It is five years since I was last in Puglia, and the intervening period has witnessed significant change. Puglia now seems to be high on the list of 'must-visit' places for tourists from many parts of the world. In the UK we see numerous holiday advertisements for tour groups that will take in Alberobello, Otranto, Vieste and Matera as part of a coach excursion. (Matera is actually in Basilicata rather than Puglia and has risen to fame this year as one of the European Capitals of Culture - more of that below). Over the last few days I have heard groups speaking English, German, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Chinese, as well as Eastern European languages that I can't decipher. When I was last here there were certainly English and German tourists around, but the whole world now seems to come to Puglia.
Looking back to the days when I studied the geography of Italy as part of my degree, this transformation in the image of the region seems astonishing. This was one of the poorest parts of Italy at the time when the great investment bank for the south - the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno - was set up in 1950. That investment didn't actually do much of substance other than improve the roads, because a lot of money went into capital-intensive developments such as steel works and oil refineries that did little to alleviate local rural unemployment and poverty. Just over the border of Basilicata the writer and intellectual Carlo Levi had been outlawed to the desperately poor and backward village of Aliano by the Mussolini regime in the 1930s, resulting in his wonderful book 'Christ stopped at Eboli' in which he argued that these southern parts of Italy had never been visited by anybody except as an enemy or an outsider seeking to extract what little value they could from the region. Many years ago I was impressed by the Goncourt-Prize-winning novel 'La Loi' ('The Law') by Roger Vailland (1957) describing the scarcely functioning rural society of a part of Puglia near Bari. And in 1983 Francesco Rosi set his Oscar-nominated film 'I Tre Fratelli' ('The Three Brothers') in the same area. Characteristically, the three brothers had all left for careers elsewhere, in Rome, Naples and Turin, returning home only on the death of their mother but then leaving once again. Emigration was the way out of poverty in the region.
I have been staying in exactly the area where these images most strongly applied - the Murge. It is a plateau around 1000 feet high, made up of karst limestone and with a steep drop to the coastal plain to the north-east. The soil is a distinctive red-brown colour, field boundaries are dry stone walls, and the dominant crop is olives. Luckily, in this area the disease that is decimating Puglia's olives further north - xylella fastidiosa - has not (yet) developed. If and when it does it will transform the landscape into a wilderness. But at the moment, with the exception of the olives, parts of the countryside look remarkably English.
So what has brought about the transformation from the impoverished image of the past to the tourist presences of today? My last blog was about two UNESCO-listed villages in China, and here once again UNESCO is in part the cause. Parts of the town of Alberobello are listed, just like the villages of HongSun and XiDi in Anhui, China. And the general area around is under a number of protective measures. The reason is the local vernacular house-type - stone-built single-storey buildings with conical roofs also made of stone, with most houses made up of several interlocking circular rooms.
Looking back to the days when I studied the geography of Italy as part of my degree, this transformation in the image of the region seems astonishing. This was one of the poorest parts of Italy at the time when the great investment bank for the south - the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno - was set up in 1950. That investment didn't actually do much of substance other than improve the roads, because a lot of money went into capital-intensive developments such as steel works and oil refineries that did little to alleviate local rural unemployment and poverty. Just over the border of Basilicata the writer and intellectual Carlo Levi had been outlawed to the desperately poor and backward village of Aliano by the Mussolini regime in the 1930s, resulting in his wonderful book 'Christ stopped at Eboli' in which he argued that these southern parts of Italy had never been visited by anybody except as an enemy or an outsider seeking to extract what little value they could from the region. Many years ago I was impressed by the Goncourt-Prize-winning novel 'La Loi' ('The Law') by Roger Vailland (1957) describing the scarcely functioning rural society of a part of Puglia near Bari. And in 1983 Francesco Rosi set his Oscar-nominated film 'I Tre Fratelli' ('The Three Brothers') in the same area. Characteristically, the three brothers had all left for careers elsewhere, in Rome, Naples and Turin, returning home only on the death of their mother but then leaving once again. Emigration was the way out of poverty in the region.
I have been staying in exactly the area where these images most strongly applied - the Murge. It is a plateau around 1000 feet high, made up of karst limestone and with a steep drop to the coastal plain to the north-east. The soil is a distinctive red-brown colour, field boundaries are dry stone walls, and the dominant crop is olives. Luckily, in this area the disease that is decimating Puglia's olives further north - xylella fastidiosa - has not (yet) developed. If and when it does it will transform the landscape into a wilderness. But at the moment, with the exception of the olives, parts of the countryside look remarkably English.
So what has brought about the transformation from the impoverished image of the past to the tourist presences of today? My last blog was about two UNESCO-listed villages in China, and here once again UNESCO is in part the cause. Parts of the town of Alberobello are listed, just like the villages of HongSun and XiDi in Anhui, China. And the general area around is under a number of protective measures. The reason is the local vernacular house-type - stone-built single-storey buildings with conical roofs also made of stone, with most houses made up of several interlocking circular rooms.
