But although professing liberal opinions and recruited "to make War against the Tyrants of the Human Race", the society certainly after Cir became its leader appears to have been primarily a means of lining its members' pockets or settling vendettas by murder.

There is a vivid description of Don Cir Annicchiarico in General Church's reminiscences. Although coa.r.s.e-featured and scarfaced, with an upturned nose and red, pig-like eyes, the unfrocked priest had become a dandy: His usual dress was of velveteen, highly laced, with many rows of b.u.t.tons, and belts in every direction. He also always wore several silver chains, to one of which was attached the silver death's-head, the badge of the secret society, the Decisi... On his breast he wore rows of relics, crosses, images of saints, and amulets against the Evil-Eye. His head-dress was a high-peaked drab-coloured hat, adorned with gold band, buckle, and tall black feather, and his fingers were covered with rings of great value.

Armed to the teeth with carbine, pistols and daggers, he carried poison hidden in a red pocket book.

Even if Cir denied killing Giuseppe Mottolese, he admitted to many other murders during his career as a brigand, lasting for nearly ten years. Often disguised as Punchinellos (Neopolitan puppets), he and his band terrorised the Terra d'Otranto. When a girl refused to sleep with him, he went to a dance at her parents' home in Carnival time, wearing his clown's costume, and gave her a last chance. She still refused, so he drugged the party's wine, left the house and then burnt it to the ground with the entire family inside.

Sometimes he said Ma.s.s for his men in an underground chapel before galloping out under his black standard to rob and kill. Macfarlane comments, "banditti... will send a knife into your bosom while a crucifix and a reliquary repose on their own." He also tells us, "Not one of his band could fire his rifle with so sure an aim, or mount his horse like the priest Don Cir". Living in caves or the forest toughened him and, always well mounted, he would ride forty miles a night along lonely paths to gravine where he could hide. His amazing escapes convinced the peasants that "the Abate Annichiarico" must be a necromancer protected by demons and they always gave him warning of approaching troops.

Cir shared the Decisi's dream of a Carbonari republic, persuading them to ally with another secret society, the Patrioti Europei, and try to build an army. Late one night during spring 1817 two of Church's officers were riding to Barletta when they saw a light flickering in the distance. The guides claimed it was a will-o'-the-wisp, but as the horses approached, the officers hid in the under-growth beside the road. The hors.e.m.e.n halted a few yards away, and they heard them say that Cir and Gaetano Vardarelli, another brigand leader, were at Castel del Monte to discuss joining forces. Since both were Carbonari supporters and might well have led their united bands in a full scale rising, the government hastily signed a treaty with Vardarelli to prevent a link-up. Cir immediately offered to clear the Terra d'Otranto of brigands in return for a similar agreement, but was refused.

Church gave a dinner at Lecce where he publicly promised, "I swear never to rest till I have destroyed Cir Annichiarico and all his blood-hounds." He met with constant obstruction, local troops arguing that Cir was a popular hero. The general had to rely on his Swiss officers and Greek irregulars. Often Cir left a Ma.s.seria or a wood just before their arrival, alerted by peasants. When the soldiers raided a safe-house, the Ma.s.seria del Duca near Martina Franca, where he and his brigands had been enjoying a hearty meal, they simply slipped away through the olive groves.

At last, Church learnt that Don Cir was attending a wedding at San Marzano di San Giuseppe, some miles off the Manduria-Taranto road. "A mountain village, straggling up and down among crags and walls, the houses jumbled among patches of olives", is how Church remembered it, "At the top of all a castle, and below the village a belt of woods." The Marchese Bonnelli's castle (still there) had been lent for the wedding by a terrified steward. "The bride, a strapping brigandessa, did not depend on her splendid costume, bright eyes, and straight black brows entirely for her conquests", says the general, "The wine flowed freely, the people gathered round and swore fidelity to Cir and the Decisi with br.i.m.m.i.n.g gla.s.ses and ringing cheers."

However, the troops had followed close on Don Cir's heels. After fighting for several hours, the guests surrendered. Including the bride and bridegroom, caught hiding in a cellar, the survivors were taken prisoner to Francavilla Fontana with 130 horses and 2,000 muskets. Among those executed was the bridegroom, who confessed to having committed twenty-three murders. Cir, however, had escaped on his fast English mare.

