An Armchair Traveller's History Of Apulia Part 3

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 gra.s.s 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 Taranto.

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 fas.h.i.+onable 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 "Andre 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 Sat.u.r.day. 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 [n.o.ble 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.

Augustus Hare found Foggia "a handsome town", yet only a little later Janet Ross thought it "dirty and mean, and the dust is worse than Egypt". She was astonished by the lack of water, especially in summer. This was old Apulia's perennial problem and explained why the region often seemed so dirty to the travellers. In Mrs Ross's day bottled water from Venosa was available, for those who could afford it.

"There would be no object in lingering at Foggia if it were not for the excursions", Hare tells us. One of these was a visit to the sanctuary of the Madonna dell' Incoronata, about six miles south of the city: "It is the oak wood in which Manfred, flying from his enemies in 1254, worn out with fatigue, and frozen by icy rain, lighted in terror the fire which he feared would betray him; and where, five years after, as a victorious king, he illuminated the forest with wax lights, and invited 12,000 people to a banquet in commemoration of his escape."

During the Middle Ages, much of the Tavoliere was covered by the same sort of dense woodland you can still see in the Gargano, and Frederick II had extended the Forest of the Incoronata, planting both oak and elm. The Hohenstaufen held some famous hunting parties in this forest, one of King Manfred's continuing for several days and involving fifteen hundred people. Hunting went on here as late as the eighteenth century. "The Puglian sportsmen run down hare with greyhounds, and pursue the wild boar with one large lurcher, and two or three mastiffs", writes Swinburne. "The hunters ride with a lance and a pair of pistols."

Very little of the Hohenstaufen's woodland remains, and nowadays the Incoronata is best known as a place of pilgrimage. In the eleventh century a herdsman discovered a statue of the Virgin in the branches of an oak tree, after his cows had knelt down reverently around it. A chapel was built on the spot and later the original statue was replaced by a thirteenth century one of blackened wood, a Madonna and Child. Janet Ross watched pilgrims dragging themselves towards the altar on their knees. "Some women were flat on their stomachs licking the filthy pavement as they wriggled along", she writes: "Their faces were soon such a ma.s.s of dirt that they no longer saw where they were going, and a relation led them by a handkerchief held in one hand. Near the altar the pavement was streaked with blood, and it was revolting to see the swollen, cut tongues of the wretched, panting creatures, sobbing hysterically as they tried to call upon the Madonna to help them."

Today's pilgrims are no less devout, if more restrained. In the past they arrived on foot or in the high-wheeled Apulian carts; now most come by coach or car, although some continue the tradition of walking between Monte Sant' Angelo, Bari and the Incoronata for their respective saint's days, all of which fall in May. The Sanctuary of the Incoronata is now a large modern church, quite unlike that seen by Janet Ross. During the service for the robing of the Virgin and Child the women's ceaseless chanting is led by someone with a peculiarly harsh yet musical voice, their refrain being "Evviva Maria! Evviva Maria!" After an hour or so of chanting, the Madonna and Child appear above the altar to rapturous applause. Slowly the black wooden statue descends on the platform, winched down by a boy feverishly turning a handle at the side. Once safely installed on the altar there is more clapping and renewed shouts of "Evviva Maria!" (the bishop's sermon is applauded with no less enthusiasm). The Virgin and Child are now taken to one side; last year's robes and crowns are removed and the statue is re-dressed in gorgeous new ones. Then, accompanied by civic dignitaries and a police escort, they process slowly round the large church and back to the altar.

The Incoronata preserves something of the Tavoliere of long ago. Augustus Hare claimed that "at all times the place is worth a visit to those who can admire flat scenery, and the... Cuyp-like effects of the oxen and horses and groups of pilgrims (for some are here always) seen against the delicate aerial mountain distances; and in the beautiful colouring of the plain, pink with asphodel in spring, or golden with fenocchio."

