When I set off this morning, I anticipated the first walk of the young trip oriented singularly towards the destination. Aside from Matera, none of the towns I’ve stayed in thus far exercised much of a gravitational pull; beyond a trip to the supermarket, I didn’t have concrete plans in mind for any of those places. But Taranto? I was pumped for Taranto, one of the biggest cities in Southern Italy and a rich history to boot. It has been nice to kick off a long pilgrimage with low-urgency stages, allowing me to meander through the introductory kilometers while imposing minimal strain on my body, but today, at last, I’d fire up the engine and kick hard to the finish line.
Of course, today had other plans for me.
Before I even set forth, my route had already shifted. Walking around Crispiano yesterday, I saw red and blue stripes on many posts around town, hinting at the promise of another waymarked route passing through town. I soon learned this was La Rotta dei Due Mari, the Route of the Two Seas, connecting Polignano a Mare with Taranto. A few seconds later, I had already downloaded the gps track for this link to Taranto; it added a couple kilometers to the walk, but I was pleased to be freed up from my phone for most of the walk, thanks to the waymarking. As it turned out, the Rotta is immaculately maintained, even easier to follow than the Materano–though it certainly helped that, for once, I was walking in the intended direction.
After that success, I was brought back to earth when I was utterly confounded by the hostel’s coffee machine. No problem; I’d just hit up a cafe on the way out. In the center of Crispiano, I had noticed a bar advertising the Cammino Materano–Bar Ideal–which suggested I could probably grab another stamp along with my cappuccino, and that proved to be the case. The barista was extra friendly, as a bonus, and sent me with two oranges in my pack to munch on later.
The dramatic ravines of days past finally yielded the terrain to flatter ground, and if the morning involved some gradual descents, bringing me ever closer to sea level, these were rarely steep, though they did involve plenty of loose rock under foot. Bright green grass coated everything, interrupted only intermittently by scrub brush and rogue olive trees. I slipped into a one-time quarry, now mostly retaken by nature, and discovered a thousand-year-old cave crypt off to the side, the Cripta di Sant’Onofrio. Unlike some of the other fresco-laden cave churches I’ve encountered, this one was wide open. I enjoyed the heck out of that, but some of the locals on Google Maps are less pleased with these circumstances: “We should ask the municipality to protect it and make it accessible. It is impossible for people to spend so much money on fireworks at parties and not take the slightest care of such an important place. HOW DISGUSTING!! SHAME!!”
I tried to pick up the pace once more, as the trail looped around a masseria. Unlike so many of the others, though, I soon discovered that this was still inhabited, and seemed to operate in part as a horse farm and riding school. As I descended the estate’s main entrance, a man turned the corner and approached me. Rarely have I seen a person who seemed so utterly content with his life; his face immediately widened in a smile, and Vincenzo, as he introduced himself, invited me to join him in his house for a timbro. I merrily tagged along, as he popped open the gate to a dining hall, lined with artifacts. As he stamped my credential, he offered me chocolate, coffee, wine, whatever! Then his attention turned to his grandfather’s sword, placing it in my hands and offering to take a picture. “How long have you lived here,” I asked, figuring that he might have taken this on as a project after working in the city. On the contrary, though, Vincenzo clarified matters: “I was born here.” So I shifted the question to his family–how long had they lived in this house? “Sempre.” Forever.
I emerged with an extra spring in my step, winding along a narrow footpath through high grass past old, stone outbuildings that had received little attention for decades. Now, finally, I was going to gun it for Taranto. Then I looked down and discovered at least a dozen shell fossils at my feet. I started laughing. I should be in a hurry more often!
Understandably, the final approach to Taranto was the least compelling walking of the day. Rarely does one make it into a large city on foot unscathed, and all things considered, this wasn’t bad. I followed a minor paved road as it looped southeast in order to navigate through a railroad and highway, before joining a seaside footpath that eventually brought me through the city outskirts via a fishing district, before joining the bridge into the old town.
Taranto’s old town is an island, linked via bridges on the north and south ends to the modern city. A larger industrial district extends further north. It’s known as the city of two seas, due mari, because the “little sea” cuts deep inland to the east, while the “big sea” looms offshore to the west, leading out to the Ionian Sea. The effect of this is that it doesn’t take much more than five minutes’ walking from any point in Taranto before one can encounter sea views. And yet, if you were to get turned around in the old town, I could understand if you might feel like you were cut off entirely from the outside world. The narrow roads are sliced by even tighter alleys; even on a bright Saturday, I still felt the back of my neck get itchy as I pushed deeper, checking back over my shoulder every so often. Graffiti lined the walls; garbage sometimes rustled at my feet. Old men sat in chairs, gesturing insistently at one another, while televisions blared from window after window as laundry billowed overhead. It’s perfect.
