41
...we glide into the sunshine of Hellenic days when the wise Archytas,
sage and lawgiver, friend of Plato, ruled this ancient city of Tarentum.
Norman Douglas, “Old Calabria”
“TODAY IT IS MUCH REDUCED from its former expanse”, Pacichelli wrote of Tàranto after his visit here in 1687. He was impressed by St Cataldo’s life-sized silver statue in the cathedral, noting that it contained the saint’s skull, together with his tongue, “uncorrupted after a thousand years.” He also tells us that at Pontifical Masses in the cathedral the Epistle and Gospel were sung in Greek as well as in Latin, which suggests that at that date the Tarantines still remained partly Greek-speaking.
A century after Pacichelli, Swinburne commented: “The streets are remarkably dirty and narrow, especially the Marina, which runs along the Mare Piccolo, and is, without dispute, the most disgustful habitation of human beings in Europe, except, perhaps, the Jewish Ghetto in Rome.” But Swinburne enjoyed the sea-food, when he was a guest at a convent:
The prior received me with great politeness, and at supper treated me with the most varied service of shell-fish I ever sat down to. There were no less than fifteen sorts, all extremely fat and savoury, especially a small species of muscle (sic), the shell of which is covered with a velvet shag, and both inside and outside is tinged with the richest violet colour. I tasted of all, and plentifully of several sorts, without experiencing the least difficulty in the digestion.
The “muscle” sounds like a murex. Among the other shell-fish he ate would have been the sea-date, or dactylus, that according to Pliny shines in the dark. “In the mouth, even, while they are being eaten, they give forth their light, and the same too when in the hands.” Oysters, for which Tàranto has always been famous, would not have been included, the oyster season here lasting only from 5 November to Easter Sunday.
When Count de Salis returned from the Salento, his interest in agriculture resulted in an invitation to stay at the house of Giuseppe Capecelatro, Archbishop of Tàranto from 1778 to 1836. Sir William Hamilton was a fellow guest at the delightful Villa Santa Lucia on the shores of the Mare Piccolo, its gardens filled with pagan statuary and acacia, myrtle and every kind of rose; an inscription over the main gate read, “Si Adam hic peccasset, Deus ignovisset” (If Adam had sinned here, God would have forgiven him). A worldly prelate, who criticised clerical celibacy, Jesuits and the enclosure of nuns, he told his seminarians to forget theology and teach modern farming. He was on friendly terms with King Gustavus III of Sweden and Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo of Tuscany, corresponding with Catherine the Great, to whom he sent a collection of Tarentine shells. Another friend was Goethe. The Prussian scholar Herder wrote to his wife, “I have made the acquaintance of the Archbishop of Tàranto, the most discerning, high-spirited, learned, intelligent and likeable ecclesiastic I have ever met.”
In 1801 the Neapolitan government agreed to let the French garrison occupy certain ports, including Tàranto. In 1803, it looked as if the English would invade the Two Sicilies, so a French artillery general was sent to organise its defences. He was Choderlos de Laclos, author of “Les Liaisons Dangéreuses”, 63 years old and in poor health, but forced by poverty to resume his military career. Exhausted by the journey, he was struck down by dysentery as soon as he arrived. From his sick bed Choderlos wrote, “Tarente est une assez vilaine ville dans un assez vilain pays” (Taranto is a nasty city in a nasty country), commenting that the inhabitants ate nothing but fish. Two months after, he died and was buried under the tower on the off-shore island of San Pietro in the Gulf of Tàranto, his tomb being broken open and his bones scattered in 1815.
In the Old Town, in Via Paisiello, a plaque on a modest seven-teenth century house commemorates the birth here in 1741 of Giovanni Paisiello, “reformer of music, who discovered in his heart a fount of harmony and channelled it into songs of love and grief, honoured by Kings and Emperors.” He composed many successful operas, such as “L’Idole Cinese”, and spent eight years in St Peters-burg at Catherine the Great’s court where he produced his master-piece, “Il Barbiere di Seviglia”. In 1803 he went to Paris to work for Napoleon, having caught his attention with a march for General Hoche’s funeral, but after only a year went back to Naples to serve Joseph Bonaparte and Murat, dying in 1815. Already his music had gone out of fashion, yet Beethoven admired the “Molinara”. His “Inno Reale”, a noble and melodious tune, remained the national anthem of the Two Sicilies until the end – at church parades it was played at the elevation of the Host, soldiers singing it on bended knee.