During the Second World War large airfields were built near Foggia, from which the Regia Aeronautica took off to bomb Greece, and then Malta and British s.h.i.+pping in the Mediterranean. When Italy changed sides in 1943 the Luftwaffe operated from here, trying to stem the Allied advance. The German troops on the ground were too few in number to put up much of a defence, how-ever, and the airfields' capture in the autumn of the same year enabled the Allies to bomb not only Austria and Southern Germany but also the vital oil wells of Romania.

Sadly, during the brief German occupation of the airfields the city of Foggia was more heavily bombed than anywhere else in Apulia, losing a good deal of its Baroque architecture. Traces of the damage can be seen even today. Yet it still retains something of its charm and, above all, that glorious cathedral.

13.

The Tavoliere: Lucera, Troia and Cerignola

We are on a hill a mere wave of ground; a kind of spur, rather, rising up from the south quite an absurd little hill, but sufficiently high to dominate the wide Apulian plain.

Norman Douglas, "Old Calabria"

THE WESTERN SIDE of the Tavoliere is bounded by the foothills of the Appenines, on one side of which stands Lucera. A reasonably important city in ancient times, supposedly founded by the Homeric hero, Diomedes of the Great War Cry, there was a temple of Athene Ilias here, guarded by dogs, who, it was claimed, barked at the barbarous Daunians but fawned on Greeks. The Romans founded a colony of 20,000 veterans, giving the city a fine amphitheatre.

Lucera's golden days, however, were in the thirteenth century under the Hohenstaufen, when Frederick II built the biggest and most luxurious of his fortress-palaces in the city, its curtain-walls large enough for a sizeable town, with twenty-four towers. "All round the outside of those turreted walls (they are nearly a mile in circ.u.mference; the enclosure, they say, held sixty thousand people) there runs a level s.p.a.ce", wrote Norman Douglas. "This is my promenade at all hours of the day. Falcons are fluttering with wild cries overhead; down below, a long, unimpeded vista of velvety green, flecked by a few trees and sullen streamlets and white farm-houses the whole vision framed in a distant ring of Appenines."

The Emperor installed a colony of 16,000 Saracens from Sicily in the enclosure and in the ruins of the old Roman town, and they created a new, Muslim, Lucera with a mosque and a souk. "No monarch has ever had more grateful or more loyal subjects than Frederick's Saracens at Lucera", comments the Prussian Gregorovius. "They formed his Praetorian Guard, his Zouaves, his Turcos, light cavalry with javelins and poisoned arrows, a crack corps." The Emperor's personal bodyguard was exclusively recruited from these Saracens so that enemies nicknamed him 'The Sultan of Lucera'. His Muslim colonists included not only warriors but potters, forgers of Damascus steel, makers of war machines, Greek fire and poisoned arrows some of their women made carpets, cus.h.i.+ons and harnesses, while others were courtesans.

The custodian suspected Norman Douglas of being a treasure-hunter, probably because the Emperor was known to have kept his money at Lucera: "After a shower of compliments and apologies, he gave me to understand that it was his duty, among other things, to see that no one should endeavour to raise the treasure which was hidden under these ruins; several people, he explained, had already made the attempt by night."

It was essential for King Manfred to gain the support of the Lucera garrison when his brother, Emperor Conrad, died in 1254. As soon as he arrived at the city the Saracens cheered him from the battlements, but their commander, John the Moor, "whose heart was as black as his face", had gone off to pay homage to the Pope, leaving orders that the gates must be opened to no one. His lieutenant, Marchisio, refused to admit Manfred. The king was about to crawl through a culvert beneath the walls when the entire garrison except for Marchisio rushed to the main gate, threw it open, placed Manfred on a horse and led him into Lucera in triumph.

When the castle surrendered in 1269 to Manfred's supplanter, Charles of Anjou, he left the Saracens in peace. However, in 1300 his son Charles II made them choose between death and conversion to Christianity. Some think that a secret, clannish people who lived at Troia until quite recently, the Terrazani (the Earthy Ones), are descended from the Lucera Saracens.

Much of Frederick's palace survived until the eighteenth century, including a great octagonal tower, but then the stones were used to build new law courts at Lucera. When Janet Ross came and admired the castle's "beautiful warm yellow-ochre colour" in the 1880s, she found an old woman, who had come from the Abruzzi for the winter with her family and 800 sheep. They lived in a crude shelter they had made inside the walls, a few planks covered with felt, sleeping on a pile of sheepskins.

