Avert your eyes from Puglia’s poverty and corruption and it’s easy to lapse into the notion of idyllic Italy.
The more you travel, the more you resent expectations. If you go on holiday once a year, then the expectation is all part of it – perhaps the biggest part of it. The planning, the shopping, the brochure worship, the web’s hol-porn.
But expectation is essentially wishful preparation, either for a repeat of the experience you had last year or for one that someone else has told you about. Expectations pre-suppose and pre-design what you’re going to see, but they don’t pre-destine. More often than not, expectations pre-order disappointment. But still they are what the travel business is based on, all that wishful photography, the mahogany prose written in coconut oil. If you travel not to rest but to be excited, not to unwind but to be wound, if you want uncomfortable in new ways rather than comfortable in the same old ways, then expectations are like safety rails or wheelchair access. Expectations are nature trail arrows in the forest, and expectations are all factor 40.
Ideally, you want to travel in neutral, without the hindrance of preconceptions. It is the great truism of abroad that the best places are the most unexpected, and they’re rarely the most pampering. But it’s almost impossible to travel in a state of balanced innocence. Sit and play geographical tennis with the person opposite you in the office. You just say a place name and they say the first thing that comes to mind. You’ll be amazed at the depth of prejudice and preconception you hold for the world. It was ever thus. Herodotus started it. He populated the globe with dogfaced men, people who used their feet as sun shades, and women with breasts large enough to incubate chickens. We laugh, knowing that in fact that’s only true about Armenia.
Nowhere in the world is as thickly swagged and laden with expectations, wishful thinking and preconceptions as Italy. It’s difficult to know if Italy actually exists under the weight of holiday romance that is laid on top of it. In Italy only the most sensitive traveller could get bruised by the pea of reality hidden under all the mattresses of wishful thinking.
Italy is most painstakingly defined by northern Europe, and in particular by the English. The English are like Italy’s plastic surgeons. Every year, thousands of them arrive wearing Panama hats and stupid lovelorn grins, and lift away the wrinkles, shove ever-larger inserts into its sagging cleavage and declare that if heaven is as good as Tuscany then God’s doing okay. The adoration is pretty indiscriminate. From the ruins and empty motorways of Sicily to the industry and damp fogs of the Po Valley, the latest part, the most recent part, to be massaged with the purple prose of votive Englishmen is Puglia. It is the most fashionable place to be this summer. There is plenty of scope for virgin preconception (though that sounds like an oxymoron).
Puglia is the heel of the boot of Italy, a long, thin strip that stretches down the Adriatic coast. It is principally famous for its trulli houses, small, stone, round hovels with pointy black roofs. It looks as if Italy were once inhabited by a race of Arts and Crafts hobbits. It is rustic and hot and out of the way, unless you’re an Albanian or a West African refugee, in which case it is in the way just in time.
Puglia has had the sort of history you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy, unless your worst enemies were Italian peasants. They were originally colonised by the Greeks, and then the Romans, the Normans, the Saracens, the Kingdom of the two Sicilies. Most of their landlords were absent and careless and greedy. Puglia doesn’t have anything worth having except for figs and olives and some fish and a lot of time. It is a very poor place, and it has been for longer than anyone has spoken their particular variation of Italian. A unified state didn’t improve much or serve them any better. It’s a long way from Rome down here, and the power has slipped easily into the hard hands of a particularly relentless version of the mafia. There is endemic corruption, protection, and quite a lot of kidnapping. The local government is communist. Communists like big capital projects. They like to build things. Building things is a way to a better future. Socialism has meant making this bit of Italy very built. Being poor, they receive lots of grants from the EU and the central government, so the communists build roads and business parks and spaghetti factories and high-rise housing for Albanian refugees. Except they don’t build them, of course. The mafia does the building, with substandard material and poor-quality finishing. And sometimes they don’t even bother finishing at all. The hulks of central planning graft litter Puglia.
But if you’re English, it doesn’t matter, because you won’t see any of that. When you drive to Lecce, you simply won’t see the miles of stained semi-slum, or the permanent roadworks, or the boarded-up petrol stations, or the blocks of apartments strung with the faded sports clothes and nylon sheets of immigrants. You won’t see any of that, because your eye is refined enough to filter it all out and bask in the marvel of the finest baroque city in southern Europe.
There is no denying that Lecce is spectacular. It’s baroque, but not in the way the Romans would know baroque, or the southern Germans, or the Austrians. It’s not baroque like St Paul’s Cathedral. It’s baroque that has been learnt by correspondence school by people who don’t read too well. It is a style imposed on Puglia by its absent landlords and the fourth great power in the land: the church. Have you noticed that the poorest places have the grandest churches? It’s no accident. It’s far easier to get money out of the destitute than the filthy rich. The poor want to go to a better place. The rich know there isn’t going to be a better place.
Puglia’s baroque has a folk art vitality. It’s an exclamation of lust and humour and anger and the sly revenge of peasants, because in the end the peasants always get you. They outlast money, titles, power, fear and even God. All the great buildings – the cathedrals, the churches, the palaces – vibrate with an earthy mockery. It’s baroque that’s been applied by teams of pâtissiers. They call Lecce the Florence of the south. It couldn’t be less like Florence. Florence was built from banking and insurance and monopolies and dirty politics. Lecce rises out of oppression, comes despite the servitude.
But you don’t need to worry about all that. Raise your eyes above it. Only the tasteless and the ethically bovine notice the plumbing when there’s a west front to marvel at. Practise and you’ll be able to wipe out the rubbish, the cracked concrete, the water-stained office blocks. They just disappear. The West African immigrants selling knock-off Ray-Bans and Prada for mafia gangs will begin to look like colourful Othellos. The Gypsy children will be bucolic urchins. The girls will only be beautiful bodies pacing the middle distance. Everything can be brushed and burnished into a classic once-a-year idyll if you sit in the shade of a vineyard’s awning and feel the cold beads of condensation on your glass, smell the cypresses and the verbena heavy in the air, listen to the chatter of sparrows and the thrum of crickets, smell the tomato and the garlic stewing in the kitchen, read a couple of lines of Henry James and think that there is nowhere quite like Italy. Oblivious of the truth. And in many ways you’re right. There is nowhere like Italy.