INTRODUCTION
Thank you for coming along with me on this project. This is the first essay. Subsequent ones will arrive in your inbox on the first of each month. We will go through the five hundred years of history of my family in Francavilla Fontana and observe the contexts of the periods we traverse. After a few days I will also send along any sources, additionally readings that might interest, photos, maps, additional commentary about the month’s essay, etc. Each essay will also have an audible option, though at this point there is no professional voiceover artist at hand or budget; it will be me. Just click on the ‘article voiceover’ box thing right above these lines.
For those who have read this piece already, sorry for the recycled essay, but this is how I wish to begin the series. There are minor changes but it’s basically the piece that was published in the April 2022 in Open Doors Review, a bilingual journal based in Florence.
I welcome your thoughts, comments, and if necessary corrections, should you discover factual errors.
1. OTRANTO
photo by Roberto Argentina, June 2024
In a side chapel of the cathedral of Otranto, behind the altar presided by Mary, a wall of skulls and bones looks down on all who visit. They are real. They are real people. They were real people. The skulls and bones are artfully arranged, we are in Italy after all, aesthetics and composition matter. Regrettably, that means that most bones have not been placed in anatomical order with the other bones that formed a singular body, but rather, will continue to spend the foreseeable future piled next to the bones of friends and neighbors in permanent community. It’s not a fascination with the macabre that occasionally brings me back here; it is a place of reflection that reminds me of my own family’s bones in Francavilla Fontana, a town about 50 miles northwest of Otranto.
Our family chapel in that town’s cemetery was spacious when first built, but the place got crowded as time passed and my dad told me that, as needed, older coffins are pulled from the wall to make room for the new arrivals. Remains of the old skeletons are put in smaller boxes and lowered in a crypt twenty feet or so directly below the chapel. On my last visit, it required the help of my two cousins to lift the heavy marble covering that keeps those spirits at peace in the dark. We looked down into a dark and musty space twenty feet below – I don’t know why it needed to be so deep – there were metal boxes sealed in lead, but names were too hard to read from above. A fall into that space would likely have caused serious injury or worse, and I stepped back as I was feeling sensations of vertigo, and we quietly replaced the heavy cover.
I remember visiting there ritually when I was a child, entering through the creaky iron gates, feeling the cold humid air, and looking around in hushed awe at the dates and the names, expecting, knowing, my own bones would end up in there at some point. In that place, generations of my family embrace me with a cold, stony, benevolent hug. When I was there recently, I stared at my own name engraved in marble; it’s my grandfather, Roberto Argentina, still lounging in the prime real estate of the chapel walls. There is one more open spot there, but after that one is occupied, who is it going to be, some of those people are going to have to move downstairs to make room for my generation and they will be removed from sight and soon after, from remembrance.
My dad and his entire generation are almost gone now, nevertheless, when after a visit I walk out of the cemetery and step into the town, the history of my family in Francavilla Fontana keeps embracing me. Many grand historic palazzi belong, or have belonged, to our family, streets bear our name, a XV Century balcony that is a historical landmark has a sign on it named Balcone Argentina. I am recognized as Nino’s boy by old people I don’t know or remember. But they do. Or imagine they do, likely they figure they know me because they knew my dad, my aunts, my uncles, my cousins – and I look like them. My wife said as much on a recent trip. “All these people look like you and your brother”. Things don’t change much there. I can step into the salumiere shop where we shopped in the early seventies, and it is still the same, though now, the posters of the soccer players are current, and the old owner’s kids, who are my age, run the shop. Despite this sense of standing still in time, the town thrives with the Italian hipsters who have found Francavilla to their liking, setting up things like artisan pizza shops in old stone buildings, like the one where Premio, the kind artisan who worked on the shop’s front steps when I was a boy, and always greeted me as Don Roberto, used to work and live. Although the stability of old is comforting, I am thankful to see growth and change since so many other rural Italian towns are on the verge of demographic collapse and abandonment. I walk by houses where beloved relatives lived; centenarian stone paved streets so indelibly etched in my subconscious by juvenile footsteps. My family’s older generation that I will remember forever as they were when I moved away, are not there anymore. They are ghosts now… bones. I can only commune with them in memory when I listen to their voices in recollection. I live on the other side of the world, and most of the time I have no thoughts for the future location of my bones, until I go back that is, and then the melancholy yearning every immigrant has surfaces again. My shoots may stretch far into this new world, but my roots were planted back there, and my DNA is from that land where I no longer belong.
