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Giannone... so celebrated for his useful history of Naples.
Voltaire, “Age of Louis XIV”
THE GARGANO has produced heretics as well as saints and holy men. The most famous is Pietro Giannone, author of a book read by many of the eighteenth century travellers to Apulia.
If you turn inland from Rodi and drive a short way up through the orange and lemon groves, you come to Ischitella, a tiny, very pretty hill-town, which has a wonderful view out to sea. After a wistful reference to “the exquisite eels” of Lake Varano nearby, the indefatigable Abate Pacichelli says “it is on a delightful hill looking over the Adriatic, with a sweet climate”, but he does not tell us very much else about the town except that it is a principality belonging to the Pinto y Mendoza family. Their palace still stands in the main piazza, a crenellated seventeenth century palazzo (a grand urban residence) with a medieval castle for its nucleus.
The only other traveller known to have come here is the young Charles Macfarlane during the 1820s, as a guest of Don Francesco Pinto y Mendoza, Prince of Ischitella. He says the town was on “the edge of a forest, which for extent and wilderness, and the sublime height of its trees, I have never seen surpassed.” Although the prince had begun his career fighting for Napoleon, he later became a Borbone general and King Ferdinand II’s minister of war. At that time, however, he was distrusted by the court and spent his time improving his estates, building roads and digging much needed wells. He showed his guest another of his great houses, the “half-ruined baronial castle” at Peschici, where Macfarlane met a pardoned brigand in the prince’s service, who told him nightmarish stories of bandit life in Borbone Apulia.
The son of a poor chemist, Pietro Giannone was born in Ischitella in 1676, just before Pacichelli’s visit. At sixteen he went to Naples to read law at the university, but kept his links with his birthplace, dedicating a book to the then Prince of Ischitella. In 1723, after twenty years research, he published his sensational “Storia Civile del Regno di Napoli”, portraying Neapolitan history as a struggle down the centuries between the civil authorities and the Catholic Church, attacking the Inquisition and the ecclesiastical courts, together with the clergy’s corruption and greed. He claimed that the Roman Church had destroyed the kingdom’s freedom.
The Church reacted furiously, placing the “Storia Civile” on the Index of Forbidden Books. The author was excommunicated by the Archbishop of Naples, hooted in the streets and nearly lynched. Since the Austrians, who then ruled Southern Italy, were far from displeased, he took refuge in Vienna where he was given a pension; here he wrote “Il Triregno”, attacking the Papacy even more fiercely. When the Austrians were driven out of Naples and the Borbone monarchy was established in 1734, he lost his pension and moved to Venice, but was expelled within a year. He wandered through Northern Italy under an assumed name, eventually settling in Calvinist Geneva. However, crossing the border into Piedmont in 1736 to visit friends, he was arrested.
Giannone spent the rest of his life in Piedmontese prisons, dying in the citadel at Turin. Although his gaolers allowed him books, pens and paper, even letting him write an autobiography, they forced him to sign a recantation of everything in his books critical of the Catholic Church – he seems to have been threatened with torture.
Europe’s intellectuals understandably hailed Giannone as a martyr. His “Storia Civile” was translated into English, French and German, consulted by Edward Gibbon when writing “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, and read by travellers who wanted to find out what had happened in Southern Italy after the barbarian invasion. Nowadays his criticisms of the Church have lost their relevance, but his history remains gripping stuff, especially its lurid accounts of the Mezzogiorno in medieval times – of the murder of Queen Giovanna I, of the private lives of King Ladislao and Giovanna II (“two monsters of lust and filthiness”), and of King Ferrante’s dreadful banquet for his rebellious barons. The book helps to explain a good deal about Apulia during the earlier centuries.
Life imprisonment, with no hope of release, must have been particularly miserable for a man with so active a mind and such racy humour. He says in his autobiography that he is writing “to assuage in some degree the boredom and tedium.” On his deathbed at Turin in 1748, poor Giannone must surely have remembered the orange and lemon groves above the blue Adriatic at Ischitella in the Gargano.