On a low hill between Lucera and Torremaggiore lie the scanty ruins of another of the Emperor's fortresses, Castel Fiorentino. Riding to Lucera, he fell ill from dysentery and rested here when too weak to go further. Astrologers had warned him he would die "among flowers" near an iron door, and all his life he had avoided Florence. Learning that there was an iron door behind a curtain near his bed, the Emperor muttered, "This is where, long ago, they said I would die, and G.o.d's will must be done." He died on 13 December 1250. His supporters claimed he did so in a monk's habit, his enemies that he expired grinding his teeth with rage and refusing the Sacraments.

"The road... to Troia (Inns, most miserable) pa.s.ses through a most desolate country which till lately was completely in the hands of brigands", Augustus Hare tells us. "The town is situated on a lofty windstricken eminence, and occupies the site of the ancient Accas or Acca". Utterly destroyed during the barbarian invasions, Aecae lay in ruins till 1018 when Basil Boiannes, Catapan of Bari, built a heavily fortified new town, which he filled with Greek settlers but called 'Troy'. Norman Douglas writes of "Troia, wrapped in Byzantine slumber", yet while it is certainly sleepy no one else can see anything remotely Byzantine about it.

Hare thought the Romanesque cathedral, begun in 1093 on the site of a Byzantine church, "the n.o.blest in Apulia", admiring "a great rose-window of marvellous beauty", but adds "The exquisitely beautiful interior has suffered terribly from a recent wholesale 'restoration' at the hands of its bishop, by whom it has been bedaubed with paint and gilding in the worst taste".

However, the city's commanding position over the plain ensured that the cathedral would be heavily bombed in 1943, after which it returned to something like its Norman appearance. Two wonderful green bronze doors with lions, lambs, dogs and dragons, were made in Benevento in 1119.

A few miles south of Troia is the little town of Orsara di Puglia. In the thirteenth century the huge castle was a commandery of the Knights of Calatrava, Spanish warrior monks, but it began as a Norman keep. Later it became a palazzo baronale (baronial estate). During an attempt to relieve the besieged fortress in 1462, King Ferrante unexpectedly defeated his Angevin rival, the Duke of Calabria a decisive victory which saved his crown.

The battle that decided if France or Spain would rule Southern Italy was fought at Cerignola, south-east of Foggia, in April 1503. A French army under the fire-eating Duc de Nemours had been marching towards Troia in search of the Spanish, mistaking giant stalks of fennel for enemy lancers, many dying from thirst because, this being the beginning of the Apulian summer, there was no water in the few rivers or streams. At dusk the French finally located the Spaniards near Cerignola, camped behind a shallow ditch and a bank of earth on a small, vine-covered hillock; they included some of the new arquebusiers. Convinced that his men-at-arms and pikemen could easily storm such a feeble earthwork, Nemours insisted on an immediate a.s.sault, which he led in person. Almost at once, he was killed in the ditch by an arquebus bullet through the head, all his officers being shot down with him. Leaderless, the French troops fled across the flat plain, pursued by Spanish light horse, who killed large numbers of them. The military significance of this brief engagement lies in it having been the first really important battle to be decided by small-arms fire.

Under the long and repressive government by viceroys sent from Spain which now began, these three little towns on the Tavoliere became somnolent backwaters. It has been said that the only benefits the Spaniards brought to Apulia were tomatoes and wrought-iron balconies, yet at least they were accompanied by two hundred years of peace.

Although Cerignola is one of the oldest cities in Apulia, it was totally devastated in 1731 by the same earthquake that destroyed Foggia. "To look upon it today one might think it a creation of our own time, even the cathedral being an entirely modern building" is Edward Hutton's ponderous verdict. Designed in a style the guide-book calls "goticheggiante" ("gothic"), the neo-gothic cathedral houses the sole survival from the medieval city, a thirteenth century painting of the Virgin, the "Madonna di Ripalta" who is the city's protectress. "The place is scarcely worth a visit, but it bears witness to the transformation of all this country by modern methods of agriculture which are fast turning the better and higher part of this ancient pasture land into vineyards and olive plantations", writes Hutton.

