In Italy, a riddle wrapped in stone

AT Castel del Monte, the stage is set for tragedy or black magic. Clouds scuttle across the sky, and a milk-white full moon rises. Footsteps echo on cold, wheat-colored stone, startling pigeons into flight.

A medieval emperor hunted with falcons and cheetahs here, consulted astrologers and slept on Oriental silk.

Local people sought refuge during the plague, and brigands hid out in the castle. Vandals over the years stripped it, leaving little more than an empty shell on a lonely hilltop at the edge of the Murge, a barren-looking limestone plateau worlds apart from the sunny Italian south most people know.

This medieval masterpiece, begun in 1240 -- about the same time as Westminster Abbey -- has eight sides, linked by eight eight-sided towers.

Its seemingly endless repetition of the octagonal form has haunted mathematicians through the ages who see it as a work of pure geometry. The more mystically inclined impute occult significance to this temple of the octagon, noting that great buildings around the world, such as Jerusalem’s 1,300-year-old Dome of the Rock, also have eight sides.

Whether icon or equation, the castle has more vibes than “The Da Vinci Code,” as I discovered when I came here in February, drawn like iron shavings to a magnet. I didn’t know why I had to see it, except I love a good mystery. And Castel del Monte is surely one, a model for the labyrinthine library in Umberto Eco’s 1983 medieval whodunit, “The Name of the Rose.” I stood in the castle’s deserted courtyard at dusk, nerves taut, heart thumping, ears pitched, wishing the walls could talk.

But Castel del Monte, as silent as a sarcophagus and as strange as a UFO, keeps its secrets, glowing like the crown of its 13th century builder, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II.

Like England’s Richard the Lion-Hearted and saintly Louis IX of France, Frederick was one of the giants of the European Middle Ages, though far more complex than his contemporaries.

Cultured and brutal, despotic and enlightened, a Christian crusader who was excommunicated, he left a legacy that historians still debate, including David Abulafia, author of the recent biography “Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor,” which seeks to demystify the medieval ruler.

But Frederick’s enigmatic aura has proved hard to dislodge. In his time and afterward, he was called stupor mundi (the wonder of the world) and the Antichrist.

A 1927 biography of Frederick by German historian Ernst Kantorowicz was a favorite of Hitler, whose delusions of grandeur were fueled partly by the emperor’s efforts to consolidate a realm that included Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, parts of France and Italy, Malta, Cyprus, Israel and Lebanon.

To oversee his vast domain, Frederick traveled widely and incessantly, taking with him his crown jewels and library, elephants, camels, hunting birds, bodyguards, poets who created the sonnet and mathematicians who gave Western civilization Arabic numerals.

Of all the lands he ruled, he loved low-lying Puglia best, in those days a richly forested region bordered on the east by the Adriatic Sea. Here he built his startling octagonal castle, part hunting lodge, part pleasure palace, part symbol of his might.

Among great architectural ciphers, Castel del Monte stands out for its stubborn unlock-ability, though it is less well known than others chiefly because it is in the relatively untrammeled, ill-reputed Mezzogiorno, at the heel of the Italian boot.

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Frederick’s shadow

WARNINGS about the region’s poverty and crime rang in my ears. I wore a money belt and resolved not to let my guard down, especially in Bari, the Puglian capital of 300,000, where I began my explorations.

I had planned to pick up a rental car and drive into the city, but I got cold feet on the plane from Rome, remembering an acquaintance who narrowly avoided a carjacking when she went astray in Bari. So I took a cab from the airport through the city’s unlovely industrial outskirts and was safely deposited at the Palace Hotel, which occupies a modern high-rise close to the city’s center.

My room’s decor was so dated it looked as though Pat Nixon had conceived the design. But it lacked no amenities, and the front-desk clerk gave me good advice about where to eat dinner.

I had my first Mezzogiorno epiphany that night at La Pignata, around the corner from the hotel. It occupies an erstwhile Chinese restaurant but is now a temple of cucina povera, or “poor cuisine,” which reflects the hearty peasant roots of southern Italian cooking.

I started with a seafood salad made of big, meaty langoustines, shrimp, squid, octopus and mussels in a simple olive oil and lemon sauce. Then I dipped into a plate of fresh, ear-shaped orecchiette pasta, coated in tomato basil sauce, a Puglian specialty, accompanied by a half-bottle of Castel del Monte red.

