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...the whole town is so gracious in spite of modern improvements that
a whole day is not too much to give it, lingering in the old churches, or
about the harbour, or lounging in the pretty public gardens by the sea.
Edward Hutton, “Naples and Southern Italy”
MANY PEOPLE THINK TRANI is the most beautiful of all Apulian cities. It has a long history and its famous maritime code, the Ordinamenta Maris, dates from 1063 when it was part of the Byzantine Empire. Under the Normans countless Crusaders embarked for the Holy Land from Trani, after a night spent in vigil at the church of Ognissanti.
Facing the sea, its deep moat filled with seawater, Trani Castle is one of the few Hohenstaufen castles to retain its original geometric pattern. The Emperor Frederick, who built it, hanged Pietro Tiepolo, the Doge of Venice’s son, from its walls in full view of the Venetian fleet cruising outside, in revenge for Venetian raids on the Apulian coast. The Via Giudea commemorates the Jewish quarter at Trani, to whose community the Emperor gave a monopoly of the city’s silk trade, and the little thirteenth century churches of Scuolanuova and Sant’ Anna began as synagogues.
It is King Manfred, however, who has the most dramatic associations with Trani. In 1259 an anonymous Dominican chronicler, from the friary next to the harbour, watched the arrival of Manfred’s Byzantine queen, Helena Comnena:
On 2 June eight galleys brought to Apulia the bride of King Manfred, Helena, daughter of the Despot of Epirus, accompanied by many lords and ladies of our realm and from her father’s. She landed at the port of Trani where the King was waiting for her. When the lady landed from her galley, he warmly embraced and kissed her. After leading her all the way through the city to everybody’s applause, he took her to the castle where there was feasting and dancing, while during that evening there were so many illuminations, with beacons in every town in the land, that it seemed just like day-time.... the said queen is most agreeable, with a kindly manner, far more beautiful than the King’s first wife, and people say that she is only seventeen.
In 1496, King Ferrantino pawned Trani to the Venetians, who remained here for thirteen years. They occupied it again in 1529, but were driven out by the Spaniards. Some palazzi have a distinctly Venetian air. The city then declined steadily under Spanish rule, the harbour being deliberately left to silt up, to make it uncompetitive.
When the tireless Abate Pacichelli visited Trani at the end of the seventeenth century, he was distressed to find it so decayed. Many fine houses had been allowed to fall down while its spacious squares were deserted. This was partly due to the plague of 1656, in which “more than a hundred of the best families had been extinguished.” He noticed and, uncharacteristically, queried an inscription over a gate, claiming that the name Trani combined those of Diomedes’s son Tyrrhenius, who founded it, and of the Emperor Trajan who restored it.
Bishop Berkeley enjoyed the wine here in 1734. “N.B. The muscat of Trani excellent,” he recorded. As usual, his notes are as vivid as they are terse: “This city, as Barletta, paved and built almost entirely out of white marble; noble cathedral, Gothic, of white marble... port stopped and choked.” He adds “piracies of the Turks make it unsafe travelling by night.” By “Turks” he meant North Africans or Albanians, who generally arrived in fast boats, abducted a few women and animals, and then vanished as swiftly as they had come. The last raid of this sort on Apulia took place in 1836.
During the mid-eighteenth century Charles VII briefly made Trani the political and administrative centre of Apulia, siting all the law courts here. He dredged the harbour, enabling its merchants to export wool, grain and olive oil. However, it soon silted up again.
Swinburne had a low opinion of the wine, and of the cathedral too– “in very mean taste, the ornament preposterous.” The interior had suffered from Baroque “improvements”. Nor did this dour Northumbrian care much for the inhabitants:
Our evening was spent with the archbishop, a worthy conversable prelate. He told us he had taken great pains to introduce a taste for study and literature into his diocese, but hitherto without much success as the Tranians were a very merry race, gente molto allegra, but unfortunately born with an unconquerable antipathy to application. The collegians, though under his immediate inspection, were above his hand, and often, when he thought the whole seminary buried in silence, wrapped up in studious contemplation, or lucubrations, he had been surprised, on entering the quadrangle, to find all ring again, with gigs and tarantellas. We were satisfied that he spoke without exaggeration, for never did we hear such incessant chattering, and so stunning a din as was kept up the whole day under our windows. It is a rule established by the custom of time immemorial, that no work shall be done in Trani during dinner; the whole afternoon is to be spent in dozing, chattering or sauntering: we could not prevail upon the blacksmith to shoe one of our horses in the evening.
The ancient custom of the siesta still infuriates Northern tourists in Apulia. Even the most famous churches are firmly shut in the afternoon. According to J.J. Blunt, writing in his book of 1823, “Vestiges of Ancient Manners and Customs discoverable in Modern Italy and Sicily”, this comes from the old pagan practice of closing temples at noon for several hours so that the gods may sleep. “Hence the goatherd in Theocritus ventures not to play upon his pipe at noon, for fear of awakening Pan.”
In 1799, the common people of Trani rose for the King when the municipality proclaimed the Neapolitan Republic, hoisting the white Borbone standard and taking control of the administration. Sailors, fishermen and labourers, they defended the city heroically for several days against the troops of General Broussier and Ettore Carafa, the revolutionary Count of Ruvo. In the end, the besiegers stormed it at the point of the bayonet, reducing the buildings to ruins and the population to mounds of corpses.
