Logo
Prev
Bookmark
Rotate
Print
Next
Contents
All Pages
Related Articles
Browse Issues
Help
Search
Home
'
National Geographic : 1981 Jun
Contents
as Santa Claus, known here as San Nicola, a posthumously transplanted Puglian who, when not working, rests in his lonely crypt in Bari, right on the Adriatic and the Traiana. Ah yes, the Appia Traiana, our home ward route, and now time to go. I can't say much about St. Nick's Bari, Roman Bari um, of which almost nothing remains. But we seemed to remain eternally in the worst traffic jams of our trip (a superlative I do not bestow lightly). Modern Bari has 400,000 people and exactly 800,001 cars. It took us all that day to count them, but we did. I had wondered how Italians, in view of their tottering economy, could afford so many cars and keep them running, with gas at more than three dollars a gallon. Pirro had explained: Many Italians have one known job, on which they cannot duck taxes; but then, what with the short working hours en forced by powerful labor unions, they also have a secret, moonlighting job, on which they report no taxes. If Bari was lacking in antiquarian charm, Egnazia, just a few miles south of it, smack on the Adriatic, was not. Its class MLR, "moody little ruins," emanate that melan cholic charm characteristic of resort towns that have gone to seed. There is a forum, fishponds in the sea, and Trajan's Appia, with ruts cut into its polygons by Romans' iron-rimmed wheels. I have disputed with other Appian scholars whether Romans drove to the right or left. Egnazia's ruts clinched it for me. Romans drove down the middle, just like Italians today. Horace stopped there and criticized it as "a town clearly built when the freshwater nymphs were at odds with the natives." He was much put out that he had to buy water in this region. But the natives here were merely ahead of their time. Today water is sold in every restaurant, acqua minerale, auto matically placed on the table at 75 cents a li ter. Waiters panic if you ask for acqua dolce (plain water). HORACE WROTE of Canusium, a main Traiana station north of Bari, that it "had bread made of gravel." I thought it was marshmallow. The bread of Puglia resembles plastic-wrapped French bread consumed with the wrapper on- totally unlike the wonderful crunchy bread we savored on the Tyrrhenian coast. Authors Hamblin and Grunsfeld warned in their book that "Canosa can be a very frustrating city," and indeed it can. We wanted to see "the magnificent bronze doors" of the Tomb of Bohemund, a 12th century Norman crusader. The tomb is at tached to Canosa's principal church, where a priest with a ten o'clock shadow was stand ing in the doorway. He had the doors nine tenths shut-it was 11:50, and he closed at noon. I asked him where Bohemund's doors were, and he directed us way around the church. There a dignified Italian matron, seeing our worry, said the doors were in the church, and walked us back. The padre looked at his watch and "chiusoed!" us. Upon which our matron lost her dignity and called him "cattivo!"several times. Loudly. Cattivo, I found later, means "wretch! vil lain!" Thank you, ma'am. Ten miles east of Canosa, off the Appia, lies hilltop Cannae, which I rate NULR, "nice unassorted little ruins," because Ro man and medieval are all mixed up in them. Just below, on the Ofanto River, in 216 B.C., Hannibal handed the Romans one of their worst beatings in five centuries. Herdoniae, modern Ordona, sits in a farmer's fields, is almost unreachable, and so is shockingly clean. A BLUR, "big little unified ruin": a grand temple sketched in pillarless bases and capitals, a bit of Appia snuggled under the boiler of a bath. But what really haunted us was the line of shops, each with a stone groove in front, ready, as in Italy today, to receive the shutter at clos ing time. Bang! Chiuso! In Troia, the Traiana goes down the main street, and under its asphalt probably lies the selce Traiana of Roman Aecae. An NSR, "no show ruin." Buonalbergo down the road, once Forum Novum, is similar. And then.. . ! We stood again in Bene vento under Trajan's Arch, eyes moist (smoggy day), recalling all the inspirational polygonal pavement and cheery old tombs we had seen, the piquant peccadilloes we had found in Horace's tracks. If a great adventure can be accumulated out of small misadventures, the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, then we, and Hor ace too, had had it. .[ Down the Ancient Appian Way 747
Links
Archive
1981 Jul
1981 May
Navigation
Previous Page
Next Page