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The word is not rendered by ‘farm house’, which gives but an
inadequate idea of the masseria.
Charles Macfarlane, “The Lives and Exploits of Banditti and Robbers”
ON THE MURGE you never see a house of any antiquity outside the cities, apart from the odd castle or masseria. One or two of the masserie have been converted into small hotels whose guests wrongly assume that they were manor houses, but in reality the nobles who owned them preferred to inhabit a castle or a palazzo in the local city, rarely visiting the masseria and then merely to hunt. They were not so much farmhouses as fortified depots for agricultural produce that at certain times of the year – lambing, sowing, reaping, pruning, fruit-picking, wine-making, etc – took on the role of villages. Strongholds with battlements and cannon, defended by armed guards, they sheltered communities of farm workers who otherwise lived in the cities.
Built as protection against slave-raiders or brigands, the surviving masserie (which are not confined to the Murge) generally date from between the sixteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, although their origin is far older. Sometimes they have rueful names, for example Spina, Petrose, Scaserba, Campi Distrutti or della Femina Morta, that hint at the harsh existence of the old Apulian countryside. Most are deserted, crumbling into ruin; bleak monuments to a way of life that ended only a little over seventy years ago and is still remembered by a handful of very aged men and women. A few have been modernised, serving as ordinary farm houses.
The construction of masserie all over Apulia from the late Middle Ages onward reflected not just a need to protect peasants but the increasing importance of olive farming, each masseria being equipped with a press and countless oil jars. A feature of Apulian life since the Messapian period, olive trees had begun to be grown commercially during the early thirteenth century, at first by the monasteries. Then the feudal lords copied the monks, so that eventually every big estate had its masseria and olive groves.
Since wine was another staple of Apulian agriculture, there were vineyards as well as olive groves near every masseria, which always contained a wine-press. In some places the masserie stood among seemingly endless almond groves while those around Conversano, Monopoli and Putignano were encircled by no less beautiful cherry orchards. Cherries were preserved in grappa as early as the eighteenth century. With fewer olives and vines, masserie on the otherwise tree-less sheep runs of the Alta Murgia or the northern Tavoliere specialised in cheese and butter, employing professional dairy men to process the ewes’ milk.
Charles Macfarlane, who came to Apulia in 1817 and knew it better than any other early traveller save Pacichelli, has an unusually helpful description. “The masserie in Apulia and the provinces of Bari, Òtranto and Tàranto, are all built on the same plan”, he tells us:
A square wall of enclosure, sufficiently high and solid, generally surrounds the dwelling-house, built against one side, and containing three or four large habitable rooms, and sometimes a small chapel. The vast stables, granaries, and out-houses, within the walls, form a right-angle with this dwelling-house, but without touching it. In the midst of the enclosure, at some distance from the surrounding walls, rises a round or square tower of two storeys, standing quite alone. The ascent to the upper storey is either by stone steps, inserted in the tower, or by a drawbridge, or by a ladder easily drawn up into the tower.
General Sir Richard Church was also in Apulia in 1817, hunting down brigands. He too describes a masseria, “a very good specimen of its class”, when prepared for a sudden attack by horse-men, the Masseria del Duca:
Its thick walls dated from the middle ages, and were loopholed and protected by great solid gates and an avenue of trees, which was now effectually blocked up by carts with the wheels taken off, and logs and tree-trunks laid crosswise. At one corner of the enclosure rose a square tower, from the top of which you might overlook the great plain, dotted with white towns and villages, patched with brown leafless vineyards, green meads, silver-grey olive-orchards, and bounded by the shining sea.
The general recalled what he found here, “in a very large room, comfortably furnished after the manner of these Apulian masserie”, obviously, the quarters of the massaro, the steward who ran the estate for its absentee landowner.’ At this date, few proprietors ever dared to visit such a dangerous countryside, not even for the hunting.
Great chests, some for holding meal, some for holding clothes and linen, a heavy oaken table, some stools and benches, were on the floor; jars of olives, figs and raisins, stood upon a shelf against the smoke-dried wall; strings of onions, sausages, and dried fish dangled from the rafters. Cheeses were there too, and huge jars of olive-oil, and half-a-dozen demi-johns (great stone bottles), stoppered with oiled cotton, and containing the wine of the country, stood under the table.
Externally, the Masseria del Duca, at the foot of the little hills just south of Martina Franca, still looks much as it must have done in General Church’s day, with caciocavallo cheeses hanging up under the eaves to mature, even if its outbuildings house battery hens and a very modern dairy.
Although deserted, the vast Masseria Jesce between Altamura and Laterza, in the Murgia Catena on the border with Basilicata, is a particularly impressive example, almost a castle. Built of tufa, on the ground floor there were stalls for oxen and horses, with store-rooms; on the floor above, more store-rooms and living accommodation; sheep-pens ran along the walls outside. Small look-out towers projected at roof level. The lower part dates from the sixteenth century, the upper from half-way through the seventeenth, added by the de Mari family, Princes of Gioia del Colle, who were lords of Altamura nearby. The de Mari also restored a medieval chapel underground, building a passage down to it. Far inland and intended as a defence against brigands and starving peasants rather than North Africans, this gigantic masseria is an eloquent monument to the chronic insecurity and dangers of life in the remoter areas of the Apulian Murge.
Nearer the sea, further south, there was another scourge. “The Masserie, or farmhouses, in this part of Apulia are generally built on elevated ground, to avoid the malaria”, wrote Janet Ross, after a visit to the masseria of Leucaspide between Massafra and Tàranto. She continues:
Round the large courtyard are high walls, and one side is occupied by a vaulted ox-shed, built of stone, with a manger running all round, divided off for each animal... At one end an archway leads into a vaulted room with stone benches all round, on which the shepherds sleep, and in the middle is a huge slab of stone on which olive branches smoulder, and where the massara prepares the meals for the men.
She tells us too that “The hoeing, weeding corn, &c., is all done by gangs of women, who come from the nearest towns, chiefly from those on the Murgie hills, sometimes twenty miles off, and stay for six weeks or two months, sleeping all together in a big vaulted room on the ground floor.”
Life at a masseria was very much that of a community:
On Sundays and saints’ days a priest with a small boy came together, on a donkey, from Massafra to say mass in the wee chapel near the threshing floor at Leucaspide... The fervour with which the labourers beat their breasts when they said “mea culpa”, was most edifying, but must have been very painful. Vito Anton, the guard, always served mass with an immense pistol stuck into his belt behind, and was quite the most important person of the ceremony.
On rare occasions they celebrated, dancing a local dance, the Pizzica-Pizzica. Mrs. Ross describes the orchestra at a masseria party:
a guitar, a fiddle and a guitar battente, which has only five thin wire strings, and is a wild, queer, inspiriting instrument which would “make a buffalo dance”, as they say; a tambourine, and a cupa-cupa, a large earthenware tube, with a piece of sheepskin stretched tight over the top, and a stick forced through a hole in the centre. The player begins by spitting two or three times into his hand, and then moves the stick up and down as fast as he can; this makes an odd, droning sound, rather like a bag-pipe in the far distance.
The result reminded her of “Arab music”.
Life was just the same at masserie on the Murge or the Tavoliere until almost the Second World War.