An Armchair Traveller's History Of Apulia Part 5

"Among the many perverse notions of which we are now rid-ding ourselves is this that Byzantinism in south Italy was a period of decay and torpid dreamings", wrote Norman Douglas with considerable justice in 1915. "There was no lethargy in their social and political ambitions, in their military achievements, which held the land against overwhelming numbers of Saracens, Lombards and other intruders."

Yet only in the Salento were Apulia's Greeks in a majority and only there was Greek universally spoken. North of Brindisi, the population in most coastal cities as well as inland was dominated by 'Lombards'. Latin speaking by now despite their Germanic names, intermarriage had turned them into a caste rather than a race, a caste which differed from its neighbours merely in laws and customs. Chronically short of men and money yet having to extract taxes and raise troops, the catapans handled the Lombards with Byzantine subtlety, carefully respecting their customs and allowing them to live under their own laws with their own magistrates.

Nonetheless, the Byzantine Emperors set the utmost value on Bari. Ever since the Moslem period the city on the promontory had been so well fortified that its possession was vital for control of the southern Adriatic. As in other Apulian ports, its inhabitants were an exotic mixture of Lombards, Latins, Greeks, Armenians, Jews and Moslems, governed by Byzantine officials. The city grew rich from importing the gold, spices, silks and luxury goods that could only be obtained at Constantinople, in return exporting oil, almonds, wine, salted fish and slaves. Prosperous citizens enjoyed luxuries unknown in most of Western Europe, Lombard n.o.bles dressing like Byzantines in silk robes and fantastic head-dresses.

Even so, the Baresi resented having to pay taxes to Constantinople, and serve in the catapan's levies. In consequence there were several rebellions such as that of Melus, the Normans' first Apulian ally. Basil Boioannes had no difficulty in putting down opposition of this sort, but he was recalled to Constantinople in 1027 and the catapans who followed him were mediocrities.

When the Catapan Eustathius was released from Norman captivity after the crus.h.i.+ng defeat at Melfi, in true Byzantine style he took care to flatter the Lombard magistrate of Bari, Bisantius. He thanked him warmly for his steadfastness against the 'Franks' (Normans), and rewarded him with a large area of land, permission to bring in settlers and tax them. He also confirmed his powers to judge all crimes according to Lombard law save for plots against the catapan or the 'Sacred Emperor'.

But flattery and bribery were no match for Normans at a time when an overstretched Imperial army was fighting Turkish invaders on the far side of the Empire. The situation deteriorated steadily. When Taranto fell in 1063 the Lombards decided that the Normans were bound to win, and the surrender of Bari was due to a Lombard traitor, Argirizzo, who let them into a key bastion. What made the city's loss final was a disastrous Byzantine defeat in Anatolia, only a few weeks later.

The early Norman period was chaotic and during the first quarter of the next century the new regime almost fell apart. From 1123 Bari, with its large population, was autonomous under Prince Grimoald Alferanites, and for a short time it seemed as if the rich city might become a merchant republic like Venice, a 'Republic of St Nicholas'. But Roger II stormed it in 1144, hanging Grimoald's successor, Jaquintus.

The Baresi had learned to regret the loss of the catapans, particularly resenting a new Norman castle that had been built to cow them. When they rebelled in 1155 they asked the Byzantines to return and an expedition arrived from Constantinople, demolis.h.i.+ng the castle. However, King William I ('William the Bad') soon recaptured the city. He gave the Baresi only two days to leave before he destroyed every building in it saying that since they had pulled his house down he was doing the same to them.

20.

Old Bari

...a n.o.ble mart for all the Adriatic Sea...

Paolo Giovio, "Vitae Ill.u.s.trium Virorum"

OLD BARI was not only the capital of the Terra di Bari, but a microcosm of Apulia. No doubt its inhabitants were distrusted by other Apulians because of a Greek subtlety and Levantine flair for business they did not share. Even so, the Old Baresi had more in common with the wildest woodman from the Gargano or shepherd from the Alta Murgia than with anyone from outside Apulia.

