An Armchair Traveller's History Of Apulia Part 8

You cannot see the ravine from the road, only the tops of a line of tall Aleppo pines marking where the land suddenly drops for hundreds of feet. Choked by vegetation, a narrow path leads down to the bottom, joining the caves to each other. A landslide has destroyed part of the settlement, including the main church, yet even so, it remains possible to gain a vivid impression of what an underground Apulian city must have looked like during the early Middle Ages.

Among the cave churches around Mottola is San Nicola, dug discreetly into the side of a secluded lama or miniature ravine, filled with p.r.i.c.kly pear, acanthus and loquats. Here are some of the best twelfth and thirteenth century frescoes in Apulia. Despite an iron gate to protect them from vandals, on one occasion thieves broke in and cut out the heads, removing the Child from the Virgin's lap. The head of the Archangel Michael was found in the lama while the Child and the heads of St Parasceva and other saints were recovered at Castellaneta.

Not far from San Nicola, at the Ma.s.seria Casalrotto, is the grotto chapel of Santa Margherita. Originally Byzantine, as can be seen from the frescoes of St Demetrius and the Archangel Michael, it was repainted in a Latin style during the fourteenth century, when the Greek rite was going out of favour. The Archangel escaped repainting through being on the far side of a pillar and less in view of the congregation.

Ma.s.safra, teetering on the extreme edge of the Murgia and divided into an old town and a new by a handsome ravine, was visited by Janet Ross in 1888. She found it "very dirty and extraordinarily picturesque", the poor living in "prehistoric cave dwellings". She watched the festa (festival) of the Madonna della Scala, brought in procession from the great church at the far end of the ravine to the Benedictine convent that is the statue's home for the rest of the year. The Madonna, clad in gold-embroidered white robes, ready to be hung with jewels on her feast day, is kept in a gla.s.s case at the convent.

The story of the discovery of Ma.s.safra's miraculous icon, which hangs over the high altar in the church of the Madonna della Scala, seems to change with every sacristan. In 1888 it was said that a simple peasant, lured on by unearthly music and a mysterious light, had dug it up in the ravine. A century later we are told a far more colourful tale; a huntsman had seen it in a dream, on the antlers of a deer that ran down a ladder into a cave. Out with his hounds next morning, he saw a stag disappear down a rough flight of steps into a grotto and, chasing after it, found the icon. Beside the church is the partially destroyed cave chapel of the Buona Nuova, the original home of the Madonna who, after her finding, was reverently cut out from the wall and taken into the new church. As with other Apulian "icons", she must have begun as a fresco painted by a Greek hermit.

The Madonna della Scala has performed many miracles. The most dramatic was for a poor girl who gathered herbs in the ravine by night; she was going to be burned as a witch when the Madonna appeared to her terrified tormentors and saved her life. In grat.i.tude, the girl carved out a flight of steps from the church to the top of the ravine, the scala.

Mrs Ross also inspected another rock-hewn church here, Santa Maria della Candalora, "well worth the climb down into the gravina." Charles Diehl considered it to be the most important Byzantine church in Ma.s.safra, and it contains a superb fresco of the Presentation in the Temple, with a wonderful white-bearded St Simeon. This part of the ravine is full of grottoes once used as cells by a hermit community. Here too, is "The Dispensary of the Sorcerer Gregorius", a complex of inaccessible caves where the hermits kept their medicines and potions.

32.

Gravina-in-Puglia

It is built on caves that can be lived in...

G B Pachicelli, "Il Regno di Napoli in Prospettiva"

THE CITY OF GRAVINA-IN-PUGLIA lies on the undulating plateau of Apulia Petrosa, the stony Alta Murgia of western Apulia, not far from the border with Basilicata. Its dramatic setting, on the edge of the giant ravine from which it derives its name, is very impressive. When the Roman city here was destroyed in the fifth century during the Barbarian invasions, its citizens took refuge in the ravine, excavating a troglodyte town with grotto churches, while attempting to rebuild their city on the surface. Four hundred years later, they tried to hide in it from the Saracens, but in 983 the Infidels ma.s.sacred over a thousand of them. The victims' bones may still be seen in the cave church of San Michele dei Grotti, once the chiesa madre of Gravina, where Ma.s.s continues to be said on the feast-days of St Michael.

