From Crete to Puglia, Italy, history comes alive in vibrant caverns and grottos http://www.newsday.com/travel/ny-trmain4485811oct30,0,5234684.story?coll=ny-travel-headlines BY JUSTIN DAVIDSON STAFF WRITER October 30, 2005 Deep in an ochre-walled ravine that plunges from a bleached mountain to the northern coast of Crete sits the abandoned monastery of Katholikos. The ruins bridge the cut with a graceful stone arch, merging into the cliffs and grottos. Christianity and paganism, worship and violence mingle in these rocky shadows - a nearby cave is said to have sheltered, at various times, Minoan gods, Artemis' sacred bear, St. John the Hermit, Orthodox monks and a covey of pirates. There's nobody there now, except the occasional hiker. The valley lies quietly redolent of sweet and pungent herbs. Late on a summer afternoon throbbing with cicadas, a man prodded his donkey up the steep trail, kicking up pebbles with the purposeful stride of a Manhattan office worker at rush hour. It seemed impossible that anything here could be so urgent. I had hiked down this harshly ravishing gorge with my wife, Ariella, and our 8-year-old son, Milo, on our first day in Crete last summer. We began at Agia Triada, a pleasant, sun-beaten cloister on a plain of the Akrotiri peninsula, a short drive from the city of Chania and an even shorter one from the beach where Anthony Quinn danced as Zorba the Greek. A few miles up a twisting road lies another religious outpost, called Gouvernetou, which sits on a high coastal ledge and is home to another handful of monks and dozens of feral cats. This is where the steep descent to Katholikos and the acid-blue sea begins - where a walk feels like scrolling back through the island's monastic history to its ancient myths. The history of the Mediterranean can be told in its caves. Wherever people have found holes in the earth, there they have painted, dug, built, worshiped, lived, killed and left their traces. A day or two after the scramble to Katholikos, we visited another of St. John the Hermit's alleged residences, the cave of Agios Ioannis Eremitis near the inland village of Spiliá. It's a simple, dusty recess surrounded by a spare, modern monastery with picnic tables and a panoramic view. Perhaps the company of his 99 acolytes grew tiresome, or else life on this aerie above olive-filled slopes and coastal flatlands was simply not hard enough for the ascetic saint. The cave is spacious enough for a bone fide altar and a few rows of rough wooden benches - luxury compared to the minuscule frescoed churches that dot the hills all around. Whatever the reason, St. John left. The precipitousness and solitude of the cave at Katholikos was more to his taste, and he died there, shot by a myopic hunter's arrow. In Crete, such vague, timeless and improbable tales have a kind of immediacy they would lack in another setting. Wherever we trekked, my son had no trouble envisioning gods springing across abysses, or Hercules on the trail of a lurking beast, or a parched saint trudging through the brush in search of a searing vision. A few days later, we drove up into the ridge of fearsome mountains that spill out onto the south coast, to the Imbros gorge, which is shorter and quieter but no less a spectacular hike than its famous counterpart at Samaría. From an earlier trip, my wife and I recalled the throngs of impressively equipped youths who speed-walked the Samaría trail, jostling slowpokes out of the way. On the Imbros trail we met only a small crowd of goats, resting in the shadow of a great natural arch. Along the way, I told my son another story, a more recent one about the resistance fighters during World War II who retreated to this kingdom of crags and caves, swooping down from time to time on German invaders. "I can see an army standing on that ridge," he said, pointing to the line where glinting cliff blurred into polished sky. "Their armor is shining." He kept marching down the path. The trail emerged from the ravine on a mountainside, halfway between the shimmering coastline and the windblown peaks. A "taxi" driver - a part-time cook in a battered pickup truck - waited to ferry us up the looping road back to the rental car we had parked near the mouth of the gorge. Every time we met a tour bus coming the other way, our truck's wheels brushed the shoulder and sprayed pebbles into the void. From mountains to beach After the hike, we wanted a swim, so we drove back down the way the taxi had brought us, dropping toward Frangokástello, a magnificently brutish Venetian fort that looms over a wide and lovely but windy beach. At the ramparts' ruined shoulders rise the natural fortifications of the Lefká Óri, a mountain range whose wilderness has barely been grazed by the