It Is Now
A Ruin, The Inhabitable Portions Of Which Have Been Converted Into Cheap
Lodgings For Sundry Poor Folk - A Monetary Speculation Of Some Local
Magnate, Who Paid 30,000 Francs For The Whole Structure.
You can climb
up into one of the shattered towers whereon reposes an old cannon amid a
wind-sown garden of shrubs and weeds.
Here the jackdaws congregate at
nightfall, flying swiftly and noiselessly to their resting-place. Odd,
how quiet Italian jackdaws are, compared with those of England; they
have discarded their voices, which is the best thing they could have
done in a land where every one persecutes them. There is also a dungeon
at this castle, an underground recess with cunningly contrived
projections in its walls to prevent prisoners from climbing upwards; and
other horrors.
The cathedral of Venosa contains a chapel with an unusually nne portal
of Renaissance work, but the chief architectural beauty of the town is
the decayed Benedictine abbey of La Trinita. The building is roofless;
it was never completed, and the ravages of time and of man have not
spared it; earthquakes, too, have played sad tricks with its arches and
columns, particularly that of 1851, which destroyed the neighbouring
town of Melfi. It stands beyond the more modern settlement on what is
now a grassy plain, and attached to it is a Norman chapel containing the
bones of Alberada, mother of Boemund, and others of her race. Little of
the original structure of this church is left, though its walls are
still adorned, in patches, with frescoes of genuine angels - attractive
creatures, as far removed from those bloodless Byzantine anatomies as
from the plethoric and insipid females of the settecento.
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