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Behold me again launched on a small sailing
boat on the waters of the Adriatic.
Crauford Tait Ramage, “The Nooks and By-ways of Italy”
ALTHOUGH EVEN TODAY the Gargano remains secret and mysterious inland, it has become a very different story on the coast, where in summer the lonely beaches and the little fishing towns of former times are now overrun by tourists. Yet these places too are often very ancient, most of them with colourful and dramatic histories. If possible, it is best to explore them from a boat, as Crauford Tait Ramage did in 1828.
Manfredonia lies at the foot of Monte Sant’ Angelo and is the most important port in the Gargano. It was founded by King Manfred in 1260 to replace nearby Siponto, destroyed a few years before by earthquakes and malaria. After consulting famous astrologers specially imported from Sicily and Milan to advise him when and where he should lay the foundation stone, according to the Abate Pacichelli the Hohenstaufen king “provided for it most nobly, with walls, towers and a castle, and also a jetty that could accommodate any number of big ships.” It was said that Manfred had such enormous quantities of stone, sand, lime and timber brought to the site that every ox and mule in Apulia was in a state of collapse.
Significantly, despite King Manfred having been overthrown and killed by the Angevins, who were always infuriated by any reference to their Hohenstaufen predecessors, the city has kept the name he gave it. Manfred remains one of Apulia’s great heroes, even if he only became king of the Regno by pretending that the real heir to the throne, his half-brother’s infant son Conradin, had died in Germany.
The Turks captured Manfredonia in 1620, razing two thirds of the city to the ground. Although Manfred’s castle survived and a new cathedral was built in 1680, the city has never really recovered. Most of the travellers found it a dismal little place. In 1818 Keppel Craven was surprised to learn that its women were obsessively house-proud: “I was informed by the commandant... that they every morning made up their beds with a pair of fine sheets, which again being removed at night, were never destined to be slept in.” Ramage thought Manfredonia “not unlike the ‘lang toun of Kircaldy’, the main thoroughfare being a long and wide street from one gate to the other.” He says the inhabitants had a pale, unhealthy appearance, due to malaria.
Janet Ross met a fine old innkeeper here. “He held up the lamp to my face, then put it down, slapped me on the shoulder and said ‘Tu mi piace’ (Thou pleasest me). When Signor Cacciavillani asked him to prepare his famous fish soup, he rushed off to give the order, and waited upon us himself at dinner, producing a bottle of good old wine.” He insisted on her drinking from a silver mug, and presented an absurdly small bill. Such an establishment was untypical. Twenty years later, Sir George Sitwell was bitten by fleas eighty times on one arm between wrist and elbow during a single night at a Manfredonia inn.
Edward Hutton’s experiences in 1914 at “the miserable house in the main street which did duty for an inn” help to explain why there were so few foreign visitors. He describes the hostess as “something between Mrs. Gamp and Juliet’s nurse... so dirty that it was horrible to go near her.” When he decided to eat out, he declared “It would be impossible to find in a Tuscan village a place so wretched as the restaurant in Manfredonia... full of flies, even at night, even in the spring; chairs, tables, plates, glasses, forks, and spoons, all were filthy, and we could scarcely eat anything that it could provide: even the omelette was rancid because of bad oil.”
Once, nearby Siponto was the port serving the ancient city of Arpi, and the last safe anchorage before the dangerous waters of the Gargano coast. Hannibal captured it, while the Romans settled a colony of veterans here. King Manfred tore down what was left after a terrible earthquake, using the stone for Manfredonia. “The sea has retired from its old beach and half-wild cattle browse on the site of those lordly quays and palaces,” wrote Norman Douglas. “Not a stone is left. Malaria and desolation reign supreme.” Since then malaria has been eradicated, and there is now a holiday resort, the Lido di Siponto. One of the two buildings to escape Manfred’s demolition, the cathedral of Santa Maria Maggiore, standing forlornly next to the Foggia road, has an air of deep melancholy amid its pine trees. Built over a fifth century church – although Byzantine in proportion and feeling, especially the crypt with columns in the form of a Greek cross – it is nonetheless a Romanesque basilica from the eleventh century. The interior has been restored and tidied; all the votive offerings seen by Augustus Hare went long ago, “women’s hair, ball-dresses, and even a wedding-dress, which must have a strange story.” Yet you can still see what he meant when he said the interior had “the effect of a mosque.”