Every spring the people of Old and New Bari commemorate the arrival of St Nicholas's bones 900 years ago. The celebrations last for days, with processions and pageants. Pilgrims come from all over the world, especially from the Abruzzi, many walking for a week behind their parish banners. Some carry pilgrim-staffs decorated with pine cones, olive flowers or feathers, singing their ancient prayer to San Nicola in an archaic, hypnotic chant that haunts those who hear it long after. The culmination is when a life-size Baroque statue of the saint has been carried through the crowded streets to the harbour by fishermen and sailors. The Archbishop says Ma.s.s on the mole, finally throwing a flask of St Nicholas's oil into the waves, and then, escorted by an armada of small craft, the statue is taken out to sea in a fis.h.i.+ng boat. As it crosses the harbour, sirens shriek and rockets burst, while the Baresi consume the nuts, olives and dried beans without which no Apulian holiday is complete. When night falls and the statue goes home to its shrine, the sky is lit by fireworks.

In 1087, sixty Baresi landed at Myra in Asia Minor, smashed open the tomb of St Nicholas and stole his bones. A fourth century bishop, his fame is due to the miracles listed in the pilgrim's prayer: "The sick are healed by his oil, and those in danger of s.h.i.+pwreck are saved... he raised a dead man to life by the roadside, baptised a Jew after finding his money for him, recovered a vase from the bottom of the sea, and a lost child..." Listening to the pilgrims crying their thanks on the quay, you realise that he still works miracles. The original Santa Claus, his gifts to some young girls won them husbands when their fathers could not afford dowries. He became the patron of small boys after rea.s.sembling and bringing to life three who had been chopped and pickled "to make tunny-fish". This idea is quite possible; as late as the seventeenth century a consignment of so-called 'tunny' from North Africa turned out to be human flesh from the corpses of the fallen in a local war. Like the three boys, it had been salted and put in barrels.

A shrine was built, the first Apulian Romanesque basilica and the largest, completed in 1105. San Nicola stands where the Catapan's palace stood, the tower known as the Torre del Catapano being almost certainly Byzantine, while the carvings lions, elephants, eagles are Lombard, Byzantine and Saracen. Nicholas is buried in the crypt, which was consecrated by Pope Urban II, preacher of the First Crusade. His bones exude the colourless "St Nicholas's Oil", bottled as a cure for many ailments.

Frederick II rebuilt the Norman castle by the sea. In 1220 he gave an audience here to Francis of a.s.sisi, and then put a beautiful wh.o.r.e in his bed, but Francis lay down on the fire and invited her to join him, to the consternation of the wh.o.r.e and also of the emperor watching through a keyhole. Frederick did not trust the Baresi, ostentatiously erecting a personal gallows in the city. After they deserted him for the Pope but were brought to heel, he placed an inscription over a gate: "The faithless Baresi are full of promises but then break them. Cherish in your n.o.ble heart, I pray you, this warning: 'Be on your guard against a Barese as you would against a drawn sword', and if he cries 'hail', then beware of an enemy."

The grim Charles of Anjou was no less cynical, despite an enthusiastic welcome, but his son Charles II Lo Zoppo (The Lame) became a devotee of St Nicholas, lavis.h.i.+ng treasure on the shrine, one gift being a tooth of Mary Magdalene. Meanwhile the city grew richer and richer. The Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204 brought even more trade with the East, since Bari was a staging post on the route from Venice to the Golden Horn.

However, due to wars between rival dynasties and as a consequence of becoming a duchy, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were a wretched period for the Baresi. One fifteenth century duke was Gianantonio del Balzo Orsini, Prince of Taranto, who had the lucrative right of exporting foodstuffs from his estates free of duty; his flocks amounted to 31,000 animals. When he died in 1463, probably murdered by King Ferrante's agents, the duchy was given to the Sforza of Milan, Ferrante's allies in the war against the Angevins.