Eventually the Gravinesi emerged from their caverns for good and built their present city. Although clearly a prosperous commercial town with a population of over 40,000 and possessing some fine buildings Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neo-Cla.s.sical whole streets in its medieval quarter are deserted, especially those that lead down into the ravine. From above, you can see the entrances to countless caves, nearly all difficult to reach, as was intended by those who dug them.

A Greek bishopric dependent on Otranto, Gravina fell to the Normans in 1042, becoming a county held by Humphrey of Hauteville. It was acquired by the Aleramo family during the twelfth century and then by the De Say. A cathedral above ground was begun in 1092, while Frederick II built a luxurious hunting lodge a mile away from the city, which became the counts' residence.

John, Count of Gravina (d. 1335) was a younger brother of King Robert and of Philip, Prince of Taranto t.i.tular Latin Emperor of the East and in 1318 married Mahaut of Hainault, Princess of Achaea (the Peloponnese). Finding she had secretly married an obscure knight, he divorced Mahaut, imprisoning her for life, but was invested as Prince of Achaea. After a single, futile campaign against the Byzantines, he went home to Gravina, exchanging Achaea for the Duchy of Durazzo on the Albanian coast, and the empty t.i.tle of King of Albania. However ineffectual it may have been, his career ill.u.s.trates Apulia's indestructible ties with the far side of the Adriatic.

The Romanesque cathedral was burned down in the fifteenth century and the present duomo, from a comparatively rare period in Apulian architecture yet among the region's loveliest dates from 1482.

After Gravina had been briefly held by Raimondello del Balzo Orsini, Queen Giovanna II gave it to his kinsman Francesco Orsini, Prefect of Rome, the county being made into a duchy. One of the great Roman princely houses a family that produced two Popes the Orsini held the Duchy of Gravina for four centuries, although not always with ease. At the end of the fifteenth century Duke Francesco vainly sought the hand of Lucrezia Borgia. In 1502 he rashly opposed her sinister brother's ambitions, whereupon he and his friends were lured into visiting Cesare Borgia, separated from their troops and arrested. Next year Francesco was discreetly strangled. The story is told by Machiavelli in "The Prince". His son, Duke Ferdinando, built the magnificent Palazzo Gravina at Naples.

When at home in Apulia the Dukes of Gravina lived no less opulently, in contrast to their subjects underground. Ferdinando III (164558) was the most interesting because of his taste and patronage, well supported by his Apulian wife, Giovanna Frangipane della Tolfa, the Count of Grumo's daughter. Abandoning the Hohenstaufen castello, they built a small but elegant palace in the centre of the city, today a ramshackle tenement divided into flats.

The church of Santa Maria dei Morti, renamed the Purgatorio, which they began building in 1644 has two horrible stone skeletons grinning over its main door. Many Apulian churches built between the mid-seventeenth century and the 1730s are dedicated to Purgatory, the plagues of 1656 and 1730 having made men more aware of mortality. Inside there are some fine paintings by Francesco Guarino, an "a.s.sumption" and a "Madonna among the Holy Souls in Purgatory".

Bernardo De Dominici, chronicler of the artists of Baroque Naples, says Guarino made "ornaments and pictures" for the ducal palace at Gravina. Unfortunately, Guarino fell in love with a beautiful lady of the city whose husband told her to respond, then murdered her. The painter literally pined away, dying of self-starvation in 1654 at the age of thirty-nine "to the great displeasure of the Duke", and was buried in the cathedral.

