Part VII
31
Remember, O Lord, those in the deserts and mountains,
and in dens and caves of the earth...
“The Greek Liturgy”
ONE OF THE STRANGEST FEATURES of the old Apulian landscape was the cave-city, originally a hiding-place from Goths and Saracens, but lasting long after the danger had ceased. Whereas grotto-churches existed almost everywhere, Apulia’s cave-cities were restricted to an area bounded by Grottaglie in the east, and by Gravina-in-Puglia and Tàranto in the north and west. The majority were abandoned during the late Middle Ages, although Mrs Ross saw people living in grottoes at Massafra and Statte during the late nineteenth century, while the underground cities at Gravina-in-Puglia and Matera (the latter now in Basilicata) were inhabited until the 1950s. Matera is the best known, thanks to Carlo Levi’s “Christ Stopped at Eboli”.
The plateau of the Murge, especially at the edges, is divided by ravines (gravine), formed by long-vanished rivers slicing through the tufa. The Apulians either moved into caves already existing in a ravine, some of which had been occupied in prehistoric times, or carved out new ones, their animals living with them. From even a short distance away, in wooded country, many cave-cities were invisible, the caves frequently concealed by dense vegetation and their access ladders pulled up each night.
A cave-house was generally divided into a living room and a bedroom, the beds being skins on platforms cut in the rock. At one side there was a tiny kitchen, with a ring carved in the ceiling to hang a cooking pot and a hole to let out smoke. Cisterns were dug in the floor, with channels for collecting rain-water; others covered by wooden trapdoors contained corn or oil, and niches in the walls held provisions and household implements. Where an underground city survived into the sixteenth century, as at Gravina-in-Puglia or Matera, the caves were often disguised by a façade of dressed stone so that outside they looked like proper houses.
Grotto-churches are known technically as rupestrian churches, meaning hollowed into a bank – from the Latin word for a cliff, rupis. These eerie places of worship resembled the better-known rock-chapels of Cappadocia, even if the terrain was totally different. Although sometimes no more than a chapel with an altar, frequently they were complete churches with pillars, aisles and apses. Occasionally, they were even full scale monasteries on several floors, possessing not only a chapel, but a dormitory, refectory and library. Their most attractive feature was the Byzantine frescoes that the monks painted on the plastered rock-face. Tragically neglected, these must rank among the most haunting and least appreciated art-treasures in Western Europe.
None of the travellers seem to have visited any of the smaller under-ground cities, such as Laterza and Ginosa. In both places the cave dwellings, including one or two churches containing faded remnants of frescoes, were abandoned long ago. The ravine at Laterza is very impressive, but the most interesting church here is not a grotto in its steep sides, but one dug out of the floor. Now the crypt of the Santuario della Mater Domini, this has some fine twelfth century frescoes, especially a beautiful Santa Ciriaca, who has the long, thin nose and enormous eyes of a true Byzantine saint. There is a fifteenth century marble fountain at the bottom of the ravine where, as in the cave-dwellers’ time, flocks still drink in the evening and clothes are washed in water gushing from the mouths of grotesques.
Ginosa has little to offer sightseers, except on the night of Holy Saturday when a Passion play is staged in its ravine, a thoroughly effective revival that makes admirable use of microphones and modern lighting. Before it starts, city dignitaries and religious confraternities escort the cast of actors and children in a procession through the city and along the ravine, which is brightly lit by flares. The audience follows, trooping down the dark, twisting streets to a natural amphitheatre opposite the old cave settlement. They sit on the ground, hissing and booing when Judas betrays Christ, and cheering when he hangs himself from a wild fig-tree.
An ugly incident at Ginosa in 1908 reminds one that, even after the inhabitants had left their caves, they still lacked water. During one of the worse droughts in living memory, a large band of parched and starving children went to the church, shouting at the priest that he must pray for rain. Instead of praying, he threw two buckets of precious water over the children, two of whom were trampled to death in the ensuing panic. A thousand labourers returning from the fields rushed to the church to lynch the priest, who was saved by the carabinieri only just in time.
