Bari and Matera

The third and last leg of our swing through southern Italy was to Bari, an area on the Adriatic (east) coast of Italy, in the region of Puglia.  Actually, we stayed in a small town about 10 miles south of Bari on the coast called Torre a Mare.  We drove over from Castelmezzano and had lunch in the town of Matera in Basilicata.  All we could find open was a sweet shop.  Tough choice!  We were tired enough that we didn't do any sightseeing there, but we drove back two days later.

The hotel in Torre a Mare was close to the beach (you could see it from there...) but it was on the landward side of the highway with no easy walking route.  Furthermore, it was surrounded by high metal fences with gates that had to be opened by the hotel desk staff.  So each time you entered or exited you felt like you were in prison.  The hotel itself was nice enough, a well appointed convention hotel, not really for tourists.  Most of the staff were quite friendly and coped through our language limitations.  Unfortunately, the woman at the desk when we checked in had an attitude about our lack of Italian so along with the gates it left a bad first impression.

The next day (Saturday) we drove into Bari itself and went to the old part of the city.  It was absolutely deserted and we couldn't even find a place open for lunch, so we had to walk out of the old part into the newer part to find a restaurant.  We did find some great gelato.

It was a rather chilly, gray day, much cooler than we had experienced in Rome or Florence farther north.  After lunch we walked back through the old city and actually saw a few people.  They were playing "calcio" (soccer) in a tiny enclosed court in a park along the harbor.

Bari harbor

Calcio

 This was about as many people at one time that we saw.  A lot different from crowded Florence and Rome!  Maybe the fact that they have a serious gang crime problem here has something to do with it.

We also found the Basilica of San Nicola.  That's right - Jolly Old Saint Nicolas resides in Bari, Italy, not the North Pole. Seems that in 1087 some Bari fishermen went off to Turkey and stole his remains and brought them back to much celebration and joy.  The Pope even came to Bari shortly after to honor the event.  Bone-stealing seems to have been very much in vogue back then since the Venetians did a similar thing to St Mark's remains.  These saints' remains were felt to be very powerful; a number of healing miracles were attributed to them.

When we got to the church a limousine pulled up.  First a well dressed man got out and surveyed the square.  Then the driver got out.  The back doors of the car were opened and an elderly man and woman got out.  The driver took the woman's purse so she wouldn't have to carry it.  The other man went into the church, obviously looked around and came down and got "the Don" and his wife.  It looked like a scene right out of "Godfathers."  

It was quite beautiful inside, though in a simpler way than most churches in Florence.

The ceiling was exquisitely painted.

On our daily jail-break the next day we drove back to Matera, about 1-1/2 hr away, to see the "sassi" or cave structures there.  Matera is built over limestone through which deep canyons have been cut by the rivers.  The town dates from at least the pre-Roman Greek period, but most of the unique features are medieval, when monks from the East moved in (presumably fleeing Moslem advances) and built cave dwellings and even cave churches into the steep canyon sides below the original town.  As the population increased, ordinary people began doing the same thing, until by the 1950's nearly half of the town (15,000 people!) lived in such caves.

Life in caves was not a picnic; sanitation was very bad, farm animals often lived in the same caves as their owners, and the high humidity led to lots of mold.  As a result, the infant death rate in Matera was around 50%, and the conditions grew to be a national scandal.  So the Italian government built high rise apartment buildings nearby and ordered all the people out of their sassi.  Now the area is being tourist-ificated and gentrified, and some quite nice B&B's and restaurants are in sassi.  We ate a delicious lunch in one, though the moment we walked in we could tell we were in a cave - the mildewy smell was there despite all the cleaning chemicals.

The sassi area is wonderfully photogenic and I have dozens of great pictures, but here are a few:

Unfortunately, all of the churches in sassi were closed up tight, which seemed odd to me since it was Palm Sunday.  In the process of walking around the town a couple of women came up to Tre and gave her an olive branch, which they tend to use instead of palm branches here.

The rest of the Bari area was flat and heavily industrialized or packed with plant nurseries or orchids.

The coast line here was rather rocky - reminiscent of many Hawaiian shorelines - and since it was cold it wasn't at all attractive for swimming.

On our train ride home, we saw many nice sandy beaches further north that were deserted - now.  In summer, they are packed.

We also saw a large number of wind turbines and some solar "farms".

 

The trip South was a totally different experience than being in the North.  Far less crowded and less developed, it was an interesting contrast to what we had seen and experienced in the North.  Far fewer people spoke English.....probably a good thing in keeping cultural identity.