few improbable roads through it. Across the island, on the northern side of the island, the coastal highway west of Chania runs past tourist villages filled with fluorescent-skinned Norwegians. But this southwestern edge of Crete is still a fierce place, a landscape fit for warriors and gods. From Crete, we crossed half of what the ancients thought of as the world: We flew to Athens, took a bus to the port of Patrás and an overnight ferry to Bari, a city on Italy's heel. That was our gateway to the land of muscular wine and pungent olive oil that Italians call Puglia (with a silent g) and that in English is known by its Latin name, Apulia. We headed north along the coast past low-lying farmland, and swung east and up onto the Gargano Peninsula, a rocky spur that juts into the Adriatic. As the road turns upward and away from the lush coast, it cuts through gray cliffs of chalk and a landscape of grim drama that might have pleased St. John the Hermit. At the top of one hill is the austerely impressive town of Monte Sant'Angelo, which was built around a sacred cave. History springs like water There is, of course, a very old tale associated with this place: In Southern Italy, as in Crete, history springs like water from holes in the ground. One evening in 492, a farmer who was herding his cattle back to the stable, lost track of a bull and spent a frustrating night trying to track it down. By the time he had found it, grazing at the entrance of a cave, the man was so enraged that he tried to kill the animal with a spear. But the weapon did a u-turn in the air, and plunged into the chest of its hurler. This extraordinary bull was eventually deemed to have been the archangel Michael, who staked out holy ground in two subsequent apparitions, and the cave was consecrated to his worship. The Sanctuary of St. Michael remains one of Christendom's principal places of pilgrimage: We arrived in Monte Sant' Angelo just as a busload of Haitians was leaving. Later, we toured the crypts with a group of middle-aged Italians wearing knotted Boy Scout-style bandannas emblazoned with a portrait of Padre Pio, the miracle-working priest who died in 1968. A hectoring friar led the tour, mixing long-winded catechism with art and history. That is, alas, the only way to visit the original cavern which over the centuries was so elaborately fitted out with staircases, altars, chapels and churches that the grotto has all but been swallowed up by architecture. The white town that spills down the slope in staircases and serried alleys has a rigorous, geometric beauty, like a Cézanne landscape transplanted to the South. Even in summer, when the shore broils, a bracing breeze blows through its piazzas. There is something almost reproachful about the way it sits so loftily above the coastal playlands. Yet the village also displays a deeply Italian mix of fervor and insouciance. The pilgrims who pour in daily, some of them on foot, make their way past hawkers of Padre Pio statuettes and children's soccer games in which church doors double as a goal. The local snack is an inspired combination of the spiritual and the sensual: communion wafers encrusted with almonds and honey. Farther south, Puglia is softer and more open, spreading out into red fields studded with olive trees that seem too dense with fruit and foliage to be quite real. This formerly hungry corner of the country, known mostly for exporting immigrants, has lately achieved fame for its food. In the old stone sanctuary of U.P.E.P.I.D.D.E., a restaurant that is the principal reason for visiting Ruvo di Puglia, we were presented with an endless parade of antipasti: creamy burrata cheese, thin slices of eggplant grilled and rolled around ricotta, marinated zucchini, thin coins of sausage, tiny green peppers softened in oil, and on and on, the whole array accompanied by Puglia's powerful primitivo. The towns along the coast seem born of this natural opulence: Trani, Ostuni, Bitonto, Otranto and Gallipoli, each one a pastel gem. In a time of plenty, poverty has become a tourist attraction. Photographers adore the trulli, rustic stone huts, immaculately whitewashed and topped by conical domes. The inland village of Alberobello has whole neighborhoods of these houses, built by stacking stone on hand-cut stone, without the aid of mortar. From a perch, the town looks like a field of upside-down ice-cream cones. Nearby Castellana recently renamed itself Castellana Grotte in honor of its principal attraction, a stupendous cavern that plunges two miles into the earth and was discovered in the late 1930s. The tour begins in a cathedral-like antechamber, illuminated by a shaft of light that descends divinely from a hole in the cavern's ceiling. Visitors file past clusters