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Well armed and accoutred, and excellently mounted, their troop was
also trained to the most rigid discipline; and Don Gaetano, the elder of
the brothers Vardarelli, as well as commander of the band, displayed an
activity and skill worthy of a nobler profession.
Keppel Craven, “A Tour through the Southern Provinces of Italy”
A nother of GENERAL CHURCH’S problems was Gaetano Vardarelli. He had deserted from the Borbone army in 1815, reassembling a comitiva of fifty, and within a year, says Macfarlane, the Vardarelli were “in high feather”. They lived off the country, plundering masserie, extorting money and the grain that was so valuable because of the famine. A raid on Alberobello was beaten off, largely by a farmer’s wife, ironically known as ‘La Brigantessa’ on account of her skill with a musket. Although they seldom murdered travellers, they often kidnapped them or made them change horses with their own tired mounts. The Vardarelli’s sister rode with the band, dressed as a man, but she was so badly wounded during a skirmish with troops that Don Gaetano killed the girl to save her from falling into the hands of the soldiers.
A peasant himself, during the famine he tried to help the starving country people. He wrote to the mayor of Foggia, demanding that massari leave nearly harvested fields to be gleaned as formerly, instead of grazing animals on them. Otherwise, he threatened he would burn everything that belonged to the landowners.
Throughout the French occupation, brigands had regularly lain in ambush in the vital Bovino pass, eluding all attempts to hunt them down. When they had not been heard of for months, they would suddenly strike, attacking the royal mail coach especially when it had bullion on board, or holding travellers to ransom. The Vardarelli appear to have joined the bands which preyed on the pass.
“I passed by the Ponte di Bovino early in the year 1816, when the mere mention of its name caused fear and trembling”, recalled Macfarlane:
The pass is in general steep, and in some points very narrow; a deep ravine, through which froths and roars a mountain stream in the winter season, is on one side of the road – hills covered with trees or underwood lie on the other. In its whole length, which may be about fifteen miles, there are no habitations, save some curious caves cut in the face of the rock, a post-house, and a most villainous-looking taverna... And then, as regards security, who would follow the experienced robber through the mountain-wood, or down the ravine, or be able to trace him to the hiding-places in the rocks that abound there? Across the mountains he has a wide range of savage country, without roads – without a path; on the other side of the chasm the localities are equally favourable; here he can, if hard pressed... throw himself into the impenetrable forests of Mount Garganus, or into the not less remote and safe recesses of Monte Vulture.
Macfarlane tells us that a journey by coach from Apulia to Nap-les, the capital, was “to the peaceful inhabitants (always, be it said, rather timid travellers) an undertaking of solemn importance and peril; before embarking on which, not only were tapers burning under every saint of the calendar, and every Madonna that could show a portrait, but wills were made, and such tearful adieus, that one might have thought the Val de Bovino the real valley of death”.
As for escorts, “four miserable-looking gendarmes á pied, with their carbines slung over their shoulders, got up in front of our still more miserable-looking vettura for our protection”, Macfarlane recalled. Travellers who were ambushed were forced to lie on the ground to shouts of Faccia in terra (Face to the ground), brigands holding guns to their heads while others rifled their pockets. “Of one thing I was quite sure – that the soldiers, in case the robbers condescended to assault us, would be the first to run away, or per-form the Faccia in terra movement.”
General Church met Gaetano as soon as he arrived in Apulia. Spending the night in a masseria just outside Cerignola, with only his ADC and his batman and, learning that the Vardarelli comitiva – by now over a hundred strong – was nearby, he boldly sent an order for them to present themselves:
“Am I not King of Apulia?”, boasted Don Gaetano, when he came. “Have I not beaten three of your sovereign’s generals? The troops in Apulia are on my side, the civil inhabitants do what I tell them. I can take as many travellers’ purses as I please. All the aristocracy, the entire middle classes, fear me. You know very well, Your Excellency, that (King) Ferdinand can do nothing against me”.
Church rather liked the brigand chief and his band, recalling years later, “They harassed the provinces, fought the troops, robbed right and left, but seldom if ever committed murder in cold blood.”
