An Armchair Traveller's History Of Apulia Part 9

THE COAST NEAREST the Murgia dei Trulli was known as the Difesa di Malta (Challenge of Malta), because it was so well guarded by the Knights of Malta. These were the Knights Hospitallers, the warrior monks who had defended Crusader Jerusalem, still waging an unceasing war on the Infidel. In Italy they were popularly known as 'Hierosolomitan' or 'Jerusalem' Knights. Even after the decline of the Ottoman Empire ended the threat of invasion, Apulia suffered from raids by North African and Albanian pirates, and the brethren's policing of the Adriatic and Ionian Seas was of vital importance, often saving the crews of Apulian merchantmen and fis.h.i.+ng boats from enslavement. Locals saw the corn, wine and oil that went out to Malta by felucca as a very good investment indeed. By the mid-eighteenth century raids on the Apulian coast had ceased, but they began again after Napoleon evicted the Knights from Malta in 1798, continuing well into the 1830s. Apulia must have sighed for the galleys of Malta.

Apulian brethren also took part in wars on the mainland. During the 1670s Fra' Giovanni Gadaleta from Trani fought as a captain of horse in the Spanish service against the French when they tried to relieve the rebellious citizens of Messina. Pacich.e.l.li heard about him when he visited Trani, "A true Hierosolomitan... who died soon after in the flower of his youth and his courage", comments the Abate.

The Apulian Knights included the odd black sheep, however, such as "a tall, wild-looking man with red hair", Fra' Vincenzo della Marra, who belonged to a family from Sannicandro Garganico. Notorious for brawling and duelling, he "would have sold his Order for a crust of bread", but his bravery was admired; when taken prisoner by the Turks during a battle at sea, his brethren ransomed him immediately. In 1633 with some friends he dragged an enemy from his coach in the streets of Naples, and smashed his skull with an iron-tipped stave. Outlawed, Fra' Vincenzo fled to Malta and then became a colonel in the Papal army, only to be dismissed for insulting a cardinal. After joining the Venetian service, he was killed fighting the Turks in Greece.

Until confiscated by Murat in the early nineteenth century, the Order of Malta's estates in Apulia stretched from Venosa to Trani, from the Gargano down to Lecce and Otranto, in a network of commanderies under the Prior of Barletta. Ever mindful of status, Pacich.e.l.li lists members of the n.o.bility in each city he visits, who have "taken the Hierosolomytan habit". A successful Knight was rewarded with a commandery, retiring to administer it, sending the revenues to Malta, but keeping enough to support himself in the style of a n.o.bleman. Rich old bachelors, the commanders entertained lavishly, occupying a prominent place in Apulian society.

The travellers' normal itinerary, from Bari to Brindisi, went along the coast of the Difesa di Malta, pa.s.sing through Mola, Polignano, Monopoli and Egnatia. Bishop Berkeley describes the country along this coast as extremely well planted and fruitful, but almost entirely lacking in houses, due to "fear of the Turks, which obligeth families to live in towns." He rode through great forests of olive trees interspersed with pears and almonds. At Mola, where the low, rocky coast was covered with figs, he found "no place in the town to dress or eat our victuals in; a merchant of the town gave us the use of an apartment to eat our meat in, as likewise a present of cherries." The town owes its existence to a fortress built here by Charles of Anjou in 1278, as linchpin in a line of coastal towers down to Brindisi, that were intended to be a protection against piracy. At that time the Knights were still in the Holy Land and not yet active in these waters.

Monopoli was an important port under the Byzantines. There are Byzantine grotto churches in the city and in the fields outside, hidden among olive groves. However, the cathedral, the best piece of late Baroque in Apulia, did not exist in Berkeley's time, being begun only in 1742 on the site of a Romanesque predecessor. The Difesa di Malta was discreetly in evidence, the Knights' tiny medieval hospice standing next to their small thirteenth century church. Both survive, identifiable by the eight-pointed cross on the church. In 1358 the Knights had established an important commandery in the former Benedictine abbey of Santo Stefano di Monopoli, three miles down the coast, but moved it to Fasano during the seventeenth century.

