At Foggia the line of railway which crosses the Italian peninsula
from Naples eastward joins the great European line which for the most
part skirts the Western Hadriatic shore. From Rome itself the _iter
ad Brundisium_ is still made by way of Beneventum; for the great mass
of mankind Bologna has in this matter supplanted Beneventum and Rome
too. Our eastward course across the peninsula has done for us much the
same as would be done by the like course across our own island. We have
undergone the same change as if we had passed from Wales, Devonshire,
or Cumberland, to Lincolnshire or East-Anglia. We need no longer
look out for hill-cities, where the first element in such cities, the
hills themselves, is not to be found. At Foggia we have not even the
amount of hill which we have at Benevento. We are in the great Apulian
plain, the plain so precious for sheep-feeding, and the occupation of
which has more than once given rise to wars and treaties. Of Foggia
itself many perhaps have never heard except as a railway junction.
Yet Foggia has a history, and its history has monuments, though we
can hardly put them on a level with the monuments and the history of
Beneventum. The capital of Apulia, the representative of ancient Arpi,
has a history in some respects the same as that of Beneventum, in some
other respects its opposite. Both cities claimed Diomêdês as a founder,
while Frederick the Second, a destroyer at Benevento, appears as a
later founder at Foggia. One arch of his palace still remains, with an
inscription telling us how under him Foggia became a royal and Imperial
seat. There died his English Empress Isabel, on the splendour of whose
passage on her way to her marriage our own historians are eloquent.
Further than this, the monumental attractions of Foggia hardly go
beyond what is left of its chief church. Of its front Gsell-fels, gives
a somewhat ideal engraving, showing it, not as it is, but as it was
before earthquakes and restorers after earthquakes had combined to mar
it. It was--indeed, with all mutilations, it still is--a fine front
of the later Italian Romanesque, with one of the rose or wheel windows
which we must now look for wherever we go. More attractive perhaps is
the crypt, with its four columns and capitals of singular beauty. They
surely belong to the time of the Imperial patron of Foggia, marking as
they do a kind of earlier and more healthy _Renaissance_, which, taking
classical form as its general models, took them only as general models,
and did not deem itself bound slavishly to copy every turn of a leaf
or every section of a moulding. Such works of the carver's tool are
akin to those noble coins of Frederick which seem ages in advance of
anything that bore the image and superscription of his grandfather.
Foggia is however less likely to strike the traveller--at least
the traveller who comes from the hill-towns by way of Capua and
Benevento--by any remarkable store of ancient monuments, than as
being the first to which he will come of a series of cities, most of
which at once impress the visitor by their air of modern progress and
prosperity. The heel of Italy, in its cities at least, certainly seems
to be the very opposite to a decaying region, or even to a region which
stands still. To be sure, the city whose name is the most familiar
of all is something of an exception; Brindisi, notwithstanding its
dealings with the whole world, is not as Bari or even as Trani. But
most of the towns at which we tarry, or which we pass by, give quite a
different impression. We cannot tarry at all. At Barletta we get only
a glimpse of the Imperial colossus, and therefore we do not venture
to hazard a guess whether it is Heraclius or any later prince whom it
represents. Along this coast, any Cæsar of the East is in his place,
if only as a memorial of the long, though half forgotten, time when
Southern Italy bowed to the New Rome and not to the Old. But we do
not let these earlier memories wholly shut out the thought of the
later combat when the Horatii and Curiatii of legend found themselves
multiplied by a process exactly opposite to decimation. The attractions
of Trani are irresistible; a bell-tower rising as proudly over the
waves as that of Spalato itself would force us to halt even if we knew
nothing before of what church and city has to show us. The metropolitan
church of Trani is certainly one of the very noblest examples of that
singular mixture of Norman and more strictly Italian forms--not without
a touch both of the Greek and the Saracen--which is the characteristic
style of this region, the natural result of its political history.
Strange, but striking in the extreme, is the effect of the east end
of this church rising close above the sea; far more truly admirable
is the effect of the inside, where the coupled columns of the Saracen
have been boldly taught to act as the piers of the great arcades,
and to bear up above them a massive triforium, which by itself would
make us think ourselves in Normandy or England. All the churches of
this district have a good deal of their strength underground, and the
under-church of Trani is worthy of the building which it supports.
The smaller church, All Saints', a charming little basilica with a
portico of singular grace, as also several good pieces of domestic
architecture, and the general effect of the tower skirted with its
dark arcades, all join to make Trani a place which cannot be passed
by, though no august form calls on us, as at Barletta, to tarry to
pay Cæsar his due homage. But Trani has found something to be said for
itself both by pen and by pencil in quite other company. An accident of
later times gave it a right to rank, like Brindisi itself, among the
Subject and Neighbour Lands of Venice. And Trani has peculiarities of
its own. The main features of the style may be studied elsewhere. We
long to see Barletta, to tarry to pay Cæsar his due. We long to stop at
Bisceglia and Molfetta, of which we read attractive notices; but again
we must pick and choose, and Bitonto is the only place on which we can
qualify ourselves to speak at all at large, till we come to the head of
the whole region at Bari.