Inspired by Lenormant, who was the first to recognise the merit of Apulia’s Byzantine frescoes, Charles Diehl visited Mottola. Perched on top of a hill, the little city has a splendid view of the plain beneath, of the sea, and of the mountains of Basilicata and Calabria. It has been inhabited since prehistoric times and in 274 BC King Pyrrhus of Epirus was routed by the Romans in a skirmish just below the city. Sacked by the Saracens in 846, it was re-fortified by the Byzantines, but those inhabitants who had not been slaughtered or dragged off into slavery preferred to live in the deep ravine that lies to the south, as did their descendants for several centuries.
You cannot see the ravine from the road, only the tops of a line of tall Aleppo pines marking where the land suddenly drops for hundreds of feet. Choked by vegetation, a narrow path leads down to the bottom, joining the caves to each other. A landslide has destroyed part of the settlement, including the main church, yet even so, it remains possible to gain a vivid impression of what an underground Apulian city must have looked like during the early Middle Ages.
Among the cave churches around Mottola is San Nicola, dug discreetly into the side of a secluded lama or miniature ravine, filled with prickly pear, acanthus and loquats. Here are some of the best twelfth and thirteenth century frescoes in Apulia. Despite an iron gate to protect them from vandals, on one occasion thieves broke in and cut out the heads, removing the Child from the Virgin’s lap. The head of the Archangel Michael was found in the lama while the Child and the heads of St Parasceva and other saints were recovered at Castellaneta.
Not far from San Nicola, at the Masseria Casalrotto, is the grotto chapel of Santa Margherita. Originally Byzantine, as can be seen from the frescoes of St Demetrius and the Archangel Michael, it was repainted in a Latin style during the fourteenth century, when the Greek rite was going out of favour. The Archangel escaped repainting through being on the far side of a pillar and less in view of the congregation.
Massafra, teetering on the extreme edge of the Murgia and divided into an old town and a new by a handsome ravine, was visited by Janet Ross in 1888. She found it “very dirty and extraordinarily picturesque”, the poor living in “prehistoric cave dwellings”. She watched the festa (festival) of the Madonna della Scala, brought in procession from the great church at the far end of the ravine to the Benedictine convent that is the statue’s home for the rest of the year. The Madonna, clad in gold-embroidered white robes, ready to be hung with jewels on her feast day, is kept in a glass case at the convent.
The story of the discovery of Massafra’s miraculous icon, which hangs over the high altar in the church of the Madonna della Scala, seems to change with every sacristan. In 1888 it was said that a simple peasant, lured on by unearthly music and a mysterious light, had dug it up in the ravine. A century later we are told a far more colourful tale; a huntsman had seen it in a dream, on the antlers of a deer that ran down a ladder into a cave. Out with his hounds next morning, he saw a stag disappear down a rough flight of steps into a grotto and, chasing after it, found the icon. Beside the church is the partially destroyed cave chapel of the Buona Nuova, the original home of the Madonna who, after her finding, was reverently cut out from the wall and taken into the new church. As with other Apulian “icons”, she must have begun as a fresco painted by a Greek hermit.
The Madonna della Scala has performed many miracles. The most dramatic was for a poor girl who gathered herbs in the ravine by night; she was going to be burned as a witch when the Madonna appeared to her terrified tormentors and saved her life. In gratitude, the girl carved out a flight of steps from the church to the top of the ravine, the scala.
Mrs Ross also inspected another rock-hewn church here, Santa Maria della Candalora, “well worth the climb down into the gravina.” Charles Diehl considered it to be the most important Byzantine church in Massafra, and it contains a superb fresco of the Presentation in the Temple, with a wonderful white-bearded St Simeon. This part of the ravine is full of grottoes once used as cells by a hermit community. Here too, is “The Dispensary of the Sorcerer Gregorius”, a complex of inaccessible caves where the hermits kept their medicines and potions.