His patron survived him by four years, to be killed at Naples by the plague. The d.u.c.h.ess erected a life-sized statue of her husband in the Purgatorio, with an epitaph describing him as "A most cultivated spouse with a heart inclined to love", and went on adding to their collection including works by Caravaggio, Ribera, Carlo Rosa, Olivieri, Altobello, Fracanzano and Miglionico. The collection, by then famous, was broken up at the start of the eighteenth century. During a visit to Venice when he was still only sixteen, her eldest son Pier Francesco II, ran away to become a Dominican friar, renouncing the duchy in favour of his brother, Domenico. As Cardinal Orsini, he gave Gravina's cathedral its splendid campanile.

Elected Pope in 1724 and taking the name Benedict XIII, Domenico turned out to be a disaster as pontiff. Leaving all business to his corrupt secretary, Niccol Coscia, he lived like some village abate in a tiny white-washed room in the Vatican, visiting the sick, sitting for hours on end in the confessional, teaching the catechism to children and trying unsuccessfully to revive public penance for adulterers, while Coscia busily sold offices and benefices to the highest bidder. There is a ludicrously incongruous statue of Papa Orsini dressed as a Roman Emperor in the Cortile del Belvedere at Rome.

Pacich.e.l.li liked what he saw of the city in the last quarter of the seventeenth century: "Its streets are wide if ill-paved, and its houses are commodious, among them the palace of the Duke Orsini." He was struck by the number of mules and horses, also of storks. He comments on the local pottery "majolica in the fas.h.i.+on of faience". Above all, he was amused by a punning inscription over the main gate, "Grana dat, et Vina clara Vrbs Gravina" ("Gravina gives Grain and fine Wine").

Sadly, when Papa Orsini's young nephew, Filippo Berualdo I, became Duke in 1705, he turned out to be obsessed with hunting, taking little interest in his city. At the same time, relations between the Orsini and the Gravinesi grew unpleasantly strained because of the wrangling over taxes and feudal dues that bedevilled every Apulian magnate.

George Berkeley arrived at Gravina from Matera on 2 June 1734. "Vines left, corn, pasture", he noted: "The same hilly country continued in the night; a world of s.h.i.+ning flies." Although a careful traveller, he had somehow taken the wrong road. "Lost our way; arrived after much wandering afoot at a Franciscan convent without the walls of Gravina at 11 in the night, dark." It was still a walled city and, because of the danger from brigands, the gates were shut at dusk until well into the nineteenth century.

Berkeley was let in next morning, his impression being "well paved with white marble; situated among naked green hills; 5 convents of men and 3 of women; unhealthy air in wet weather." He adds, "Duke a wretch; princes obliged by del Carpio to give their own or the heads of the banditti with whom they went sharers." This is a reference to a former Spanish Viceroy's attempt to destroy the secret understanding between magnates and brigands. The Austrians, whose rule was about to end, governed no less firmly. "Bishop of Gravina dead these two years, since which no bishop in the town, the Viceroy not admitting the person made bishop by the Pope as being a foreigner", we learn from Berkeley's journal.

After only a few hours, Berkeley left Gravina. In his staccato yet extraordinarily vivid prose he preserves, as if in a snapshot, a landscape which even today is almost unchanged: open green fields and hills mostly covered with corn backwarder than in the plain; corn the commodity of the country. Here and there rocky; some trees on our right thinly scattered; a small brook; pasture and little corn. 11[am], great scene opening, long chain of barren mountains about 3 miles on the right, thistles left; for half an hour pa.s.sed a green vale of pasture bounded with green risings right between our road and the stony mountains. 11. 40, vast plain, corn, the greater part pasture between ridges of mountains; Appenine on the left, old Vultur on the right; hardly a mountain. 1.20[pm], a deep vale, diversified with rising hills reaching to the mountains on left. 1.25 Poggio Ursini [Poggiorsini], where we dined; chaplain lent us his chamber in the Duke of Gravina's ma.s.seria; dirty; the Duke spends some time there in hunting.

