Travel: Puglia, Land Between Two Seas

According to Goethe, “The best education for a clever man [or woman] can be found in travel.” I couldn’t agree more. Writing essays that were published in the anthology “Venturing in Italy: Puglia, Land Between Two Seas,” taught me so much about the country’s southern region – its history, culture, music, cuisine and, of course, its people. Halfway through my trip, I was inspired to write a sonnet about how I came to love Italy.

INCANTATO (Enchanted)

By Carol J. Kelly

My maiden voyage to fair Italy

Was a tour of Rome, Florence, and many a quaint city

But, at best, you could call it drive-by reverie

Because each stop was just one night or two – such a pity!

 

I made a vow way back then in 1995,

With a glass of limoncello in hand,

To return for as long as I was alive

And explore, with a pace more slow, this sweet land.

 

As the years fly by, I never tire

Of discovering new places like Siena and Capri,

And when I got a tip about a writing workshop to admire,

I set my sights on a plane ticket to Bari.

 

The sun beats bright and hot upon by trullo,

As thoughts drift back to songs by Al Bano.

 

STONES UNTURNED

PUGLIA, Italy — On a sunny afternoon in Lecce’s Piazzetta Falconieri, I started to warm up to stones. I had already been in Puglia for a few days and admired the centuries-old baroque architecture and decorative stonework in every square and on most streets and alleyways. But stones generally leave me cold, despite their stoic beauty.

As Marilù, my Italian tour guide, proudly pointed out the soft, pinkish, local limestone, I touched a nearby portico and felt the powdery residue on my fingers. And in that moment, something shifted. I got it. Puglia’s easy-to-carve pietra gentila or pietraleccese limestone made possible the region’s elaborately beautiful buildings, especially its cathedrals and basilicas. Lecce was the heart of it all—the very center from which an extravagant style of stonework, known as barocco Leccese, developed between the sixteenth and the early eighteenth century and spread throughout southern Italy, giving Pugliese towns their distinctive look.

This over-the-top architectural style flourished in the seventeenth century Counter-Reformation era when the church was intent on reasserting its power. Stonework was the cornerstone of the church’s campaign to impress and win people back to its pews. Lecce’s lavish Basilica di Santa Croce, commissioned in the middle of the sixteenth century by the rich Order of Celestines, is one of the finest examples of the city’s baroque style. At first glance, I felt overwhelmed by its overly ornate façade and couldn’t figure out the iconography of its three distinct sections. Chrysa, the youngest and sharpest-eyed member of our travel group, helped me to distinguish some richly carved symbolic figures high up above the balcony of the church’s main entrance.

“Cherubs show the happy face of religion,” Marilù said, “and back then, most people couldn’t read, so images were important.” I understood why these lavish friezes and stone carvings inspired awe. And it made sense that the dramatic church and adjoining convent buildings, now the seat of the local government, were “conceived like a theater,” as Marilù said.

From Lecce, the “rock star” of stonework, to the humble, unadorned trulli of Alberobello, stones silently tell the story of Puglia’s past. It’s a tale of serfdom and poverty as well as wealth and power. Italians etch and build their lives in stone. Frederick II, King of Sicily and Holy Roman Emperor, contributed forty stone castles to the region’s landscape—the most impressive being Castel del Monte, built in 1240 on a hilltop in Andria. The Romans used interlocking stones to build Via Appia, the first superhighway and the tactical route to much of Italy’s history. In Oria’s La Basilica Cattedrale, stones wore makeup—stucco walls were painted to look like marble. In Matera, peasants lived inside stone caves, or sassi, for centuries. And limestone grotte (caves) revealed Puglia’s subterranean world, exhibiting natural “rock art,” formed by stalactites and stalagmites. Simple stone fences that looked like strips of ribbon in the fields were a fixture on masserie(farms). Stones were everywhere. The way they were used revealed the infrastructure, culture, economics, art, and history of the south. Stones underpin Puglia’s cultural identity—contributing much more than building blocks for the region’s architectural gems.