Even so, the brigand-priest knew he was doomed. He had already tried vainly to make his peace with the government, and then to take a s.h.i.+p from Brindisi but he could not find the 2000 ducats demanded by the skipper. He realised too that his friends, the Decisi, were betraying his hiding places. Ten days later he was trapped in the Ma.s.seria Scaserba, only ten miles from General Church, who was at Francavilla Fontana. For forty-eight hours, he held out with three companions in the Ma.s.seria's tower, against 130 regular troops and numerous militia, killing or wounding over a dozen of them. Finally, the usual Apulian lack of water forced him to surrender.

Asked by the military tribunal at Francavilla Fontana how many people he had murdered, he replied "E chi lo sa? Saranno tra sessanta e settanta." ("Who knows? Maybe between sixty and seventy.") When a fellow-priest offered him the last rites, the Abate Annichiarico declined the offer with a grin: "Lasciate queste chiacchiere! Siamo dell' istessa professione non ci burliamo fra noi." ("Let's not bother about that nonsense! We belong to the same profession we don't want to laugh at each other.") On 8 February 1818 he was marched through crowded streets to his death in the main piazza at Francavilla Fontana, which was guarded by troops with cannon. Again refusing the last rites, he was blindfolded and made to kneel down with his back to the firing-squad. After a first volley, he was still breathing, muttering to himself. Later a soldier explained what happened next. "Seeing that he was enchanted, we loaded his own musket with a silver bullet, and this destroyed the spell". His head was cut off, and displayed with the words, "Here is the head of the chief of a.s.sa.s.sins, Cir Annichi-arico of Grottaglie." Then it was taken away, to be hung in an iron cage above the main gate of Grottaglie, his birthplace.

Shortly after, Church arrested Don Cir's betrayers, the council of the Decisi, when they met at Grottaglie to plan the general's murder. The troops found them sitting beneath a black banner, not a band of brigands filthy from living rough in the gravine, but ten of Grottaglie's leading citizens, grown rich on extortion and blackmail. They were shot and then beheaded in the same piazza as Cir.

45.

Baroque in the Salento

The Baroque does not know what it wants...

Eugenio d'Ors, "Du Baroque"

THERE IS A MISTAKEN BELIEF that the Baroque in Apulia is confined to Lecce. There are fine examples of Baroque at Apulian cities further north, like the Palazzo del Monte di Pieta at Barletta or the duomo of Monopoli. But it is certainly true that there is far more in the Salento than anywhere else in Apulia. Many of the smaller Salentine cities have churches with wildly extravagant faades and campanili, palazzi with frenziedly elaborate balconies and doorways. Although the style, as at Lecce, sometimes seems to be ornament for the sake of ornament, these are often delightful buildings.

After being destroyed by an earthquake in 1743, the city of Nard spent over forty years rebuilding itself in imitation of Lecce. Even by Leccese standards the church and convent of San Domenico in the piazza of that name are ornate. The faade of the church, attributed to Tarantino, which survived the earthquake of 1743 was built in two phases; the lower part covered with caryatids typical of the earlier period and the upper very much more restrained. There are attractive little palaces in and around the triangular Piazza Antonio Salandra, like the white Palazzo della Pretura, which has an elegant loggia on the first floor over an open arcade. The guglia of the Immacolata in this piazza erected in 1769, is one of only three in Apulia the others being at Ostuni and Bitonto. (A guglia is a Neapolitan folly of Austrian origin, a fantastically decorated, free-standing column.) The streets in the city centre are full of ironwork balconies with swags and caryatids.

The largest city in the Salento after Lecce, Nard has had a peculiarly tragic history. During the breakdown of Spanish and feudal authority in 1647, many of its citizens rose in revolt against their tyrannical feudal lord, the Count of Conversano, Giangirolamo II Acquaviva d'Aragona, who was also Duke of Nard. The count-duke crushed the rebels with a systematic, murderous savagery that has never been forgotten. Even today, the blood-stained Giangirolamo is still one of the great ogres in local folklore, 'Il Guercio di Puglia' 'The Squinter of Apulia'.

There have been other tragedies at Nard, and in more recent times, some of them almost within a very bitter living memory. Because the city was the centre of a highly profitable wheat-growing enclave, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries its people suffered all the horrors of labour gangs. In April 1920 they disarmed the carabinieri, seized their weapons and hoisted the red flag over the Municipio. The authorities had to use artillery and armoured cars to regain control.

Copertino was home to that supremely Baroque figure, Giuseppe da Copertino, the 'Flying Saint' of whom Norman Douglas makes fun in "Old Calabria". In his ecstasies Fra Giuseppe flew into the air, usually up to the chapel ceiling though, if outside, to the treetops; occasionally he took a pa.s.senger, such as his confessor whom he held by the hair. More than seventy flights were logged, the most famous being in 1645, in the presence of a Spanish viceroy. As soon as the great man entered the church, the friar shot up to kiss the feet of a statue above the altar, then flew back over the congregation. The viceroy's wife fainted. He repeated the performance for Pope Urban VIII, flying on the day before his death in 1663.