When the ducal "wretch" died the following year, his son moved to Rome. The Orsini connection with Gravina was almost severed, but did not end till Duke Filippo Berualdo II formally renounced his feudal rights in 1816. However, the family still use the t.i.tle "Duke of Gravina."

Gravina interested de Salis as a source of saltpetre, among the Regno's most important products. He found few inhabitable houses when he came in 1789, most of the population of 10,000 living in "subterranean hovels." The streets and the people on them were filthy, only the clergy seeming to thrive. Every 20 April there was a livestock fair, "little more salubrious than a swamp; and as the concourse of strangers is immense, all the convents become hotels." Jewellers came from Naples to sell shoddy trinkets to the "half-savage beauties who flock down from the surrounding mountains, and who then return in triumph to their nests hidden in the rocks, to arouse the envy of their poorer friends and relations."

"The city is surrounded with strong walls and towers, probably not older than the 16th century", recorded Octavian Blewitt in 1853. He adds, "It is a dirty place although it is remarkable for the number of its fountains." He also noted that "the common people live... in caverns excavated in the tufa."

After the Risorgimento, Gravina had to endure the horrors of latifondismo, with labour gangs and almost total corruption. An official report of 1888 admits to "the crudest and most squalid poverty." The "shelter for the homeless" consisted of some foul cellars whose occupants were starving, while the orphanage served as a source of recruitment for brothels.

Gravinesi were known to feed and shelter brigands. Even the clergy were suspected of being hand-in-hand with the banditi (bandits), like a chaplain at the Purgatorio, Don Matteo Abruzzese, who in the 1860s was charged with helping to kidnap a local landowner's son. A local historian, Don Carlo Caputo, one of Gravina's parish priests, wrote that "Banditry became a normal weapon in the vendetta against [Northern] oppressors."

In September 1943 during a raid on German headquarters at Gravina, Colonel Penkovsky, who commanded a reconnaissance force operating behind the enemy lines, captured a doc.u.ment that listed German troop dispositions in southern Apulia. There were 3,500 in total, including 92 officers and 755 men at Gioia del Colle, 83 officers and 629 men at Altamura, and 75 officers and 140 men at Gravina. However, very few of them were fighting troops, most being administrative personnel hastily evacuated from the coast after the Allied landing.

Many of the rock churches here, Gravina's most interesting feature, have crumbled away, their frescoes lost for ever. Decay has been compounded by vandalism. The beauty of the frescoes in the grotto chapel of San Vito Vecchio deeply impressed Henri Berthaux when he saw them at the end of the nineteenth century. Fortunately these were removed from the ravine in 1956 and taken to Rome for restoration. They returned to Gravina in 1968, to be displayed in a replica of San Vito Vecchio, built on the ground floor of the Museo Pomarici Santomasi. Dating from the end of the thirteenth century, it is thought they are by an Apulian artist who had worked in either Cyprus or Palestine. They are certainly among the best surviving examples of Byzantine art in Apulia.

33.

Matera

No one has come to this land except as an enemy, a conqueror, or a visitor devoid of understanding.

Carlo Levi, "Christ Stopped at Eboli"

ALTHOUGH TECHNICALLY IN BASILICATA, Matera was once part of Apulia. We have included it not only for this reason, however, but also because its caves were inhabited and in working order until the 1950s, and shed an invaluable light on life in the Apulian cave cities.

While scarcely any frescoes survive in the grotto churches of Gravina-in-Puglia, Matera retains a fair number since far more churches were tunnelled into the rock, over a hundred in and around the great ravines known as the Sa.s.si that sheltered the old troglodyte community. After the destruction by the Saracens of a large city above ground towards the end of the ninth century, its people returned to the ravines, where they carved out new dwellings for themselves on a more ambitious scale than anywhere else in Apulia. Matera fell to the Normans in 1042, but never the less remained a city completely beneath the earth until the thirteenth century, when the cathedral and the church of San Giovanni were built on top. Other buildings followed, yet even today the place's fascination lies underground.