Could those people in Otranto have considered on the morning of August 14, 1480, in their final moments of consciousness, moments of solitary terror, that they would be declared martyrs and that for hundreds of years their bones would be publicly displayed together to benefit the meditations of believers and amusement of visitors? Would that have made a difference to them while waiting in line for a scimitar to sever every single atom that attached the head to their body? Would that have been consolation of any sort? Possibly, since it is recounted that they chose their fate freely.
Otranto, a port town, is located in Salento, on the lower part of the heel of the Italian boot, fifty miles south of the ancient port of Brindisi on the Adriatic Coast, and fifty miles from the Albanian coast directly due east. From there, in winter, the snowcapped Albanian mountains are visible to the naked eye. Brindisi was a port town used by Greeks to send troops to colonize the lower Italian peninsula, by Romans to send troops to colonize the Grecian peninsula, by crusaders to go do whatever it was that they were doing, and incidentally, the town that gave birth to me. Its large, beautiful, and natural port had been the intended destination for the Ottoman invasion, but a storm in the days of navigation by oars and sails made Otranto more attractive. Such are the vagaries of history.
There could not have been a more terrifying sight for those who looked out into the sea from the walls of Otranto on July 29, 1480, than dozens of sails with crescent moons. Constantinople, the symbolic remnant of the Roman Empire had been sacked just a generation earlier in 1453, and reports of the horrors inflicted on that conquered population made for horrific tales that were kept alive for generations. When I was a child, parents down in Salento terrorized us children with threats that ‘Li Turchi’ will come get us if we wondered too far away from home. Thousands of Ottoman soldiers disembarking and setting siege machines on the hills surrounding the town would have raised existential questions for the four hundred soldiers and untrained citizens inside the walls. Much as they might have mentally explored pathways and stratagems to survival, deep inside, all in Otranto knew that along with their families, after an undetermined, but too short, period of resistance, their bodies would be mortally sliced by the metal of the scimitar.
The Ottomans were in the midst of an imperial expansion, a frightening thought for Latin Christendom, and would eventually take their armies all the way to the gates of Vienna, and in 1480 as Mahmet II, the conqueror of Constantinople set his sights on Rome, a Salentine port was the ticket for ascending on the ancient Appian Way towards the home of the Popes who incited crusades on Muslims during the preceding centuries. The crown of Naples had neglected funding for the defense of those ports, but nevertheless the outnumbered and underequipped soldiers and citizens of Otranto improbably resisted within their run down walls for a couple of weeks. A remarkable feat. Traditionally, they would have been offered immunity if they surrendered, but as stories tell, three times the defenders refused and finally, exasperated, symbolically threw the keys of the main gate into the sea, or into a well, depending on which tale is to be believed, after the last offer. The doors would not be opened willingly. After the walls were breached on August 12, the survivors gathered in the cathedral in the hope of divine intervention. The priests were immediately slain in front of everyone, women were sold to slavery, and the last men who survived the battle and sack of the city were presented with the simple choice of conversion or decapitation. The bones in the chapel in Otranto’s cathedral reveal their answer. The earth around Otranto is dark red, and as a child I squeezed that earth in my fingers and felt pleasure at that rich red color, and sweet, fresh, earthy aroma. The blood pouring out of hundreds headless bodies would not have made a noticeable stain on it.
The delay in taking Otranto proved fatal to the Ottoman ambitions. Pope Sixtus IV and King Ferdinand I, ruler of the Kingdom of Naples and all of Southern Italy, known as Re Ferrante to the people in Salento, made defensive arrangements. The Ottoman ruler, Mahmet II, conqueror of Constantinople, suddenly died, the invading general Pasha was recalled home, and Rome would not be taken this time, having to wait a few decades to be pillaged in 1527 not by Muslims, but by Christians instead, just like Constantinople had been devastated in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade. The Ottomans made only modest advances around Otranto’s countryside before being repulsed the next year and abandoning designs on the Italian Peninsula for a while.
Had the Ottoman army succeeded in overtaking Otranto more expeditiously, it would have then had to pass through the vibrant agricultural town of Francavilla Fontana on the Appian Way to Rome where Roberto de Argentino bought land that same year of 1480 and started my family’s five hundred year presence there. Had the Ottoman army come through Francavilla on the way to Rome, it is improbable that I would be here to write this story five centuries later. Maybe that’s what brings me back to that chapel lined with bones. Deep inside, I have an awareness that among the incalculable multitude of events, a few significant, most absolutely banal, that had to happen over the centuries for me to exist, this also had to happen: an entire city delaying its own slaughter for a couple of weeks. It was the only path through which I might one day emerge seventeen generations later, and those bones in Otranto make sure I remember that.
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Great first post and thank you for the audio! I look forward to listening to the next one.
Bravo DON Roberto! So well-written and really informative. Thank you for doing this.