A Church Used To
Occupy The Site, But The Warrior, Recognizing Its Strategic Advantages,
Transplanted The Holy Edifice To Some Other Part Of The Town.
It is now
a ruin, the inhabitable portions of which have been converted into cheap
lodgings for sundry poor folk - a monetary speculation of some local
magnate, who paid 30,000 francs for the whole structure.
You can climb
up into one of the shattered towers whereon reposes an old cannon amid a
wind-sown garden of shrubs and weeds. Here the jackdaws congregate at
nightfall, flying swiftly and noiselessly to their resting-place. Odd,
how quiet Italian jackdaws are, compared with those of England; they
have discarded their voices, which is the best thing they could have
done in a land where every one persecutes them. There is also a dungeon
at this castle, an underground recess with cunningly contrived
projections in its walls to prevent prisoners from climbing upwards; and
other horrors.
The cathedral of Venosa contains a chapel with an unusually nne portal
of Renaissance work, but the chief architectural beauty of the town is
the decayed Benedictine abbey of La Trinita. The building is roofless;
it was never completed, and the ravages of time and of man have not
spared it; earthquakes, too, have played sad tricks with its arches and
columns, particularly that of 1851, which destroyed the neighbouring
town of Melfi. It stands beyond the more modern settlement on what is
now a grassy plain, and attached to it is a Norman chapel containing the
bones of Alberada, mother of Boemund, and others of her race. Little of
the original structure of this church is left, though its walls are
still adorned, in patches, with frescoes of genuine angels - attractive
creatures, as far removed from those bloodless Byzantine anatomies as
from the plethoric and insipid females of the settecento. There is
also a queenly portrait declared to represent Catherine of Siena. I
would prefer to follow those who think it is meant for Sigilgaita.
Small as it is, this place - the church and the abbey - is not one for a
casual visit. Lenormant calls the Trinita a "Musee epigra-phique" - so
many are the Latin inscriptions which the monks have worked into its
masonry. They have encrusted the walls with them; and many antiquities
of other kinds have been deposited here since those days. The ruin is
strewn with columns and capitals of fantastic devices; the inevitable
lions, too, repose upon its grassy floor, as well as a pagan altar-stone
that once adorned the neighbouring amphitheatre. One thinks of the
labour expended in raising those prodigious blocks and fitting them
together without mortar in their present positions - they, also, came
from the amphitheatre, and the sturdy letterings engraved on some of
them formed, once upon a time, a sentence that ran round that building,
recording the names of its founders.
Besides the Latin inscriptions, there are Hebrew funereal stones of
great interest, for a colony of Jews was established here between the
years 400 and 800; poor folks, for the most part; no one knows whence
they came or whither they went. One is apt to forget that south Italy
was swarming with Jews for centuries. The catacombs of Venosa were
discovered in 1853. Their entrance lies under a hill-side not far from
the modern railway station, and Professor Mueller, a lover of Venosa,
has been engaged for the last twenty-five years in writing a ponderous
tome on the subject. Unfortunately (so they say) there is not much
chance of its ever seeing the light, for just as he is on the verge of
publication, some new Jewish catacombs are discovered in another part of
the world which cause the Professor to revise all his previous theories.
The work must be written anew and brought up to date, and hardly is this
accomplished when fresh catacombs are found elsewhere, necessitating a
further revision. The Professor once more rewrites the whole. . . .
You will find accounts of the Trinita in Bertaux, Schulz and other
writers. Italian ones tell us what sounds rather surprising, namely,
that the abbey was built after a Lombard model, and not a French one. Be
that as it may - and they certainly show good grounds for their
contention - the ruin is a place of rare charm. Not easily can one see
relics of Roman, Hebrew and Norman life crushed into so small a space,
welded together by the massive yet fair architecture of the
Benedictines, and interpenetrated, at the same time, with a
Mephistophelian spirit of modern indifference. Of cynical
insouciance; for although this is a "national monument," nothing
whatever is done in the way of repairs. Never a month passes without
some richly carven block of stonework toppling down into the weeds,
[Footnote: The process of decay can be seen by comparing my photograph
of the east front with that taken to illustrate Giuseppe de Lorenzo's
monograph "Venosa e la Regione del Vulture" (Bergamo, 1906).]
and were it not for the zeal of a private citizen, the interior of the
building would long ago have become an impassable chaos of stones and
shrubbery. The Trinita cannot be restored without enormous outlay;
nobody dreams of such a thing. A yearly expenditure of ten pounds,
however, would go far towards arresting its fall. But where shall the
money be found? This enthusiastic nation, so enamoured of all that is
exquisite in art, will spend sixty million francs on a new Ministry of
Justice which, barely completed, is already showing signs of disrupture;
it will cheerfully vote (vide daily press) the small item of eighty
thousand francs to supply that institution with pens and ink - lucky
contractor! - while this and a hundred other buildings of singular beauty
are allowed to crumble to pieces, day by day.
Not far from the abbey there stands a church dedicated to Saint Roque.
Go within, if you wish to see the difference between Benedictine dignity
and the buffoonery which subsequently tainted the Catholicism of the
youth.
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