I was so used to New York’s clichéd “concrete jungle,” and its own beauty born mostly of man-made materials that, at first, I wasn’t able to fully take in and appreciate the beauty of using local stones to build everything in Puglia—up to the modern era. It was fitting and totally in harmony with nature that the region’s plentiful stones would be integral to its major buildings as well as its humble homes. I started to pay more attention to stonework and masonry as we visited unique towns and stunning piazzas all over the south. You could say I developed a crush on stones.

In Oria, I was fooled. Basilica Cattedrale’s brightly colored rococo interior was impressive, and while I thought I was looking at real marble walls, they were expertly painted stucco. “There are no quarries of colored marble in our region so it was very expensive to import marble from other regions,” said Prof. Pino Malva, the author of tourist guidebook, “I Colori di Oria” (The Colors of Oria), and our host as we toured his vibrant city. “So in order to save money, they thought to decorate the walls in that way.” In an email later, Prof. Malva had more to say about the “fake” marble. “Really because of historical and economic reasons, the cathedral’s walls remained white for much time and the decoration was completed only in 1912, according to the ancient plans. The colored stucco is also called ‘Venetian Stucco’ because in the eighteenth century it was used very much in that wonderful city,” he said.

Sandstone, Prof. Malva added, was used to build the outside of the cathedral while limestone was used only for the decorations of doors, dripstones, and the Corinthian capitals because it was easier to carve. “Sandstone is a typical stone of Salento,” he said, “and much more rugged than limestone.”

There are two kinds of sandstone, Prof. Malva continued: “The first kind, called tufo, tender and white, is used for building the walls of common houses; the second kind, called carparo, hard and colored [yellow or brown] is used for important buildings.” He said carparo changes color according to the position of the sun. “In fact, in the morning it seems to be brown, in the afternoon it seems to be yellow and at the sunset it appears pink-red colored, and this gives to the front wall of the cathedral a particular charm.”

Later that afternoon, Prof. Malva led our travel group up a hill to Oria’s castle, built by Frederick II between 1227 and 1233, mostly using hard, local sandstone that looked yellow in the hot sun. As I walked to the roof and got great views of Oria and surrounding Pugliese towns, I thought: the oldest stones of this castle had weathered almost eight hundred years!

In Alberobello, the home base of our travel group, more than a thousand exquisite cone-roofed trulli told a rags-to-riches tale. Overlapping limestone slabs were literally the roofs over heads of poor farmers and their lifestock; now trulli have become hot property for resort developers and foreign investors. Trulli were built without mortar so, in feudal times, the stones could quickly be disassembled into a pile when the tax collector came.

I had the distinct pleasure of living in a trullo loft apartment on Via Monte Sabotino for almost two weeks. The comfortable, renovated space that I shared with my roommate, Nancy, stayed nice and cool even when temperatures soared above ninety degrees Fahrenheit. The high ceiling gave our apartment an airy feel, despite the small, narrow windows, while its thick limestone walls and stacked-stone roof functioned like ancient air-conditioning. When I wanted to feel soleone (lion sun, or the hottest sun of the summer) and catch a lovely breeze, I sat on the limestone steps in front of our trullo and watched locals and tourists walk by.

The simple, unfussy design of trulli—many dating back to the fifteenth century— contrasted starkly with Lecce’s baroque architecture. But the stones used to build them served their purpose: varying degrees of form and function. For me, Alberobello’s modern trullo church, Chiesa Sant’Antonio (completed in 1927), with its gigantic, central, cone-shaped dome, or cupula, was more approachable than Basilica Cattedrale. I enjoyed a quiet moment in the updated trullo church, appreciating its stone interior.