He seems to have had not the slightest inkling that for all too many Apulians the 'transformation' had made life on the Tavoliere very nearly as wretched, painful and lethal as a battlefield.

14.

Life on the Old Tavoliere

The northern plains of Apulia are still, as in the time of Strabo and Pliny, famous for the rearing of sheep...

Augustus Hare, "Cities of Southern Italy and Sicily"

WHEN HARE WROTE this in the early 1880s, sheep farming had been giving place to wheat on the Tavoliere for nearly twenty years. The traditional way of life had almost gone for ever, and he was lucky to see it.

Each autumn the ancient Samnites had brought their flocks down to the low ground of Apulia, returning to the Abruzzi for the summer gra.s.s. Ramage was told at Ascoli Satriano that "during the later ages of the Roman Empire a tax was levied on all sorts of cattle and sheep thus migrating." The system was known to Frederick II, who ordered compensation for anyone whose trees or crops were damaged by the animals: his laws were not enforced, resulting in the loss of great tracts of Apulian woodland, since the trees' self-seeding was annihilated by goats. In 1442, not only did King Alfonso make the shepherds pay tolls for grazing their sheep here, but also for selling their flocks and skins, wool or cheese, solely at Foggia. Taxes per hundred sheep had to be paid to the Foggia customs house, the Dogana delle Pecore, while the king guaranteed protection and drove-roads for the flocks. Over the centuries the drove-roads, the tratturi, came to form a bewilderingly complex network known as the Draio.

Wild animals were attracted by the grazing. When King Ferrante rode out from Barletta in 1462 to fight the Duke of Calabria, he saw a cloud of dust so big that he thought it was a huge enemy army and fled back to Barletta. Later he realised that it had only been a herd of deer.

Landowners were forced to give up land for several months a year, to provide the enormous tracts needed for grazing, expanded as the number of sheep increased. Pasturage eventually included not only the Tavoliere but the Murge, part of the Salento and the lower slopes of the Gargano, causing widespread destruction of arable and the disappearance of whole villages, unable to grow the vegetables that formed their diet. In the fifteenth century there were 600,000 sheep, by the seventeenth four and a half million. The Dogana delle Pecore at Foggia was such a source of wealth that, during the brief period when the French and Spanish divided Southern Italy between them, they agreed to share the Dogana's extremely lucrative revenues from tolls and taxes.

Each flock of sheep was accompanied by a shepherd, a dairyman and a cheese-maker, all dressed in sheepskins, living on coa.r.s.e bread, oil, salt, sheep's milk and cheese, sleeping on sheepskins in a sheep-skin tent. Two white Abruzzesi dogs, with spiked collars for protection against wolves, guarded each flock, a mule carrying the tent and the cheese-making utensils. Every flock of three or four hundred was part of a large flock of ten thousand, known as the punta that was supervised by a head shepherd, an under-shepherd and a head dairyman. Sometimes the wives stayed in the mountains, spinning or looking after the crops, but very often they and their children came too, on horses and donkeys. Franois Lenormant compared this once familiar spectacle to a folk migration.

The unusually white-wooled sheep nearly always belonged to a breed known in Apulia as the pecora gentile. Some said that the breed had been introduced from Spain by King Alfonso, but more probably it was indigenous. (Tarantine sheep were famous in antiquity and wore coats to keep their white fleeces clean). Shorn twice a year, completely in the spring but only half in the summer, these sheep were particularly valued for their excellent cheese, which made up an important part of the Tavoliere's diet and was worth more than the wool, earning the owners of the flocks a great deal of money.

There was a long-developed art in making the cheeses and an experienced shepherd could tell from their taste on what sort of gra.s.s and in which month the sheep had been feeding when milked a skill that, even now, is not quite extinct at certain ma.s.serie on the Murge. In years of drought he would proudly prefer to let his flock die rather than feed it on wheat in place of gra.s.s.