To know Taranto is to track nearly three millennia of history. Start at the beginning: this old town dates to the 8th century BC, when Spartans founded the place. This was perhaps the only Spartan-founded town in the Greater Greek empire, a consequence of an unusual moment in their history. During the Messenian Wars, special permission was granted for the Perioeci, free men but non-citizens, to have children out of wedlock with unmarried Spartan women. More soldiers were needed, after all. As sometimes happens, though, public policy shifted over time, and the children of those informal unions, the Partheniae, or “sons of virgins,” were forced to leave Sparta completely. Lots of legends surround what happened next–a vision to the Delphic oracle, a dolphin-aided intervention (dolphins do live in the bay), and the leadership of Heracles in the city’s founding. Regardless, it happened. Two Greek columns survive today and little else–perhaps the best proof of all that it was Spartans involved in this initiative.
The old town, in its own way, is a testament to the Greek presence, though thanks are due as well to the Byzantines, who rebuilt it in 967, after it was razed by Saracens. Just a century later, the cathedral was established, home to the relics of San Cataldo, or Catald the Irish monk. We are, it has to be noted, a long way from Ireland. Catald, however, had ventured even further, traveling to Jerusalem. On his return trip home, though, his boat crashed near Taranto. The locals recruited him to join their Church and he took root in the city, ultimately being credited with performing a range of miracles, including the healing of plague victims and rebuffing floods. When his tomb was opened in the 11th century, a gold cross was discovered within. In time, he was identified as the patron saint of the Sicilian Normans, who also ruled here for a spell.
Fast forward now to the late 15th century. Ferdinand II of Aragon, of Ferdinand and Isabella fame, ordered the construction of a castle here at some point between 1486 and 1492, responding to the growing threat of Turkish raids. It’s worth pausing here to take note of just how entangled the Mediterranean was–already, we’ve seen Greeks, Byzantines, Saracens, Normans, Sicilians, Turks, the Aragonese, and even one exhausted Irishman, all making their mark on this small notch in the Italian heel. Today, the castle is in naval hands, and Italian officers run tours throughout the day and well into the evening–a 12:20am tour is possible!
There are folk traditions as well–harder to date, given their oral roots and evolution over time, but crucial to the larger story of Taranto nonetheless. Most important is the story linked to the city’s name. Perhaps you noticed a similarity between Taranto and tarantula; perhaps you immediately disregard any possible reference to spiders. Well, the link is real and–as someone sleeping here tonight–alarming. The tradition goes that in the 15th-17th centuries in particular, locals feared tarantula (or wolf spider) bites, believing that the recipients–most often, for some reason, lower-status women–suffered a disease known as tarantism. That victim, the “tarantata,” would then suffer from a fit characterized by heightened excitability. Don’t be concerned, though; while this person might experience a fever, it was nothing more than dance fever. The tarantata would soon be surrounded by musicians, all playing at different tempos in pursuit of the perfect beat to chase the poison. Once that was discovered, the victim would dance and dance until they successfully sweated out the toxins. Today, the tradition is preserved in the tarantella dance.
Sadly, those three thousand years of history encompass the present as well, and the past few decades have been rough on Taranto. In 2006, the mayor, Rossana Di Bello, was imprisoned for corruption, and then the entire municipal government declared bankruptcy. Somehow, that’s less concerning than the public health concerns. Since the 1960s, Taranto has suffered from the highest mortality rate in Italy, and an absolutely staggering “+54% above-average tumor incidence rate and +21% mortality rate among children (0-14 years old).”
The air pollution issues stemming from the city’s chemical industries are catastrophic: “According to data by the Italian National Institute of Emissions (INES), in recent years, Taranto accounted for 93% of all the dioxin and 67% of all the lead released in the country’s atmosphere. The level of environmental pollution is so extreme that the health authorities were forced to outlaw pasture within a 20-km radius from the plant and to order in 2009 the cull of over 3,000 animals due to dioxin contamination.” Suddenly, I’m less concerned about spiders!
Some days are hard to write about because very little happens. Some days are hard to write about because it feels like everything happens all at once. I have no tidy way to bundle all of this up, but I know it’s a day and a place I’ll remember for a long time.