of dripstones that make you feel as if you were wandering among a dragon's fangs. Finally, they wind up at the White Grotto, a natural space so dazzling and intricate it looks as though a rococo sculptor had carved it out of confectioner's sugar. Negative architecture From Puglia's fertile splendor, our trajectory took us into Italy's southern badlands, the arid, chalky gorges of Basilicata. Matera, the region's capital city, sits on a promontory riddled with caves and embraced by deep ravines. Since carving space out of the soft soil was easier and cheaper than constructing from scratch, the city's first churches were not built, but dug. This negative architecture emulates more orthodox building techniques: Fake beams cross the ceiling. Stone columns that bear no structural load nevertheless divide the nave. Blind, glassless windows face onto nothing but more earth. Until the 1950s, tens of thousands of people lived in Matera's city of caves, in conditions that had changed little in 2,000 years. A family of a dozen shared a dank, windowless chamber with a flock of chickens under the only bed. A donkey occupied one corner, its stall segregated from human space by a foot-high wall. In an early 20th century photo of Matera, one of the urban peasants who lived here has just stepped out of his cave-dwelling and is scrambling down the teeming cliff on the way to his distant fields. Italy's postwar democratic government, mortified by the existence of a malarial, stone-age slum, took the drastic step of shutting it down. Residents were forcibly moved to modern quarters and for decades, their erstwhile homes sat empty, gathering garbage. Some still do. But bit by bit the caves are being modernized, dehumidified, electrified and preserved. A few serve as bars or galleries, one or two as tourist boutiques. Some are being reclaimed as residences, not by the original families, who associate them only with misery, but by out-of-towners in search of the picturesque. In the upper strata of the town, the main drag runs past pleasantly dilapidated baroque palazzos, 19th century apartment buildings and lively cafes. It has the appearance of a normal provincial city. But down below, in the pockmarked cliffs, is a fragile, prehistoric warren slowly being adapted to the modern world. Check back in a decade or two. IF YOU GO The food in Crete is almost uniformly good and almost never better. Distinctions between one place's grilled swordfish and another's are matters for dedicated connoisseurs. There is, however, one restaurant worth picking out from the phalanx that line the harbor in Chania. It's called Apostolis, but beware - there are two, one for visitors and a better one that locals go to, at the eastern end of the Inner Harbor, a few blocks farther than many tourists stroll. The best meal we had in Puglia, and one of the top three or four in Italy, was at the mysteriously named U.P.E.P.I.D.D.E, in an alleyway off the principal piazza of Ruvo di Puglia. The restaurant, a cozy lair that makes overeating seem sensible, has captured an honor that means nearly as much in Italy as three Michelin stars: three shrimps from the restaurant guide Gambero Rosso, indicating excellent food at tolerable prices. Visit www.upepidde.it or call 080-3613879. (From the U.S., dial 011-39 before this or any of the following numbers.) A close second was in Lecce, at a place that bears the generic name of Cucina Casalinga, which means "home cooking." The husband and wife who inherited the venerable restaurant are keeping up family traditions, offering an astounding suite of rustic dishes, including, for those in search of the genuine local specialty, horsemeat. Don't even think about going without a reservation. Via Costadura 19; phone, 0832245178. A bad meal is difficult to find in Puglia (though we managed), and some agriturismo farm hotels offer excellent meals, as well as the ideal distance from table to bed. At the Agriturismo Serragambetta, halfway between the villages of Castellana and Conversano, dinner is served at a long table on the patio of a rose-colored 19th century villa, and places are set for overnight guests, family and however many transient friends stop by. Phone, 080-4962181, www.serra gambetta.it. If you're not determined to stay in town and you can do with a minimum of frills, agriturismo-hopping is a wonderful way to travel in Italy. The Touring Club of Italy publishes an English-language version of its agriturismo guide as "Italian Farm Vacations" ($16.95, www.touringclubof italy.com). Our favorite was Madonna Incoronata, a bucolic compound of private houses nestled in an olive grove outside Mattinata, on the Gargano Peninsula. Phone, 0884-582317, www. agriturismogargano.it. - Justin Davidson