The punte met annually at the Foggia sheep fair, their shepherds solemnly leading them in a ceremonial review before the chief tax-man, 'Il Magnifico Doganiere', who wore a special robe of office. This splendid dignitary ranked as a magistrate and had his own tribunal. The fair took place in May, when the pilgrims were re-turning through the city from the feast days of the Madonna, the Archangel Michael and St Nicholas that had replaced the old pagan spring festivals. "On this occasion Foggia becomes a place of great resort and gaiety, even for the Neapolitan n.o.bility", Henry Swinburne observed in 1780. "They come here to exercise their dexterity at play upon the less expert country gentlemen, whom they commonly send home stripped of the savings of a whole year."

Some farmers began to lease more land than they needed for pasture, sowing corn from which they made a hefty profit because of the low price they paid for the lease. In consequence, during the early eighteenth century, a considerable amount of wheat was being grown on the Tavoliere. Such crops were of course technically illegal and in emergencies, Swinburne tells us, the authorities enforced the letter of the law ruthlessly. "In the famine of 1764, instead of encouraging the farmers of Puglia to throw a reasonable supply of corn into Naples by the offer of a good price and speedy payment, the ministry sent soldiers into the province to take it by force, and drive the owners before them, like beasts of burden, laden with their own property. Such as were unwilling to part with it, by compulsion and upon such hard terms, carried their corn up into the hills and buried it. If they were detected in these practises, they were hanged."

This period saw the start of emigration to America, if on a comparatively small scale. Henry Swinburne tells us that Apulian labourers were crossing the Atlantic during the eighteenth century, returning home after a few years. Others found seasonal work in France, Germany and the Low Countries, including musicians, who when not playing their fiddles or bag-pipes, dug ditches. A fair number of these came from the Tavoliere.

Another eighteenth century development was the authorities' concern about the enormous amount of Tavoliere land that belonged to the Church, two thirds of the total and increasing daily. One reason for this was the notorious 'soul-will' or 'testamento dell' anima', the words "I bequeath my lands to the Church" muttered on a death-bed, that needed no written proof and merely the witness of the priest and his sacristan. Once it belonged to the clergy, land could neither be sold nor taxed. Despite t.i.thes, the abbeys usually had a fairly good relations.h.i.+p with the peasants, and were often model farmers, but the system was costing the Crown large sums in lost revenue. During the 1760s the government made soul-wills illegal, abolished t.i.thes and dissolved several monasteries.

As soon as the French occupation began in 1806, not only were many more monasteries dissolved, but the Dogana delle Pecore and the Apulian System were abolished, causing considerable hards.h.i.+p on the Tavoliere. The nomadic shepherds from the Abruzzi and Basilicata suffered most, since they had nowhere else to take their sheep in winter. Many became brigands. However, the Dogana delle Pecore and pasturage rights returned in 1817 after the restoration of the Borbone monarchy.

Terrible misery would ensue in the wake of the Risorgimento, when the new regime sold off the Regno's crownlands and the lands of the Church, United Italy's att.i.tude being essentially that of an a.s.set-stripper. The Apulian System came to an abrupt end in 1865, with the auction of vast areas of the Tavoliere. Since by now this included not just the Capitanata but parts of the Terra di Bari and the Terra d'Otranto, the sales had a disastrous impact on the lives of countless Apulian labourers and their families.

15.

Latifondismo

No words descriptive of wretchedness can portray the utter deprivation of the peasantry in these southern provinces, or the way in which large families are huddled together, with their pigs and fowls, eternally unwashed and covered with vermin, to which in time they become impervious, like the beasts themselves.

Augustus Hare, "Cities of Southern Italy and Sicily"

THE PEASANTS OF THE TAVOLIERE became victims of latifondismo (land owners.h.i.+p), a term derived from the Latin word for the vast estates of Roman times that had been worked by slaves. Even if the Tavoliere men's life on the former estates of the crown and the church or on the sheep runs had been wretched enough, it is no exaggeration to say that now they were reduced to slavery.

