Each year the Mellon Professor organizes the annual Fellow’s Spring Trip to points away from Rome. This year the Trip’s aim was a deeper understanding of lesser-known parts of Italy and an appreciation of how culture and heritage fit – and clash – in a modern Italy. We thus set out to follow the length of the tratturi – the paths along which great droves of sheep began in the Abruzzo Mountains and ended in Puglia. From the 15th through the 19th centuries and perhaps even in the Roman period, these annual taxed migrations of sheep from mountain pasture to the Tavoliere shaped the spine of Italy. But where once flocked Renaissance families, Neapolitan nobility, armies, and artists are now among the poorest areas of the peninsula and the question of how to manage –and profit – from this past is an urgent one. Tourism, clean energy, and slow food are all being tried, each bringing possibilities and challenges. It was thus in search of slice through Italy – its history as well as its present – that we set off on March 17, starting near L’Aquila and ending in Otranto.
We had a stunning beginning, climbing to the top of Rocca Calascio, sat atop an abandoned village. The mountain/plains dichotomy, the views of the tratturi, and its aftermath - emigration and demographic collapse - all set the scene for a night in Santo Stefano in Sessania, a village "rescued" by an entrepreneur as an albergo disperso, or dispersed hotel, using the houses of the village as upscale “peasant” accommodation. A vigorous debate about the invention of the Italian "peasant" and authenticity of the past ensued over a massive Abruzzo feast in a previous stable.
A rainy second day was equally interesting with a visit Alba Fucens, where the problems of Roman urban archaeology overlapped with the tragedy of the 1915 earthquake that destroyed the meager remains of the town. A wonderful lunch-time discussion about Ignazio Silone and the characterization of Abruzzi peasantry had a coda in Sulmona, a center of early 20th century labor organizing and anarchy. A beautiful 15th century hospital in Sulmona likewise seemed to crystalize a continuing conversation about "extra-regionalism" in the Abruzzo, where places seem perpetually to look outside their seemingly closed worlds to worlds distant - in this case to Jerusalem, home of the Hospitalers who founded the hospital, or to Naples from which so much of its sculptural vocabulary came. Overshadowing the town, too, was Ovid, born here and alternately - and strangely - a symbol of Christian learnedness, and later exile and social dissent.
Passing into the green richness of Puglia through the snowy passes was to experience first hand the climatic difference of mountain and plain that lay at the root of the tratturi. Today instead of sheep, it is agro-industry that dominates the plains of the Tavoliere. Even more obvious – and controversial – are the great wind farms that have made Puglia a top supplier of clean energy in Italy. We had many debates about the pros and cons of these huge windmills who now dominate the landscape; good investments, wreckers of natural heritage, tributes to the great Roman traditions of massive building – we couldn’t agree any more than does the Italian public.
Our first stop in the Tavoliere was the small town of Canosa di Puglia, a deceptively sleepy place that yet again reminded us that what is today a backwater was once the center of a world. In this case, that world was the later Roman empire. When Rome was gently crumbling, northern Puglia was thriving. We visited some of the extraordinary late antique sites excavated by the University of Foggia – the huge churches of San Leucio, San Giovanni Battista and San Sabino – all projects of the great 5th c. A.D. bishop-builder Sabinus. These are churches whose scale and architectural sophistication point to Constantinople, where Sabinus was often ambassador – a richness only recently understood through some great modern archaeology. Equally great was the management model of these sites: ring a cell phone number listed on the gates and two local archaeologists arrive in less than five minutes to open the doors and give you a lively tour. By forming collaborations with property owners and business owners, this local archaeological foundation makes its amazing sites accessible on a shoestring budget – a task the state-run Soprintendenza struggles with.
Exiting the tratturi region for points south, we headed westwards to the center of modern Italy’s image of the peasant – the cave-village of Matera. Immortalized as a center of poverty and despair by Carlo Levi and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Matera was another place to renew a discussion about the images of rural life, in this case, the response of post-war governments to these peasants with modern housing projects and the abandonment of ancient centers like Matera’s sassi.
Our trip ended on a rainy day in Otranto, where we were reminded yet again of the ways in which this southern-most part of Italy once inhabited a very different world. The church of Saint Peter there is a perfect little Byzantine building that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Greece or Turkey, while the Norman-period Cathedral with its extraordinary mosaic floor was crafted by eastern monks of imagery drawn from Islamic silks, English legends and illustrated Byzantine romances. But it was the 8000 skulls of Otranto’s inhabitants, martyred under the Ottoman occupation and kept in open cabinets in the Cathedral’s chapel, that really reminded us of how far we had come. Here the Ottoman Empire was more present than was Rome and the East – crusaders, Byzantines and eastern adventurers – seemingly just over the horizon. Now a tourist town more focused on its summer music festivals and beach culture than its international past, Otranto encapsulated one of the themes of the trip – varied, cosmopolitan pasts and an uncertain place for that culture in the modern present.