The ancient castle of Copertino is the largest inland fortress in the Salento other than Lecce. Given to the family of the Albanian hero Skanderbeg, in 1540 they employed a local architect, Evangelista Menga, to add diamond-shaped bastions, sumptuous apartments, gardens on the ramparts and a slanted terrace to channel rainwater into the only bathroom. When Pacich.e.l.li visited Copertino during the 1670s, it had pa.s.sed to the Genoese Pinelli, Dukes of Acerenza, who were clearly excellent hosts, the Abate remarking on "very comfortable and well arranged accommodation."

There is some dramatic Apulian Baroque at Ruffano, a city unvisited by any early traveller, on an unexpected hill rising sharply out of the Salentine plain. The hill is crowned by two palaces and a church. Built in 1626 by Prince Rinaldo Brancaccio, according to an inscription in the courtyard, Palazzo Brancaccio is linked by a great bridge to Palazzo Licci, smaller and of about the same date. The early eighteenth century chiesa madre in the tiny city's main square is another typical piece of Leccese Baroque with an exuberant high altar. A first glimpse of Ruffano is unforgettable.

Most of the Salento's Baroque churches were inspired by Lecce; a good example is that at Galatone, near Nard, where the Sanctuary of the Crocefisso della Pieta has a faade of 1710. Several towns here are a mixture of Romanesque and Baroque, but Galatina is Gothic as well. During the 1390s its Italian-speaking citizens collected 12,000 ducats to ransom their lord, Raimondello del Balzo Orsini, who had been captured by the Turks. In grat.i.tude he built a Latin rite church for them since the chiesa madre, San Pietro, used only the Greek rite. This new church, Santa Caterina, has fine frescoes that were painted during the 1430s. They seem Western enough, with their kings and knights, until you realise that most of the subjects and nearly all of the saints are those venerated by Eastern Christians, such as the Virgin's Dormition or the Emperor Theodosius. Even Raimondello's patron saint turns out to be that Byzantine favourite, Antonio Abate.

Janet Ross was so overwhelmed by the frescoes, "a perfect glory of colour", that a local antiquarian had dark suspicions about her motives for visiting the church. He "dropped behind my artist friend and inquired whether I was a spy of the English government; such things had been heard of, and England was so rich that she could afford to buy the whole church of Santa Caterina and carry it bodily away. It certainly was a curious thing to see a woman travelling about and reading inscriptions on old tombs; he thought it praiseworthy, but very odd."

She was intrigued by much else about the city, including the fast disappearing local language, Greek with many Italian words. "Galatina so enchanted us that when we went to lunch at the small inn we asked whether we could sleep there for the night", she recalls, "It was with difficulty that we could make the people understand but at last they showed us a long room with five beds in it close together. Two were already engaged, and they offered us the other three. So reluctantly we had to go back to Lecce late in the evening."

During the early seventeenth century, egged on by Jesuits the bishops of Apulia banned Ma.s.s in the Greek rite. To suppress it at Galatina, the former parish church of the Greeks, SS Pietro e Paolo, was rebuilt between 1633 and 1663 in the style of Zimbalo. A vigorous example of Counter Reformation triumphalism, its faade is one of the best pieces of Baroque in Apulia.

46.

A Band of Brigands the Vardarelli

Well armed and accoutred, and excellently mounted, their troop was also trained to the most rigid discipline; and Don Gaetano, the elder of the brothers Vardarelli, as well as commander of the band, displayed an activity and skill worthy of a n.o.bler profession.

Keppel Craven, "A Tour through the Southern Provinces of Italy"

A nother of GENERAL CHURCH'S problems was Gaetano Vardarelli. He had deserted from the Borbone army in 1815, rea.s.sembling a comitiva of fifty, and within a year, says Macfarlane, the Vardarelli were "in high feather". They lived off the country, plundering ma.s.serie, extorting money and the grain that was so valuable because of the famine. A raid on Alberobello was beaten off, largely by a farmer's wife, ironically known as 'La Brigantessa' on account of her skill with a musket. Although they seldom murdered travellers, they often kidnapped them or made them change horses with their own tired mounts. The Vardarelli's sister rode with the band, dressed as a man, but she was so badly wounded during a skirmish with troops that Don Gaetano killed the girl to save her from falling into the hands of the soldiers.