From 150024 Bari was ruled by the d.u.c.h.ess Isabella Sforza, who was the daughter of Alfonso II of Naples and the widow of Gian Galeazzo II of Milan. She hated the French for chasing the Sforza out of Milan and for taking her young son by Galeazzo a prisoner to France, where they forced him into becoming a monk. She never saw him again, signing herself "Isabella, unique in misfortune." A poetess and an accomplished musician, she lived in splendour at the castle, devoting herself to her daughter Bona. But in 1517, in a dress of blue studded with golden bees, Bona was married by proxy to King Sigismund of Poland.

After Isabella's death, Bona governed Bari from Poland. When Sigismund died in 1548, she took a lover, her luxurious court at Cracow corrupting even the clergy. She was on bad terms with her son, Sigismund II, hating her daughters-in-law; the first died in childbirth, the second within days of being crowned, and it was widely believed that Bona had poisoned them. After a final quarrel with her son, in 1555 she returned to Bari, taking so much treasure with her that, at their coronation, future Kings of Poland had to swear to recover it. She died two years later.

Bona may have brought one or two Protestants with her from tolerant Poland, for during the latter half of the sixteenth century, "a foreigner from a distant land" appeared in Bari, teaching philosophy. When it was discovered that he was "a perfidious Calvinist", who cast doubt on the doctrine of Transubstantiation, Archbishop Puteo ordered his arrest. He fled to Trani, but was caught and sent to Rome, where he was burned at the stake.

Since the Turkish conquest of the Balkans, the city had been increasingly threatened by Muslim pirates, Baresi notables being captured and held to ransom on their way to greet Bona at Venice when she was returning from Poland. The situation became so serious that the duomo's bell-tower was used as a look-out post, a permanent watch being kept for the sails of Turkish or North African raiders. Inland, brigands frequently intercepted wagon-loads of food en route to Bari.

In 1579 Camillo Porzio wrote of the Terra di Bari, "this province is famous for corn, oil, cotton, wine, saffron and... whole woods of almond trees." Rich Baresi often owned a ma.s.seria in the country or a share in one, where olives were pressed, but many of the city's palazzi contained presses that could handle several hundred-weight. Grapes were pressed in the country, the must brought in to the palazzi to ferment. A palazzo generally had two storeys and a roof-terrace, the owner's apartments being on the first floor, store-rooms and cisterns on the ground floor; if more storage s.p.a.ce was needed the courtyard would be covered with sail-cloth. Five hundred Venetian merchants came regularly to buy wine and wheat.

As elsewhere, savage taxation caused a popular rising in 1647. Plague broke out in 1656, killing 12,000 Baresi out of 15,000. Brigandage grew even worse, pirates more active, so that the walls had to be rebuilt at great expense. With not enough labour to work them, the price of arable land, olive groves and vineyards slumped; by the 1670s they were almost unsaleable. There was famine in 1672, another outbreak of plague in 169092.

Yet the Abate Pacich.e.l.li, visiting Bari in the 1680s, calls it the "Crown of the Province and Jewel of Cities". He liked the people, whom he says are good looking, fine men of business, honest, hardworking and kind-hearted, and make good soldiers Arditi nelle Guerre.

As a result of the War of the Spanish Succession, Austrian rule replaced Spanish from 1707 to 1738. In his journal George Berkeley describes Bari at this time. It "hath inhabitants 18,000; moles old and new, port shallow, not admitting s.h.i.+ps of any burden." He says of two friaries outside the walls, "pleasantly situated, cool cloisters, orange and lemon groves in them, fine views, delicious living." He adds that the outskirts abound in cornfields, vineyards and orchards, and admires the extremely delightful small white houses. But he also tells us, "The gentry of Bari dare not lie during summer in their villas for fear of the Turk."

In 1738 the kingdom of the Two Sicilies became independent once more under Charles VII of Bourbon, the first of the Borbone dynasty, who revived Southern Italy's prosperity, building count-less roads. In 1740 he spent three days at Bari to thank St Nicholas for the birth of a son and heir, presenting the basilica with a silver baldacchino (canopy of state).

