Salty Sea, Old Stones and Martyrs on Italy’s Heel in Otranto
TIME runs at a different pace in Otranto, where the brutal June heat shuts the town down for the entire afternoon, and memories cycle in centuries rather than hours. Perched in the Apulia region, on the southeastern point of Italy’s heel, Otranto is surrounded by a raw, arid landscape more redolent of Greece or Cyprus than of the rolling hills and vineyards of Northern Italy. The Adriatic, a peerless turquoise with a white sand bottom, feels thickly salted compared with the more gentle Mediterranean.
The remote, sometimes primitive southern coast is dotted with a rich array of architecture — from medieval to Byzantine to Baroque — reflecting the relentless waves of invaders that washed over the Salento peninsula. Its picture-postcard buildings range from Otranto’s castle, which resembles a child’s sand castle on a grand scale, to trulli, the humorous conical huts in the Itria valley, to the lacy filigree of Lecce, “the Florence of the South.”
Compared with the dark, labyrinthine palace evoked by Horace Walpole in his famous novella, “The Castle of Otranto,” the real thing is a benign, if hulking, presence, stuck on the edge of this city like a sturdy millenniums-old barnacle. The closest thing to a Gothic atmosphere is the turret used for falcons; a multitude of pigeons inhabit the castle, and the falcons and a falconer had been brought in to control the problem.
Sitting in one of the vaulted cells at the top of the castle, I paged through Walpole’s story. Watching the falconer put the birds through their bloodthirsty paces, it was easy to imagine the place as a full-fledged fortress, cannons blazing. Although the surrounding moat was bone dry, used these days for events like concerts, a cannon and catapults stand sentry in the courtyard, reminders of the town’s most vivid memory. In 1480, Otranto was attacked by the Turks, and 800 martyrs were decapitated during the slaughter, an event still constantly evoked, from the skulls on display in the crypt of the town’s cathedral to Martyrs Hill (also called Minerva Hill after an ancient temple), where the Sanctuary of St. Mary of the Martyrs memorializes the dead.
The cathedral is an amazing potpourri of the architecture that permeates the region. Its bell tower (which clangs crazily to mark the hours — ringing, say, 13 times at 7 p.m.) was built by the Normans. The otherwise plain facade boasts a Renaissance rose window. But it’s not until you get inside that you see its greatest treasure — a 12th-century mosaic floor beneath the 17th-century Moorish coffered ceiling.
Painstakingly created by a monk, Pantaleone, at the behest of the Archbishop Jonathan, the astonishingly detailed mosaic looks like the work of someone tripping on acid. The nearly 1,000-square-yard pictogram borrows its images from everything from pagan times to ancient Greek and Hindu mythology to the Old and New Testaments to medieval history. Using the Tree of Life as its central motif, it weaves a wildly chaotic chronological web ranging from creation to the fall of Adam and Eve. Here King Arthur and Alexander the Great share floor space with the Tower of Babel, elephants, dragons, hydra-headed beasts, griffins, unicorns, minotaurs, Norse gods and horned devils. The cathedral’s ornate crypt, columns and even the charming remnants of its early-Italian frescoes pale beside this nutty masterpiece.
Carlo Pisanelli, our guide, spoke an ornate broken English as he described the details of the floor. “The mosaic covers the history of man,” he said, pointing out some “bad angels,” as well as a “legendary, very dangerous cat living in Switzerland that King Arthur had to fight.” Like all of Otranto, the ancient merges seamlessly with the current, and the mosaic, rather than being off limits, is covered with chairs for the congregation.
During my two-week stay as member of a residency for artists and writers planned by the BAU Institute, a cultural organization, the cathedral was the scene of at least a dozen fancy weddings. It seemed that there was always a bridal limousine pulling up to the castle, or a glowing young couple posing in the ruined arches near a favorite lunch spot, Agli Angeli Ribelli, where even the simplest bruschetta with arugula, mozzarella and tomatoes was, thanks to the freshness of the ingredients, a feast.