Matera was magical. Standing at the top of a hill looking down at the sprawling cave city set at the rim of a deep ravine, I could imagine what it would be like to wake up in the eighth century—stoned! The ravine gave me a glimpse of the dry, rocky limestone in the Murgia bedrock, the geological foundation of the region. Its fertile limestone plateau between the Adriatic and Ionian coasts has been cultivated by generations of farmers, starting with the Messapians. People have lived in these cave dwellings, or sassi, for two millennia—since the Palaeolithic Age.

Along with my travel companions, I visited Casa Grotta, a typical sasso in vico Solitario, and was amazed that ancient peasants shared their tiny caves with livestock. Chickens lived under the very high bed and the back of the cave had a “stable” for the family’s horse, and even sheep and pigs. The tufa interior was white-washed—I had a feeling this had to be done often.

That Matera’s sassi and Alberobello’s trulli have been designated UNESCO World Heritage Sites highlights the importance of the south’s stone dwellings not only to Italian culture but to world culture. These stones preserve valuable history for future generations everywhere. And Italy has more World Heritage Sites than any other country in Europe.

In the town of Castro on the Adriatic coast, I saw different types of limestone caves on a trip to the prehistoric Grotta Zinzulusa. It was on a hot, sunny day but the caves were chilly, damp, and uncomfortable. The thin stalactites had an eerie quality to them and I was bored while our group waited in an endless queue to enter the cave. It was worth the wait. I got a better sense of the importance of Italy’s longest, natural subterranean network, Puglia’s rocky coastline, its limestone plateau, prehistoric seacaves, and the unique ecosystem that has nurtured a highly diverse mix of plants and animals, including unique sponges. As well, the cave is home to fossil remains of birds, bovines, felines, deer, horses, rhinoceroses, elephants, bears, hippopotamuses, and Neolithic and Eneolithic earthenware. Fossils etch history in stone.

On my last evening in Italy, I was strolling the narrow stone streets of Bari’s old town (summer passeggiata, or evening stroll, was easy to adopt) when I came upon a roped-off, carefully preserved, old section of Roman road in Piazza del Ferrarese. I observed two levels—on top were large, squared paving stones in a fairly regular arrangement, all similar in size and shape, while below were smaller slabs of random shapes, laid irregularly. The Romans used volcanic ash to cement the stones. Porta Nuova (New Port), as it was labeled, seemed like a side view or an “MRI cross-section” of a sophisticated highway-construction technique used to build Via Appia connecting Rome to Brindisi—a project that was begun in 312 B.C.E. When completed, the Appian Way covered about three hundred and sixty miles.

It was the first superhighway. Via Appia’s tactical and strategic importance to the Romans cannot be overstated. Their army used it as the main route for military supplies as it prepared for battle. Bases along the highway allowed the Romans to keep troops in the field waiting to strike. Via Appia also was an information superhighway, bringing new ideas and cultural trends north to the south. As well, it was the gateway to the east, to Greece and Greek culture.

In Egnazia, at the Magna Graecia ruins, were remnants of the Appian Way. I glimpsed the magnificence of the fourth-century B.C.E. “Queen Road” and saw features like its convex shape that allowed good drainage. An example of another feature, the stone monuments or standing columns along Via Appia’s route, was an impressive sight near the ruins of an amphitheater in Lecce’s Piazza Sant’Oronzo.

At sunset, as I came to terms with the waning moments of my trip, I sat on the stone steps of Cattedrale San Sabino in Bari’s old city watching families and groups of friends walk about the piazza. The steps were warm, holding the heat of the day’s sun. I glanced wistfully at the cathedral’s stone façade, which had recently been cleaned and looked creamy and pure in the sun’s yellow-orange glow. In the distance, mostly hidden by the buildings in the piazza, Castello Svevo’s thick, sandstone looked yellow in the dimming light. The slightly decrepit castle was first a Roman fort, then was incorporated by the Byzantines in the eleventh century before the Normans had their turn. The sprawling castle suited its ordinary coastal setting in Bari; it couldn’t compete with the imposing, octagonal Castel del Monte (also called the Crown of Stone) or with Puglia’s many other impressive castles. My trip to Puglia ended where it began—in Bari, the region’s bustling capital.