During the nineteenth century, Ferdinand II was so proud of the city that he made his second son Count of Trani. He dredged the harbour once again, this time for good, finally restoring prosperity. The depots near the cathedral, inscribed “AMSTERDAM”, “DANIMARCO”, “LONDON” AND “SVEZZIA”, all date from his reign.
In 1865 Mme. Figuier and her husband, eager to escape from the chambre d’horreur and the restaurant nauséabond at Foggia, looked forward to seeing Trani. They expected to eat better, even if they prudently brought a basket with a cold chicken and a bottle of wine. When they arrived in the rain, however, they both thought the town uglier and unhealthier than Foggia, with dark, narrow, winding streets, badly paved and crowded by wretched looking houses, although the population of sailors and traders seemed bustling by comparison. Out of the seething mob that fought for their custom at the station, they hired a driver and his assistant: “One was a peevish old man with red eyes and hair like a hedgehog, only half-dressed in tatters, and the other was a squat, one-eyed youth in rags.” These two drove them in search of a room. In the first locanda they tried, they were puzzled at seeing six pillows on each of the four beds in the camera d’onore till informed that six persons slept in a bed – one being reserved for women. The next hostelry was a complex of huge passages opening into each other, window-less and doorless, faintly lit by night-lights. The beds were smaller, flanked by jars of foul-smelling oil. There was a knife on every bed. “My locanda is for merchants who carry a lot of money when they come here”, the proprietress explained proudly. “So they like to sleep with a knife handy.” She suggested the couple might lodge with her sister, the widow of a sea-faring man, where they could have a proper chambre bourgeoise.
The rain had stopped, so after arriving at the sister’s house, they went out onto the balcony to admire the view of the harbour. Going back into the room, Juliette Figuier found their hostess raiding their trunk. “The old woman had a hard, glaring stare, pale lips and a false, cruel face.” She ran up to Mme Figuier, raised her veil and cried with a hideous laugh, “What no earrings, no necklace, no jewels? My sister must be mad. Here’s a guest who’s not worth strangling, not even worth the price of the cord.”
Juliette was so frightened that she ran out into the street, to see dark blotches on the paving stones which she fancied were blood-stains. Telling the cabmen to retrieve their trunk, she and M. Figuier just managed to catch the 3.00 pm train back to Foggia, the last that day. On the journey they tried to eat the chicken, unsuccessfully, deciding that when a fowl was killed in Apulia it was always the oldest member of the flock.
Twenty years later, no one tried to strangle the formidable Janet Ross when she arrived with her timid protégé, the painter Carlo Orsi. She was amused by the ill-feeling between Trani and Andria. “At Trani they told us that the people of Andria were all thieves and assassins, uncivil to strangers, and perfect savages; while at Andria we were informed that Trani was a nest of robbers, and its inhabitants ‘maleducati e gente di nessuna fede’ (ill-bred and untrustworthy)”. There were certainly some unusual members of the medical profession in Trani. In a dirty back street Janet Ross found an advertisement posted up outside the house of a Professor Rica:
The said Professor Rica will buy, for making his salves, live snakes and big serpents, wolves, bears, monkeys, marmots, weasels, and may other kinds of wild animal, alive and in good condition.
But Mrs. Ross met only politeness in the town, even if the people were amazed by her courage in walking about alone. They were equally astonished at her wearing a hat instead of a shawl over her head. “‘Are you a man that you wear a hat?’ asked a small boy. Some nice-looking young men at once reproved him and asked me to excuse the bad manners of an ignorante [uneducated]. They then offered to show us the way to the cathedral and made way for us through the crowd.” To be fair to the little boy, there was clearly something unmistakably masculine about Janet Ross, judging from photographs.
The cathedral, with its tall campanile and its magic setting by the sea, was largely built between 1159 and 1186 although only completed in the thirteenth century. A recent restoration has re-moved the Baroque ornament disliked by Swinburne, revamping the interior in twilight twentieth century style. The effect is unspeakably bleak, that of a soulless barn, even the local clergy comparing the bishop’s new throne to a dentist’s chair.
On the evening of Holy Saturday, Mrs. Ross returned to the cathedral, to find out just what was meant by the abbavescio di Cristo:
As the clock struck eleven a great curtain which hid the high altar fell, and the noise which followed was frightful. The whole congregation shouted, knocked their sticks on the pavement and dashed chairs against the walls, while the bells rang all over the town. This was the abbavescio which I discovered meant the resurrection of Christ... The noise outside was even worse. Crackers, paper bombs and rockets were exploding all over the place, and on the pavement in front of every house were lines of little brown-paper parcels full of gunpowder, which went off with a deafening effect. This was the batteria di Gesù (the battery of Jesus), a demonstration of joy at His rising from the tomb.
What she did not appreciate was that the abbavescio was a survival from Byzantine Apulia, from the Greek Orthodox celebration of Easter.
She thought the public gardens “wildly picturesque”, and her description shows that they still remain much as they were a century ago. They are next to the seawall, adjoining the little semi-circular harbour, which reminded her of Venice.