Bitonto shares a station with San Spirito, but it lies further away
from the railway, and that on the inland side, than most of the towns
along this line. Its main interest is found in its cathedral church,
which in some points prepares us for the buildings of Bari. First
of all in point of wonder, though latest in point of date, is the
treatment which it has undergone at the hands of modern improvers.
A dim remembrance comes to us that we saw something of the same kind
in the Dominican church at Perugia; otherwise we ask in amazement why
any man should think it an improvement to cut off the whole upper part
of a church as seen inside by thrusting in a roof a great deal lower
than the original one, and thereby leaving the upper stages outside
to stand up in the air, serving no kind of purpose. Yet this has been
done both at Bitonto and at Bari. Yet perchance the improvers of modern
times might retort on the original architects, and ask why, when they
had made three apses at the east end, they presently built up a wall
to hide them. This is the arrangement both at Bitonto and in the two
great churches of Bari. The notion of Normans working in Italy would
almost seem to have been to make an Italian front at one end, and
something approaching to a Norman front at the other end. Thus the
church of Bitonto has an excellent west front of Italian outline, with
details more Italian than Norman, and with the characteristic round
window evidently designed from the beginning, though the one which is
actually there must be of later date. Also there either has been or has
been meant to be a portico over the lower stage of the west front, a
thoroughly Italian notion. But the east end takes almost the form of
a Norman west front; a Norman founder, it would seem, was not happy
unless he could somewhere or other get two towers with an ornamental
wall between them. To this end the apses are sacrificed. Instead of
the three curved projections which form the main features of so many
Italian, German, and indeed Norman, east ends, the whole east end is
flat. The side apses are disguised by towers, one only of which is
carried up to any height, while the great apse is hidden by the wall
between the towers. Herein is the difference between Bitonto and Trani.
At Trani there are no eastern towers, and the apses, though of amazing
external height and no less amazing slightness of projection, are still
real apses with a real curve. At Bitonto no one could know from the
outside that there were any apses at all. As the ordinary ranges of
arcades and windows are thus made impossible, the architect, like an
English architect some generations later, threw his strength into a
single east window, and certainly made one as large and as rich as was
possible before the invention of tracery. An elaborate round-headed
opening is covered with rich devices, and has wonderful monsters to
bear up its side-shafts. This too is to be seen at Trani, and we shall
come again to other examples at Bari. There is something very strange
in these attempts to reconcile the ideas of Normandy and of Italy in
one building. But in these flat east ends the result is that we get
something which is certainly neither Italian nor Norman, and which can
hardly be approved according to any law of either reality or beauty.
The same spirit of compromise goes on in other parts. The endless
columns of the under-church supply a rich study of capitals, largely of
the grotesque kind. Men, monkeys, the original ram's horn, leaves, the
Imperial eagle--better suited for the purpose than anything else--all
do duty as volutes. The columns in the upper-church too give another
rich collection of various kinds of human, animal, and vegetable forms.
But here a soberer spirit reigns; though perhaps no one capital is
strictly classical, yet the grotesque does not reign as it does below.
Three arches from columns, a solid block, three more arches from
columns, make up the nave. Over these Italian elements Norman taste
set a triforium; modern taste has hidden the clerestory. Outside, the
Italian has his way in the rich open arcades of the parapets and in
the windows of various forms, filled, some of them, with that kind of
pierced tracery which is neither Italian nor Norman, but distinctively
Oriental, and which look as if they had come--as they possibly may have
come--from a mosque.
Altogether there is something singularly interesting in this mixture of
styles--more strictly this mixture of two varieties of the same style,
for Italian and Norman Romanesque are after all members of one great
artistic family. Nothing of the kind happened in Sicily, where the
Norman kings simply set native craftsmen, Greek and Saracen, to build
for them after their several native fashions. Here, in a land where
Greek and Latin elements were striving for mastery, where the Saracen
was a mere occasional visitor, the Norman brought in the ideas of his
own land to make a new element. But, if nothing like this happened in
Sicily, something a little like it did happen in England. There is no
doubt that Norman architecture was influenced, though very slightly,
by the earlier native style of England, a rude imitation of Italian
models. That Norman architecture in Apulia should be far more deeply
influenced by the Italian models themselves was but carrying out the
same general process, as was only natural, in a far greater degree.