I started to think of stones as a gift from nature to Puglia’s artists and architects. Of course, it was a much more generous gift as these stones have graced world history and culture. I was stuck on stones. Perhaps Frederick II was on to something—he knew imperial stone castles would be his timeless legacy.

 

ON THE ROAD, WITHOUT THE BAND

Violenza, crimini e povertà

Fannu parte te la quotidianità

Mentre ci allu governu te sta società

Face te tuttu cu ne scunne la realtà

Violence, crime and poverty

Are part of our daily lives

While the government of this society

Hides this reality from us

 

“Violenza, Crimini e Povertà” (Violence, Crime and Poverty)

by Sud Sound System

PUGLIA, Italy — Of all the places to find a local reggae band, Salento in Italy’s southern region of Puglia seemed unlikely. Sud Sound System’s rich rhythms, heavy on bass and percussion, reminded me of the music I grew up listening to—and, of course, dancing to—in Jamaica. Though I knew some Italian, I couldn’t, at first, understand their songs because the lyrics were in Salento dialect.

Sud Sound System’s energetic music recalled the lively, fast-paced style of dancehall, a subgenre of reggae that was popular in the 1980s, and popularized by singers like Shinehead, Ninja Man, and Beenie Man. It also brought me way, way back to bands like Toots and the Maytals, Bob Marley and the Wailers, and to singers like John Holt, Gregory Isaacs and U-Roy who were among my favorites when I was hanging out with school friends in Kingston. Reggae and even its precursors—ska and rock steady—are ingrained in my sense memory.

Back then, the music was a constant soundtrack to my daily life. Even today, all over the island in towns like Portmore, where I visit my aunt on frequent trips from New York, loudspeakers still blast reggae every night into the wee hours.

I first stumbled on Sud Sound System in an Italian guidebook while preparing for a writing workshop in Puglia, the “heel” of Italy’s “boot.” The whole notion of a big southern reggae scene and a band from Salento was intriguing. Why here, I wondered. As well, I was fascinated by Sud Sound System’s highly political message along with their stubborn decision to sing in local dialect, which could be lost in translation even for native Italians from other regions. Similarly, most Jamaican reggae groups sing in patois, the vocabulary of the island’s poor, from whom this style of socially conscious music emerged in the late 1960s.

Band leader Nandu Popu told the guidebook’s authors about the influence of his local language: “The dialect is an antidote. It’s the antidote to the sickness of our society caused by stress, ambition and superficiality, and the idea that anything is acceptable in the name of money.” He said southern dialect captures “the rhythm of nature,” the sea and the land. The singer cited the link between reggae and the desire to express the aspirations of people “forgotten and exploited by progress.”

What was it about the Italian south and Jamaica? Perhaps history had acted on people and cultures over 5,000 miles apart in very similar ways, enabling this dance to the same rhythm. Italy’s south suffered the kind of economic hardship common to so-called Third World countries like Jamaica. Puglia’s struggles with underdevelopment, high unemployment, emigration, crime, and the Mafia’s chokehold were topics addressed by Sud Sound System. And Reggae has long been critical of social injustice and a system of government that saps poor people. What else did Italy’s rural south and Jamaica have in common, I wondered. Why was Salento called “la Jamaica Italiana” (the Italian Jamaica)? Perhaps reggae resonated with people who felt alienated, beaten down, and left behind. Perhaps the connection was more mysterious. Still, I set out to explore the path that led to musical kinship, and to understand—at least in part—why the vast farmlands of Puglia provided fertile soil for reggae to flourish.

There’s a saying that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. It’s no surprise that official Italian is the Tuscan dialect of the rich and powerful north. The dialects of Puglia, made up of Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Spanish words, tell the story of the south in words its occupiers left behind. These words echo the region’s bitter history of invasions, starting from the eighth century B.C.E. when the Greeks founded a string of settlements along the Ionian coast.