All the travellers agree that the countryside around Monopoli was delightful. Today, fields of fruit trees and olives are still interspersed with pretty villages and handsome villas set on the slopes of the Murgia. But on reaching Egn.a.z.ia, Horace's Gnathia, Bishop Berkeley went inland, a footnote in his Journal explaining: "This left on our left for fear of the Turks." Clearly, raiders were still slipping through the Order's patrols.

Sitting on the edge of the escarpment above the coast road, Ostuni the same place as Pliny's Stulnium was visible to every traveller on his way to Brindisi. The Normans wrested it from Byzantium only as late as 1070. It has some fine churches, in particular its Gothic cathedral begun in 1435, and is certainly one of the most attractive of the Difesa di Malta's whitewashed towns. The citizens owed a good deal to the Knights' activities, even if some of the travellers were ungrateful.

On his way to Ostuni, Swinburne stopped for refreshment at what must have been part of the charming Ma.s.seria Difesa di Malta nearby, built amid the olive groves by the Knights during the 1770s: We arrived at a small single house, consisting of a kitchen, loft and stable, lately erected for the convenience of travellers, by the agents of the Order of Malta, to which the land belongs. The kitchen was too hot for me to breathe in, and the other two apartments as full of fleas as Shakespeare's inn at Rochester, so that my only refuge was the narrow shade of the house, which was contracted every minute more and more, as the sun advanced towards the meridian. Behind the house then I sat down, to dine upon the fare we had brought in our wallets. Unluckily I had not thought of wine or water, neither of which were now to be had tolerably drinkable; so that I was obliged to content myself with the water of a cistern full of tadpoles, and qualify it with a quant.i.ty of wine, that resembled treacle much more than the juice of the grape. While I held my pitcher to my lips, I formed a dam with my knife, to prevent the little frogs from slipping down my throat. Till that day I had had but an imperfect idea of thirst.

No doubt the water here was like that from all too many cisterns in waterless Apulia and the wine vile, but at least the Order was providing humble travellers with free food in the kitchen, free bedding in the loft and free stabling for their mules. This "small single house" was one of many maintained by the Knights in the Difesa di Malta.

Some idea of the Knights' wealth and standing can be gained at Fasano and Putignano. At Fasano, the palace of the Bailiff (now the Municipio) dates from the sixteenth century, but, with the adjoining church, was rebuilt in the eighteenth by a Knight of the Falcone family; his coat-of-arms, a bird of prey, can be seen on both buildings together with the eight-pointed cross. The cross of Malta is on other buildings too, while the city's main street is still Via del Bali. The Bailiff's role in the life of Fasano resembled the Count's at Conversano or the Duke's at Martina Franca; he was its feudal lord, the Order holding it in fee from the Crown. He spent the summer months at a villa in Selva di Fasano, on the edge of the escarpment looking out to sea, where he escaped from the heat and mosquitoes.

Nowadays Putignano, to the west, is a busy commercial centre, but the old city survives behind its white walls, amazingly intact. Here too, in what has been renamed Piazza Plebiscito, there is a Baroque Palazzo del Bali. This stands next to the ancient chiesa madre of San Pietro, rebuilt by the Knights in the seventeenth century with an imposing campanile, a double-decker high altar and an exuberant painted ceiling. The Knights prayed here and at the little Rococo church of the Purgatorio nearby, which has Maltese crosses over the portico. Putignano, with its white-washed houses and wrought-iron balconies, is the Difesa di Malta at its most elegant.

The Order of Malta's palazzi in Apulia have become offices or flats. Yet there are still one or two Apulian Knights, whose towers or ma.s.serie are decorated with the eight-pointed cross.

36.

The Duel at Ostuni

The fencer is by fencing overcome...