The introduction of free trade resulted in the collapse of Southern Italy's factories and textile mills. Overnight, land became the only safe investment. Anyone who had any money or could borrow it rushed to buy when the confiscated estates were sold off, changing the Tavoliere out of recognition. For the first time in centuries it went under the plough, huge latifondi (estates) being created. The province of Foggia became known as 'The Apulian Texas'. No attempt was made to form a new cla.s.s of peasant proprietors, the buyers ranging from finance companies to tradesmen, many from Northern Italy. The enormous new farms were let on very short leases, run by ma.s.sari whose sole concern was to make money as fast as possible, without worrying about the soil, let alone the workers. Grain yields were miserably low, wine of the poorest quality. Because the buyers had exhausted their credit, there was no capital for development, the purchase money going north. Far from "liberating" Apulia, as often claimed, the Risorgimento reduced much of it to semi-colonial status, especially the Tavoliere.

Augustus Hare, not the most compa.s.sionate of men, was horrified by what he saw. "Much of the misery is due to the immense size of the great farms (latifondi), which are worked by gangs under an overseer, and to the absenteeism of landlords... Their vast do-mains are managed by fattori [farmers] or rented by mercanti di campagna [merchants of the campaign], the sole intermediaries between the proprietors and the peasantry, of whom they are often as much the cruel oppressors as the slave owners in South America."

Most Tavoliere labourers worked as diggers, zappatori, boys as young as eight spreading fertiliser or killing mice. Hired by the day, before dawn they lined up in the local town's main piazza (city square), hoping to be hired by the ma.s.saro's overseer, many of whom demanded a bribe to take them on. They then walked as far as twelve kilometres, to work from dawn to dusk, after which they walked back; at harvest time they slept in the fields or in dirty sheds. Their food was bread and pasta, broad beans, a little oil and plants picked on the way to work, vegetable plots having vanished with the common land; meat was eaten only at Easter and Christmas. It was a way of life that broke a man by the time he was fifty, when he became unfit for work in the fields. There was no poor relief, the system operated by the Church having disappeared with the monasteries.

There was compet.i.tion for even this miserable employment, however, from migrant workers like those seen at Foggia by Charles Yriarte in 1876: You would have thought the city's entire population sleeps under the stars, when we walked through interminable rows of sleepers wrapped in cloaks on pavements turned into dormitories... Natives told us that these unwanted lazzaroni [homeless] had been camping on them for three days; they were all peasants from the Abruzzi, come for the harvest... I was able to watch them at my leisure, and they were thin and haggard if well built, dark-skinned; many shook with fever and had a greenish hue; their only belongings consisted of a small bag and a big, worn-down sickle with a very thin blade. All day long they wandered listlessly through the streets, their eyes lack-l.u.s.tre and expressionless.

A small cla.s.s of skilled workers, the annaroli, consisting of ploughmen, vine-dressers, shepherds and carters, were recruited from outside the Tavoliere, so that they would have no kinsmen or friends in the labour gangs, and hired annually instead of daily. They had good pay an ordinary labourer's wage could not even buy the bare necessities of life and vegetable plots. From their ranks were recruited the overseers and estate guards, who were mounted, armed with rifles, cudgels and whips, and accompanied by notoriously vicious dogs.

When American wheat began to be imported in large quant.i.ties in the late 1870s, many landowners went over to vines. Minute plots were let on twenty-five year leases to day-labourers, who somehow found the money to buy them and time to plant and dress vines the owner's overseer making sure the conversion was done the way his master wanted. When the lease expired, the land reverted to the owner, turned into a thriving vineyard at no cost to himself. He then had it worked by day-labourers, whose conditions were only marginally better than in the wheat-fields.

A sub-human existence as a day-labourer was the sole occupation open to four out of five Tavoliere men. Not all accepted it tamely. Overseers and estate-guards were knifed as they slept or had their faces slashed with cut-throat razors, many never daring to go out of doors without a revolver. The fortified ma.s.serie (fortified farms, see chapter 27) were occasionally attacked, the occupants being murdered and the buildings going up in flames. Some labourers became brigands, fighting battles with the carabinieri especially peasants known as 'ciccivuzzi' who had lost their land because of enclosures.

