Free An Armchair Traveller's History of Apulia by Desmond Seward, Susan Mountgarret

forgotten him. Janet Ross had every reason to call it “The Land of Manfred.”

Part III

The Tavoliere

12

Foggia and the Tavoliere
    In a dry summer at Foggia water costs more than wine; it is brought
    by train, and the station is besieged by people with pails, jugs, basins
    and bottles, who buy it by the litre.
    Janet Ross, “The Fourth Generation”
     
     
    WHEN AUGUSTUS HARE visited Apulia early in the 1880s he came by rail from Naples to Foggia, through the mountains to the Tavoliere. “We have now entered a part of Italy which is behind-hand in civilisation to a degree which will only be credible to those who have tried it”, he sniffed. “ All sanitary arrangements after leaving Foggia are almost unknown. The filth even of the railway stations is indescribable.” In those days there was simply not enough water to clean them properly.
    Many travellers remarked on the bare, endless expanse of the flat Tavoliere, with not a house in sight, the only notable feature being the giant fennel lining the trackways. Flocks of sheep were everywhere, guarded by milk-white dogs as intelligent as they were fierce – the beautiful Abruzzesi , whose descendants can still be seen.
    Nothing could be more different from the mountainous Gargano than this vast plain in the southern Capitanata, whose centre is Foggia. The name ‘Capitanata’ (land of the catapan ) is a memory of the Byzantine governors who ruled for the Emperors at Constantinople. Under the Romans the Tavoliere had been farmed by veterans of the Punic Wars, before they and their small-holdings were displaced by sheep ranches. From the second century AD until the Risorgimento the land was dominated by sheep, driven up into the Abruzzi during summer when the Apulian grass was parched, but returning in the autumn.
    By Apulian standards Foggia is a late-comer as a city, founded in the eleventh century around a spot where a miraculous icon of the Virgin had been discovered, the “Icona Vetere”, now hanging be-hind a curtain in the cathedral. No other town then existed in the area, only hamlets peopled by refugees from the old city of Arpi, destroyed by Saracens. The Normans fortified Foggia, which became important in the thirteenth century when Frederick II made it his administrative headquarters, because of the good roads to Naples, Bari and Tàranto.
    The palace which Frederick built was destroyed by Papal troops, who used its stones to strengthen their entrenchments while fighting Manfred. Contemporary descriptions give some idea of it, “rich in marble, with statues and pillars or verd-antique, with marble lions and basins.” Part of the extensive gardens was set aside for aviaries and the Imperial menagerie.
    A royal menagerie was fashionable throughout the Middles Ages. Frederick’s is the best recorded, perhaps because it always travelled with him and was seen by thousands of his subjects. The Sultan of Cairo sent an elephant, complete with howdah, which led his procession from town to town, and a giraffe – the first in Europe. Hunting leopards and baggage camels came from Tunisia where there was a Sicilian consul. Frederick’s hosts must have dreaded his visits. At Padua he spent many months at the monastery of Santa Justina with the elephant, five leopards and twenty-four camels.
    Although personally abstemious, the Emperor entertained foreign princes on a lavish scale, both here and at Lucera. A contemporary chronicler gives us this picture of life at court: “Every sort of festive joy was there united. The alternation of choirs, the purple garments of the musicians evoked a festal mood. A number of guests were knighted, other adorned with signs of special honour. The whole day was spent in merriment, and as the darkness fell, flaming torches were kindled here and there and turned night into day for the contests of the players.”
    The ladies of the court, on the whole excluded from the hunting boxes of Castel del Monte and Gravina, lived a normal