Ta.s.so, "Gerusalemme Liberata"

IN 1665, OSTUNI in the Difesa di Malta was the scene of a duel that, after the Disfida of Barletta, is the most famous personal combat in Apulian history. It was fought by two great n.o.blemen, both of whose families had given many Knights to the 'Hierosolomitan Order' Cosmo, Count of Conversano and Petracone V, Duke of Martina Franca.

Son of the terrible Giangirolamo II, Count Cosmo was thirty-eight years old. Just as his unloved father had been given a nickname, 'Il Guercio' (the Squinter), he himself was known as 'O Sfidante' (the Challenger). A lethal swordsman, the count was a veteran duellist who had already killed an alarming number of opponents. He had also taken a leading part in the bloodthirsty repression of the Neapolitan riots of 1661. Savagely morose, he was as dangerous as he was quarrelsome.

Count Cosmo nursed an especially bitter hatred for his Apulian neighbour, the elderly Michele Imperiali, Prince of Francavilla. This stemmed from a long-running family vendetta, that had begun when Cosmo was a child erupting into a full-scale battle in a Neapolitan street in 1630 between the Acquaviva of Conversano and the Caracciolo of Martina Franca, supported by their kinsmen, the Imperiali of Francavilla Fontana. Friends and servants joined in the fighting. By the time the police arrived several combatants had been killed while twelve were badly wounded. Everyone still on his feet was arrested, only Fra' t.i.tta Caracciolo, a Knight of Malta, managing to escape.

Prince Michele had taken a leading part in the "battle". Meeting the Prince by chance one day in 1664 at the viceregal court at the royal palace in Naples, the count immediately challenged him to a duel and thrashed him with the flat of his sword. The Viceroy at once placed both men under arrest, hoping that their tempers would cool. But when they were released, Prince Michele, who was too aged and decrepit to fight, asked his nephew Petracone Caracciolo, Duke of Martina Franca, to do so in his place. The unfortunate Duke could not refuse. Since he was only seventeen, the duel was postponed until he came of age in twelve months time.

Understandably, young Duke Petracone grew very apprehensive. Keppel Craven tells us how he found out just what he would have to face: A gentleman, who had been sometime, as was the custom in those days, a retainer in his family, left it abruptly one night, and sought the Count of Conversano's castle, into which he gained admission by a recital of the injurious treatment and fict.i.tious wrongs, heaped upon him by the tyrannical and arbitrary temper of the Prince of Francavilla. A complaint of this nature was always the pa.s.sport to the Count's favour and good graces, and he not only admitted this gentleman to the full enjoyment of his princely hospitality, but having found he was an experienced and dextrous swordsman, pa.s.sed most of his time in practising with him that art.

A few days before the duel, the gentleman, who was a spy one source says he had been both men's fencing master left Conversano and went to Martina Franca, where he reported to Duke Petracone: the only chance of success which he could look to, was by keeping on the defensive during the early part of the combat; he was instructed that his antagonist, though avowedly the most able manager of the sword in the kingdom, was extremely violent, and that if he could parry the first thrusts made on the first attack, however formidable from superior skill and strength of wrist and arm, he might perhaps afterwards obtain success over an adversary, whose person, somewhat inclined to corpulency, would speedily become exhausted.

When Petracone reached the age of eighteen in 1665, a meeting was arranged at Ostuni, on 19 July. Before he rode to meet his doom, the Duke made his will and confessed his sins, saying goodbye to his mother, who went into her chapel to pray. 'O Sfidante' ate an unusually good breakfast and then, taking leave of his wife muttered carelessly, "Vado a far' un capretto" "I'm off to kill a kid."

The combatants had arranged to fight their duel as publicly as possible, on the forecourt of the great Franciscan friary just outside the walls, one of the city's most imposing buildings and only recently completed. Warned by the friars, however, the Bishop of Ostuni, in cope and mitre and bearing the Host, was waiting to stop them. Followed by an eager crowd, the two duellists looked for an alternative arena, settling on a little paved yard in front of the Capuchin church. Petracone's second was his sixteen year old brother, Innico, Cosmo's his eldest son, Girolamo the same age as Petracone. Their weapons were rapiers with blades three foot long, balanced by daggers in their left hands.

