SOUTHERN ITALY

New Zealand Tablet, 12 August 1915, Page 45

SOUTHERN ITALY

(For the N.Z. Tablet by the Rev. J. Kelly, Ph.D.)

, If you look at the map of Italy you will see on the Adriatic coast the bold headland of Monte Gargano, marking the northern frontier of the province of Apulia, which forms the heel of the peninsula. And from Monte Gargano in the north to Otranto in the south the province of Apulia is a land of thrilling interest and of wonderful charm for the student of art or of history. It is probable that many of our wounded warriors will in the near future find a shelter in the ports of Apulia, and in their convalescence have an opportunity of seeing the historic scenes of that corner of southern Italy. The upper part of Apulia is a great plain named Puglia Piana, and in the summer is dry and dusty, and so warm that an Italian proverb has it—- ' Le pene si soffriscano dell' inferno L'estate in Puglia, all' Aquila l'inverno ' —• . "which may be translated : One suffers the pains of hell in Apulia in summer, in Aquila in winter. This vast plain, 'one sea of gently swelling ground, a fitly moulded orchestra of war,' is broken only by the towns of Foggia and Lucera as far as the Ofanto, the ancient Aufidus, so often mentioned in the Latin classical literature. Foggia is a handsome town, and an important railway junction. It has an ancient cathedral, much damaged by an earthquake in the eighteenth century, but still retaining its original west front. Here, seven hundred years ago, Manfred, son of Frederic 11., was crowned. And a little way to the right we come upon a Norman arch, which, an inscription tells us, was the gate of the palace of Frederick, where his wife, Isabella, daughter of Henry 111. of England, died in childbirth in 1241. Forty-four years later, Charles of Anjou came here to die of a heart broken by the rebellion of his subjects and the captivity of his son Charles. Foggia- is a good centre for excursions to places of interest in the neighborhood. Seven miles away there is an oak forest in the heart of which is a shrine called 'La Madonna dell' Incoronate.' In May and September pilgrims come here in vast numbers, and, with their tents and camp-fires, it then looks like the camp of an army. North of Foggia there is a little town called Manfredonia, after its founder, Manfred. From Manfredonia there is a good road to the top of Monte Gargano, on the summit of which is }>erched the flourishing S. Angelo, a place thronged with old-world associations. In its streets there stands a great medieval tower, where once a pagan temple stood above a cave where oracles were consulted back in the twilight, of history. In the fifth century St. Michael appeared to a shepherd, and since then he has had a shrine, in the cave, whither on the Bth of May thousands of pilgrims come to pray to him. Horace mentions more than once the woods of Garganus. but now there are no trees around the mountain, and the plain extends bare and flat for miles. Yet the views are very striking, and when the sun sets upon the Apulian Plain, clothing it with all the hues of the rainbow, the scene is indescribably beautiful. - On a. low hill about twelve miles from Foggia is Lucera. a "walled town which was old already when its walls were battered by Constans 11. in 663. In 1230, Frederick 11. restored if, and settled there 40,000 Saracens. He allowed them free exercise of their religious rites, driving the Christian population out of the city. The Saracens were expelled by Charles 1., and later, in 1300, the town was peopled by settlers from Provence, brought over by Charles IT. The fine old cathedral has been disfigured by the present Italian Government, but it still retains remains of its former beauty. Outside the town stands the great Palace which was the favorite residence of Frederick 11. Its glory has long departed. The descriptions of its ancient state read like pages from some Eastern romance. Italy

was plundered of works of art to adorn it. Amid a retinue of, odalisques and eunuchs, clad in Oriental splendor, surrounded by tame lions, guarded by a troop of Saracens, to whom he allowed full license, punishing neither debauchery nor sacrilege, he lorded it at Lucera like an Asiatic tyrant. Looking across from the castle we see a mass of ruins some miles distant. These were once Castel Fiorentino, where Frederick died. ; Astrologers ' told him that he would die near iron gates, at a place deriving its name from Flora. All his life for that reason he avoided Florence. And when at the end he came here and found near his room a door barred with iron he said : ' This .is the spot. The will of God must be done.' Melfi, another town that can be reached from Foggia, is more picturesque than comfortable. You enter the town by a drawbridge leading to the Castle, which was probably built by Robert Guiscard. A twelfth century cathedral was almost"completely destroyed by an earthquake in 1851. The old medieval buildings looking down on the valley beneath, the clear river, the fountains, the walnut groves, the convents, shrines, and spires form a picture of great beauty. And from Melfi one can walk or ride to the top of Monte Voltore, a fine peak rising amid chestnut woods from the bosom of its plain. The path winds through beautiful, shady woods until the Lake of Monticchio is reached, above which is the Monastery of San Michele. As at SuliLo great rocks loom over the buildings and seem ready to fall on them. The beautiful convent is separated from the lake by a steep slope, studded with huge walnut trees: and over all rises the highest peak of Monte Voltore. For the scholar Monte Voltore has an interest beside its picturesqueness. In Book 111., Ode 4, Horace tells us an adventure of his childhood on this mountain. He escaped from his nurse and strayed away and got lost amid the woods. Wearied, he fell asleep, and the wood-pigeons came and covered him with myrtle and laurel leaves. And not far away is the little town of Venosa, where the poet was born and where he lived till he went to Rome in his twelfth year. Venosa stands on the brink of a chasm : its quaint streets are full of old-world buildings. It has an ancient Abbey of the Most Holy Trinity, consecrated by Pope- Nicholas in 1058, according to an inscription on a column in the north aisle. Alberada, the first wife of Robert Guiscard, died and was buried in the abbey where she had taken refuge. On the wall an inscription commemorates the great Norman brothers whose bones rest together after their tumultuous lives; William Iron Arm, 1046; Drogo, murdered at Venosa, 1051 ; Humphrey, -1057 : Robert Guiscard, IQBS. No tomb in the world is more eloquent of the vanity of human ambition than this out-of-the-way sarcophagus in Venosa. The sons of Tancred de Hauteville rose from the condition of squires in a Norman valley to regal glory. Pirates and brigands they were, but their children were mated with the offspring of kings, and they swayed the politics of Europe. Though only four of them rose to the height of power, all the twelve brothers were cast in the same mould, a strange mixture of courage and loftiness, of piety and lawlessness, of rudeness and culture. On the coast below Foggia there is a large town now called Barletta, from which one can drive over the plain to Canosa, a little town which has a beautiful church, rebuilt by Roger Bohemund. And in one of its side chapels that Norman hero's bones are laid to rest, after all the intrigue and romance of his life in the spacious days of the Crusades. Canosa is built on a hill. And if you go to the top and look down its valley, ' Where Aufidus, between his humble banks With wild thyme plotted, winds along the plain A devious path, as when the serried ranks Passed over it, that passed not back again,' you can see the site of the little village of Cannae, where on 2 August 8.C., 216, the great Carthaginian general routed the armies of Rome, with a loss of eighty thousand men.

