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None the less, they have a public garden; even more immature than that of Lucera, but testifying to greater taste. Its situation, covering a forlorn semicircular tract of ground about the old Anjou castle, is a priori a good one. But when the trees are fully grown, it will be impossible to see this fine ruin save at quite close quarters just across the moat.
God be merciful to him. May Allah likewise show mercy to him who reads." One cannot be at Lucera without thinking of that colony of twenty thousand Saracens, the escort of Frederick and his son, who lived here for nearly eighty years, and sheltered Manfred in his hour of danger.
Yet this Frederick is no dim figure; he looms grandly through the intervening haze. How well one understands that craving for the East, nowadays; how modern they were, he and his son the "Sultan of Lucera," and their friends and counsellors, who planted this garden of exotic culture! Was it some afterglow of the luminous world that had sunk below the horizon, or a pale streak of the coming dawn?
Yet their town is by no means a clean place it is twice as dirty as Lucera: a reposeful dirtiness, not vulgar or chaotic, but testifying to time-honoured neglect, to a feudal contempt of cleanliness.
For this country is the Sahara of Italy. One is glad, meanwhile, that the castle does not lie in the natal land of the Hohenstaufen. The interior is quite deserted, to be sure; they have built half the town of Lucera with its stones, even as Frederick quarried them out of the early Roman citadel beneath; but it is at least a harmonious desolation.
I am weary, just now, of these structures; the spirit of pagan Lucera "Lucera dei Pagani" it used to be called has descended upon me; I feel inclined to echo Carducci's "Addio, nume semitico!"
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