The composer Nicolo Piccini was born here in 1728. His first success was at Naples; the opera "La Cecchina: la Buona figliuola", with a plot inspired by Richardson's novel "Pamela" about the trials of a virtuous servant girl. Piccini later went to Paris, to become the unwilling rival of Gluck. When he died in 1800, he had written more than 150 long forgotten operas. "La Cecchina" was revived some years ago, at the Val d' Itria festival.

Henry Swinburne visited Bari at the end of the 1770s, finding its streets "narrow, crooked and dirty", but enjoyed the prospect from the harbour wall "at every turn you catch a different view of the sea and the coast, stretching from the mountains of Garga.n.u.s to the hills of Ostuni." His reaction to the shrine of St Nicholas was typical of his period: "a dirty, dark, subterranean chapel... Underneath its altar is a hole through which devout and curious persons thrust their heads, to behold a bone or two swimming below in water; this liquid is drawn up by the priests in a silver bucket, and distributed under the name of Manna, as an infallible cure for sore eyes and disordered stomachs."

In 1798 Ferdinand IV gave the city's borghesi equality with its n.o.bles. By then everyone agreed that Bari should be expanded. Huddling behind crumbling walls, it still covered no more ground than in medieval times, with too many ruinous houses and horribly inadequate sewage. Already, in 1790 two engineers, Viti and Palenzia, had produced a plan for a new city. But the plan had to be postponed, although King Ferdinand had approved it.

At the beginning of 1799 the French invaded Southern Italy, chasing out King Ferdinand and inviting their sympathisers to set up the "Parthenopean (Neapolitan) Republic". In February the Baresi joined it, planting a Tree of Liberty in their city with great ceremony. Early in the summer, however, Bari was reoccupied by Borbone troops. Later, the Risorgimento would canonise the Southern Revolutionaries as "Patriots of '99", although their regime was incapable of surviving without foreign bayonets. It was not a good moment to begin rebuilding.

When the French invaded the Regno again in 1806, Napoleon's parasitical brother, Joseph Bonaparte, was placed on the throne of Naples as 'King Giuseppe Napoleone I'. Remembering how pro-French Bari had been in 1799, the new monarch decided to make it the Apulian capital. The royal favour continued when in turn the Emperor's flamboyant brother-in-law, Marshal Joachim Murat, became "King Gioacchino Napoleone I". He gave his regal approval to Viti and Palenzia's plan for Bari, the first stone of the New City being laid in April, 1813.

21.

Bari, 1647 Revolution

...an unequivocal social revolution, from which the reactionary cla.s.s of seigneurs emerged triumphant. The n.o.bility had won for years to come...

Fernand Braudel, "Le Mediterranee et le monde mediterraneen"

SURPRISINGLY, THE CITY had experienced a genuine people's revolt well over a hundred years before the French Revolution. Admittedly, it did not begin there. But in 1647 the initially successful rising at Naples led by Masaniello, the 'Fisherman King', had spread like wildfire all over Apulia, inspiring popular anti-Spanish and anti-feudal revolts of the same sort. They included a particularly serious one at Bari.

As the seventeenth century went by, life had become increasingly difficult for the Baresi of every cla.s.s, especially for the poor. Like the rest of the Mediterranean, trade was suffering from Atlantic compet.i.tion while at the same time there was a long running agricultural depression. All this was made worse by Spanish taxation. Fighting to keep their dominion over Western Europe, the Spaniards had run out of money and were draining dry what should have been the richest kingdom in their empire. During the later stages of the Thirty Years' War Spanish troops were paid almost entirely from Southern Italian revenues.

The Regno's public debt was astronomical, and everybody in Bari was in debt too: city, n.o.bility and borghesi. So were the barons in the countryside of the Terra di Bari. The value of agricultural land, a large part of the capital of even Baresi merchants, fell steadily. However, the burden of taxation was born by the poorer cla.s.ses.

