About Us

Lecce's friends of the English language, the Circolo Berkeley, have never followed the straight lines of a roadmap. They stroll through the city's Baroque byways favoring blind alleys that on occasion end in wide-eyed surprise. Born in contradictions, the Circolo has made them thrive. Devoted to the English language, it dared take the name of an Irish bishop with a strong brogue, a Protestant to boot. Furthermore, history had long forgotten his ecclesiastical role and installed him among the great philosophers. His Lecce followers, with a drum beat of their own, chose to see him first of all as one of the early foreign explorers of the Salento, a role that in their meandering way they perpetuate.

Another alumnus of Trinity College, Dublin, Bernard Hickey, lent his energy to launching the Circolo. Hilda Coppola, born, suspiciously, Caffery, led volunteers in support. But here again anomaly reigns, and it would be wrong to see Irishism at work. (The Oxford Dictionary defines this harmless -ism cruelly, forgetting the fun, "A statement which is manifestly self-contradictory or inconsistent.") Hilda in fact hailed from Yorkshire on the larger off-shore island and Bernard was an Australian. The Circolo has always echoed to sounds of English from the seven continents, including that of valiant Italians dragooned into instructing the barbarians. George Berkeley, a proud proponent of 18th Century rationalism, made important contributions to philosophy, theology, psychology, optics, physics and mathematics.

Interest in his work rekindled in the 20th Century. Arthur Schopenhauer, thinking of metaphysics, called him "the father of idealism". But the word has a popular sense too: a dupe for grandiose projects. "The good Bishop" (Immanuel Kant's word) for all his genius had a weakness for half-baked but well-meant schemes that verged on quackery. It's a failing his admirers in the Circolo are willing to forgive—just as his contemporaries did—in virtue of his generous heart and mild manner.

The love affair of Puglia and the Bishop began in May and June 1717. He was thirty-two and in the midst of a grand tour. Coming from the Campania he reached Troia near Foggia and proceeded to descend the coast exercising his considerable curiosity along the way. The result was a wealth of earthy notes on the life of the time and place.

At Brindisi:

"An English sailor asked us for money. He worked nights for 12 pence a day. At daggers drawn with the locals he claimed to be on his way to Naples and said his ship wrecked on the coast and that his mates were dispersed over the countryside. Later at Naples I learned of their crimes. They had murdered Muslim passengers."

Then:

"We arrived at Lecce at midnight. We had to wait a while before they opened the gate. I don't think there's architecture like this anywhere in the world."

In Puglia Berkeley had something on his mind beside architecture and crops in the fields. His Enlightenment clarity didn't protect him from one of the juicier regional superstitions. From Barletta on, gape-eyed, he gathers details on the tarantula, its bites, remedies, and the dancing of its victims. He meets a French officer as taken with the phenomena as himself. Noting his interest, the simple folk and learned clergy keep it alive with scraps of hearsay. At Bari he manages to attend a session of the dance. He describes it clinically without suspecting it might be laid on for travelers and sportier locals. Doubt doesn't faze him even when he's asked to chip in for the music.

The Bishop was just as all-embracing in geography. He dreamt of founding a university in Bermuda from which missionaries would make North America great, first time around. Like many of our own generation, he found life in an utopian commune less alluring than it had been in his head. He retired to marriage and episcopal comfort in Rhode Island. Though he did leave a mark at Yale University, it was in faraway California, never seen by him, that the Bishop left the huge footprint of his Irish boot. The town of Berkeley, hotbed to-be of the cultural wars, was named for him in 1866. The contradiction here was that they said "burk-lee" while he said "bark-lee".

Lecce's Berkeleyites revel in the games history plays. The gentle Bishop actually pried from the grasp of the tigerish Jonathan Swift the inheritance of his sweetie, Vanessa, (Esther Vanhomrigh). Strange to imagine the butterflies, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope and Richard Steele, fluttering about this heavyweight polymath when he took himself to London drawing rooms. But the trick of fate that most pleases the Lecce Circulars is the one that best illustrates the ways of the world. George Berkeley's hobbyhorse was tar water. An infusion of pine-tree tar does in fact disinfectant small cuts. But the Bishop, no friend of smallness, saw it as an oceanic cure-all. No disease was safe in those who imbibed the bitter brew. The irony is that his wrong-headed publications on the subject far outsold any of his other books throughout his lifetime. George Berkeley returned from America to Ireland and then to Oxford. He rests there now in Christ Church Cathedral, in peace when undisturbed by backslappers from Puglia.

Peter Byrne