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Bari, not long ago, consisted of a dark and tortuous old town...
It now has its glaring New Quarter.
Norman Douglas, “Old Calabria”
NEW BARI’S CITIZENS are said to have inherited all the distinctive qualities of the Old Baresi. They are no less wily and money-minded than their ancestors. At least, that is what every Apulian who comes from outside the city will insist on telling you.
Little change could be seen when Keppel Craven visited Bari during the spring of 1818, although he conceded that trade with Trieste and the Dalmatian ports gave “an appearance of animation, ease and opulence.” But the first house had already been built in 1816 in what is still the New City’s main street, the Corso Ferdinando (later renamed Corso Vittorio Emmanuele). The public buildings were begun in the 1820s, the entire New City being paved in 1830. Soon there was a railway station, and work started on a new harbour. An opera house, the Teatro Piccini, opened in 1854 with Donizzetti’s Poliuto. This pioneer phase coincided with the last days of the Borbone monarchy.
Ferdinand II and the royal family came to Bari in 1859, to greet Maria Sophia of Wittelsbach, who had just married by proxy the heir to the throne, the Duke of Calabria. A cheering mob dragged the King’s carriage through the streets to the castle. Harold Acton describes the occasion:
On February 3, a spring like day, the bride’s approach was announced by repeated cannon fire at ten in the morning. The Queen as well as the Duke of Calabria climbed on board the frigate which had brought her from Trieste, and there was a rapid exchange of greetings and embraces. The Duke clasped both his bride’s hands and kissed her forehead; they spoke to each other in halting French, she a little pale from the sea voyage, he abashed by the beauty of his Bavarian bride.
Already a dying man, King Ferdinand burst into tears when she visited him in his bedroom. Yet on the same day he found enough strength to approve a plan “to encourage the city’s growth, prestige and dignity.” They were to be two huge new squares, a state boarding school and a nautical institute.
Ferdinand died in May. An abler man than his nervous young successor, Francis II, was needed to save the tottering Regno. First Garibaldi and then the Piedmontese invaded the Two Sicilies, the last Borbone king sailing into exile early in 1861.
The handful of Apulians who fought for the Risorgimento cannot have foreseen its consequences. Peasants left the land in droves to escape from speculators’ work-gangs; in 1861 the population of Bari was 23,000 while ten years later it was nearly 51,000. Augustus Hare thought the city had “all the characteristics of the meanest part of Naples – flat roofs, dilapidated, whitewashed houses, and a swarming, noisy, begging, brutalised population. Two modern streets intersect with formal dismalness the labyrinths of old houses and narrow alleys”, “Begging is unfortunately still a national industry” says Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Southern Italy of 1878: “The best way to get rid of the nuisance is to give it a very minute coin.” The “nuisance” included middle-aged men too broken by work to toil on in the fields, monks and nuns thrown out of their convents, and the rank and file of the former Borbone army turned off without pensions.
During the economic crisis that afflicted Europe in the 1870s, the situation was made worse by protectionist measures designed for the North. If it helped new industries in Piedmont and Lombardy, the tariff of 1878 on mechanical products and textiles caused many bankruptcies, driving capital northwards and encouraging the flight from the land. All this made life still more miser-able in Bari – as it did in every other Apulian city.
Old Bari, more ruinous than ever, was packed with unemployed labourers, crammed into dirty rookeries and cellars, riddled with tuberculosis, pneumonia, arthritis and syphilis, even leprosy. Murder was commonplace in both the Old and the New Towns; “A betrayed husband generally kills”, observed the chairman of Bari’s Chamber of Labour. In 1898 cholera and famine led to savage riots; a mob trying to storm the municipality was dispersed by troops with much bloodshed. In 1903 deaths in the province of Bari were 29.30 per thousand, the second highest rate in Italy and nearly twice that in England and Wales. A large proportion of the deaths were in Bari itself, which seethed with discontent and class hatred. Understandably, there was massive emigration, mostly to the United States, Argentina or Venezuela, or to Libya after its acquisition by Italy in 1912.