Every meal I ate in Puglia was memorable, starring fish from the Adriatic and produce from the plains northwest of Bari known as the Tavoliere, which means chessboard. Its farms, geometrically laid out by the ancient Romans, yield what many consider Italy’s best olive oil, as well as almonds, fruit, cheese and grapes for the region’s red wines.

But you’d never know about the agricultural hinterland in Puglia’s capital. Like Barletta and Trani, two other coastal towns with Frederick II connections, Bari is surrounded by a workaday port largely devoted to petroleum shipment, tough, gritty suburbs and a maze of deteriorating streets. Reaching the old historic center on the waterfront can be a nerve-rattling adventure.

But any tour dedicated to Frederick II must include the old town of Bari. It was an Arab emirate in the 9th century, then ruled by Byzantium until the arrival of the Hauteville clan, freebooters from northwestern France who launched their own Norman conquest in Italy in the early 11th century. The Hautevilles battled throughout the island of Sicily and the southern Italian mainland, conquering Bari in 1071, helping found the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Frederick inherited this kingdom from his Norman grandfather, Roger I.

Despite the passage of 800 years, Frederick II still casts a long shadow throughout southern Italy. Streets, piazzas, trattorias and even laundries in Bari are named for him. One of the many fortresses he built or renovated stands on the waterfront, moated and walled. Sculptural details on its western portal, as finely wrought and imaginative as an illuminated manuscript, include Frederick’s symbol, an eagle clutching a lion in its claws.

Bari’s lovely cathedral and San Nicola basilica predate Frederick by at least a century but speak eloquently about the Italian Middle Ages, introducing travelers to Puglian Romanesque, a style unique to the region. Unlike Gothic cathedrals in northern Europe, medieval Puglian churches look squat from the outside, though their interiors are lofty, graceful and full of light, bespeaking an achieved state of grace, not the striving toward heaven of Notre Dame.

Even more singular are their elaborations, inspired by Byzantine, Muslim and Classical art. San Nicola, for instance, has Arabic windows, blind arches, sculptural motifs and a central portal surmounted by a sphinx. Two oxen frame the doorway, the smoothness of the stone attesting to the frequency with which passersby pet them.

I picked up a rental car after touring Bari and had no trouble finding my way up the coast, first to Trani, a quiet town with another Frederican castle dating from 1233, and an exquisite Puglian Romanesque cathedral on the waterfront, backed by the Adriatic.

San Nicola Pellegrino, the third of three churches built one on top of the other, has a tall, elegant campanile, a fancifully decorated facade featuring all the animals in Frederick’s menagerie, including elephants, and a finely crafted, 12th century bronze door (now inside the church for safekeeping).

Barletta, about 10 miles north of Trani, has another striking Puglian Romanesque cathedral and was where Frederick launched a crusade in 1228 to liberate then-Muslim-controlled Jerusalem, after repeated promptings from Pope Gregory IX. The emperor’s tardiness in getting started earned him excommunication, a censure he bore for the rest of his days even though he won back Jerusalem using diplomacy. But his willingness to negotiate with infidels instead of spilling blood further infuriated Gregory, who took to calling him a lover of Muhammad.

At a time when theologians were criticizing Rome’s worldliness and hedonism, Frederick came to be seen alternately as God’s chastising instrument and the Antichrist to the church establishment.

Frederick’s castle in Barletta is now a museum, with a bust of him, one of the few remaining likenesses. But no amount of contemplation reveals whether he was the wonder of the world or the Antichrist.

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The hunt is on

AFTER my one night in Bari, I took a room in a fortified farm, or masseria, within sight of Castel del Monte, about 40 miles northwest of Bari. Like many other masserias in rural Puglia, the rambling farm complex welcomes tourists. Accommodations are in a recently built wing of simple but comfortable guest rooms, where the sheets and towels bear the crest of the masseria‘s owner, Salvatore Tannoja, whose family was ennobled around 1770.

The kitchen next door is fronted by a porch, with strings of drying tomatoes, garlic and onions hanging from the rafters. I ate most of my meals in the rustic dining room, ensconced beside a huge open hearth decorated with antique farm implements and gleaming copper pots. Everything served here -- ricotta cheese, focaccia bread, pizza, eggplant Parmesan, pickled mushrooms, olive oil and wine -- was made at the masseria, heavenly fresh, authentic and delicious.

