The Pursuit of Italy

by David Gilmour

  It would have been fun to sit at a café table and listen to this animated fellow with his blue eyes and spectacles, his tubby appearance and his curious wispy beard which he allowed to grow only under his chin. He was a clever and amusing man, affable in company, charming at most times and generous to the peasants on his estate. Yet he could be cynical and quarrelsome and was often odious to friends and to colleagues; in offensive moments, after listing their defects, he was apt to summarize them to their faces as ‘useless nonentities’. He could also fly into such a rage, shouting and banging his fists on the table, that onlookers feared he had gone off his head. At a lunch with Azeglio and other colleagues in the early 1850s, he suddenly lost his temper, flung his plate and omelette on the floor and ran out of the room.

  One victim of Cavour’s rages and disdain was Victor Emanuel. The prime minister was often discourteous and condescending to his monarch and sometimes insulted him, as he did when presenting his resignation after Villafranca. On another occasion he lost his temper, kicked the palace furniture and broke one of the clocks. Even stranger was his behaviour when the king, whose queen had been dead for many years, decided to marry morganatically his favourite mistress, Rosina Vercellana. Cavour, who wanted him to marry a Russian princess, was so annoyed that he informed him that Rosina was an unfaithful mistress who enjoyed orgies. Victor Emanuel was tempted, understandably, to challenge his prime minister to a duel for telling such a story, which, apart from anything else, appears to have been untrue.5

  The Piedmontese gaze traditionally swivels north, but Cavour’s was directed even further north than most people’s. His father’s mother came from Savoy, a region he ceded to France in 1860, and his own mother was Swiss. He himself was born a French subject because in 1810 Piedmont belonged to the napoleonic empire, under which his family had prospered, his father being appointed chamberlain at the court of the governor-general, Prince Camillo Borghese. The chamberlain dignified his infant with Borghese’s Christian name and with the more glamorous (though no more useful) prestige of having the governor’s wife – Napoleon’s sister Pauline – as his godmother.

  The countries Cavour most admired were France and Britain, both of which he visited on numerous occasions. Their culture, however, was not a great draw because he himself had few cultural interests, although he took one of Walter Scott’s novels on a visit to the Highlands to help him experience ‘romantic emotions’. He was essentially a man of reason who would have been happy as a statesman of the Enlightenment; the Romantic era had little effect on his life until in middle age he became a convert to nationalism.

  Cavour’s journeys to England as a young man were industrious and practical. With energy and enthusiasm he inspected gasworks and railway stations, he toured the Arsenal at Woolwich, he visited shipyards in Newcastle and factories in the Midlands. While he found Parisian society more congenial than its London equivalent, he was impressed by English prosperity, by the sense of liberty and security there, by the workings of government; he thus became a liberal, convinced that political freedom was essential for the creation of wealth. After looking at the careers of William Pitt and Robert Peel, he was also persuaded of the advantages of measured progress and an undoctrinaire approach. As an advocate for free trade, he applauded Peel’s Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, though he himself would never have broken his party or sacrificed his career for a matter of principle. One journalist from southern Italy described him, not unfairly, as ‘a cross between Sir Robert Peel and Machiavelli’.6

  Cavour’s knowledge of economics was a great advantage to Piedmont during his years as prime minister. So were his skills as a deputy, his energy and leadership and talent for debate; he did much to consolidate a parliamentary system in a country with few traditions of representative government. Yet in politics he could be both unjust and undemocratic: he sometimes managed to exclude opposition members from parliament and he refused, even after the victories of 1860, to allow Mazzini to return from exile. His chief defect, however, was the mendacity and unscrupulousness which he displayed in his parliamentary manoeuvres and his changes of policy. Azeglio, who in these respects was very much his successor’s superior, thought that after long exposure to these traits people had simply learned to believe that what Cavour said was the opposite of the truth.

  Turin has many wonderfully overblown monuments to Piedmont’s kings, generals and politicians. The ugliest one is the huge and ridiculous statue of Cavour in the Piazza Carlo Emanuele, erected on the spot where the French revolutionaries had placed their guillotine. Known as ‘the paperweight’, it reveals nothing of its subject’s character, no suggestion of the gregarious frequenter of cafés and gaming tables. Its bottom half is crowded with bronze reliefs and nude allegorical figures representing Cavour’s great services to Italy. At the top stands the statesman in a toga, helping a curvaceous and semi-naked Italia to her feet while she clings to him and presents him with a laurel wreath.