From Piazza Basilica, it’s just a narrow, winding street away to Otranto’s main drag, Corso Garibaldi, which runs parallel to the sea. The street is a perfect example of Otranto’s weird coupling of the antique and the honky-tonk; think Provincetown if it were set in a Crusades-era stone village. The narrow street, which leads down to the tiny park with its carousel, is filled with tourists and lined with shop after shop hawking everything from beach garb to coral jewelry to gelato. Colorful scarves and skirts from India and Indonesia flutter in the breeze. Everywhere there are bars and restaurants specializing in the hearty Pugliese cuisine. And then there’s the harbor, with its cement boardwalk and stone quay, and the beaches. From dawn until past dusk, they are studded with swimmers and sunbathers.
In this part of the world, the ancient is omnipresent. Just outside the centro storico, or old city, about 10 minutes south of Piazza de Gasperi, is Torre Pinta, a bee-hive-shaped stone structure probably used as an ancient temple. A small group of us wandered through a field to enter the place, which contains a chamber that is illuminated by sunset. The cone’s interior is honeycombed with odd, recessed pigeonholes, possibly meant for candles or religious items. It felt eerie even in daylight.
ANOTHER evening we took a field trip to an extraordinarily numinous place, driving through haunted valleys where “the cats are not cats and the dogs are not dogs,” as the founder of the BAU Institute, Paola Iacucci, puts it. Deep in the olive groves near Minervino di Lecce, just about a half-hour’s drive from Otranto, are some of the mysterious stone mounds known as dolmen. These strange, carefully piled rock slabs were the sites of ancient rituals, including sacrifices.
The closest city to Otranto, about 45 minutes away, is Lecce, famed for its over-the-top Baroque architecture. Like Otranto (and for that matter, all of Italy) it shuts down between 1 and 5 in the afternoon, but in the evening the beautiful old city comes to life. The well-lit remains of a Roman amphitheater create a dramatic first impression.
The unique town square, the Piazza del Duomo, is gracefully asymmetrical, with a massive cathedral sandwiched between a five-story bell tower and the bishop’s palace. But it’s the 16th-century Basilica of Santa Croce that is truly jaw-dropping. With its extravagantly ornate facade entirely covered with beautifully carved cherubim and mythical beasts — from mermaids to wolves — it epitomizes the architecture known as Leccese Baroque, the diametric opposite of the dolmen hidden in the olive groves.
It is the dichotomies — the civilized juxtaposed with the pagan, the Eastern sensibility juxtaposed with the Western — that give Apulia its unique and unsettling flavor. In Galatina, for instance, a small inland town about halfway between Otranto and Lecce, there is the 14th-century church of St. Caterina d’Assandria, a Calvin Klein store and on the night of the Feast of SS. Peter and Paul, June 29, the yearly ritual of the Pizzica Taranta.
Gathered in a circle, the men played accordions and slapped tambourines adorned with the image of a tarantula, while the women performed a frenzied dance originally intended to exorcise them of evil caused by the spider bite. The Cajun-sounding music was hypnotic as the dancers stalked each other, spider and prey, dangling weblike red scarves. (Freudians and feminists could have a field day deconstructing the origins of Tarantismo, which evolved as a way for the repressed peasant women to express their subconscious, dancing until they literally fell down in a hysterical trance.)
Otranto feels as though it’s in the middle of nowhere, and to a certain extent it is. But toward the end of my stay, a group of us explored several other Apulian towns: Ostuni, Martina Franca and Alberobello, all within an hour or two to the north. Our first stop was Ostuni, “the white city,” where we arrived at high noon. The stark, whitewashed town shimmered like a mirage in the sun. It was Sunday, and almost everything (including the cathedral) was closed, but we found relief from the heat at a delightful restaurant, Taverna della Gelosia.
About half an hour west of Ostuni is the Itria valley, dotted with the unique huts called trulli. Like mushrooms, they seem to sprout everywhere, with their signature cone-shaped cobbled roofs topped with white orbs. They are as funny as they are magical — one half expects to see hobbits or Snow White’s seven dwarves emerge from the low doorways.
When we returned to Otranto, the World Cup was on, and there was a video screen set up at the base of the park. But as soon as we stepped through the gates of the centro storico, we were once again plunged deep into the distant past.
PHOEBE HOBAN - NYT