Cerignola at the end of the nineteenth century has been called 'the company town'. Behind the corso (main street) on which stood the land-owners palazzi were the worst slums in Apulia. The streets were muddy paths that doubled as sewers, giving off a sickening stench, the houses hovels with ten people in a single, filthy, windowless room, often underground. Here lived the labourers who formed the bulk of the city's population, paying exorbitant rents. From December to March, when there was no work, they stayed in bed, the only furniture. Diseases such as malaria, trachoma, syphilis and leprosy flourished. The death rate was the highest in Apulia, the chief causes in 1905 being cholera, enteritis and bronchitis, though tuberculosis took its toll. Starvation was the tenth commonest cause of mortality.

Most of the new landowners were ex-tradesmen, the old Apulian n.o.bles making way for people with t.i.tles purchased from the House of Savoy or the Pope. Frank Snowden (in "Violence and Great Estates in Southern Italy") writes, "as parvenu n.o.bility with freshly acquired t.i.tles, the Apulian proprietors a.s.sumed the grand manner. On the rare inspection tours that owners made of their property, for instance, they insisted that the labourers should bow and kiss their hands." To such men their workers were "wild unwashed people who lived underground with their animals, and spoke an impenetrable dialect. The workers believed in magic and committed savage crimes."

The men in the labour gangs saw the new landlords as thieves who had stolen the common lands where they once grew vegetables and kept a pig or a goat. Enclosures had begun during the French occupation, continuing a little under the restored monarchy, but accelerated drastically under the Risorgimento. By 1898 only 6,000 acres remained. "They cannot accept the thought of having been robbed for ever of fields they regard as part of their very being," a journalist observed: "Again and again they revisit them, like some Irish farmer's children brooding over the cabin with a long dead fire from which the family has been evicted."

After decades of bad farming, by 1900 the Tavoliere was producing less and less wheat, a crop fetching lower prices every year. Vineyards were destroyed by phylloxera; what wine was made faced a French tariff war. Employment was harder to find and at Cerignola starving men fell dead in the streets. All over Apulia rioters shouted for work, bread and a guaranteed wage at the start of the day. The first strike took place at Foggia in 1901 and 'peas-ants leagues' (unions) were founded. Their members, who called themselves "syndicalists", demanded the replacement of landlords by workers' co-operatives. In their few free moments, they tried to look like borghesi, wearing tattered frock-coats and battered bowlers instead of the old Apulian folkdress. Yet it was almost impossible for them to air their grievances in the parliament at Rome. Men were given the vote only if they had served in the army or could read and write; most Apulians were too undernourished to be accepted for military service or were illiterate. In any case, the ruling Liberal party was hand in glove with the latifondisti.

Even so, emigration was reducing the supply of cheap labour. "The roles are now reversed, and while landlords are impoverished, the rich emigrant buys up the farms or makes his own terms for work to be done, wages being trebled" Norman Douglas wrote with considerable exaggeration. Besides emigration, another escape from life on the Tavoliere was work on building the new Apulian aqueduct, which began in 1906, although contractors paid starvation wages. To some extent, the effects of emigration and the aqueduct were offset by labourers from the Abruzzi and Basilicata.

The new unions' demands meant bankruptcy for the latifondisti. They fought back, breaking strikes with hired thugs and calling in troops, 2,000 of whom were needed to crush a rising at Cerignola. They welcomed the outbreak of war in 1915; wheat prices rose dramatically, there were government contracts and subsidies, and it forced into the fields women who could be paid less than men. When Italy was nearly defeated in 1917, they staved off revolution by promising to share out the latifondi and restore common rights as soon as the War was over.

The landowners went back on their word in 1918. But Apulian soldiers came home hoping for a Russian-style revolution. Very soon, bands armed with scythes and mattocks were terrorising the Tavoliere, and many other rural areas as well, slaughtering live-stock, burning ma.s.serie and lynching overseers. All workers demanded impossibly high wages.