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...send for the chaplain, and have the chapel exorcised,
for, for certain, it is enchanted.
Horace Walpole, “The Castle of Otranto”
ONE REASON WHY early travellers came to the Salentine peninsula was to see Òtranto, because they had read Horace Walpole’s “Castle of Otranto”. Published in 1764, the first “Gothick” novel, full of ghosts and horror, for many years it was enormously popular, translated into fourteen languages. But its author had never been to Apulia, let alone to Òtranto.
In his preface, Walpole says, “The following work was found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England. It was printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529.” The title page claims it is “A story translated by William Marshall, Gent. From the Original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St Nicholas at Otranto.” Yet while there was a church of St Nicholas here, it was staffed by monks, not by canons, and Onofrio Muralto never existed. Finding the name “Otranto” in an atlas in his library, Walpole decided that if the second syllable were stressed, wrongly, it would sound nice as a title. His “castle” was modelled on Strawberry Hill, his house at Twickenham.
“The Castle of Otranto, a name calculated to awaken feelings of pleasing recollections in an English mind, is far from realising the expectations created,” grumbled Keppel Craven. Even so, the castle’s real history was hair-raising enough on more than one occasion.
The Normans occupied Òtranto in 1071, Isaac Contostephanos, Grand Duke of the Fleet, unsuccessfully trying to retake it for Byzantium a few years later. It was an important port throughout the Crusades for all those preferring to stay on land as much as possible when they travelled to Palestine. The Byzantine citadel was replaced with a castle by Frederick II, who waited there with Queen Yolande while his fleet was at Brìndisi during the abortive Crusade of 1227. King Ferrante rebuilt the castle, much as it looks today, after his son had recovered it from the Turks. A dry moat filled with wild chrysanthemums lies behind the massive walls.
Consecrated in 1188, the cathedral has a splendid Norman crypt with forty-two columns, each with a different capital; Classical, Byzantine, Egyptian and even Persian. A capital with four birds that Riedesel thought were harpies probably symbolised Mahomet’s ascent into heaven.
The cathedral’s Norman floor is the most important mosaic in Apulia, its theme the struggle between good and evil. A Tree of Life starts at the door, filling the whole nave. In its branches are animals representing virtues and vices, with figures from the Old Testament. King Arthur is here too, clean-shaven like a Norman and riding on a goat, the earliest pictures of him since the floor dates from 1163–66. So is Alexander the Great, in a chariot drawn by two griffins. The middle part of the floor has the signs of the Zodiac with each month’s activities. The farmers of Òtranto kept sheep, goats and pigs, worked in vineyards and cornfields, ploughed with oxen – and apparently spent March picking their feet with an iron scraper normally used for cleaning hoes.
The ruins of the church of San Nicola de Càsole are on a hill south of the city. Bohemond, Prince of Tàranto and Lord of the coast between Bari and Òtranto, rebuilt the monastery here, destroyed in 1032 by Saracens. Its monks followed the rule of St Basil, growing corn and vegetables, fishing in the bay below, or working in the famous library. Scholars came from all over Italy to study Greek. Although their rule and their liturgy were Byzantine, they accepted the Pope’s authority, which gave them unusual influence after the schism between East and West. When Pope Gregory IX contemplated compulsory rebaptism of those baptised in the Greek rite, Abbot Nettorio dissuaded a tribunal of cardinals, while a later abbot went to the Council of Florence, trying to reconcile Catholics and Orthodox. However, the community was wiped out in 1480.
In July that year the Turkish Grand Vizier arrived before Òtranto with a hundred ships. Both castle and city fell after a fort-night, 12,000 out of a population of 22,000 perishing during the sack. Among them were 800 men and women who refused to renounce Christianity, so impressing their executioner that he was converted and died with them. But Sultan Mehmet II died before he could invade Italy, and at the news of his death the Turkish garrison surrendered. They had converted the cathedral into a mosque, white-washing the walls and using the campanile as a minaret. When it was reconsecrated the martyrs’ bones were enshrined in a chapel. Hundreds remain in cupboards behind the altar, one near the entrance holding mummified feet and hands, shrivelled intestines, and skulls with eyelashes and scraps of hair.
The martyrs had died on the Hill of Minerva, once dedicated to Apulia’s favourite goddess, their corpses rotting next to a pyramid of their skulls for a year until King Ferrante ordered their burial. A church on the summit has a tablet inscribed with their names and the name of the converted executioner, Berlabey. Every 14 August Òtranto commemorates their death.
The stone cannon-balls lining the city streets are reminders of the Turkish occupation. Janet Ross heard from the station master how memories of the massacre lingered, mothers warning disobedient children that the Turks would come back and “get them”. The city never recovered; by 1600 its population had dropped to 3,000 and by 1818 to 1,600. Every watch-tower along the coast had once had its own small settlement, but all were abandoned. The reason, however, was not so much “fear of the Turk” as malaria.
On a clear day, you can see Albania’s snowy mountains from the Hill of Minerva. Eighteenth century travellers say that snow was brought to Òtranto by Albanians and landed on the beach. Plague and cholera being common in the Balkans, payment was left on the sand to avoid physical contact. The snow was stored in cisterns in the tufa and used to cool medicines.
Visitors admired the country around the city for its gardens and citrus groves, but they have gone beneath modern housing or have been replaced by rough grazing for sheep and goats. Inland, there are forests of unusually tall olive trees, vineyards and plots of corn or tobacco. Many olive trees are so gnarled that it is easy to suspect they were alive in the days of the Caesars – undoubtedly some of them witnessed the sack of Òtranto.
South of Òtranto, towards the Capo di Leuca or Finibus Terrae, the land is fertile and hilly. It has always been thickly populated despite the destruction of whole villages by Saracens and Turks, putting de Salis in mind of a garden, instead of the bare rock he had expected to find at the “End of the Earth.” The tip of the Salentine peninsula, a dazzling white finger of low cliff, is topped by a church built over a temple to Minerva. The Sanctuary of Santa Maria di Leuca houses a Byzantine icon of the Virgin; a pilgrimage here has been considered a passport to Heaven since pagan times – those who do not come in their lifetime must do so after death. Capo di Leuca was thought by Ramage and Hare to be the harbour described by Virgil in the “Aeneid” when the Trojans sailed past the Terra d’Òtranto on their way to found Rome. They did not land because it was “an abode of Greeks.”