As in many Apulian ravines, besides hermits, there were several flouris.h.i.+ng communities of Basilian monks. Some of them were founded soon after the terrible devastation that accompanied Belisarius's reconquest of Italy from the Goths for the Emperor Justinian and Byzantium. It was the monks of these communities who were mainly responsible for constructing Matera's underground churches. The churches date from the sixth century to the thirteenth, their frescoes from the twelfth to the sixteenth. The most important frescoes are in the Sa.s.so Caveoso and the Sa.s.so Barisano; in the churches of Santa Lucia alle Malve, Madonna della Croce, Santa Barbara and Madonna della Virt. There are also entire monasteries, the largest Laura being the Convicinio di Sant' Antonio which has four chapels dating from the late twelfth century, cells with beds carved out of the tufa, and even tufa wine-presses.

Most of the grottoes at the top of the ravine opposite Matera were oratories and never served a monastic community. Some are still places of pilgrimage but any medieval frescoes they may have contained were obliterated by others who painted over them during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Diehl records a legend told to him at Matera, an explanation, he believes, for much of the vandalism suffered by grotto churches. After being defeated by the Saracens, Frederick Barbarossa fled with his treasure to Matera where he hid in one of the grottoes, which closed over him. "He is still seen today", says Diehl, "and the mountain shepherds, whose greed is aroused by the treasure of the Swabian monarch, have more than once known the emperor emerge and chase them along the ravine when they went too near his eternal abode." In 1880 memories of this story set off a species of gold rush after a grave containing a h.o.a.rd of Venetian coins was discovered in San Nicola at Palagianello.

Over the underground city stands the imposing but unfinished castle built by the hated Count Tramontana, Lord of Matera, who was murdered by the cave dwellers in 1514. The city was part of the Terra d'Otranto from 1500 to 1633, but then became the capital of Basilicata until it lost its status to Potenza in 1806. Still, there are other fine buildings above ground in the upper town from the days when Matera was a provincial capital.

Viewed from the far side of the ravine, Matera does not look like a troglodyte city. The caves are faced with stone walls that have windows and doors, many with extensions under tiled roofs, all of which gives the appearance of a normal town. But a closer inspection reveals the sheer squalor of the caves, crawling with vermin when they were lived in. Often the inhabitants ran the risk of falling to their deaths, according to de Salis: I visited many of the grottoes, and not without danger, because at the least false step, I could have fallen from the precipice and dashed myself on the rocks below; and in clambering up I could not but tremble at the thought that thousands and thousands of people for many, many years were exposed to a similar danger.

He paints a picture of unutterable degradation, of hideous, filthy savages, the women so liable to commit crimes that the prisons were always overflowing. He attributes it to bad landlords, bad government, bad roads, bad sanitation and bad health. Under-nourished and deformed, crazy enough to believe unquestioningly in werewolves and incubi, they were completely under the thumb of the ignorant clergy whom they thought could protect them from such horrors, and led a life no better than the animals with whom they shared their cave. Often it was an abandoned laura Diehl describes the Cripta di Cascione as being used as a stable.

"It is not difficult to see in the summer many men and women, so-called Tarantolati, covered with wine-shoots and red ribbons, dancing continuously in the street with no one to stop them," de Salis comments, citing other forms of madness at Matera: All these illnesses are usually preceded by profound melancholy, and are caused not so much by the hot climate as by the way of life and the normal diet in these villages. The excessive consumption of rancid salt pork, the absolute lack of cleanliness in the habitations, a life spent in dark and damp caverns, the continuous evaporation of open sewers, and the mountains of dung and filth left to decay in the streets, are the actual causes of these disorders and sad illnesses, which usually end in the most horrible manner.