When Ferdinand Gregorovius came here, Paisiello’s house re-minded him of Mozart’s birthplace at Salzburg. Despite writing that “cultural life is dead in Tàranto”, he had been impressed by a scholarly booklet on the ancient city by a certain Francesco Sferra. He tracked down the sage with difficulty, eventually directed by a priest to Via Paisiello. Here, in what he calls a “Temple of Aesculapius” (a pharmacy), he found a sickly looking young man with a dirty towel round his head making pills. The chemist’s apprentice admitted that he was Sferra and immediately tried to sell Gregorovius another learned work.
Lenormant observed in 1880 that, because of the Tarantines’ fish diet, they suffered from rickets and even elephantiasis. Augustus Hare found a “miserable, filthy, scrofulous population, which has been confined in the narrow space occupied by the Acropolis of the Greek city since the eleventh century.” Yet he could not forget the legend that Plato had landed at the ancient bridge, to be welcomed by the Tarantine philosophers. He was also intrigued by the muslin produced from a shell-fish, the lana-penna, from the rocks around Punta Penna, its long, silky, golden-brown filaments being dyed purple and woven into a filmy gauze. (The veils of the dancing girls in the murals at Herculaneum were made of this material.) “Taranto has been compared to a ship”, observed Hare with his painter’s eye, “the castle at its east end representing the stern, its great church the mast, the tower of Raimondo Orsini the bowsprit, and the bridge the cable.”
Mrs. Ross believed the Tarantines “show their evident Greek descent by their shapely hands and ears and well-poised heads”, although this was wishful thinking. She thought the Old Town’s side alleys so narrow that they “seem built for shadows, not men”, but in the upper town “Some of the palaces are handsome in a baroque, rococo style, with balconies which bear witness to the Spanish rule, and are suggestive of serenades.” She says the fishermen dread moon-rays: “They carefully protect the fish from them when caught, and if they find a dead one on board after a night’s fishing, declare it is allunato, or moon-struck, and nothing will persuade them to eat it.”
“Old Taranto glimmers in lordly fashion across the tranquil waters”, observes Norman Douglas, “a sense of immemorial culture pervades this region of russet tilth, and olives, and golden corn.” He considered the cathedral “a jovial nightmare in stone”, but was fascinated by the fishermen’s huts on the banks of the inland sea, built of branches and grass-ropes. “There is a smack of the stone ages, of primeval lake-dwellings, about these shelters.” They must have been descendants of the fishermen’s huts Leonidas knew. Even so, “Hellenic traits have disappeared from Taranto”, Douglas comments: “It was completely Latinised under Augustus, and though Byzantines came... they have long ago become merged into the Italian temperament.”
Edward Hutton agreed that everything from ancient Greece had vanished:
Here in Taranto, the last city of Magna Graecia, let us confess the appalling change this whole country must have suffered from earthquake and neglect since classic times”, he wrote after his visit. “Everywhere it is a prey to malaria, because it has so long lacked a population which may pursue the art of agriculture in peace; everywhere, save for its noble outlines, its mountains and its sea, it is a bitter disappointment to those few fantastics who hold a memory of the ancient world dearer than any mechanic triumph of today. Magna Graecia is not here but in our hearts...
Visitors of a new and unpleasing sort came in November 1940 when Tàranto was attacked by British biplanes. Their bombs sank the warship “Conte de Cavour”, together with two other battle-ships and a cruiser, crippling the Italian Royal Navy. The damage was greater than that inflicted by the Grand Fleet at Jutland on the Germans in 1916, and far more decisive, changing the course of the war. But little damage was done to Tàranto itself.
Even today, Tàranto’s fishermen rarely face the perils of the open sea, fish of every description flooding into the Mare Piccolo. Their old method of farming mussels is documented as far back as the twelfth century, but probably dates from long before the founding of Taras. Row upon row of pales are stuck in the shallow water, with ropes slung between. From these ropes are suspended others in rings, to which the baby shellfish cling in colonies, reaching maturity within a few months.
The ropes have, however, been replaced by plastic netting. In the past, garlands of mussels were brought to the market, where a housewife could choose the ones she wanted, but nowadays, with the advent of plastic, it is easier to sell them strips of netting. From the housewife’s point of view, this is cheating since she has to pay for many too small to eat; from the mussels’ it is infanticide and possibly, in the long term, genocide.