It stayed cold and foggy while I was here, which made Frederick’s castle seem all the more haunting, especially at night when its ramparts were illuminated. But even in daylight, you can see Castel del Monte from miles away. A winding road leads past vineyards and orchards, then through a pine forest on its way up to the castle, which I first visited at dusk.

It’s a stiff climb from the parking lot to the portal, a Classical triumphal arch on the building’s east side, sculpted of rose-colored breccia. Besides the main entry and a handful of small, mullioned windows, the exterior walls are blank.

Inside the octagon, the rooms are arrayed around an eight-sided courtyard and open onto one another with no corridors. The towers between them have vestiges of 13th century latrines, vaulted Gothic ceilings and spiral staircases leading to the second story, almost a mirror image of the first. Though most of the castle’s embellishments are long gone, some marble fireplaces, graceful three-tiered columns and cunningly sculpted capitals remain, hinting at the original decor.

The chamber above the entrance is thought to have been Frederick’s throne room, though he never spent much time at Castel del Monte, stopping occasionally to indulge his passion for hunting.

Around 1248, the emperor wrote “The Art of Hunting With Falcon,” an ornithological treatise that survives in illustrated-manuscript form at the Vatican Library in Rome.

In it, Frederick identified himself as “one who cared nothing for the size of the kill but only for the thread of understanding between man and bird, [for] the skill that enabled a man to extend his will into the sky and to draw back his emissary from the clouds.”

That is the man I thought of rattling around his castle in the dying light, not the heretical monster abhorred by the pope or the medieval tyrant admired by Hitler, though historians suggest he may have been something of both.

Good and bad at once, like all men. Maybe that’s the real riddle of Castel del Monte, tantalizing, troubling, impossible to solve.

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This way to castle

GETTING THERE:

From LAX, connecting service (change of plane) to Rome is offered on Air France, British Airways, Continental, US Airways, Lufthansa, Delta and American. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $740 until May 25, then increase to $1,260 until Sept. 10. From Rome to Bari, nonstop service is offered on Alitalia and Air One. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $70.

From there, it’s about a 45-minute drive to Castel del Monte by way of highways 98 and 170.

TELEPHONES:

To call the numbers below from the U.S., dial 011 (the international dialing code), 39 (country code for Italy) and the local number.

WHERE TO STAY:

Tenuta Tannoja, Masseria San Francesco, Andria; 0883-545-731, www.tenutatannoja.com, is a country inn on a farm a few miles west of Castel del Monte. Doubles about $104, including breakfast.

Castel del Monte Park Hotel, Castel del Monte, Andria; 0883-569-866, www.casteldelmonteparkhotel.it, is a stylish new hotel complex near the castle. Doubles from $120, including breakfast.

Palace Hotel, 13 Via Lombardi, Bari; 0805-216-6551, www.palacehotelbari.it, is a well-run modern hotel. Doubles start at $240, including breakfast.

Hotel Regia, 2 Piazza Duomo, Trani; 0883-584-444, is a 10-room inn and restaurant in a restored palazzo. Doubles $150, including breakfast.

Hotel San Nicola, 29 Via Luca de S. Cagnazzi, Altamura; 080-310-5199, www.hotelsannicola.com, is in a distinguished 18th century palazzo in the historic center of Altamura. Doubles from $156, including breakfast.

WHERE TO EAT:

La Pignata, 173 Corso Vittore Emanuele II, Bari; 0805-232-481, is a terrific place to sample Puglian seafood; a two-course dinner with wine costs about $25.

Osteria al Duomo, 29 Via Duomo, Barletta; 0883-332-816, serves seafood, pasta and pizza. Two-course meal about $25.

Trattoria Federico II di Svevia, 3 Via Giuseppe Luciani, Altamura; 080-314-5699, features simple Puglian basics such as steak and pasta; about $15 for two courses, including a house wine.

TO LEARN MORE:

Italian Government Tourist Board, (310) 820-1898, www.italiantourism.com.

Consorzio Operatori Turistici Pugliese, 363 Via Napoli, Bari; 080-534-7030, www.turismoinpuglia.it.

-- Susan Spano