When the combat started, according to a chronicler from Noci, Count Cosmo attacked Petracone so ferociously and skilfully that it seemed scarcely possible the young Duke could survive. Yet, somehow he warded off the Count's thrusts, letting him tire himself out. Then, to the crowd's astonishment, Petracone succeeded in wounding Cosmo. He asked if honour had been satisfied, but the enraged Count's only answer was to rush at the Duke. Receiving a second thrust, Cosmo fell to the ground, streaming with blood, whereupon Petracone and Innico mounted their horses and hastily rode away.

A friar helped Count Cosmo rise to his feet. Clutching his right breast from which blood was still pouring, he staggered into the friary, demanding a confessor. He died a few hours later.

Everyone had expected the duel to end very differently. A band of a.s.sa.s.sins, brigands hired by the Prince of Francavilla, waited in vain for Count Cosmo on the road home to Conversano.

37.

Brigands

...a land Where laws are trampled on and lawless men Walk in the sun...

Samuel Rogers, Italian Journal APULIA SUFFERED FROM BRIGANDS until almost a century ago, as it had always done, even under Charles of Anjou. They multiplied during the unhappy reign of his great-granddaughter Giovanna I. In the fifteenth century Antonio Becadelli claimed, in his life of Alfonso the Magnanimous, how that unusually effective king had rid the realm of brigands, "something never known before." They soon came back, however, large armies of them fighting pitched battles with the Spanish viceroys' troops. The scourge was tamed by later viceroys and largely, if not entirely, eradicated under the Borboni, but revived in the early nineteenth century during the French occupation.

The caves in Apulia's ravines made good hideouts, and the olive groves that stretched for mile upon mile provided an escape from pursuing cavalry. A hollow tree trunk quickly hid someone on foot while, after putting fifty yards of trees behind him, even a horseman vanished. The woodland, formerly a feature of the Murgia dei Trulli, suited robbers particularly well, and the area around Alberobello, Noci and Martina Franca was infested with them. For centuries the valley of Ponte di Bovino, a long, narrow pa.s.s through which ran the only road from Naples into Apulia, was notorious for hold-ups. Crouched on a hill that dominated the pa.s.s, the town of Bovino was the birth-place of several famous brigands. They often ambushed the royal mail coach, although it was always heavily escorted; on one occasion a comitiva (band) found that the coach was carrying the robes of a newly appointed judge, so they amused themselves by dressing their leader in the robes and "trying" a captive traveller who was sentenced to death and "executed".

Many of the brigands came from the Abruzzi, leaving its barren mountains for richer pickings; men such as Marco Sciarra in the sixteenth century, who led a comitiva a thousand strong, well armed and paid regularly, marching in three companies behind the banners of three lieutenants. For seven years they terrorised the Papal States and the Regno, including Apulia. Sometimes they stormed entire cities, such as Gioia del Colle, looting the houses of rich citizens. Marco always took care to hand out money and food to the poor. He genuinely believed in redistributing wealth, calling himself "a minister sent by G.o.d against usurers and drones." As the historian Rosario Villari explains, brigands like Marco were "shaped by a sense of justice and also by the standards and customs of a peasant world to which wild and primitive ferocity was far from alien."

He fought several pitched battles with government troops. Often he showed considerable chivalry, ordering his musketeers not to shoot at the enemy commander. When a traveller whose party he had ambushed strode up and announced "I am Torquato Ta.s.so", he knelt down to kiss his hand, beseeching the great poet to remount and go on his way. For, Marco saw himself as more than a mere captain of banditi; in his own eyes, he was a patriot fighting Spanish invaders. Ta.s.so understood this, commenting: "He waged a war like that of Spartacus."

