FOGGIA has long been the dominant town of the Basilicata and has paid the price, not least during the last world war. Lucera to the south has been more fortunate. We think of Lucera, if we think of it at all, as the fortress town where the Emperor Frederick II settled his Saracens. But the potential of the site, on a rise above the plain, had long been recognized.
On my first visit, in 1985, I arrived in time for a late lunch, half dazed after leaving northern Umbria at dawn and pausing to survey Rieti and L’Aquila. As I walked towards the cathedral a distinguished old man in a dark grey suit handed me his card. I was still in driving mode and, besides, the gaunt Gothic church founded by Charles II of Anjou was predictably shut. But I still half regret not trying the services of the professore, who was one of the last ciceroni of his type.
I made off for the castle commandingly placed to the west of the town. This was constructed between 1269 and 1283 by Charles I of Anjou on the site of the fortress built for Frederick II two generations earlier; this too was closed. But it was not difficult to squeeze below the wooden door and enter the vast empty trapezoidal space within to see the base Frederick’s palace. It is, however, from the outside that Lucera impresses, with its circuit of high curtain walls and well-preserved towers built of brick with stone dressings. The ambitious Anjevin king did not wish to leave his subjects in any doubt that he had expunged the power of the Hohenstaufen, crushing the descendants of the Saracens planted at Lucera by Frederick II after a six-month siege in 1269. But something of the taste he generated can be seen in finds from recent excavations in the castle, now in the Museo Civico, including a fine capital and ceramics of Islamic character.
When I returned to the town, the cathedral was open. The interior also is austere, a forceful reminder of the Francophile taste of the Anjevins. It says something as to the calibre of many Cinquecento pictures in the south that an altarpiece of 1535 by that modest Venetian Girolamo da Santacroce should stand out. The ruthless austerity of the cathedral itself, which is beautifully echoed in the nearby Franciscan church, seems more impressive every time I return. But it is with a sense of some relief that I speed on to Troia on its hill to the south, once settled by Greeks who it is not altogether fanciful to assume were ancestors of the wizened veterans gathered near the stupendous Romanesque cathedral, with its richly decorated front and bronze doors of 1119 by Oderisio da Benevento.
Museo Civico: fragment of thirteenth-century plate from the Castle.
Castle, with the lower wall of Frederick II’s palace and the walls of Charles of Anjou in the distance.