The other survival from medieval Siponto is the beautiful Romanesque church of San Leonardo, also on the main road to Foggia, with Byzantine vine-leaves on its capitals. It was part of the abbey of San Leonardo, given by King Manfred to the Teutonic Knights. Ferocious warrior-monks, always of German blood, their order was modelled on the Templars and founded in Palestine during the Crusades. So rich were the fourteen Apulian commanderies the Hohenstaufen gave the Deutschritter (command) that the revenues enabled them to wage their own Crusade on the Baltic, exterminating the heathen Old Prussians and setting up an independent state. The Iron Cross was modelled on the cross they wore on their white cloaks.
In an area that suffered constantly from raids by North African or Turkish corsairs, there were few ports on the actual coast of the Gargano, notably Rodi, Peschici and Vieste on the north east. Rodi is the most ancient. Cretan in origin, by the eighth century BC it belonged to Rhodes, from where it takes its name. A maze of steep, narrow streets and glaring white, flat-roofed houses, Rodi’s greatest attraction lies in the light and the intense blue of the sea at its feet.
Flanked by handsome Aleppo pines, the road from Rodi to Peschici runs beside a long sandy beach, with orange and lemon groves inland, as Pacichelli observed. Life has always been easier here than in the rest of the Gargano, probably than in most of Apulia. A tiny walled town on a cliff, Peschici was founded by Slavs in the tenth century but, apart from being saved by St Elias from a plague of locusts, has little history.
Ramage visited the “miserable village” of Vieste by boat, and describes it as “standing on a kind of peninsula, and washed on three sides by the waters of the Adriatic.” It must have changed a good deal since 1828. Although catering increasingly for tourists, the medieval town on its rocky headland is charming, with a Romanesque cathedral and a Hohenstaufen castle. Near the cathedral is the chianca, a stone on which the corsair Dragut had several thou-sand of the inhabitants slaughtered in 1554 before dragging the rest off to slavery.
From the Gargano southwards along the Apulian coast, and along the coastline of the entire Regno at intervals of a mile stand squat, square forts which were designed to guard against raids of this sort, and are still called ‘Saracen Towers’. Although some of them date from the fifteenth century, most were built in a programme begun in the sixteenth by the Spanish viceroy Don Pedro de Toledo. Machiolated and crenellated, proof against naval gunnery, they offered shelter to anyone in the area, communicating by smoke-signals – when an enemy sail was sighted as far off as Sicily, the authorities at Naples knew within ten minutes.
In classical times the Tremiti Islands, 22 kilometres off the Gargano coast, were named the Diomedean Isles, after one of Homer’s heroes, “Diomedes of the Great War Cry”, who took eighty black warships to the siege of Troy. Shipwrecked on the coast of Daunia – northern Apulia – he became King of the Daunians. When he died, his companions mourned him so deeply that Zeus changed them into sea-birds – during the sixteenth century local monks told the Duke of Urbino that the birds, apparently great shear-waters, could often be heard talking among themselves. Augustus Caesar confined his granddaughter Julia here because of her notorious promiscuity. When friends tried to intercede for Julia’s mother, who was in prison for the same reason, the angry Emperor shouted at them, “May your own daughters be as lecherous and your wives as adulterous!”
According to legend, a church was founded on the largest of the three Tremiti islands, San Nicola, when Diomedes’s crown was discovered there in the fourth century after a vision of the Blessed Virgin. Benedictine monks were certainly on the island from the eighth, building the abbey “just like Monte Cassino rising from the sea.” Later it passed to Augustinian canons. Since Pacichelli was an Augustinian, he sailed over from the mainland to inspect the abbey. He says that it was heavily fortified, with a garrison of a hundred soldiers under six officers. He tells us too that the famous human birds looked like starlings and, always a gourmet, adds that they were “excellent, boiled or fried.”
The canons left in the eighteenth century, when the monastery became a prison. During the Fascist Era Mussolini used the Tremiti as a place of confinement for political opponents. It is hard to believe that somewhere so beautiful should hold such cruel memories.