In 1592, after defeating 4,000 troops sent against him by the Viceroy, Marco invaded the Capitanata. Here he captured Lucera, whose unlucky bishop, Don Scipione Bozzuto, was shot by a marksman when he peered down from the church tower where he had taken refuge. During the same year, however, Adriano Acquaviva, Count of Conversano, drove Marco out of both Apulia and his lair in the Abruzzi. Hired by Venice to fight Dalmatian pirates, Marco and his men refused to fight in Crete, so the Venetians slaughtered them. He escaped, trying to reach the Regno, but was murdered by one of his lieutenants for the money on his head and a free pardon.

In 1594, the traveller Fynes Moryson had been told of the hunted, wolfish existence led by such men all over Southern Italy. He was aware that many brigands had killed comrades for the sake of head-money and a pardon: "they are so jelous one of another, and so affrighted with the horror of their owne Consciences, as they both eat and sleep armed, and uppon the least noyse or shaking of a leafe, have their hands uppon their Armes, ready to defend themselves."

Other brigand comitive (groups) were active in Apulia at the turn of the sixteenth century, especially in the Terra d'Otranto, if not so well organised as Marco's. The peasants often helped them, regarding the Spanish soldiers as robbers and murderers with good reason. The Benedictine monks of a priory near Troia not only gave shelter to brigands but helped to dispose of their plunder.

The most dangerous comitive, usually about thirty strong, were those around Cisternino and Martina Franca: those in the Lecce area led by the Lubelli brothers, and those near Ceglie Messapico under Cataldo and Nunzio, whose other hunting ground was the Monopoli district. For many years Antonio Rovito of Ugento was popularly known as "King of the Brigands" in his neighbourhood, while in 1608, Stefano Cal was wanted in Ostuni for more than twenty murders. Two years later the authorities congratulated themselves on having rid Apulia of banditi, which was clearly wishful thinking.

Sometimes the comitive were led by local n.o.blemen, like Giovan Vincenzo Dominiroberto, Baron of Palascianello, who once escaped from prison in the basket in which his food had been delivered. In 1631 the baron was finally run to ground in a church at Serracapriola, dragged out from sanctuary and beheaded, despite the local bishop's protests; presumably his head was sent off to obtain the head-money, while his four quarters were hung from roadside trees.

In the 1630s magnates began recruiting small armies of banditi, to enforce their dominion over the peasants and cow the commons in the towns. "Never before had Southern Italian brigandage... been so closely linked with the barons' activities and interests", comments Villari. The wool merchants grew frightened of doing business in the dogana at Foggia where the magnates' new henchmen bullied them into paying robbers' prices. Feudal privilege enabled barons to give their brigands virtual impunity, although many were hunted down by revengeful peasants during the revolt of 1647.

Later in the century the authorities almost eradicated brigandage, but it revived during the 1760s. The comitiva of Nicola Spinosa, or 'Scanna Cornacchia' ('Carrion Crow') as he was popularly known, a murderer and escaped convict from Castellana, became a useful political tool for Count Giulio Antonio IV of Conversano, who protected its members in return for favourable results in the elections to his city's commune. He regularly received the 'Carrion Crow' after dark at his hunting-lodge of Marchione outside Conversano, turning a very blind eye to murder, robbery, rape and extortion.

Giulio Antonio was also Count of Castellana, where 'Scanna Cornacchia' was no less active. In 1782 its people pet.i.tioned King Ferdinand, imploring him to save them from the 'Carrion Crow', and explaining that the comitiva was under their feudal lord's protection. In response, the count was ordered to hand the comitiva over to justice within a month; otherwise, His Majesty would put in train "certain steps of an economic nature." Giulio Antonio thereupon bribed Gregorio Matarrese, whom he knew was in their confidence, to murder them and gave him guns. The comitiva was planning to rob the King's Messenger near Taranto so Matarrese laid a lethal ambush. Most of its members were killed or captured, but the 'Carrion Crow' escaped into the woods. He went to ground with his mistress, Domenica Pugliese 'La Falcona di Putignano' in a ma.s.seria near Putignano, where the couple were at last tracked down by a company of Swiss soldiers. Realising he had no hope of escape, the 'Carrion Crow' ordered his mistress to kill him, the 'Falcon' shooting him in the neck. Stuck on a lance, his head was paraded through Castellana.