The little city was governed by its n.o.bles from the Palazzo dei Sedile in Piazza Maggiore. The sociable Abate Pacich.e.l.li carefully records some of their names: Affaitati, Boccapianoli, Ca.s.sama.s.simi, Doppoli, Gerundi, Izzinosi and Taurisani, "& altri". They were largely exempt from taxation or service in the Spanish army, and often owned their own bakeries, avoiding the levies on public ba-keries. Despite the recession, life cannot have been too bad for most of them in their small but imposing palazzi there were excellent shops where they could buy luxuries.

In contrast, crus.h.i.+ng taxation on food was making life almost intolerable for the poor. An added misery was the press-ganging of young men for the Spanish armies while, at the same time, there was constant friction with the castle's underpaid Spanish garrison, always p.r.o.ne to rob and rape. In 1641 riots had broken out in Bari against conscription, followed by riots against the price of food, mobs marching through the narrow streets and a.s.saulting the better off. During the summer of 1647 it became clear that there was going to be a very bad harvest, which meant still higher prices for bread, at a moment when new taxes on food had just been introduced.

Even a hundred and fifty years later, the poorer Baresi normally lived in a single, smoke-filled bas.e.m.e.nt room dug out of the rock, whose only light came from a small window at street level or from the door through which one stepped down, a dwelling shared with hens and a pig or sheep, sometimes with a horse or donkey as well. It was people inhabiting dens like these who bore most of the tax burden. The majority worked in the surrounding countryside beyond the walls, but this was becoming a very dangerous place indeed, since the barons were employing brigands as enforcers, and they were getting out of hand, robbing all and sundry.

To a limited extent the Baresi poor looked to the borghesi, who also had to pay swingeing taxes, for leaders.h.i.+p. The borghesi had their own piazza or a.s.sembly of commoners, who argued endlessly with the n.o.bles in Piazza Maggiore. But the n.o.bles stayed in control of the city for the moment. Meanwhile, the viceroy's authority was collapsing. Some of the great magnates toyed with the idea of inviting the French to invade the Regno and free them from the by now detested Spanish regime. But then, sparked off by yet another new tax, on fruit, Masaniello's rebellion broke out at Naples in July 1647.

Within days, a revolt had broken out at Bari. Led by a sailor called Paolo di Ribeco, mobs surged through the streets, attacking the palazzi of n.o.bles and rich merchants, looting and setting fire to them. The Spanish garrison did nothing and within a short time Ribeco and the people were masters of the entire city save for the castle. They insisted on being represented in the a.s.semblies of n.o.bles and borghesi, and on the abolition of the most hated taxes. Al-though, as at Naples, the revolt was as much against the n.o.bles and their privileges as against the Spaniards, the attack on Bari's n.o.bility seems to have been fairly restrained. It was different outside the city walls. There, the collapse of authority came just after an explosion of brigandage throughout the Terra di Bari and the peas-ants, driven beyond endurance, rose up savagely against brigands and barons.

In response, the Apulian n.o.bles quickly forgot their resentment of Spanish rule, rallying to the viceroy. They were lucky in possessing two formidable soldiers in Giangirolamo, Count of Conversano and Fra' Giovan Battista Caracciolo, Prior of the Knights of Malta at Bari. Within weeks their army of Spanish troops and baronial levies routed the main body of Apulian rebels near Foggia, though not without some vicious fighting. Meanwhile, borghesi who had supported the revolt at Bari lost their nerve amid the an-archy and bloodshed, surrendering the city to government forces as soon as they heard of the defeat at Foggia. Paolo di Ribeco died on the gallows.

Not much is known about what really happened inside Bari during the revolt (despite the efforts of that magnificent historian Rosario Villari). Even so, it seems obvious that the revolt never had any hope of succeeding. What we know for certain is that taxes were re-imposed at the old level, and that the city's n.o.bles regained their privileges.

The story of Paolo di Ribeco and his forgotten rising ought to be remembered by anyone who wants to understand the Baresi. They have always been rebels by temperament, as they would show again and again, not just in 1799, but in 1922 and in 1943.

22.

New Bari

Bari, not long ago, consisted of a dark and tortuous old town...

