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Manduria is a nice, clean town, very oriental looking with its flat-roofed
houses, and the inhabitants seem well-to-do, old-fashioned people.
Janet Ross, “The Land of Manfred”
BETWEEN TÀRANTO AND GALLIPOLI, Manduria is one of the Terra d’Òtranto’s most interesting cities. In its great days, in Classical times, the inhabitants were not Greeks but Messapians, who have left impressive remains. After being sacked by the Saracens, the city lay deserted for centuries until re-founded in the thirteenth century as “Casalnuova”, only reverting to its ancient name in 1799.
Whether Manduria or Casalnuova, it was on every educated traveller’s itinerary, as the site of Pliny’s uncanny well. “In the Salentine, near the city of Manduria, there is a well full to the brim, whose water is never reduced by any quantity withdrawn nor ever increased by any added,” says Pliny. Still in existence, this never runs dry, not even during the most blistering Apulian summer. Inside a grotto within the walls of the ancient Messapian city, the well seems to be just as it was when Bishop Berkeley, Swinburne, Keppel Craven, Ramage and Janet Ross saw it.
Swinburne was amused by the citizens’ reputation as dog-eaters:
Casalnuova contains about four thousand inhabitants, noted for nothing but their taste for dog’s flesh, in which they have no competitors that I know of, except their neighbours at Lecce and the newly discovered voluptuaries of Otaheite (Tahiti). We did not see one animal of the canine species in the streets; and woe be to the poor cur that follows its master into this cannibal settlement. I could not prevail upon my conductor to own whether they had any flocks of puppies, as of sheep; or took any pains, by castration or particular food, to fatten or sweeten the dainty, before they brought it to the shambles.
He adds that dogs were kidnapped by tanners, their skins making fine “false Morocco” leather, their meat food for under-nourished workmen.
The massive remnants of the Messapians’ double walls, five miles in circumference, are often over fifteen feet thick and some-times nearly twenty high. They were built during the fifth century BC as a defence against the Tarantines. Almost as striking are the dozens of rectangular graves carved out of the rock, and the elaborate chamber tombs that contain frescoes and have rafters painted on their ceilings. A couplet in the Aeneid (Book VI) gives us some idea of the after-life that they hoped to live in such tombs:
They lie below, on golden beds displayed;
And genial feasts with regal pomp are made...
The Messapians spoke an extinct Indo-European tongue, probably akin to modern Albanian, which was written in a script derived from Greek. The language ceased to be spoken shortly after the birth of Christ, but its intonation lingers in the stressed first syllable of place-names such as Tàranto, Òtranto and Brìndisi.
“There is a fine palazzo, which belonged to the Princes of Francavilla”, Mrs. Ross noted, when she could spare the time from inspecting the Messapian remains. Begun in 1719 by Prince Michele II, with its long balcony of iron scroll-work and its row of tall windows, this has a distinctly Spanish appearance. It was still unfin-ished when Swinburne visited “Caselnuovo” nearly sixty years later. He commented,
The suite of apartments is grand, but the situation uncomfortable without garden or prospect. Nearby lie the remnants of a ghetto from which the Jews were expelled at the end of the seventeenth century; some of the houses, one dated 1602, have curious windows whose heavy tracery is designed to conceal the occupants from being seen by passers-by in the street below.
Janet Ross visited Manduria while staying at Leucaspide near Tàranto as the guest of her friend Sir James Lacaita. A notary born in Manduria, he had become legal adviser to the British legation at Naples. After giving information about political prisoners to Mr Gladstone, who then described the Borbone regime as “the negation of God,” Lacaita fled to England. Here he failed to become Librarian of the London Library, but was employed as secretary by Lord Lansdowne, acquiring many influential friends, including the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell; he was knighted in 1858 for organising Gladstone’s mission to the Ionian Islands. In 1860, in desperation, the Neapolitan government asked him to become its ambassador in London and persuade the British to stop Garibaldi invading the mainland from Sicily. As he afterwards admitted, it took him three days to decide, but he refused, helping to destroy the old Regno.
No Apulian profited more from the Risorgimento. A director of Italian Lands Ltd., a London based firm formed in 1864 to handle the sale of all Neapolitan crown and church lands for the new regime, he quickly amassed a large fortune, and in 1868 bought Leucaspide with other former monastic property. Certainly the best known Pugliese in Victorian England (not excepting the Duke of Castromediano), he entertained English visitors lavishly. A small man with simian features, lowering eyebrows and bushy side-whiskers, despite his charm and scholarship, he had a slightly unsavoury air, even if it was not apparent to Mrs. Ross.
She was escorted from Massafra station to Leucaspide by a guard “with a big pistol stuck in his belt and a gun slung over his shoulder.” The drive was lined by agaves, tall as small trees. Behind the house her host had planted a ravine with bushes in imitation of an English shrubbery, rosemary and cistus covering its sides. There was a view of olive groves sweeping down to the Gulf of Tàranto with, far off, the rugged Calabrian mountains. “We were never tired of looking down from the loggia or arcade, which ran all along the south-west front of the “impostura” (“imposter”), as Sir James laughingly called Leucaspide, so imposing in its dazzling whiteness from a little distance, and giving itself the airs of a large palazzo”, Mrs. Ross recalled. “From the garden below came the scent of lemon and orange trees, laden with fruit.”
In 1988, exactly a century after her visit, we went to Leucaspide. Lacaita’s son had left it to his agent, a descendant of whom lived in a small house behind the villa, empty for twenty years. A nervous German shepherd dog patrolled its vast, flat roof. Yet white roses clambered up the loggia, which seemed as if sleeping, waiting for the labour gangs to dance for the guests. We might even have fancied that the ghost of Janet Ross was sitting on the terrace in her Turkish trousers, smoking one of her infamous cheroots. But on the far side of the ravine and to the south of the farm buildings, loomed the sprawl of the Italsider steel-works, coming nearer and nearer. We have not been back.
Apulians are a superstitious race, a trait sometimes exploited for political ends. During the revolutionary troubles of 1799, the Mandurian royalists, using a belief that on 2 November the dead come out of their tombs and walk the streets, staged a procession of “ghosts” chanting “Be calm, be faithful to Ferdinand!” Apparently the ruse worked.
Many travellers describe seeing votive offerings at churches, like the round stones hung outside the sanctuary of the Archangel at Monte Sant’ Angelo. Some years ago, at the rupestrian chapel of San Pietro Mandurino, we saw the skin of a fox stuck on a tree just outside the door. A Mandurian said it was a thanks-offering to St Peter for saving a hen from the jaws of death. But Janet Ross heard that the skin of an animal always hung on the great walnut tree of Benevento, a meeting place for witches. Inside the church there were intricate circles of pebbles in front of the altar. When we asked a friend in Gioia about what we had seen, he laughed: “I don’t take that stuff seriously.” But then he changed colour, adding “It’s very dangerous, like using cards to get control of someone’s soul.”
Shortly after, we read in Norman Lewis’s “Naples ’44” that he had come across fox-magic at Sagranella, up in the hills behind Benevento. “This village seems hardly to have moved out of the Bronze Age,” he writes. “I am told it has a fox-cult, and every year a fox is captured and burned to death, and its tail is hung, like a banner, from a pole at the village’s entrance.” Benevento was neither Greek nor Messapian territory but Samnite. Even so, we feel sure that the Messapians would have had no difficulty in explaining the significance of our Mandurian fox hanging in a tree.