Part VI
23
...an arid region, not unlike parts of northern Africa.
Norman Douglas, “Old Calabria”
NORMAN DOUGLAS decided he did not care for the Murge, which he dismissed as “that shapeless and dismal range of limestone hills.” He never saw them properly, however, only glimpsing the western Murgia from the train, on a wretched journey by night from Venosa to Tàranto.
The Murge form the plateaux seventy miles by ten that covers most of the Terra di Bari. From the coast it rises almost imperceptibly till in the south-west it is a good 1,500 feet above sea level. In the north east, where the limestone has been heavily eroded, the rich red soil is very fertile indeed; inland from Bari vines are grown, while climbing towards Gioia del Colle, olives and fruit trees take over. By contrast, in the south-west the Alta Murgia is bleak, rocky downland, providing only a small amount of poor quality arable and some scanty grazing, a landscape that was known in Roman times as Apulia Petrosa. Partly because they were unafflicted by malaria, from the eighteenth century until the Risorgimento the Murge’s little cities were generally much more flourishing than those on the Adriatic coast, although they seem to have been visited by comparatively few of the early travellers.
The River Òfanto marks the boundary between the Capitanata and Terra di Bari. In the mountains behind Melfi, which the poet Horace knew well, this can be a boiling torrent in winter, but here the Òfanto is no more than a sluggish trickle, almost dry in summer, the “stagnant Aufidus” of the ancient writers. The last river in Apulia as you go south, it is a reminder of just how little water there was until recent times.
In February 1817 the eighteen-year-old Charles Macfarlane explored the banks of the Òfanto, to see the battlefield of Cannae where Hannibal had defeated the Romans: “I had no companion, except the Calabrian pony that carried me, and a rough haired Scotch terrier.” Whatever scholarly conclusions Macfarlane may have reached about the battle, he has left us a fascinating glimpse of a long vanished way of life that had been lived on the desolate uplands of the Murge for centuries before the coming of the Romans.
The young traveller met some shepherds, who invited him to spend the night in their tugurio, a long, low hut, where he was given a meal; an omelette, fat bacon, maize bread and ricotta, with a glass of rough wine.
When all the pastoral society was assembled, the patriarchal chief shepherd taking the lead, they repeated aloud, and with well modulated cadences, the evening prayers, or the Catholic service of “Ave Maria”. A boy then lit a massy old brass lamp, that looked as it if had been dug out of Pompeii, and on producing it said “Santa notte a tutta la compagnia” (a holy night to all the company). The shepherds then took their supper, which was very frugal, consisting principally of Indian corn-bread and raw onions with a little wine....
The hut was just a single room with no chimney, smoke finding its way out through crannies in the roof. The beds were made of sheepskins and dried maize leaves.
Several of the huge dogs lay dreaming with their faces to the fire... Soon, however, the flames died on the hearth, the embers merely smouldered, and all was darkness, but not all silence, for the men snored most sonorously; the wind, that swept across the wide open plain, howled round the house, and occasionally the dogs joined in the chorus.
Macfarlane says that the shepherds were going to stay here until the middle of the spring, when they would slowly make their way to the Abruzzi, returning to the Pianura di Puglia at the approach of winter.
Even in the bleak south-west, however, most of the Murge’s peasants lived a very different sort of existence, going out daily from the little cities to scratch a living from the stony soil, ploughing with oxen if they were lucky but more often using mattocks or digging-sticks, by night sheltering their beasts from brigands near some fortified masseria. Life was still more dissimilar in the fertile north-eastern Murge, a rich land of olive groves, vineyards, and almond and cherry orchards, that in autumn swarmed with huge gangs of fruit-pickers, men and women who camped in the masserie’s courtyards. There were also dense forests, more than one of whose clearings contained a famous horse-stud.
The roads of the north-eastern Murge frequently go for miles through grove upon grove of olive trees, their gaunt branches trimmed in the Italian way as opposed to the Greek method used in the Salento, reaching up to the sky in a witches’ ballet. “They are pruned into the form of a cup, by cutting out the centric upright branches, in the same manner as gardeners trim gooseberry bushes”, noted the ever observant Swinburne. “This treatment lets in an equal share of the sun and ventilation to every part, and brings on a universal maturity.”
The absence of tall trees throughout the Murge dates only from the late nineteenth century. Formerly whole areas were thickly wooded, very like the Forest Umbra in the Gargano. Full of game, these had been the primeval forests through which Frederick II had once hunted with such pleasure. After the Risorgimento, however, laws specifically designed for clearing useless dwarf oak and chestnut from the lower slopes of Piedmont’s mountains, were cynically distorted on behalf of the new, ruthless speculator landowners. They systematically cut down all the great oak and beech trees, stripping the entire Murge of its woodland, and transforming its landscape.