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

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.

Part II

Hohenstaufen Country

8
“The Wonder of the World”
    There has risen from the sea a beast full of blasphemy, that, formed with
    the feet of a bear, the mouth of a raging lion and, as it were, a panther in
    its other limbs, opens its mouth in blasphemies against God’s name...
    this beast is Frederick, the so-called Emperor.
    Pope Gregory IX
     
     
    GOING DOWN FROM THE GARGANO into the Southern Capitanata and the flat Tavoliere that stretches as far as Foggia, you enter the region most closely associated with the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II (1194–1250).
    He captured the imagination of the thirteenth century English chronicler Matthew Paris, who called him “Frederick, greatest of earthly princes, the wonder of the world”, and he continues to fascinate. Not even Adolf Hitler was immune to his spell. Among the travellers, he appealed to Norman Douglas in particular, as a “colossal shade”. For Apulians, “Our Emperor, Federico di Svevia” is beyond question a Pugliese, by choice if not birth, and there is nobody they