Jamaica had its own share of occupiers, starting with the Spanish in 1494, to English colonial rule that began in 1655. The bitter history of slavery left its economic and cultural imprint. And patois, a blend of English and African words not spoken at the dinner table when I was a child, is widely used by reggae artists.

As I listened to Sud Sound System’s music on YouTube and got help translating their lyrics, I found another theme the band shared with or borrowed from Jamaican reggae groups—the importance of staying true to cultural roots. In fact, “roots reggae” is a subgenre that honors African culture and the Rastafari movement—the spiritual underpinnings of many popular Jamaican musicians.

Se nu te scierri mai delle radici ca tieni

Rispetti puru quiddre delli paisi lotanti!

Se nu e scierri mai de du ede ca ieni

Dai chiu valore alla cultura ca tieni!

If you don’t forget your roots

You respect the ones of countries far from yours!

If you don’t forget your roots

You value your culture more!

“La Radici Ca Tieni” (The Roots That You Have)

by Sud Sound System

Two weeks after discovering the band, I was in Puglia’s gritty capital of Bari enjoying a summerpasseggiata (evening stroll) on the narrow, labyrinthine alleyways of the old city that dated back three thousand, five hundred years. Young people, families with children, and couples were walking about, stopping in cafes and gelaterie (ice cream parlors). Old women sat in doorways, reminding me of the elderly ladies who would sit on verandas in rural villages of Jamaica. I was careful as I walked around because I had been warned that like Kingston, Jamaica’s capital, Bari had a reputation for crime. The old city’s vibrant street life, with its fish and vegetable stands and people socializing outdoors, stirred childhood memories. The next morning, I felt a gentle breeze as I walked along the coast in the hot sun and came upon a group of local fishermen with low-tech boats and equipment—not unlike a scene from any Caribbean coastal community. The sea, the sun, the land, and the laid-back lifestyle all resonated with me.

Weeks earlier, on the band’s Web site, I was thrilled to find out that one of their concert dates was June 18 in Bari during the first week of my trip. I wasn’t sure exactly how close Puglia’s capital was to Alberobello, the small trulli town where our travel group would be staying, but I was sure of one thing: I would find a way to go.

Two days before the concert, we visited the band’s beautiful hometown of Lecce, called the Florence of the south because of its unique baroque style of architecture. There, I had one of those so-near-yet-so-far experiences. My only contact with the band was Francesca, the girlfriend of Andrea Moretti, a travel adviser I met at the Italian Tourist Office in Manhattan. It was una fortunata coincidenza, (a lucky coincidence) that she also lived in Lecce and knew someone who knew someone in the band. With our local guide, Marilú, as interpreter, Francesca encouraged me to contact her friend Marinazzo, who later gave me a number for the band’s studio.

On the morning of the concert, I felt light and excited. As I boarded our tour bus, Marilú said there might be a snag. My heart plummeted. I trusted Marilú, a thoughtful, pretty, and highly professional young woman from Bari; I expected her to have good hometown sources.

This being Italy, the concert was canceled, with no explanation. And after weeks of anticipation, I was crushed.

Meanwhile, I kept calling the band’s studio (no answer), surfing the Internet for their songs, and talking to Alberobello locals about reggae. I also started searching for someone to translate Salento dialect, which turned out to be a tall order.

On my last day in Italy—a few hours before heading for the airport—I went into Centro Musica, a record store on Bari’s bustling Corso Vittorio Emanuele. There, I bought “Dammene Ancora” (“Give Me More”), which is Sud Sound System’s latest CD. Store owner Vito Causarano said Sud Sound System was the most popular local reggae band, but there were others. In an email a few weeks later, Vito wrote, in Italian, thatreggae was very widespread in the 1970s, thanks to artists of the calibre of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Dennis Brown. “Southern Italy has taken in many of these sounds, making them their own,” he continued, adding that the rhythm in southern folk music like pizzica or taranta are close enough to the rhythmic cadences of reggae. Vito attributed Sud Sound System’s success to “the freshness of their sounds and to the lyrics that are very tied to social realities,” He cited Nidi d’Arac, Mascarimiri, Radicanto, and Etnoritmo as popular bands that sing mainly traditional music. Besides Sud Sound System, other regional reggae bands of note included Treble, Marina & Papa Leu, Boom da bash, and Rankin Lele.