Werewolves were a common phenomenon in these mountain districts. De Salis describes them as howling like wolves, "rolling in the mud and filth, and hurling themselves upon anyone unfortunate enough to find himself in their path." "So wild and barbarous are many of the inhabitants of the caverns in the valley that they have obtained by their howlings at night and the desperate nature of their attacks, the name of Lupi Mannari", wrote Octavian Blewitt. Taken for granted by other peasants, men known to change into wolves at night were treated with respect. Although, they were never seen in such a shape by their womenfolk. Carlo Levi was told by his housekeeper a witch that when a husband of this sort came home it was essential to keep the door locked, not only to give him time to regain his human form, but for him to forget he had been with his lupine brethren.

According to Carlo Levi, things had not improved by the Second World War. His sister Luisa, a doctor, visited the city in 1936 and described it to him. She had never met with poverty like this before, nor illnesses such as trachoma and what she took to be black fever, normally confined to Africa. Some caves had no proper entrance, merely a hole in the ground with a trapdoor and ladder. Children lay on filthy rags, their teeth chattering from fever, sharing their dens with dogs, sheep, goats and pigs: I saw children with the faces of wizened old men, their bodies reduced by starvation almost to skeletons, their heads crawling with lice and covered with scabs. Most of them had enormous, dilated stomachs, and faces yellow and worn with malaria.

During the 1950s the Sa.s.si's inhabitants were rehoused on the plateau above, although a few stuck stubbornly to their old homes in the ravine.

Today these once verminous lairs have been re-invented as a tourist attraction and at least half-a-dozen have been converted into high-priced hotels. There have been plans to build an underground car park supposedly adapting modern ways to old, but in practice undermining many of the old dwellings. Even so, the place has kept enough of its menacing atmosphere for Mel Gibson to use it as Jerusalem in his film, "The Pa.s.sion of the Christ". In 2004, locusts devoured every crop in the area, a plague that affected only a handful of farmers, but which, in former times, would have meant death by starvation for the entire population.

Part VIII.

Trulli and the Difesa di Malta.

34.

Trulli.

One sees a great number of dry-stone cabins made of limestone or tufa, scattered over the countryside. They are called trulli... lodgings for beasts and country people.

Galanti, "Della descrizione geographica e politica delle Sicilie"

THE MURGIA DEI TRULLI is famous for strange, bee-hive shaped houses, the trulli, and for horses. Despite the area's lush appearance, it has a bitter history of poverty and outlawry, thankfully long over.

Alberobello, which takes its name from Sylva Arboris Belli (the wood of fine trees) has over a thousand trulli in the old quarter. They also appear around Ceglie Messapico, Cisternino, Martina Franca and Locorotondo, each district having its own version of the basic design a cone of stones built without mortar. The historian Guelfo Civinino claims that trulli are identical to the specchie of the Messapians which, besides being burial chambers, were used for religious rites.

The Murgia dei Trulli was once heavily forested, an ideal refuge for brigands, which may explain why early travellers avoided the area. The woods were not cleared until the twentieth century, to make way for vineyards and orchards. Nowadays the Val d' Itria is like a garden, with an unmistakable air of prosperity, but it was very different a hundred years ago. "Their poverty may be imagined by the food of the day labourers, polenta made of boiled beans" says Mrs. Ross, describing the trulli people.

The inhabitants of some of the towns on the Murge eat "la farinella" (pounded maize, peas, chestnuts, &c., which have first been roasted in ovens), which they eat just as it is, never attempting to cook it. These towns, Noci, Albaribello &c., are called by the others "Paese di Farinella", to indicate their poverty.

Even if overrun by trippers, Alberobello is well worth seeing. Selva, as it was first called, was given to the Counts of Conversano in the fifteenth century as a reward for fighting the Turks, and became part of estates that stretched from Putignano to within five miles of Martina Franca. Since Selva was uninhabited and uncultivated, the Counts encouraged labourers to settle there, living in rough wooden huts. In 1550 Count Giovanni Antonio gave them leave to build in stone, for protection against the wind, but without mortar. This meant that each house could be quickly pulled down before a tax collector arrived to count the dwellings and quickly rebuilt after his departure. In 1635, when enough trees had been cleared and sufficient land cultivated, a town was founded by the fearsome Count Giangirolamo II, who built an inn, a mill and a communal oven for the labourers, charging them heavily for the compulsory use of these facilities.