"Many abandon their wretched way of life and turn to robbery", Galanti wrote of the Regno's peasants in the 1790s, yet when de Salis visited the Terra d'Otranto at this time he noticed that guards were not needed although their presence was a help in dealing with extortionate innkeepers. By then the authorities seldom executed brigands since they were useful as convict labour.

However, in 1806, Joseph Bonaparte became king, succeeded by Marshal Murat two years later, and brigandage broke out all over Southern Italy. 'Il Pennacchio' ('the Plumed One') stormed through the Gargano, claiming he was under orders from the exiled King Ferdinand, killing French supporters and plundering their property. In 1808, Major Courier reported that the area around Foggia was a land of thieves: "They hold up travellers and have their way with the girls. They rob, rape and murder."

During Joseph's reign they terrorised the Bovino valley, along which ran the main road from Naples. Charles Macfarlane writes, "rarely could a company of travellers pa.s.s without being stopped; a Government officer, a Government mail, or the revenue from the province, never without a little army for an escort. And all these troops were at times unable to afford protection, but were themselves beaten off, or slaughtered by the brigands." They even dreamt of capturing Joseph and taking him prisoner to King Ferdinand in Sicily. However, Murat eventually brought the situation under control.

The most notorious comitiva was led by Gaetano Vardarelli and his brothers. After deserting from Murat's army in 1809, Gaetano harried northern Apulia with 300 hors.e.m.e.n, one of his bases being the Bovino valley. He and his band encouraged the country people not to pay taxes, burning conscription lists. Since salt was a government monopoly, they broke into state warehouses and handed out the salt. They lived off the land, raiding ma.s.serie; if resisted, they set fire to the buildings and the crops, driving off the livestock. When the hunt finally grew too hot, many of the comitiva fled to Sicily, including Gaetano, who became a sergeant in King Ferdinand's guards. But Apulia had not heard the last of Don Gaetano Vardarelli.

Part IX.

Taranto and Brindisi.

38.

Cla.s.sical Taranto.

Taranto is in many ways the most remarkable city left to us in all Magna Graecia... The ancient city spread itself out over the mainland eastward, its acropolis alone occupying the peninsula, which is now an island.

Edward Hutton, "Naples and Southern Italy"

THE TWO GREAT PORTS of southern Apulia are Taranto and Brindisi, on the Ionian Sea and the Adriatic. Since the third century BC they have been linked across the Heel of Italy by the Via Appia. Famous in Antiquity, they fascinated the travellers, who had read about them in Polybius or Livy. To understand how they saw these venerable cities and what they hoped to find there, you have to look at the history of Taras and Brentesion.

According to legend, Taranto in Greek, Taras was founded by a divinity of that name, son of Poseidon, the G.o.d of the Mediterranean, and of the nymph Saturia, who was a daughter of Minos of Crete. She had set out for Italy from Crete with Iapyx (ancestor of the Messapians), but en route she had been raped by Poseidon. Taras arrived in Apulia on a dolphin, having ridden over the sea from Cape Matapan. He was wors.h.i.+pped as a demi-G.o.d by the Tarentines, who put him on their coins, and even today he appears on the city arms, riding on his dolphin.

The Cretan elements in the story, however fantastic, are probably significant. Minoan s.h.i.+ps could well have visited the Gulf of Taranto. Strabo says that the Cretans were here before the Spartans while Herodotus thinks that the Messapians came from Crete. (Although Herodotus admits that he is not infallible "my job is to write down what has been said, but I don't have to believe it.") In reality, the Messapians came from the other side of the Adriatic; their pottery, unique in Italy, is relatively common in the Balkans. Yet there were undoubtedly Greek links from a very early date, with a small Mycenean trading colony on a site at Scoglio del Tonno near today's railway station which flourished from about 14001200 BC. Even after the collapse of Mycenae, when most of the West lost contact, the Messapians kept in touch with Greece.