'Trullo' houses
The town containing the greatest number of these 'trulli' houses is Alberobello where whole districts are comprised of this distinctive architecture. The history of this local house-type is unclear - there appear to be few references to it before the seventeenth century (but then no writer was interested in such an impoverished area before then). They may date back earlier (on some houses there are plaques claiming a history back to around 1400, but proof is slight). What is certain is that these were the dwellings of the poor.
Part of Alberobello
So the historic poverty of many parts of Puglia has now become a factor in the attraction of tourists to the region. The trulli with their lack of running water, animals and people sharing one property, and poor living conditions (children often slept on wooden platforms under the conical roofs, accessed by wooden ladder) have become tourist attractions. Most in Alberobello itself are now either souvenir shops or have been upgraded to become Air bnb properties, whilst many of those out in isolated spots in the countryside have been spruced up with the addition of swimming pools to be let as holiday villas.
Trullo converted into a holiday villa
But doing up a trullo is now an expensive business. Planning and conservation laws, even outside the UNESCO zone, mean that the cost of repairing a roof has risen ten fold in the last few years, and detailed regulations have to be followed in any renovation scheme. (Or should I say, there are detailed regulations in existence - although I suspect they are often got round in some way, such is the custom in Italy.) There are many hundreds, possibly even thousands, of trulli in the area between Alberobello, Locorotondo and Martina Franca that have collapsed or are in total disrepair - a sign of the way in which, during the post-war period, their inhabitants moved out of them as soon as they could. Many of the older residents of the area must be amazed by the way in which the properties that they fled from out in the olive groves have become the preserve of wealthy northern Europeans, either as holiday homes or holiday rentals, once many thousands of euros have been spent on them (including, of course, the digging out of swimming pools and the removal of huge limestone boulders that lie beneath the thin soil of the area).
I don't see this as voyeuristic tourism because the holidaymakers are not here to see or experience poverty. Something a little different is perhaps present in Matera, referred to earlier, where the big tourist draw is to see the 'sassi', the houses carved out of rock faces (effectively caves) where people lived until they were (often forcibly) relocated to social housing in other parts of the city from the 1950s onwards. I visited Matera in 2014, and there was a frisson in seeing the amazing conditions in which whole families once lived. But the area of the sassi has now become chic and hotels have since been created in the old caves. It still baffles me, however, as to why the city was chosen (along with Plovdiv in Bulgaria) as one of the two European Cities of Culture for 2019.
Tourist developments in inland Puglia and Basilicata have probably created more employment than the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno ever did, and spread across a wider area (at least in the trulli zone of the Murge plateau). But there is another way in which the past poverty of the region has become a selling point - through its cuisine. I notice, though, that what was advertised in 2014 as cucina povera ('the cooking of poverty') has now been reimagined as 'authentic Puglia products' - but the ingredients are the same: the use of rough wholemeal flour, brown pasta, dried beans, biscuits (taralli) made with a little white wine and olive oil. Today's food fashions make such simple products sellable. Last night in a restaurant I ate lampascioni - grape hyacinth bulbs treated with oil and vinegar and tasting a little like shallots. Puglian cooking, traditionally some of the most basic in Italy, is now all the rage. I'm not always impressed with it. Five years ago, at a time when it was still being sold as 'cucina povera', I chose the menu bearing that name in a side street restaurant in Lecce (a city that has always bucked the trend of regional poverty, with some of the most stunning baroque churches one could find anywhere in Europe): it was one of the most boring meals I have ever had to pay for.
So the economy of Puglia has traded on its history of poverty and is now creating new images for the region and attracting new activities to its inland areas to supplement the coastal tourism that has been present for many decades (principally driven by the demands of Italian families). Data for 2017 show that gross domestic product per capita in Puglia is now ahead of that in Campania (around Naples), Sicily, and Calabria - although it is still at only 65% of the average for Italy as a whole. There is some way to go, but Puglia is doing better than much of the rest of the Italian South.
My previous blog was also about UNESCO-recognised villages - but in China. Both in Italy and in China I saw distinctive house types - as well as witnessing a history of poverty. But there is also one great similarity between the various villages I have visited. Sitting in a pizzeria near the start of the main street in Alberobello, three groups with 30 or so people in each make their way past me, each group led by a guide holding a flag on a stick; they are clearly making the ten minute trek up from the coach park on the edge of the village. In HongSun I waited several minutes to cross the bridge over the South Lake into the village while a number of tour groups, each led by a person carrying a flag on a stick, hustled past me: I didn't see their tour buses but they must have been somewhere near. Recognition brings tourism, and tourism so often means groups. What do such groups get out of visiting historic villages? There were large numbers of school parties in Alberobello, just as in HongSun and XiDi, each group distinguished by a common cap colour or some other uniform. Most children were more keen on talking to their friends or, for older children, taking selfies and group photos than in listening to their teacher or guides explain what they might see. What do school parties actually learn from a visit to a historic site? Souvenir shopping was also a dominant activity in all cases: at least that would have an economic benefit. But mass group tourism brings its own problems. Could Alberobello ultimately become a less attractive destination because it is too crowded with groups? In China, might visitors to HongSun turn instead to LuSun? If I come back to Puglia again in five years time what further changes will I see?