A treaty signed by King Ferdinand in July 1817 enrolled the Vardarelli comitiva as highly paid auxiliary troops in the royal army, with the job of clearing the brigands out of the Bovino valley. Don Gaetano performed his new duties admirably, but he had made too many enemies. In September 1817 he was ordered to leave the Capitanata for the Molise. He obeyed very reluctantly, only leaving in February the following year. At Ururi, just inside the Molise, during a morning inspection of his men, he and his brothers were shot from the balcony of a nearby palazzo. Their killer was Don Nicola Grimani, a landowner whose sister Gaetano had raped – he bathed his face and hands in Vardarelli blood, shouting “I am avenged.”
About forty of the comitiva escaped. In April 1818 they rode into Foggia, reporting to the district commander, General Amato, who ordered them to go to Lucera. They objected so strongly that, after a long argument, shots were exchanged and one of the band fell dead. Some galloped off, firing as they went, while the remainder barricaded themselves in a cellar. Four who surrendered were sent in to tell them they would be smoked out, and were promptly murdered. Sporadic shooting came from the cellar, killing a soldier. Bales of straw were lit and pushed through its entrance, which was then blocked by huge stones. After two hours soldiers went in, to find seventeen men dead or dying; several had stabbed each other. Once the citizens realised the danger was over, the dead brigands became objects of pity, the general being blamed for the tragedy.
Keppel Craven had arrived in Foggia at the moment when the firing started. He was taken into the ground floor of his inn, with his guide, servants and horses, and not allowed to emerge for several hours. That evening, he was shown the corpses at the prison:
They had been stript of every article save the reliquaries or consecrated images, which the lower classes in Italy invariably wear around their neck, and which now rested on the ghastly wounds that disfigured their bodies, some of which were also blackened by smoke.
There were other Apulian comitive besides those of Gaetano Vardarelli. When Craven went on to Cerignola he was informed that a band had kidnapped the sindaco. (As ransom, its members were demanding 1,200 ducats, 100 yards of pantaloon velveteen and silver buckles.) A raid described to Janet Ross seventy years later by the old inn-keeper at Manfredonia, Don Michele Rosari di Tosquez, a ‘baron’ from Troia who had lost everything at the hands of brigands, may have been by a Bovino comitiva. “‘My ancestors were Spaniards and I was born at Troia; but when I was a small child the brigands came, burnt the masseria, hung my father from the pigeon tower, and killed my two elder brothers. My mother died of fright. Curse them,’ he exclaimed, bringing his fist heavily down on the table, ‘that ruined us.’”
While General Church was able to put down brigandage and secret societies in the Terra d’Òtranto, he failed to crush the Carbonari revolutionaries, who were demanding a constitution. In 1820 they marched on Naples. General Nugent fled and King Ferdinand reluctantly granted a constitution. Church was briefly imprisoned in the Castel del’ Ovo and, on being released, continued to serve the king until 1825. Two years later he was persuaded by Theodore Colocotrones, a former bandit and member of the Duke of York’s Greek Light Infantry, to fight in the Greek War of Independence. Sadly his career in Greece was undistinguished – at Pireus and the Siege of the Acropolis he never left the safety of his yacht.
In 1824, when staying with the Prince of Ischitella at Peschici in the Gargano, Macfarlane met a survivor from the Vardarelli comitiva called ‘Passo di Lupo’, who described the reality of brigand life. Most of the loot was taken by the guappi (bullies) while Passo di Lupo could not go into a town to spend his small share; often he could not even buy pasta or wine. Stolen sheep were roasted whole in their wool, sometimes eaten raw. Since they were without doctors or medical supplies, wounds were left to fester, so that many of them were covered in sores. For years after ceasing to be a brigand, Passo di Lupo “could never enjoy a sound sleep in his bed, but... was constantly starting up convulsively, and shrieking out his former companion’s names.”
When Macfarlane last visited the bridge at Ponte di Bovino in 1824, “General del Caretto has decorated it with the heads and mangled quarters of some half dozen of more modern, but less conspicuous brigands.” He adds that even when there were not organisedcomitive, the locals lay in wait in the pass: “In some places the hill and the wood, or concealing thicket, is so close to the road on the one hand, and the ravine on the other, that it is really enticing. A shot from the one, and the man’s business is done – and there yawns a dark capacious grave, to receive his body when deprived of what it is worth.”
Ramage came across brigands four years later, but he was unmolested since they were only interested in rich landowners who could pay a big ransom. Nevertheless, when in 1836 Saverio Mercadante from Altamura wrote the opera “I Briganti”, its theme still remained unpleasantly familiar to Apulians.