Leaving Trani, we pause in Ruvo, just south and slightly inland. The tree-lined main street is of normal width but the sidewalks are wider than the street; this town favors strolling. People sit on their white iron balconies that front the creamy-stone residences, looking down as their friends and neighbors take a passeggiata.
Weirdly, as we walk, we see effigies of an old woman in black hanging from electrical wires above our heads. Is that a fish hanging from the wire? She’s holding a spindle. Near the Museo Archeologico Nazionale Jatta, we spot two of them. What’s with that? I’m from the American South; a hanging black figure counts as nightmare.
THE MUSEUM, ON the bottom floor of the Jatta family’s nineteenth-century palazzo, is closed. We weren’t expecting much anyway, just brothers Giovanni and Giulio’s collection of locally discovered artifacts and vases. Two women sit by a stove in a side entrance room and when we ask about opening hours, one of them takes a key and lets us in. Four rooms, just as the paterfamilias collectors left them. I love the tall wooden cabinets, with wavery glass doors and sequential Roman numerals, filled with objects and hand-inked tags. House museums fascinate me; they manifest individual passion. The brothers gathered their trove in the early nineteenth century, long before anyone regulated digging in a field or your backyard and unearthing a pre-Christian frying pan, Roman pins for a cloak, or stunning red clay vases painted with scenes from mythology. There must have been late-night furtive knocks at the door; some stealthy man unrolling a blanket wrapped around a small statue with an archaic smile. The brothers must have been awed by the terra-cotta drinking vessels shaped like animal faces, whimsical and graphic. I imagine Giovanni wandering down here at night with a glass of wine, moving among his cases, taking out a red-orange plate from 340 B.C. and admiring the two painted orate (sea bream) and the flowing tentacles of seppia (cuttlefish) filling the surface, exactly what he had for dinner. He picks up the even more ancient beads—his wife has worn them to celebrations—turning the pre-Roman glass and stones over in his fingers.
Just as he did, I can run my hands over the amphorae and precious vases displayed outside the cases. Oh, they’re vulnerable, up on pedestals in the open. Watch that backpack! Several kraters (wide-mouthed urns used for mixing water into wine) found here were imported from Greece from the eighth until third centuries B.C. and were used not for all-male symposia parties, as they had been in Greece, but as accompaniments to the departed in their graves. What a pleasure to see these vases up close, the delicate leaves and spiraling tendrils of a grapevine, a half-reclining nude and winged woman—long before Christian angels—holding aloft what appears to be a casserole topped with a mountain of whipped cream.
Outstanding, among a lot of outstanding objects, is the vase depicting the death of Talos, who was invulnerable except for a vein in the malleolus—the bony knob on the side of the ankle. Sent by Jupiter to guard Crete, Talos was bewitched by Medea and somehow banged his malleolus on a stone and died—a rather ignominious death for such a hero. His pale body is supported on either side by Castor and Pollux. What dark night yielded this treasure?
The woman with the key returns after leaving us alone for an hour. She knows everything about the collection, the family, and the gardens behind the villa. On one vase she points out, a serpent twines around a tree, slithering upward to a young woman who holds out a plate to feed him. “The snake and the beauty,” she says, “and we read about this pairing centuries later in the Bible.” Among the iron objects, I see a crusty grill much like my Tuscan neighbors use for veal chops in their fireplaces. The quotidian items bring close the ancient people of Puglia.
LIKE MOST ITALIAN towns, Ruvo has a well-stocked tourist office with a helpful staff. We ask a raven-haired young woman, whose ancestors must have been settlers of Magna Grecia, about the black-robed effigies hanging around town. “Quarantane! Vedove [widows]. They hang for forty days. Inside their robes they hold an orange stuck with six black feathers and one white, one for each week of Lent and then the white for Easter. For the end of Lent, they explode on Easter morning.”
This sounds so deeply pagan that it makes me dizzy. “Why old women?” I ask.
“Widows—they are mourners, yes? As widows of carnival, they symbolize Lent.”
“Why the orange and the fish and the spindle—what do those mean?”
“The orange signifies the end of winter. The herring is about the lack of meat during the deprivation of Lent. The spindle is the woman’s work.” She tells us about numerous celebrations around Easter. When we go out into the streets again, I notice signs on churches announcing schedules of processions. One church, San Francesco, has a portal surrounded with skeletons. Photos show all the old wooden figures that will be carried through the streets. I start imagining the Easter pranzo that will take place in every house. These narrow streets of stone houses will throw the windows open, all the scents of roasting lamb and potatoes, steaming chicory and fennel drifting through the air. Which leads us to lunch.
WE STOP IN at the very casual Sesto Senso, the first place that looks good. We meet Giacomo, the owner, who brings over wine even though we say we want only water. Then two platters of grilled vegetables arrive. His wife and two boys, nine and fifteen, come in with their Jack Russell, who immediately tries to jump in my lap. The younger boy chases him about while the older boy stares hypnotically at his phone. Giacomo is bringing out various courses for them and seems disconsolate when we tell him the vegetables and great bread are all we can manage. We’re the only guests. Americans, they marvel. As Ed savors an espresso, I look up the Quarantane tradition. Towns that honor this ritual hang up seven widows. Some disapprove because, as I guessed, the deep tradition is pagan, going back to agricultural and Dionysian fertility rites. In Ruvo, one quarantana was stolen this year. The writer speculated that the thief might have been a priest.
PUGLIAN ROMANESQUE! ALL through this region we’ll be visiting these great cathedrals of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. I want to see each rose window of carved stone, not stained glass, as in French cathedrals. Romanesque, my favorite church architecture, with a Puglian twist—the local mix of Arab, Byzantine, French, Spanish, Venetian, Norman architectural influences. Ruvo di Puglia’s church may have less grandeur than Trani’s but its proportions are pitch perfect for the intimate square where it’s situated, with radiating streets of low stone homes. The cattedrale, spare in ornament, focuses on its rose window with the roofline angled sharply down on either side. The carved-stone ornamentation looks like cut-out pastry designs pressed into a piecrust. Mythical animals always astound me on medieval churches. Some of Ruvo’s are eroded, like sand castles when a wave washes over. Beneath the church, as is so often the case, lie remains of an earlier religious site and below that, another. Puglia: layers on layers. Mosaics, tombs, paths—it always has been thus. One religion gives way to another, the truer one, until the next truer one comes along.
Ruvo we like. Idyllic village. Eat from the clean street! Natives nod at strangers. The Jattas still haunt. Probably there’s more to be discovered in groves and byways. The grilled vegetables, perfect lunch. The hanging widows, I don’t know. Exploding on Easter. A bit creepy. “Fetishistic,” Ed says.
“Are you sure that’s a word?”
“Haunted. That orange with seven feathers piercing the rind.”