Part III
12
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 grass 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 Tàranto.
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 fashionable 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 “André 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 Saturday. 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 [noble 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 mass 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 shipping 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.