The Bare Cross

Ten crosses are painted on the walls of Cristo alle Grotte, a church cut into the side of a ravine outside Mottola, a hill town above the Gulf of Taranto, in the heel of Italy. For a long time they were all the decoration it had.

They differ in size and style and were not all painted at once. The oldest seem to belong to the first half of the eleventh century, two hundred years after Constantinople ended iconoclasm, its long campaign against painted saints, and this corner of the Byzantine south may have been keeping faith with an abandoned scruple, though nothing shows it. Then, late in the thirteenth century on the fullest local account, though a more recent study allows the eleventh, someone painted over the older scheme in the apse of the right-hand nave, adding a half-length Christ in a red tunic and a blue mantle. The thumb and two fingers of his raised hand are extended in the Latin blessing, and the altars below him are Latin in type, in a church whose arches keep traces of a screen, the Greek templon, later pulled down. Anyone who has come to Puglia for the Greek rite surviving under the Latin will have to fit that hand into the story somewhere. The church was afterwards deconsecrated, and shepherds and travellers slept in it. One account, marking the date as unverified, has it reconsecrated in 1968, three years before scholars met nearby to settle who had dug these places.

There are hundreds of such churches along the ravines, the gravine, that cut the country between Taranto and Matera. For almost two centuries they have been made to testify: for peasants, then for monks, then for peasants again, then for God and the tourist trade. My subject is the people who called them as witnesses, and how much was claimed before anyone had examined the ground.

I. The Basilian story

The first witnesses for the peasants were clergy. Francesco Paolo Volpe became canon theologian at Matera in 1816 and in 1842 published a Descrizione ragionata of some of the town's churches, and local historiography credits him and a Mottola canon, Francesco Caramia, with suggesting early on that the cave settlements were lay: villages, Christian in worship and older in their habits. Volpe died in 1858. The French archaeologist François Lenormant first crossed Puglia in about 1866 and came back several times, writing for a general public, as he said himself when a colleague complained that his book on Magna Graecia had no notes. In his account Basilian monks fleeing iconoclast Byzantium had peopled the gravine as the Desert Fathers peopled the Egyptian wilderness. Charles Diehl, who in 1894 was the first to describe the church of San Nicola at Mottola, took this up, and Émile Bertaux after him, and for most of a century it was what these caves were.

Local historians now say that the documents behind the story were false. The accounts I have traced name neither the documents nor whoever exposed them, and until someone does the claim should be held loosely, for all that Lenormant already had a record. In 1854, when he was seventeen, inscriptions turned up at the chapel of Saint-Éloi on his family's land in the Eure. Philologists called them forgeries; his father denied it and he kept quiet. His 1862 book on Eleusis let stelae from the island of Rhenea pass as Eleusinian, and Wilhelm Fröhner later accused him, with evidence, of plagiarism, though none of this concerns Puglia.

The word Basilian was shaky without his help. Ordo sancti Basilii grows common only from the papacy of Innocent III, around 1200, mostly in papal bulls, and may have been a label the Roman curia devised for Greek-rite monasteries. Greek monks had been in southern Italy for centuries by then. There were fewer of them in the caves than the story required: the current reading ties most of Puglia's surviving frescoed crypts to private patrons and burials. Italian scholars eventually gave the habit of seeing a monk in every hole a name, panmonachesimo.

II. A priest, a film, a magazine

In 1954 the Istituto Luce, the state newsreel house, put out ten minutes of colour film called Cristo fra le campagne, with Daniele G. Luisi's name on it. A shepherd crosses himself before a Basilian crypt, the camera goes in, and the voiceover calls the frescoes a "rare example of Byzantine painting in Italy" and a "destination of popular devotion". The archive files it under Catholic religion, figurative arts and tourism. That same year Cosimo Damiano Fonseca, born in neighbouring Massafra in 1932, was ordained a priest, and it fell largely to this clergyman, who became a medieval historian, to take the monks out of the caves. His Civiltà rupestre in Terra Jonica came out in 1970; the term, "rock-cut civilisation", is usually credited to Gianni Jacovelli. In 1971 Fonseca brought the first international conference on the subject to Mottola and Casalrotto, with five more over the next decade, and what they set in place of the hermits was an organised peasant world of churches, hamlets and work. San Gregorio, one of the churches in question, lay nearly buried until it was dug out in 1972 and 1973.

In October 1987 the magazine Bell'Italia ran twelve pages headed "Le grotte di Dio", God's caves, and the name settled on four of Mottola's churches: Santa Margherita, Sant'Angelo, San Nicola and San Gregorio. I have not read the article and it may say something subtler. The name, sixteen years after that conference, put God back in. San Nicola picked up a second title, "the Sistine Chapel of rock-cut civilisation", and the town hall's website carries both.

III. Two rooms at Poggiardo

Poggiardo lies well to the south-east in the Salento, outside this country of ravines, and belongs here for what was done to it. The crypt of Santa Maria degli Angeli was dug around the year 1000 and by the sixteenth century had been filled with rubble; in 1583 a synod under the archbishop of Otranto ruled against the Greek rite in the Salento, though it hung on into the next century. A local writer, Giovanni Circolone, described the hidden church in 1847, which did not prevent its discovery by chance in 1929, during an excavation near the parish church. The vault had nearly gone and was replaced in concrete.

Damp and mould then went for the paintings. In 1955 they were taken to Cesare Brandi's Istituto Centrale del Restauro in Rome, and the town's own account has the walls sawn out with them. They toured exhibitions around Italy while Brandi, it is said, refused more than once to send them back to the crypt. On 12 June 1975, with Aldo Moro attending as prime minister, they were installed in an underground museum beneath Piazza Episcopo, in their old relative positions, with the old outline marked on the floor.

An authentic surface, set against an outline marked on a museum floor, in a town that no longer holds the rite that produced it.

Hauntology, the English kind especially, has spent twenty years on what lingers after its source has gone, mostly in metaphor. At Poggiardo the copies are prints on fire-resistant polystyrene, fixed to the walls of the real crypt in the places the paintings had left. The town dates this to 1999, a local history to 1985.

IV. The Poles' church and the blood

The largest rock settlement around Mottola is in the gravina di Petruscio, and even its dates are proposals: it may be the fort raised in 1023 by the Byzantine governor Basil Boioannes, and may have been abandoned around 1156 during Manuel I Komnenos's campaign in Puglia, though a document still names it in 1227. Among its churches, the biggest, never a bishop's seat, is known as the Cathedral. Another, unfinished, is the Poles' church, named for the graffiti of soldiers of the Polish II Corps, which set up its headquarters at Mottola in January 1944. Many of those men had come to Italy from Soviet camps by way of Persia and Egypt.

The blood could be called next. Ezio Silvestroni and Ida Bianco, who mapped thalassaemia, the inherited anaemia, across Italy, connected its spread to Greek colonisation, and it is a short and tempting step from there to reading the Byzantines in the living population of these plains. I can find no study that takes it. Carriers of the trait also resist malaria better. This was malarial country, and selection can raise the frequency of a mutation with no settlers involved.

The ten crosses at Cristo alle Grotte have not, to my knowledge, been dated one by one, so the sequence of the church's earliest painting remains an estimate.

Last revised: July 2026