Mafia bussiness controlla l’Italia

Mafia bussiness controlla la miseria

 Mafia business controls Italy

Mafia business controls misery

—“T’a Sciuta Bona” (You Got Away With It)

by Sud Sound System

My quest for a translator revealed some quirks Italians and Jamaicans have in common. A wonderful travel manager at our trulli resort promised to put me in touch with a colleague who spoke Salento dialect. I emailed her several times and called her office from Brooklyn, but she never got back to me. Like Italians, Jamaicans are rarely tentative when asked a favor. You usually get an breezy “yeah, man,” then there’s no follow-through. And Jamaicans, like Italians, are always late, never rushed, and possess a mellow, “no problem” approach to life.

A month after my trip to Puglia, I was finally on the phone with Sud Sound System’s band leader. One of Francesca’s friends, Dario Quarta, a journalist for a magazine called quiSalento, knew Nandu personally.

“It was an instinctive choice,” said Nandu, when I asked why his band sang in dialect. He was animated and passionate as he continued in Italian. “From way back in our school days,” said Nandu, the band members were proud of their identity and of Salento dialect and culture. The group of three on-stage members has been together since 1987, and their first recording was in 1991. “Dammene Ancora” was the band’s twelfth CD. Nandu said they chose reggae because of the south’s “similarities with Jamaica and Africa.” Southern Italy is geographically close to Africa, added Nandu, “and Puglia has more in common with Tunisia and Morocco than with northern Europe.”

Nandu said his music was heavily influenced by mento, an outdated, fast-paced style of Jamaican folk music considered the grandfather of reggae. Though the band had never been to Jamaica, Nandu “woud love to collaborate with Jamaican artists.” He hoped “to bring Sud Sound System’s music throughout the world, and to try different styles of reggae.”

I asked Nandu why the concert in Bari was canceled. His only response was, “I don’t know. It wasn’t our fault.” Later, in an email, he said: “The organizers decided to change the date and location but didn’t inform our agency,” adding, “This is the Italian fucking way!” Then he invited me to Salento for the August festa (festival).

What Nandu said about Italy’s proximity to Africa got me thinking about race in reference to Italians and a recent Wall Street Journal article on the definition of whiteness, by June Kronholz: “Whiteness and the privileges that came with it were so closely guarded that in 1912, a House committee held hearings on whether Italians were really Caucasian,” said Thomas Guglielmo, a historian at George Washington University. The idea was picked up from Italy, where northern, lighter-skinned Italians were asking the same questions about the southern, darker-skinned Italians, continued the article.

To be sure, this idea has long been debunked, but I wondered if an old perception of southerners factored into reggae’s popularity in the region. Musical influences often cross borders, building bridges across language. I felt proud that in less than forty years, an original music genre whose birth I witnessed had been adopted all over the world. The rhythms of a small island in the Caribbean Sea echoed in a region washed by the Ionian and Adriatic seas.

Though I didn’t get to see or hear the band, I heard and felt the pulse of the south as I traveled throughout Salento—to such towns as Brindisi, Oria, Ostuni, Grottaglie and Martina Franca. I explored Sud Sound System’s cultural roots. As well, I deepened my appreciation of reggae and my own Jamaican heritage as I replayed the songs of my youth. Music, like travel, reveals how strikingly similar we all are.

—All lyrics are in Salento dialect.

 Please visit Sud Sound System’s website: www.sudsoundsystem.eu