  This association with Italy was of course natural yet, while Cavour was a great Piedmontese, he was not a great Italian. Until near the end of his life he was simply incurious about what was happening in the peninsula beyond Piedmont. Although as a young man he had plenty of spare time, he had had no inclination even to see Tuscany; in his one visit to Venetia, in 1836, he contrived to find Venice and Verona uninteresting. He spent nearly a decade as prime minister of the Kingdom of Sardinia‡ without going near the island of that name, although its impoverished inhabitants were subject to his rule and in great need of political and economic assistance. Cavour never travelled as far south as Siena, yet in the last year of his life he was legislating for vast areas hundreds of miles south of Tuscany. Had he only bothered to visit the former Bourbon kingdom, he would have noticed how different it was from Piedmont and might have devised a more appropriate system for its administration. He might also have realized that his free trade dogmas were unsuitable for an economy with a history of protectionism. He might even have learned that Sicilians no longer spoke Arabic.

  Cavour’s reputation rests on a string of political and diplomatic successes in 1859 and 1860: the alliance with France, the defeat of Austria, the absorption of the centre, the annexation of the south and the establishment of the Kingdom of Italy. He was indeed a brilliant diplomat but he was also a lucky and sometimes irresponsible one. Bismarck in Prussia considered it immoral to start a general European war for the sake of German unity and expansion. Yet Cavour often talked of wide conflagrations, of ‘setting Europe alight’, stirring up the Balkans, bringing in the Russians, fomenting implausible civil wars in Germany and Switzerland. Nor was this just talk. In 1859 he sent thousands of rifles to Hungarian rebels fighting the Austrian Empire and a year later dispatched five shiploads of weapons for use by Romanian revolutionaries against the Ottoman Empire. When it was discovered that the ships’ crates, which masqueraded as coffee containers, actually contained guns, there was a diplomatic uproar. Cavour tried to lie his way out of the scrape but did not fool Queen Victoria, who was appalled by the piratical actions of ‘this really bad, unscrupulous Sardinian government’.7 In the year of his death Cavour was still plotting a great European conflict that would result in an enlargement of Italy’s borders.

  Victoria’s adjective ‘unscrupulous’ was one commonly applied to Cavour by foreign statesmen and diplomats as well as by political opponents at home. Yet few people were aware of the extent of his deviousness and inconsistency. In 1855 Cavour had sent an army to the Crimea because he claimed it was essential to exclude the Russians from the Mediterranean, but two years later he allowed them to establish a naval base on Piedmontese territory near Nice. In the mid-1850s he was plotting to put Napoleon’s cousin Lucien Murat on the throne of Naples and yet also suggesting an alliance between Piedmont and the Bourbons. More contorted still were his actions in February 1860, when he was simultaneously suggesting to the Prussians that they should jointly attack Austria and to Napoleon that together they should march against Prussia.
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  The wonder is that anyone in Europe put up with him. Part of the explanation is that the governments of Britain and France supported, for emotional as well as political reasons, the Italian national cause; however much they distrusted Cavour personally, they wanted to see a resurgent Italy. He himself undoubtedly achieved great successes, yet his behaviour set a tone for his country’s diplomacy that was copied less successfully by his successors for almost a century. Through him and his example, Italy gained the reputation of being an unreliable and sometimes embarrassing ally.

  THE NOBLEST ROMAN

  Take down the Michelin guide to Italy and look at the maps of the towns. Start with the As (Alassio, Alessandria, Ancona, Aosta), go down to the Bs (Bari, Barletta, Belluno, Bergamo), and carry on to the Vs, the last letter to have proper towns in Italy (Venezia, Vercelli, Verona, Viterbo). All these places have something in common: they have at least one space – a via, a viale, a ponte, a corso or a piazza – named in honour of Giuseppe Garibaldi. Many also have statues of the great man, often astride a horse impassively directing his volunteers, or standing with a lion at his feet in case viewers need reminding of his leonine qualities of strength and courage.

  In Genoa Garibaldi is represented not only by a huge equestrian bronze in front of the opera but also, in diverse and equally inappropriate ways, by a Via Garibaldi (a street of Renaissance palaces), a Piazza Garibaldi (a yard with a shop selling motorbikes), a Vico Garibaldi (a gloomy cul-de-sac) and the Galleria Garibaldi, not an art gallery here nor a shopping arcade like the Galleria Mazzini but a tunnel for motorcars – useful in a city that tried to solve its traffic problems by erecting a motorway on stilts that separates the old town from the port. The next tunnel is dedicated to Nino Bixio, Garibaldi’s most ruthless and violent lieutenant in 1860.

  Garibaldi was an authentic hero, an idealist and a visionary but an achiever too, a valiant soldier and an incorruptible man. He also looked and sounded right for the part he had to play, wide-browed, fine-featured and possessed of a rich and melodious voice. According to Giuseppe Guerzoni, his friend and biographer, his ‘superb head’ made him look at different moments like Jesus, a lion and Jove on Olympus.8 Others were struck by his resemblance to images of Christ, and people often referred to him as a ‘saviour’ and a ‘redeemer’.