During the eighth century BC, a band of young Spartans left home because their countrymen refused to treat them as equals. They were b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, born to women whose husbands had been away at war for nineteen years. The legend is that, led by Phalanthus another dolphin rider the youths sailed northwest into the Ionian Sea and founded Taras. What is certain is that Spartans established a colony here at about this time, administered by a 'nomarch'. Trading with the Messapians, they were no doubt attracted by the marvellous harbour and beautiful coastline. "The landscape, vegetation and intensity of light all recalled Greece", Francois Lenormant points out: "The first colonists from h.e.l.las must have thought they were still in their own country... Here you enter a new land... which really does deserve the name 'Greater Greece'."

Predictably, there was unending war between colonists and natives. Yet there must also have been cultural exchange since the Messapians adopted the newcomers' alphabet. This was realised in 2003 when archaeologists unearthed a 'map' on a shard of black-glazed terracotta, which is the size of a large postage stamp and dates from about 500 BC. The oldest example of western cartography, it shows thirteen towns including Otranto, Soleto, Ugento, Leuca (Santa Maria di Leuca) and Taras. Save for Taras their names are in Messapian, but written in ancient Greek script.

Until the fifth century Taras was governed by kings. Like all Greek colonies its citizens frequently faced extermination by the natives; as late as 474 BC they suffered a terrible defeat. However, they won a decisive victory in 460 at Carbina, when, as Hutton puts it, "the Messapian women were outraged upon the altars of their G.o.ds with such refinements of l.u.s.t that one must suppose an extraordinary corruption of manners among the Tarantines." Carbina is modern Carovigno.

During the fourth century BC, its most prosperous period, Taras had a population of 300,000 and covered much the same area as modern Taranto. Its first citadel was an acropolis, on a rock on what was then an island, but is now the peninsula occupied by the Old Town, guarding the entrance to the Mare Piccolo. The chamber tombs were the most magnificent in Magna Graecia. Later, elegant suburbs with wide streets, theatres and baths were laid out on the site of today's New Town.

Tarantine pottery was more florid than any in mainland Greece, while Tanagra figurines originated here, being afterwards copied at Tanagra in Boeotia. The city's craftsmen made enchanting gold jewellery wreaths, bracelets, earrings some of which have been recovered from graves at Mottola and Ginosa, where the richer Tarantines had summer villas. (There are superb examples in the museum.) The coins were among the most elegant in the entire ancient world; the silver staters show Taras or Phalanthus riding on a dolphin, while the reverse usually has either a horse, Tarantines being renowned for their horsemans.h.i.+p, or a murex sh.e.l.l.

All this wealth came from orchards, fisheries, sheep and the famous Tarantine purple dye. Each spiny-sh.e.l.led murex (or rock-whelk) exudes a few drops from which a dye can be extracted, varying between dark purple and pale rose; since no other fast dye for these colours was then available, it was much prized, Tarantine purple costing only less than Tyrian. The merchants of Taras had depots all along the Adriatic coast besides close links with the Greek traders further east.

Janet Ross was told the legend of the dye's discovery; one day the hero Hercules's dog had found a murex on the beach and, crunching it between his teeth, it had stained his jaws purple for life. She also heard the theory that the citizens of Taras had been the first Europeans to keep domestic cats. Previously, like other Greeks, they seem to have used tame 'weasels' probably pine martens for keeping down rats and mice. Some Tarantine coins of the fifth and fourth centuries have a youth on the reverse holding a bird, with a cat climbing up his leg to catch it, while one or two vases show cats hunting birds. Presumably they were imported from Egypt or Persia.

The later Tarantines grew so effete and unwarlike that in retrospect Horace gave their city the d.a.m.ning name molle Tarentum (soft Taranto). Perhaps their decline was due to drinking a little too much of their good wine, which the poet compared favourably with his famous Falernian. Despite walls ten miles in circ.u.mference, they lived in daily fear of the Messapians and Lucanians, depending for protection on mercenaries who were not always victorious. The Romans became steadily more threatening, and in 280 BC Taras sought help from King Pyrrhus of Epirus.