New Bari continued to grow remorselessly, buildings going up every year. Another opera house was built in 1903, the Petruzzelli – affectionately known as La Perla di Bari (the pearl of Bari)– which saw many memorable productions. (In 1991 it was completely destroyed during a fire started by rival claques, but was eventually restored and re-opened in 2008.) The expansion surged on until the Great War of 1915.
Inflation went up by fifty per cent in 1918–20, unemployment rocketing as men came home from the Front. In the ‘Red Years’ after the War, Bari seemed to be on the brink of a Russian-style revolution. There were countless strikes and demonstrations, well-dressed people were jostled, army officers booed. The Left was encouraged by news from all over Apulia of riots, of town-halls stormed and police stations stoned. But at the end of 1920 Giuseppe Caradonna set up a Fascist cell at Cerignola which was so effective that it earned him the name ‘Duke of Cerignola’. Soon Fascist squadristi (blackshirts) were smashing labour unions and breaking strikes throughout the province. The blackshirts made ready to stem “the rising Bolshevik tide”. Organised by the fire-brand Giuseppe di Vittorio, the Left bought as many ex-army rifles and revolvers as it could. On 1 August, 1922, it rose in a carefully planned revolt, a vicious struggle raging between armed workers on one side and troops, carabinieri and blackshirts on the other. Women threw stones or burning oil. But after three days the Red Baresi were broken and would give no more trouble.
Accounts of what happened in Bari during the Fascist Era are often deliberately confused, but clearly Mussolini found more than a few supporters when he was seen to be firmly in power. Economic expansion revived, an annual trade-fair, the Fiera del Levantebeing established in 1930 to encourage trade between Italy and the Middle East, a university was founded and emigration continued, many Baresi settling in Abyssinia when it was an Italian colony. Little was done, however, for the slum-dwellers of Old Bari.
In 1939, the invasions of Albania and Greece were launched from Bari and Brìndisi. The following year, however, Bari seemed to be in real danger when the Italian offensive in Greece collapsed; for a time there were fears that the Greeks were going to invade Apulia. The Fascist Era ended with considerable bloodshed in July 1943, after which the city became the headquarters of Marshal Badoglio’s anti-Axis government. When the Germans attacked in force in September, General Bellomo counter-attacked, taking many German prisoners and saving the port for the Allies.
Allied troops did not behave well at Bari, requisitioning houses and evicting their owners without any warning. In a sad little book, “Il Regno del Sud”, Agostino degli Espinosa tells of famished children flocking round the city’s restaurants and cafés, reserved for British or American personnel, and begging for the scraps left on their plates. The only way to avoid starving to death was to buy stolen army rations.
Evelyn Waugh came here and (in “Unconditional Surrender”) says less compassionately that there was an agile and ingenious criminal class consisting chiefly of small boys. Yet he comments, too, that the city regained the “comsopolitan martial stir” which it had enjoyed during the Crusades. Allies soldiers crowded the streets and the harbour was full of small naval vessels. For in late autumn 1943 Bari became one of the three main ports of the “British Italy Base”.
Waugh adds that the city “achieved the unique, unsought distinction of being the only place in the Second World War to suffer from gas.” On the evening of 2 December a hundred German planes from Foggia attacked the harbour, sinking seventeen ships. Among those that blew up was the USS John Hervey with a secret cargo of mustard-bombs; over 600 Allied personnel were gas casualties besides those killed by German bombs, together with all too many Baresi. ‘Many of the inhabitants complained of sore throats, sore eyes and blisters’, says Waugh: “They were told it was an unfamiliar, mild, epidemic disease of short duration.” Even now, you meet aged Baresi whose respiratory problems are due to mustard-gas. Old Bari was further damaged in 1945 when the American ammunition ship Henderson exploded in its harbour.