The Mounts of Daunia, with their valleys opening towards the Apulian Tavoliere and the big villages gathered on their rises, belong to the inner and Apenninian part of Italy, even if nowadays they breath the scent of the Ionian part of the Adriatic sea, filled with oriental lights and atmospheres. They possess the skinny, poor face of the Appeninian Italy, made sorrowful by the decadence of men and things, but at the same time ennobled by the antiquity of human signs and the full Mediterranean brightness which seems to enrich everything is touched by the sun.

For example, Troia is a small town which, although ancient and in decay, attests its mark of nobility through its name, coming from the mythical Dauni who founded it, and its old cathedral, an “oriental” interpretation of an architectural ideal of Tyrrhenian derivation; Lucera, which dominates the Capitanata, saves even greater surprises and visiting it turns into a small but delicious cultural adventure, which allows to discover the lively and various history stratified in its old buildings.

But the appeal spreading from these high-placed towns and those citadels, closed and solitary during the evening but opened and pleasant during the day, does not lie solely in the wonder of discoveries, if they are able to partly remove and soothe our anxieties, of modern and “northerner” men.

Leaving the Daunia and descending toward the Tavoliere is like abandoning an ancient and forgotten world for a more lively, modern and rational one, with its large fields of wheat, its straightaway roads, its geometrical landscape, a busy town like Foggia or the big populated areas like San Severo, made of white houses recalling the summery and rural Apulia. But while heading toward the Gargano the rugged and heavy-laden mountains come into view again, dominated by the high and bare gibbosity of Monte Calvo and the same villages (Apricena, Sannicandro, San Marco, San Giovanni Rotondo) gathered together on its rises. The nearby presence of the maritime visions of Gargano is not still sensed when reaching the northern coast, broken by the lakes of Lesina e Varano, which introduce to an unusual lagoon landscape, with its calm waters dotted with the fishermen’s boats.

The peninsula, the “spur of Italy”, takes the visitor by surprise as soon as he reaches Rodi Garganico. The mountains are still the same, but now they open directly on the sea, and the coast, a flight of rocky promontories and placid, cosy inlets girded with olive, pine, bay and citrus trees, introduces a new, essential note that suddenly transforms the images gathered during the approaching march. The stretch of road between Peschici and Vieste offers the most unexpected sights. Specially in Peschici it is enchanting to stop and observe from the high terrace of the village the wild inlet with the rocks bordering it: the inlet seems far away and deep, opened to a sea bending towards horizons which are not ignored and, thus, without distress.

And on the stony rocks towards Manacore, with their wild and green-blue caves, it seems to see again the mythical figures of the Ulysses landed from that sea, calm and undisturbed in the silence, intent to splinter flints, to pick up, clean up and eat shellfish, with slow, timeless movements, a suggestion that can be justified only in the lazy immutability of the landscape. Gargano, as untouched as it came to us, leads to these easy evocations, which are legitimized, after all, by the rich prehistory of this strip of land outstretched towards the Illyrian and Byzantine Orient. And these coastal themes, the green-blue and resounding caves, the sweet-smelling pine trees, the centenarian olive-trees, the shining bay-trees, recur along the whole extreme arch of the peninsula and can be found also in the small island of San Domino in Tremiti. To these mythical and charming components has to be added the pattern of villages perching over the sea, the shelters of an old and troubled humanity of fishermen who live with the sea (fishing from the promontories with their big and complex machineries, the “trabucchi”) and of farmers escaping the sea to reach the fields on the bare ridges of the mountains which, on their heights, are mantled with the wide Foresta Umbra, a survived strip of ancient landscapes miraculously untouched by the destruction. Rodi, Peschici, Veste, Mattinata crown the long perimeter. But Monte Sant'Angelo, upon the big coastal arch of Manfredonia, is a unique small town; very high over the sea, with total openings towards the Mediterranean dome: an extraordinary corner of Italy, exotic and incredible, with the old houses, the alleys, the breathless flights of steps, the sanctuary under the rock that gathers the devotion of people exhausted by secular frustrations, by a poverty resulting into a painful and with no way-out emigration.

The young people are quite totally absent in these white, adventurous villages, and a hope for their redemption seems lost together with this absence. Maybe tourism, which is entering by force the noiseless and cosy inlets, will not cure the old disease corroding these places, though within some of the most beautiful landscapes of the Italian coasts.

by Eugenio Turri