The first trulli were very like the stone huts called caselle that are seen in every olive grove. Without any windows or chimneys, they had square bases and conical roofs, and often a spiralling outside staircase. According to Civinino, this was the ladder Messapian priests climbed to wors.h.i.+p the stars. The only light came through the open door. In many ways such houses were less sophisticated than the cave dwellings of the ravines, but they were very much healthier; dry all the year round, cool in summer and warm in winter. Probably they did not improve in design until the end of feudalism at Selva in 1797, since with a constant threat of demolition there was too little incentive.

Then the trulli gradually became much more elaborate, with a small window and a tall chimney. As a family grew, more cones were added. The walls were white-washed inside and out, but the roofs were usually left unpainted, save for a large cross, swastika or heart, magic charms to ward off evil. A cistern was dug for rain-water coming off the roof, the sole water supply. Beds were placed in alcoves round the main living room, while an attic reached by a ladder held flour, dried pulses, fruit and firewood.

Conventional houses began to be built with mortar after 1797, but many peasants still preferred the trulli either because they were poor or simply because "what was good enough for my father is good enough for me." As late as the 1920s a church was built at Alberobello in the trulli style.

The original church here, a tiny edifice built by the peasants on land given to them by the Count, was served by a priest from Martina Franca, who rode out on his donkey to celebrate Ma.s.s each Sunday. Giangirolamo II endowed an oratory next to a house he had built for his visits to the town, placing in it a painting of the saints to whom it was dedicated, Cosmas and Damian. When he was packed off to a Spanish prison, the peasants moved it to their own church. Since then the town has been devoted to the two saints. During the terrible drought of 1782, a statue of San Cosma was borne in procession through the streets of Selva with immediate results, a downpour falling out of a cloudless sky.

The last feudal lord of Selva, Count Giulio Antonio IV, Gentleman of the King's Bedchamber and Knight of San Gennaro, was hand-in-glove with the brigands who terrorised the little town. Eventually, in desperation, its long suffering inhabitants sent a deputation to King Ferdinand when he was staying at Taranto with Archbishop Capecelatro, a well-known foe to brigands, pet.i.tioning that their town should be administered by the Crown. The pet.i.tion was granted in May 1797 and Selva renamed itself Alberobello.

In the centre of the Murgia dei Trulli, the round, gleaming white city of Locorotondo sits on a small hill. Unlike some of its neighbours, it is untouched by modern development, which has been diverted to a new town in the valley below. Locorotondo contains little of interest, apart from the church of Santa Maria della Greca, but there is a superb view of the Val d' Itria from the public gardens at the top of the hill. Trulli can be seen in every direction, from single houses to great cl.u.s.ters forming ma.s.serie, from aged trulli with tiny orchards and hens scratching round the doors to brand-new trulli with wrought-iron gates and crazy-paving. Dry-stone walls divide the fields and, on either side of the valley, herds of silvery grey cattle and black Murgesi horses graze on the green hills.

Until quite recently, hundreds of big, pure black horses were imported to the Murgia from Calabria, Northern Italy, Albania and Montenegro. All they had in common was their colour and their amount of bone. However, during the 1920s they were glorified with the impressive new name of Murgesi. Such horses must not be confused with the Conversano horse, a far more glamorous beast. The Val d'Itria used also to be renowned for its donkeys, which when crossed with Murgesi horses produced exceptionally tough mules.

While the old woodmen of the Murgia dei Trulli and Selva have vanished, together with their dense forests, their odd little houses continue to be built. Some are bought as weekend cottages by business men from Bari, who no doubt fancy that they are returning to their roots.

35.

The Difesa di Malta

Lambs at the sound of a church bell, lions at the blast of a trumpet.

R. dall Pozzo, "Historia della Sacra Religione Militare di San Giovanni"