It now has its glaring New Quarter.

Norman Douglas, "Old Calabria"

NEW BARI'S CITIZENS are said to have inherited all the distinctive qualities of the Old Baresi. They are no less wily and money-minded than their ancestors. At least, that is what every Apulian who comes from outside the city will insist on telling you.

Little change could be seen when Keppel Craven visited Bari during the spring of 1818, although he conceded that trade with Trieste and the Dalmatian ports gave "an appearance of animation, ease and opulence." But the first house had already been built in 1816 in what is still the New City's main street, the Corso Ferdinando (later renamed Corso Vittorio Emmanuele). The public buildings were begun in the 1820s, the entire New City being paved in 1830. Soon there was a railway station, and work started on a new harbour. An opera house, the Teatro Piccini, opened in 1854 with Donizzetti's Poliuto. This pioneer phase coincided with the last days of the Borbone monarchy.

Ferdinand II and the royal family came to Bari in 1859, to greet Maria Sophia of Wittelsbach, who had just married by proxy the heir to the throne, the Duke of Calabria. A cheering mob dragged the King's carriage through the streets to the castle. Harold Acton describes the occasion: On February 3, a spring like day, the bride's approach was announced by repeated cannon fire at ten in the morning. The Queen as well as the Duke of Calabria climbed on board the frigate which had brought her from Trieste, and there was a rapid exchange of greetings and embraces. The Duke clasped both his bride's hands and kissed her forehead; they spoke to each other in halting French, she a little pale from the sea voyage, he abashed by the beauty of his Bavarian bride.

Already a dying man, King Ferdinand burst into tears when she visited him in his bedroom. Yet on the same day he found enough strength to approve a plan "to encourage the city's growth, prestige and dignity." They were to be two huge new squares, a state boarding school and a nautical inst.i.tute.

Ferdinand died in May. An abler man than his nervous young successor, Francis II, was needed to save the tottering Regno. First Garibaldi and then the Piedmontese invaded the Two Sicilies, the last Borbone king sailing into exile early in 1861.

The handful of Apulians who fought for the Risorgimento cannot have foreseen its consequences. Peasants left the land in droves to escape from speculators' work-gangs; in 1861 the population of Bari was 23,000 while ten years later it was nearly 51,000. Augustus Hare thought the city had "all the characteristics of the meanest part of Naples flat roofs, dilapidated, whitewashed houses, and a swarming, noisy, begging, brutalised population. Two modern streets intersect with formal dismalness the labyrinths of old houses and narrow alleys", "Begging is unfortunately still a national industry" says Murray's Handbook for Travellers in Southern Italy of 1878: "The best way to get rid of the nuisance is to give it a very minute coin." The "nuisance" included middle-aged men too broken by work to toil on in the fields, monks and nuns thrown out of their convents, and the rank and file of the former Borbone army turned off without pensions.

During the economic crisis that afflicted Europe in the 1870s, the situation was made worse by protectionist measures designed for the North. If it helped new industries in Piedmont and Lombardy, the tariff of 1878 on mechanical products and textiles caused many bankruptcies, driving capital northwards and encouraging the flight from the land. All this made life still more miser-able in Bari as it did in every other Apulian city.

Old Bari, more ruinous than ever, was packed with unemployed labourers, crammed into dirty rookeries and cellars, riddled with tuberculosis, pneumonia, arthritis and syphilis, even leprosy. Murder was commonplace in both the Old and the New Towns; "A betrayed husband generally kills", observed the chairman of Bari's Chamber of Labour. In 1898 cholera and famine led to savage riots; a mob trying to storm the munic.i.p.ality was dispersed by troops with much bloodshed. In 1903 deaths in the province of Bari were 29.30 per thousand, the second highest rate in Italy and nearly twice that in England and Wales. A large proportion of the deaths were in Bari itself, which seethed with discontent and cla.s.s hatred. Understandably, there was ma.s.sive emigration, mostly to the United States, Argentina or Venezuela, or to Libya after its acquisition by Italy in 1912.