Pyrrhus, who in Hannibal's opinion was the finest general of his lifetime, possessed a great toe rumoured to have divine powers. When he landed at Taras, because of a storm he had only a handful of cavalry, 2,000 infantry and two elephants. Learning that the Tarantines expected him to do all the fighting, he at once conscripted the male population, banning drinking parties and banquets. He managed to beat the Romans twice, but his losses were so heavy that he evacuated his troops to Sicily. The second of these battles, Asculum, was the original 'Pyrrhic' victory; "One more victory over the Romans like that and we're done for", he told a soldier. When the Romans marched on Taras, he rushed back to relieve it but was defeated, and in 272 BC the city finally fell to the Romans.

Taras became Tarentum, a Roman garrison occupying the citadel. However, in 212 when some Tarantine hostages tried to escape from Rome and, after being caught, were flung to their deaths from the Tarpeian rock, there was widespread revulsion against Roman rule among the citizens. Two young cousins of the victims, Philomenus and Nicon, wrote to Hannibal, offering to hand over the city to him. His army was camped nearby and he had ingratiated himself by releasing all the Tarantine prisoners taken at Cannae if he could capture the port of Taras, he would be able to get badly needed reinforcements and supplies from Carthage.

The Romans were accustomed to letting Philomenus in after dark because of his pa.s.sion for hunting, and because he always gave them some of his game. One night, while the garrison were having a party, he came back with an enormous wild boar; when the sentry bent down to admire it, he stabbed him with his boar-spear and then opened the gate for the waiting Carthaginians. Nicon had already opened another gate for Hannibal with the main storming party, and together they quickly overran the city. However, the Romans held out in the citadel, protected by the sea on three sides, and guarded on the landward by a deep moat and a strong wall. It bottled up the Tarantine fleet, so Hannibal had the s.h.i.+ps dragged across the isthmus on huge wagons. Then they blockaded the citadel, but it still refused to surrender.

Three years later, when the Carthaginians were busy elsewhere, a Roman army besieged Taras. A traitor opened the gates, and after half-heartedly throwing a few javelins at them, the panic-stricken Tarantines ran into their houses. The Romans enslaved 30,000 men, women and children, besides sending home an immense quant.i.ty of gold, silver and statuary. "I see the Romans have their own Hannibal" was Hannibal's comment. "We've lost the city in the way we took it."

This was the end of Taras as a great city-state, Brundisium swiftly replacing it as Southern Italy's princ.i.p.al port. Yet Roman rule cannot have been all that harsh, since after two centuries Strabo reported how Tarentum still kept its Greek language and way of life. It charmed both Horace and Virgil, who, like most cultivated Romans, revered everything Greek. Horace swore that if the Fates did not allow him to live out his last days at Tivoli, then he would do so near Tarentum. He praised the wine, the merum tarentinum, claiming that it was far better than the bland vintages from the vineyards around Rome, while Virgil wrote lyrically of the Tarantine countryside.

About 95 AD, Marcus Cocceius Nerva, a kindly, dignified senator, was exiled here by the paranoiac Diocletian. Too gentle to fear as a murderer, the savage and tyrannical emperor may have been afraid of him as a potential replacement. When Diocletian was a.s.sa.s.sinated in 96, Nerva was summoned to the throne although in his sixties. He only lived for another two years but his reign was one of the most benevolent in Roman history. No doubt, he rewarded the pleasant place of his banishment.

Centuries later, the River Galaesus, so often mentioned by the two poets, attracted cla.s.sically minded travellers to the city. But they could not credit that any of the wretched, swampy little streams flowing into the Mare Piccolo could possibly be the beautiful river of Horace and Virgil that had once "soaked the golden fields."

39.

Two Men from Taras

I die far from the land of Italy and from Taranto, my home, and for me that is a harder fate than death.