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The Baroque does not know what it wants...
Eugenio d’Ors, “Du Baroque”
THERE IS A MISTAKEN BELIEF that the Baroque in Apulia is confined to Lecce. There are fine examples of Baroque at Apulian cities further north, like the Palazzo del Monte di Pietà at Barletta or the duomo of Monopoli. But it is certainly true that there is far more in the Salento than anywhere else in Apulia. Many of the smaller Salentine cities have churches with wildly extravagant façades and campanili, palazzi with frenziedly elaborate balconies and doorways. Although the style, as at Lecce, sometimes seems to be ornament for the sake of ornament, these are often delightful buildings.
After being destroyed by an earthquake in 1743, the city of Nardò spent over forty years rebuilding itself in imitation of Lecce. Even by Leccese standards the church and convent of San Domenico in the piazza of that name are ornate. The façade of the church, attributed to Tarantino, which survived the earthquake of 1743 was built in two phases; the lower part covered with caryatids typical of the earlier period and the upper very much more restrained. There are attractive little palaces in and around the triangular Piazza Antonio Salandra, like the white Palazzo della Pretura, which has an elegant loggia on the first floor over an open arcade. The guglia of the Immacolata in this piazza erected in 1769, is one of only three in Apulia – the others being at Ostuni and Bitonto. (A gugliais a Neapolitan folly of Austrian origin, a fantastically decorated, free-standing column.) The streets in the city centre are full of ironwork balconies with swags and caryatids.
The largest city in the Salento after Lecce, Nardò has had a peculiarly tragic history. During the breakdown of Spanish and feudal authority in 1647, many of its citizens rose in revolt against their tyrannical feudal lord, the Count of Conversano, Giangirolamo II Acquaviva d’Aragona, who was also Duke of Nardò. The count-duke crushed the rebels with a systematic, murderous savagery that has never been forgotten. Even today, the blood-stained Giangirolamo is still one of the great ogres in local folklore, ‘Il Guercio di Puglia’ – ‘The Squinter of Apulia’.
There have been other tragedies at Nardò, and in more recent times, some of them almost within a very bitter living memory. Because the city was the centre of a highly profitable wheat-growing enclave, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries its people suffered all the horrors of labour gangs. In April 1920 they disarmed the carabinieri, seized their weapons and hoisted the red flag over the Municipio. The authorities had to use artillery and armoured cars to regain control.
Copertino was home to that supremely Baroque figure, Giuseppe da Copertino, the ‘Flying Saint’ of whom Norman Douglas makes fun in “Old Calabria”. In his ecstasies Fra Giuseppe flew into the air, usually up to the chapel ceiling though, if outside, to the treetops; occasionally he took a passenger, such as his confessor whom he held by the hair. More than seventy flights were logged, the most famous being in 1645, in the presence of a Spanish viceroy. As soon as the great man entered the church, the friar shot up to kiss the feet of a statue above the altar, then flew back over the congregation. The viceroy’s wife fainted. He repeated the performance for Pope Urban VIII, flying on the day before his death in 1663.
The ancient castle of Copertino is the largest inland fortress in the Salento other than Lecce. Given to the family of the Albanian hero Skanderbeg, in 1540 they employed a local architect, Evangelista Menga, to add diamond-shaped bastions, sumptuous apartments, gardens on the ramparts and a slanted terrace to channel rainwater into the only bathroom. When Pacichelli visited Copertino during the 1670s, it had passed to the Genoese Pinelli, Dukes of Acerenza, who were clearly excellent hosts, theAbateremarking on “very comfortable and well arranged accommodation.”
There is some dramatic Apulian Baroque at Ruffano, a city unvisited by any early traveller, on an unexpected hill rising sharply out of the Salentine plain. The hill is crowned by two palaces and a church. Built in 1626 by Prince Rinaldo Brancaccio, according to an inscription in the courtyard, Palazzo Brancaccio is linked by a great bridge to Palazzo Licci, smaller and of about the same date. The early eighteenth century chiesa madre in the tiny city’s main square is another typical piece of Leccese Baroque with an exuberant high altar. A first glimpse of Ruffano is unforgettable.
Most of the Salento’s Baroque churches were inspired by Lecce; a good example is that at Galàtone, near Nardò, where the Sanctuary of the Crocefisso della Pietà has a façade of 1710. Several towns here are a mixture of Romanesque and Baroque, but Galatina is Gothic as well. During the 1390s its Italian-speaking citizens collected 12,000 ducats to ransom their lord, Raimondello del Balzo Orsini, who had been captured by the Turks. In gratitude he built a Latin rite church for them since the chiesa madre, San Pietro, used only the Greek rite. This new church, Santa Caterina, has fine frescoes that were painted during the 1430s. They seem Western enough, with their kings and knights, until you realise that most of the subjects and nearly all of the saints are those venerated by Eastern Christians, such as the Virgin’s Dormition or the Emperor Theodosius. Even Raimondello’s patron saint turns out to be that Byzantine favourite, Antonio Abate.
Janet Ross was so overwhelmed by the frescoes, “a perfect glory of colour”, that a local antiquarian had dark suspicions about her motives for visiting the church. He “dropped behind my artist friend and inquired whether I was a spy of the English government; such things had been heard of, and England was so rich that she could afford to buy the whole church of Santa Caterina and carry it bodily away. It certainly was a curious thing to see a woman travelling about and reading inscriptions on old tombs; he thought it praiseworthy, but very odd.”
She was intrigued by much else about the city, including the fast disappearing local language, Greek with many Italian words. “Galatina so enchanted us that when we went to lunch at the small inn we asked whether we could sleep there for the night”, she recalls, “It was with difficulty that we could make the people understand but at last they showed us a long room with five beds in it close together. Two were already engaged, and they offered us the other three. So reluctantly we had to go back to Lecce late in the evening.”
During the early seventeenth century, egged on by Jesuits the bishops of Apulia banned Mass in the Greek rite. To suppress it at Galatina, the former parish church of the Greeks, SS Pietro e Paolo, was rebuilt between 1633 and 1663 in the style of Zimbalo. A vigorous example of Counter Reformation triumphalism, its façade is one of the best pieces of Baroque in Apulia.