New Bari continued to grow remorselessly, buildings going up every year. Another opera house was built in 1903, the Petruzzelli affectionately known as La Perla di Bari (the pearl of Bari) which saw many memorable productions. (In 1991 it was completely destroyed during a fire started by rival claques, but was eventually restored and re-opened in 2008.) The expansion surged on until the Great War of 1915.

Inflation went up by fifty per cent in 191820, unemployment rocketing as men came home from the Front. In the 'Red Years' after the War, Bari seemed to be on the brink of a Russian-style revolution. There were countless strikes and demonstrations, well-dressed people were jostled, army officers booed. The Left was encouraged by news from all over Apulia of riots, of town-halls stormed and police stations stoned. But at the end of 1920 Giuseppe Caradonna set up a Fascist cell at Cerignola which was so effective that it earned him the name 'Duke of Cerignola'. Soon Fascist squadristi (blacks.h.i.+rts) were smas.h.i.+ng labour unions and breaking strikes throughout the province. The blacks.h.i.+rts made ready to stem "the rising Bolshevik tide". Organised by the fire-brand Giuseppe di Vittorio, the Left bought as many ex-army rifles and revolvers as it could. On 1 August, 1922, it rose in a carefully planned revolt, a vicious struggle raging between armed workers on one side and troops, carabinieri and blacks.h.i.+rts on the other. Women threw stones or burning oil. But after three days the Red Baresi were broken and would give no more trouble.

Accounts of what happened in Bari during the Fascist Era are often deliberately confused, but clearly Mussolini found more than a few supporters when he was seen to be firmly in power. Economic expansion revived, an annual trade-fair, the Fiera del Levante being established in 1930 to encourage trade between Italy and the Middle East, a university was founded and emigration continued, many Baresi settling in Abyssinia when it was an Italian colony. Little was done, however, for the slum-dwellers of Old Bari.

In 1939, the invasions of Albania and Greece were launched from Bari and Brindisi. The following year, however, Bari seemed to be in real danger when the Italian offensive in Greece collapsed; for a time there were fears that the Greeks were going to invade Apulia. The Fascist Era ended with considerable bloodshed in July 1943, after which the city became the headquarters of Marshal Badoglio's anti-Axis government. When the Germans attacked in force in September, General Bellomo counter-attacked, taking many German prisoners and saving the port for the Allies.

Allied troops did not behave well at Bari, requisitioning houses and evicting their owners without any warning. In a sad little book, "Il Regno del Sud", Agostino degli Espinosa tells of famished children flocking round the city's restaurants and cafes, reserved for British or American personnel, and begging for the sc.r.a.ps left on their plates. The only way to avoid starving to death was to buy stolen army rations.

Evelyn Waugh came here and (in "Unconditional Surrender") says less compa.s.sionately that there was an agile and ingenious criminal cla.s.s consisting chiefly of small boys. Yet he comments, too, that the city regained the "comsopolitan martial stir" which it had enjoyed during the Crusades. Allies soldiers crowded the streets and the harbour was full of small naval vessels. For in late autumn 1943 Bari became one of the three main ports of the "British Italy Base".

Waugh adds that the city "achieved the unique, unsought distinction of being the only place in the Second World War to suffer from gas." On the evening of 2 December a hundred German planes from Foggia attacked the harbour, sinking seventeen s.h.i.+ps. Among those that blew up was the USS John Hervey with a secret cargo of mustard-bombs; over 600 Allied personnel were gas casualties besides those killed by German bombs, together with all too many Baresi. 'Many of the inhabitants complained of sore throats, sore eyes and blisters', says Waugh: "They were told it was an unfamiliar, mild, epidemic disease of short duration." Even now, you meet aged Baresi whose respiratory problems are due to mustard-gas. Old Bari was further damaged in 1945 when the American ammunition s.h.i.+p Henderson exploded in its harbour.

Part VI.

The Murge.

23.

The Murge.

...an arid region, not unlike parts of northern Africa.

Norman Douglas, "Old Calabria"