Lucania

LUCANIA. - Lucania essentially corresponds to the south-eastern slope of the Apennines of the same name, which sends its waters to the Gulf of Taranto, but it does not constitute a natural region; and toward the west it faces the Tyrrhenian Sea for a short stretch. The name Lucania, dating back to classical antiquity, was replaced in the 12th century by that of Basilicata, which recalls the Byzantine domination and has recently been revived in place of the ancient Lucania, which was brought back into use in 1932.

I. GEOGRAPHY

Extending over slightly less than 10,000 sq km, it is one of the most mountainous regions of Italy (70% mountains and 22% hills); the short coastal plains along the Ionian Sea are unhealthy and almost deserted. In absolute population, L. occupies the last place among the Italian regions; only after 1931 did the tendency toward decrease come to a halt, a tendency that had manifested itself after the late nineteenth century and was due to intense emigration, in turn determined by difficult economic conditions. Agriculture (of an extensive character: wheat, vines, olive trees) and pastoralism (with sheep in absolute predominance) are the dominant occupations: the percentage of the population engaged in them (75.4%) is the highest among those of the Italian regions. The population lives for the most part concentrated in towns; nevertheless only one commune, that of the capital, exceeds 30,000 inhabitants.

Giuseppe Caraci

II. HISTORY

Ancient L., the third region under Augustus and the ninth under Diocletian, stretched from the Tyrrhenian to the Ionian Sea, but in the Middle Ages it lost its unity. At the time of the barbarian invasions it suffered the fate that its very position as a passageway assigned to it, and it was a field of battle, of plunder and of settlement for new races of peoples; but very little is known of its vicissitudes during this period. On the other hand, the harsh Byzantine lordship left an indelible mark on it: from this there derived for L., as indeed for almost all of southern Italy, a stronger tinge of Greekness, in language, in worship and generally in institutions and customs. Nor did the Lombard penetration succeed in erasing these marks, which on the contrary intensified at the time of the struggle over iconoclasm, when groups of Basilian monks transplanted their seat there, first in laure (cells carved into the rock) and then in churches and convents; and with them the Greek rite penetrated.

The martyrs attributed by the Hieronymian Martyrology to L. on 29 Oct. and 18 Dec. probably come from other regions; Gelasius I on 11 March 494 addressed a letter to the bishops "per Lucaniam, Brutios et Siciliam," but already the letter of the priest Uranius on the death of Paulinus of Nola (431) speaks of an "Exuperantius episcopus de Lucaniae partibus." Likewise a rescript of Constantine the Great (31 Oct. 319) alludes to Christianity in L., so as to permit the conclusion that in the first decades of the 4th century there were organized Christian Churches there.

In the 9th century, the Duchy of Benevento having been split, the greater part of the region was included in the Principality of Salerno and was divided into gastaldates. It was then absorbed into the state organism that the Normans created in southern Italy, and then the name Basilicata appeared, which, however, being of undoubted derivation from the title of Greek officials, must certainly have pre-existed; the name L. nevertheless remained in learned use.

Under the Normans, Melfi was of very great importance, because of its geographical position at the crossroads of roads and safe from attack: there in 1059 the new State (Duchy of Apulia) was recognized by Pope Nicholas II. To the pre-existing institutions, the new rulers added the feudal institution, which characterized for centuries the economic-social structure of all of southern Italy. Consequently almost all of L. was enfeoffed; and, the kingdom being founded on the coexistence of monarchy and baronage, it is natural that in the successive epochs, Swabian, Angevin and Aragonese, the region should see unfold upon its lands the continuous clash between king and barons, which, rendering the life of the Kingdom precarious, prepared its retrogression to a viceroyalty under Spanish rule. The struggle reached its most critical phase under the Aragonese, when a single family, that of the Sanseverino, held in fief almost the entire province. Here the famous conspiracy of the barons against Ferrante I (1485-87) had its preparation and its epilogue; here fell the last bulwark of the Sanseverino, the castle of Diano, besieged in 1497 by Frederick of Aragon.

