Old Calabria | Page 6

the coast-lands of Apulia veiled by its tepid and
unwholesome breath. To cheer me up, she says that on clear days one
can see Castel del Monte, the Hohenstaufen eyrie, shining yonder
above Barletta, forty miles distant. It sounds rather improbable; still,
yesterday evening there arose a sudden vision of a white town in that

direction, remote and dream-like, far across the water. Was it Barletta?
Or Margherita? It lingered awhile, poised on an errant sunbeam; then
sank into the deep.
From this window I look into the little harbour whose beach is dotted
with fishing-boats. Some twenty or thirty sailing-vessels are riding at
anchor; in the early morning they unfurl their canvas and sally forth, in
amicable couples, to scour the azure deep--it is greenish-yellow at this
moment--returning at nightfall with the spoils of ocean, mostly young
sharks, to judge by the display in the market. Their white sails bear
fabulous devices in golden colour of moons and crescents and dolphins;
some are marked like the "orange-tip" butterfly. A gunboat is now
stationed here on a mysterious errand connected with the Albanian
rising on the other side of the Adriatic. There has been whispered talk
of illicit volunteering among the youth on this side, which the
government is anxious to prevent. And to enliven the scene, a steamer
calls every now and then to take passengers to the Tremiti islands. One
would like to visit them, if only in memory of those martyrs of
Bourbonism, who were sent in hundreds to these rocks and cast into
dungeons to perish. I have seen such places; they are vast caverns
artificially excavated below the surface of the earth; into these the
unfortunates were lowered and left to crawl about and rot, the living
mingled with the dead. To this day they find mouldering skeletons,
loaded with heavy iron chains and ball-weights.
A copious spring gushes up on this beach and flows into the sea. It is
sadly neglected. Were I tyrant of Manfredonia, I would build me a fair
marble fountain here, with a carven assemblage of nymphs and
sea-monsters spouting water from their lusty throats, and plashing in its
rivulets. It may well be that the existence of this fount helped to decide
Manfred in his choice of a site for his city; such springs are rare in this
waterless land. And from this same source, very likely, is derived the
local legend of Saint Lorenzo and the Dragon, which is quite
independent of that of Saint Michael the dragon-killer on the heights
above us. These venerable water-spirits, these dracs, are interesting
beasts who went through many metamorphoses ere attaining their
present shape.

Manfredonia lies on a plain sloping very gently seawards--practically a
dead level, and in one of the hottest districts of Italy. Yet, for some
obscure reason, there is no street along the sea itself; the cross-roads
end in abrupt squalor at the shore. One wonders what
considerations--political, aesthetic or hygienic--prevented the designers
of the town from carrying out its general principles of construction and
building a decent promenade by the waves, where the ten thousand
citizens could take the air in the breathless summer evenings, instead of
being cooped up, as they now are, within stifling hot walls. The choice
of Man-fredonia as a port does not testify to any great foresight on the
part of its founder--peace to his shade! It will for ever slumber in its
bay, while commerce passes beyond its reach; it will for ever be
malarious with the marshes of Sipontum at its edges. But this particular
defect of the place is not Manfred's fault, since the city was razed to the
ground by the Turks in 1620, and then built up anew; built up, says
Lenormant, according to the design of the old city. Perhaps a fear of
other Corsair raids induced the constructors to adhere to the old plan,
by which the place could be more easily defended. Not much of
Man-fredonia seems to have been completed when Pacicchelli's view
(1703) was engraved.
Speaking of the weather, the landlady further told me that the wind
blew so hard three months ago--"during that big storm in the winter,
don't you remember?"--that it broke all the iron lamp-posts between the
town and the station. Now here was a statement sounding even more
improbable than her other one about Castel del Monte, but admitting of
verification. Wheezing and sneezing, I crawled forth, and found it
correct. It must have been a respectable gale, since the cast-iron
supports are snapped in half, every one of them.
Those Turks, by the way, burnt the town on that memorable occasion.
That was a common occurrence in those days. Read any account of
their incursions into Italy during this and the preceding centuries, and
you will find that the