ANNO DOMINI MCMXL/ XVIII AB ITALIA PER FASCES
RENOVATA/ VICTORIO EMMANUELE REGE ET
IMPERATORE/ BENITO MUSSOLINI DVCE/ PROVINCIA
F. F. (Feliciter Fecit)
In the year of Our Lord 1940, eighteen years after the revival of Italy by Fascism under Victor Emmanuel III, King and Emperor, and Benito Mussolini, Duce; gladly donated by the Province.
BUT NOTHING IN THE warm air of Brindisi felt dangerous that evening. Finding a table just off the pavement and with a small band tuning up, I sat and ordered a beer. It is always fascinating to watch a crowd gather. A couple in their twenties sits at the table to my left; they seem morose, not unhappy with each other, just bored. Then two others join them and the conversation raises smiles. Then four more. Another table has to be brought. Someone is taking photos. They order pizzas. Now the original two are chattering away, to each other, too, glowing with happiness. I’ve noticed again and again in Italy how often couples are dependent on groups, presumably the groups they met in. No doubt this is related to that strong Italian attachment to the home town, an emotional dependency and richness that lies behind endless weekend train journeys. The couple find themselves among their old friends in the familiar piazza, and they are happy.
The band so far is just a couple of guys in their late forties, riffing jazz on keyboards and guitar, warming up, but then they’re joined by a young woman, energetically overweight, who starts to make some serious soul sounds into the mic. Things are beginning to look promising. I order another beer.
I had begun to notice a typical face in the south, a woman’s face, and sure enough, sitting at the table between me and the band, here was another example. The nose is the dominant feature, long, thrust forward, slim, very slightly hooked. The eyes are large and very carefully defined with make-up, the eyebrows plucked in high arches. The forehead slopes back at quite a marked angle, accentuating the nose, and the thick raven hair, which is firmly gathered and swept back, is held tense and tight by a headband and three long wooden skewers, poking up and out at spiky angles. The neck is tall, the lips shapely, very slightly puckered, the teeth large, protruding a little, all adding to that feeling of forward thrust and intensity. Slim, small-breasted, these women are not beautiful. They are designs on terracotta. Or, no, I’m wrong, they are fantastically beautiful. Are they? I’m not sure. It’s a type. They seem to have a wisdom about their bodies, their manners, their sly, ancient smiles. That’s what draws the eye. Anyway, the band has begun to play, a soulful jazz in the summer twilight; between the songs loud June bugs fill the silence; the drone of their noisy wings swells and fades, swells and fades beneath the chatter of forty or fifty local people enjoying an evening out in town. All this just five minutes’ walk from the station in the port of Brindisi, whence the following morning the next and last stop would be Lecce, the so-called Florence of the South.
Chapter 7
LECCE–OTRANTO
OUTSIDE THE STATION at Lecce I saw these words printed on a sheet of A4 and taped, together with a phone number, on a bin: TAXI DA LECCE PER OTRANTO, €60. A shame, I thought, that there was no train to take me onward all the way to Otranto, or even Gallipoli, to the very end of the land, the tip of Italy’s stiletto heel. I had checked the FS train map, but there was nothing on offer for the forty miles south of Lecce. It was sad – I would have liked to see Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto; it had always seemed odd to me that the English Gothic novel, which one always associates with decaying battlements deep in gloomy forests and ghosts that appear between sheets of rain, should have begun on the sunbaked shores of Puglia, where surely castles would not look anything like the places we visited as children. I also remembered, from my work on the Medicis in the fifteenth century, that Otranto had been the object of one of the most devastating Turkish incursions into Italian territory, one that threatened to be a bridgehead to an attack on the centre of Christendom: in August 1480 the Turks took the town, killing twelve thousand people and shipping ten thousand more back to Turkey for a life of slavery. It was one of those moments when the direction of history hangs in the balance. For Lorenzo de’ Medici, however, the threat turned out to be a godsend; his Florentine armies were being hard pressed at the time by papal troops; but now the Pope took fright, made his peace with Lorenzo, and drew Florence into a defensive pact with himself and the Kingdom of Naples. It was the kings of Naples, then in possession of Puglia, who would reinforce the castle over the coming centuries, transforming it into an impregnable bastion against the Turks. No sooner, then, did I see the name Otranto on the notice taped to the rubbish bin soliciting taxi fares than I was yearning to go there. Except that Otranto was not on the train network. Let it go, I thought. If one wants to see everything historically important in Italy one will never get home at all.
And, of course, there was Lecce. My Regionale from Brindisi arrived in just thirty minutes, passing fields of solar panels on the way. Lecce is about seven miles from the Adriatic coast to the east and fifteen from the Ionian to the west, on the relatively flat, unspectacular plain of Italy’s narrow heel. So there are none of the dramatic hills here