The administrative system of the region was handed down almost identically to the new Spanish lordship, yet not without obstacles. Symptoms of intolerance repeatedly arose on the part of the subjects: famous is the tumult of Matera (which in truth at that time was part of the Terra di Bari) against its feudal lord Gian Carlo Tramontano (1514-15); noteworthy also is the province's participation in Masaniello's revolution (1647) under the leadership of Matteo Cristiano, who stirred up several cities. Nevertheless, if one excepts the damages suffered at the time of the struggles between France and Spain at the beginning of the 16th century, and if one reduces to the status of episodes common to the rest of the Kingdom and to all the Italian domains of Spain the tumults against the local lords, the country found, during this period, in peace a long-desired good. So that the population grew notably in number, and from its midst a bourgeoisie began to emerge which a certain prosperity was to permit to give to a new generation the means to educate itself in the capital and in the diocesan seminaries. In the 18th century, as the crowning of long efforts aimed at obtaining exemptions from feudal services, the conditions of the peasants also improved. Moreover the Commune, which had made a timid appearance in the Middle Ages, increased its prerogatives by struggling daily against baronial arrogance and wresting, often by means of heavy payments in money, part of the very jurisdiction of the feudal lords. As an expression of this evolution, the new class, formed in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, made its trials during the revolution of 1799. Figures such as those of Pagano and of Bishop Serrao represented it in the sacrifice that southern Italy offered to the anti-absolutist cause. Memorable in this regard are also the defenses of Picerno and of Avigliano against the reaction. The abolition of the feudal regime, willed and carried out by the French government in 1806, facilitated the rise of the bourgeoisie, which enriched itself with landed possessions at the expense of the nobility; but the lowest classes, left in their misery, did not share in the benefits of the measure. Meanwhile sects and brigandage gravely disturbed the country. The constitution of 1820 was celebrated at Potenza; but such enthusiasm was dearly paid for. Class conflicts broke out more vividly in '48, because the peasants did not hesitate then to interpret the revolution as the means to attain possession of the land or at least the revision of the contracts that kept them in a state of barbarism and misery. In its turn the bourgeoisie, united, but not without conflicts, in the Constitutional Circle of Potenza, was unable to realize the plan of sending forces to the Neapolitan Parliament after the events of 15 May, and still less of supporting the Calabrian revolt. In any case the political unpreparedness was paid for with several convictions. Since there had not been in L. a wide diffusion of republican ideas, in '60 the bourgeoisie was united in warmly advocating union with the Kingdom of Sardinia. But soon the symptoms of discontent of all those who had hoped for social reforms arrived; and on this discontent the reactionary faction speculated, and the second period of political brigandage began. In effect the annexation was at first very disadvantageous to the slender Lucanian economy, which was subjected to a fiscalism never before known. The impoverishment of the country provoked a strong migratory current toward the Americas. Certainly the national government did not do, or could not do, all that the backward region needed: the roads built in the first twenty years of unification, the schools established, the law of 1904 and the subsequent ones proved quite insufficient to bring L. to a level of civilized life. Today, the voices raised by the scholars of the so-called "southern question" give hope of a prompt solution to the great Lucanian problems.

Carlo De Frede

III. CONCILIAR REGION

Lucania forms with the Salerno area a conciliar ecclesiastical region that comprises the three ecclesiastical provinces of Salerno, Acerenza and Matera, Conza, plus the archbishopric of Amalfi and the immediately subject sees of Campagna, Cava and Sarno, Melfi and Rapolla, and finally the nullius abbey of the Most Holy Trinity of Cava.

The episcopal conferences are held every year under the presidency of the archbishop of Salerno or, in his place, of the archbishop of Acerenza or of Conza (S. Congr. of Bishops and Regulars, 24 Aug. 1889; S. Congr. Concistorial, 15 Feb. 1919, 22 March 1919; S. Congr. of the Council, 21 June 1932); the resolutions are sent to the S. Congr. of the Council for approval and any observations. The work of coordination is carried out by the secretary of the conferences. The regional plenary council must be held every 20 years with the participation of all the dioceses of the region under the presidency of a pontifical legate (can. 281). The regional tribunal for matrimonial cases in first instance has its seat in Salerno; the regional tribunal of Naples is competent for the judgment of appeal (motu proprio: Qua Cura, 8 Dec. 1938; Normae of the S. Congr. of the Sacraments, 10 July 1940).

In Salerno there is also the seat of the Pontifical Regional Seminary of Salerno and Lucania Pius XI, while the Pontifical Minor Regional Seminary of Lucania has its seat in Potenza.