, Farther down the coast lies the dirty town of Bari, famous for its great Church of St. Nicholas, which has ever been one of the greatest centres for pilgrimages even in Italy. St. Nicholas was a saint of the people, ' invoked by the peaceable citizen, by the laborer who toiled for his daily bread, by the merchant who traded from shoro to shore, by the mariner struggling with the stormy ocean. He was the protector of the weak against the strong, of the poor against the rich, of the captive, the prisoner, the slave; he was the guardian of young marriageable maidens, of schoolboys, and especially of the orphan poor. In Russia, Greece, and throughout Europe, children are still taught to reverence St. Nicholas.' (Jameson.) In three hours the traiu will take one from Bari to the more important port of Brindisi, which is the starting-point, for steamers for Corfu, Athens, Constantinople, and the port of call for the P. and O. boats. Brindisi has been offered by the Italians as a sanatorium for our wounded heroes. In a little time probably many of them will be walking the streets of this old port, which in bygone years shook beneath the tramping feet of Roman armies, which came here to embark for the wars which made Rome mistress of the world. Horace and Maecenas, Cicero and Octavius passed up and down the same streets. Here, too, Virgil, ' wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man,' died on his return from Greece, B.C. 19. For him, indeed, it was ' Briiiidmium longctf. finis viae' (the end of the long road). Later, in the Middle Ages, the port of Brindisi saw great armies when the .flower of European chivalry sailed away for the East under the banner of the Cross; for it was the chief port whence the Crusaders embarked. In its Cathedral, several times ruined by earthquakes, Frederick 11. was crowned in 1225, and later, married to his second wife, lolanthe. Below Brindisi is the fine town of Lecce, from which a road leads across the isthmus to Taranto, once an important city in Magna Graecia. According to a tradition it was founded by Taras, a great-great-grand-son of Noah: history, however, places its origin in B.C. 707, when a colony of Spartans settled here. Besides the outer harbor, there is an inner harbor protected by a. drawbridge across its narrow entrance, really an inland lake, famous for its fisheries from remote times. All along the shores of the Mare Piccolo, as the lake is called, there are many remains of antiquities. Somewhere near Fontanalla Plato landed and was received by the Tarantine philosophers: near Citrezze, by the Church of S. Maria di Galeso flows a fountain, the Galesus of Horace : 'Fairest on earth that little nook of ground Smiles to my right, nor doth Hymettus bear Honeys more sweet; Venafrum's oil hath found Its rival there. 'There winters mild and springs that softly sigh. Kind Jove affords. There. Anion's vineyards blessed By fruit Bacchus, clusters call defy Falernian-pressed.'— Carm. 11., Ode 6. And in Taranto we must not forget the Cathedral of St. Cataldo, in no wise memorable for its beauty, but because it reminds us than ever here in the extreme South of Italy we find another of those stalwart Irish saints who left their own dear land and went all over Europe for the sake of Christ— peret/rinari pro Christo. Such, then, is Apulia in the extreme south-east of Italy, over against the mountains of Albania which can be seen on a clear day from the Italian shore. It is a backward province, now, out of the tide of modern progress, rarely visited by tourists, and only seen by most travellers from the windows of the express trains that thunder along through its sleepy towns and oldworld churches and castles to bring the mails to the P. and O. or Orient steamers at Brindisi or Taranto.

But over it all is the glamor of the past. It teems with memories of old Rome's fiercest' enemies and of the carnage of Cannae; of the oriental splendor . that illumined the land under Frederick 11. and of "the valiant warriors who poured down here from tlie v North in their way to deliver the Holy Places from the Turk. The splendor of these years has passed but the memories that hang over Apulia are immortal.