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Situated among gentle hills, surrounded by strong high walls...
G B Pacichelli, “Il Regno di Napoli in Prospettiva”
ALTAMURA IS ANOTHER CITY on the Appian Way, 1500 feet above sea level, among the hills of the Murge. Its name, derived from its “high walls”, has taken on a new and unpleasing significance in recent times, because of the bleak grey apartment blocks that have arisen on the outskirts.
Called Sub Lupatia under the Romans, Altamura was destroyed by the Saracens and lay deserted for centuries before Frederick II re-founded it in 1230, specifying that its inhabitants must include Catholics, Greeks and Jews in equal numbers. The Greek rite survived at the church of San Nicola dei Greci until 1601 and a synagogue till the sixteenth century. He gave the city a castle, and also a cathedral that King Robert the Wise began to rebuild in 1316, placing his coat-of-arms over the main doorway; heavily restored in the 19th century, it lacks charm. The castle, a typical Hohenstaufen fortress, together with the high city walls, was demolished during the nineteenth century. It stood in what is now Piazza Metteoti.
In the 1360s one of the naughty Giovanna I’s four husbands, the faithful Otto, Duke of Brunswick, was imprisoned at Altamura by the enemies who later murdered her. During the same century Giovanni Pipino, Count of Minervino and Lord of Altamura, was considered so intolerably overbearing that he suffered the ultimate indignity of being hanged from the city walls by his own vassals.
In 1463 the fabulously rich Gianantonio del Balzo Orsini, having grown very old, was secretly done to death in the castle by royal command. Prince of Tàranto and Altamura, most of Gianantonio’s life had been spent in civil war and king-making.
In 1482 another over-mighty magnate, Pirro del Balzo, was created Grand Constable of the Regno and Prince of Altamura, only to perish miserably a few years after. During King Ferrante’s gruesome reprisals for the ‘Barons’ Plot’, del Balzo was strangled in a Neapolitan dungeon and his body thrown into the sea in a sack. The doomed Federigo of Aragon, last of his dynasty, was briefly Prince of Altamura before becoming King of Naples in 1496, but the French and Spaniards soon came and conquered his kingdom.
During the eighteenth century the city become very prosperous, with a population of 24,000. It established a short lived ‘studio’ or university and called itself the ‘Athens of Apulia’. Unfortunately for the Altamuresi, its academics adopted the ideas of the French Revolution.
Early in 1799, the dons at the university rallied Altamura to the new Neapolitan Republic. However, Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo landed in Calabria, raising a royalist army from his family’s tenants. The Sanfedisti (Christian Army of the Holy Faith) included not just loyal gentry but a number of brigands who killed and plundered as they went. When they reached Altamura on 9 May, its citizens ran out of ammunition after only a day. They fled the same night, the men going first, followed by the women and children, to hide in the dank grottoes of the Murgia like their ancestors. Entering Altamura, the Sanfedisti found a vault full of dead royalists, some buried alive, and any citizens who had stayed were massacred and the houses sacked. Men from Matera and Gioia del Colle joined in, bringing carts, while every sheep and cow, every horse, pig and chicken in the surrounding countryside was stolen, the Gioiesi alone making off with 3000 sheep. After a fortnight the Sanfedisti allowed the starving Altamuresi to creep back from the ravines into a city where their goods were still being sold in the market place. They had to ask permission to enter their own houses and 130 were arrested as known Jacobins. It took decades for Altamura to recover.
George Berkeley had commented on the openness of the country in the region between Altamura and Gravina, and on the vast flocks of sheep:
not a tree in view; some corn, some scrub, much the greater part stony pasture; a small brook, no cattle or houses, except one or two cottages, occur in this simple space; sheep fed here in winter, in the summer in the Abruzzo, grass here being dried up in the summer, and a fresh crop in September... those who own the sheep mentioned are men of the Abruzzo, many of them, very rich, and drive a great trade, sending their wool to Manfredonia, and so by sea to Venice; their cheese to Naples, and elsewhere up and down the kingdom; they nevertheless live meanly like other peasants, and many with bags of money shan’t have a coat worth a groat.
But this sort of sheep ranching created a landscape like the Scottish Highlands after the clearances, driving many peasants to despair. Some joined the brigands, others forced their daughters into prostitution in the towns. Sons with good voices were castrated and sold to choirs – if discovered, their parents claimed that the boy had fallen asleep in the fields and a pig had bitten off his testicles. The Risorgimeno brought even more misery.
Just as on the Tavoliere, the sheep runs of the western Terra di Bari became latifondi. Shepherds and dairymen were thrown out of work and common land was ruthlessly enclosed. By the late 1860s, it was said at Altamura that there were only two sorts of people, carriage folk and the rest. An Altamuran bureaucrat reported how the masses “openly display their hatred for landlords and officials”. Their distrust of officialdom was justified, corruption being rampant and every charity maladministered. Former Borbone soldiers turned brigand, establishing hideouts in the region called the Graviscella, full of small ravines and caves, from where they emerged at night to find food and money at gun-point. More than a few landowners or priests sheltered them out of dislike for the new Northern regime and for its alien, arrogant Piedmontese troops and administrators.
Most Altamuresi, however, had no stomach for an outlaw’s hunted life, accepting an equally lethal if less dramatic sub-existence in a labour gang. By 1901 eighty per cent were day labourers whose misery was aggravated by the uncertainty of being employed at all. In 1920, when drought made the ground too hard to dig, one in five went without employment, the lucky seldom working a three day week. There were government hand-outs of flour, but it was mouldy or adulterated; the officials at Altamura would only give women ration-tickets in exchange for sexual favours. With such widespread resentment, the situation was explosive, kept in check solely by fear of a nearby Fascist cell at Minervino Murge.
When the Germans abandoned Bari in the autumn of 1943, they established a new headquarters base at Altamura. Up in the Murge, it was ideally placed for directing a stand against the Allies. However, Field Marshal Kesselring – ‘Smiling Albert’ as his soldiers called him – needed every man he could find, to try and beat back the Allied landing at Salerno, and simply did not have enough troops to hold Apulia. No doubt, his decision to withdraw was helped by the all pervading misery of life in the little city in those days.
Horace must have driven along the Via Appia through Altamura – or, at any rate, Sub-Lupatia – on his way to Tàranto. Nearly two millenia after he had passed by here so cheerfully, most of its inhabitants were worse off under King Victor Emmanuel III than their Roman ancestors had been under the Emperor Augustus.