Agostino Pugliese

IV. ART

1. Architecture

The Byzantine lordship, which lasted from the 6th to the 11th century, and the influence of Basilian monasticism brought about in L. a profound artistic renewal and gave impetus to buildings of notable merit, but today the surviving testimonies of that period are quite scarce. Besides the small cave churches, scattered among the Vulture, the Matera area and the Agri Valley, decorated for the most part by the monks themselves and modeled on the example of the Eastern churches, and a few Byzantine elements remaining in the thirteenth-century construction of the church of Anglona, the only Basilian monument of L. that survives is the abbey of S. Angelo al Monte Raparo of the 10th century. It has a single nave, with a square drum that supports another, cylindrical one, which then ends in a truncated-conical dome and is decorated on the outside with blind arches. From the middle of the 11th century is the first of the two churches of the abbey of the Trinity at Venosa, rebuilt over another of the 5th century, of which some remains in the apse were identified not long ago. In the following century the Benedictines began the construction of the second church, which however remained unfinished. The mutilated complex of the two buildings is among the most evocative in southern Italy. The Romanesque forms of the second church of Venosa were repeated in the cathedral of Acerenza, in the bell tower of Melfi, decorated with figures of animals of Arab-Sicilian derivation, in S. Lucia of Rapolla and in S. Maria of Pierno built between 1189 and 1197 by a Sarlo of Muro Lucano, to whom the bell tower of the cathedral of Rapolla is also owed. Influences of the Romanesque architecture of the neighboring regions are recognizable in many buildings of the 13th century: they hark back, for example, to the Apulian architecture, to which L. was repeatedly tributary, the portal of S. Francesco of Tricarico and the abbey of Banzi, remodeled in the Aragonese era. Ultramontane characteristics are instead presented by the church of S. Giovanni Battista of Matera, rigorously Burgundian, which, together with a few other constructions, such as the cathedral of Rapolla of Cistercian type, but much remodeled, and the bell tower of the cathedral of Irsina, which has a harmonious decoration of blind arches and beautiful mullioned windows, documents the scant vitality of the Gothic in L. In the Renaissance period the architecture of L. harked back especially to the Catalan-Aragonese forms that immigrated from Naples. Other influences are legible in belated adaptations of older buildings. See the castle of Venosa and portals and other architectural decorations of S. Francesco at Potenza and of S. Antonio at Tricarico.

Baroque architecture has no great prominence and is for the most part derived from that of Naples: religious and civil buildings of a certain interest are at Lagonegro, at Maratea, at Melfi.

2. Sculpture

The most important example of medieval sculpture in L. is constituted by the sumptuous decorations of the abbey of Venosa, in part still in situ, in part dispersed among various buildings of the city. Portals such as that of the cathedral of Matera and reliefs of the bell towers of Rapolla and of Tricarico hark back to Apulian decorative sculpture. Tombs, sarcophagi and marble altars, besides some sculptural group, recall the modest participation of L. in the Renaissance renewal. Thus the tomb of the Balzo in S. Biagio at Venosa and that of the Ferrillo in the cathedral of Acerenza, of Neapolitan descent.

3. Painting

The first testimony, but not yet fully assessed, of medieval painting in L., starting at least from the 11th century, are the remains of the frescoes in the hermitic grottoes; to them follow others of Byzantine style in S. Ambrogio al Monte Raparo, in the cathedral of Melfi, in the church of Banzi. In the crypt of the church of S. Francesco at Irsina there is an interesting fourteenth-century cycle of modest quality, which however reveals the infiltration into the region of the manners of contemporary Neapolitan and central Italian painting.

With the Renaissance there begins in L. an influx from outside, and the preference of the patrons for the Venetian art of the Quattrocento is singular. Paintings by the Vivarini are at Matera and at Tricarico, a large polyptych by Cima da Conegliano is at Miglionico. There is also alive a southern vein centered on Neapolitan Mannerism and headed by Andrea da Salerno, of whom there is a triptych at Banzi and clear influences in other provincial works scattered through the region. The Ridola Museum of Matera and the d'Errico collection at Lagonegro, which are the only collections of L., preserve examples of it. A local Mannerist of the end of the sixteenth century, Pietro Antonio Ferri, and the contemporary Giovanni di Gregorio, called il Pietrafesa, are active in churches and convents especially of the Matera area. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries painters such as Giordano, Lanfranco, Solimena send works from Naples, Monrealese from Sicily, while Maratta introduces knowledge of Roman painting. After that era there are in L. no artistic documents worthy of particular note. - See pl. CXII.

Giovanni Carandente