  Garibaldi may have been the most commemorated secular figure in history; his only rival is Gandhi. Hailed in his lifetime for his exploits in South America as well as Europe, he was probably the most famous person on the planet. In England, which he visited in 1854 and 1864, he inspired the adoration of vast crowds, the love of several women, the business sense of the manufacturer of ‘squashed flies biscuits’ and the spirit of Nottingham Forest football team, which in his honour adopted his red shirts. The British of the period, whose education consisted mainly of Latin and Greek, saw him as a classical hero, Punch magazine saluting him with the words Shakespeare gave Mark Antony to describe Brutus – ‘the noblest Roman of them all’ – though whether Garibaldi would have relished comparison with Caesar’s assassin is doubtful; although a revolutionary, he deplored assassination as a political weapon. One lord mayor of London claimed him as a modern embodiment of both the Spartan Leonidas and the Roman Cincinnatus, who was said to have rescued Rome in times of crisis and returned to his farm afterwards. Such classical comparisons were apt: like Leonidas, Garibaldi usually fought against superior forces and, like Cincinnatus, he often returned afterwards to his farm. Yet he was also likened to medieval paladins such as William Tell, William Wallace, Joan of Arc and Robin Hood, while Americans referred to him as Italy’s George Washington (another of the cincinnati, a rare breed). Alas, he had a dreadful effect on poets. After Tennyson had planted a tree in his garden on the Isle of Wight, Britain’s poet laureate was moved to write:

  Or watch the waving pine which here

  The warrior of Caprera set

  A name that earth will not forget

  Till earth has roll’d her latest year –§

  Born in Nice in 1807, Garibaldi was a mariner by profession. From 1824 he worked as a merchant seaman on the Black Sea route before joining the Piedmontese-Sardinian navy in 1833. Almost simultaneously he became attached to Young Italy and soon deserted the navy to take part in Mazzini’s planned uprising in Genoa in the following year. As happened quite often, this type of plot failed to get off the ground, and, although Garibaldi managed to escape, he was sentenced to death in absentia and forced to flee, first to Marseille and then to South America. He did not return to Italy for fourteen years.

  In exile across the Atlantic, Garibaldi became a freemason and preached the message of Young Italy to Italian immigrant communities on the southern continent’s eastern seaboard. To earn a living, he sailed up and down the coast, attempting to sell maccheroni, but he was not much good at this or any other commercial activity: while he was trying to herd 1,000 oxen to Montevideo, 400 of them drowned in the River Negro. Yet in South America he managed to discover his vocation: to fight ‘for the ideal of freedom and independence’. As a result, he spent several years battling for the secessionists of Rio Grande do Sul who wanted independence from Brazil, followed by several more in the service of Uruguay in its wars against Argentina. He fought numerous skirmishes on land and at sea, winning a few more than he lost and suffering such vicissitudes as imprisonment, torture and capsized boats. José Garibaldi, gaucho and guerrillero, learned his new trade and became a leader of men. From the horsemen of the pampas he acquired his riding skills as well as his beige poncho and collarless red shirt, the uniform his followers in Italy loved and his opponents derided as vulgar and clownish.

  Garibaldi’s admirers have accepted their hero’s own estimate of the struggles he waged in South America on behalf of oppressed peoples. Yet the politics of the continent are complicated, and it is not always easy to discern who were the oppressors and who the oppressed. The figure of the foreigner taking part in other peoples’ civil wars is seldom an appealing one, and it may not have been obvious to everyone why a man determined to unite an independent Italy was so determined to disunite an independent Brazil. Garibaldi may have been the freedom fighter he claimed to be but equally accurate descriptions for this period, during which he preyed on his opponents’ merchant shipping, would be bandit, corsair and buccaneer.

  In 1839, while his ship was anchored off the Brazilian coast, Garibaldi saw a young woman through his telescope and was so captivated that he went ashore to find her. He instantly fell in love with the vivacious Anita, who reciprocated his passion strongly enough to abandon her husband, a local cobbler, and attach herself to Garibaldi, with whom in due course she had four children. In 1848 they sailed to Europe, in different ships and to different destinies, Giuseppe to celebrity and Anita to martyrdom.

  On reaching Spain, Garibaldi heard about the spate of revolutions and rushed to fight for the Italian cause alongside the Piedmontese. Mazzini’s revolutionary newspaper, established in Milan after the expulsion of Radetzky, saluted ‘with brotherly love the brave, the long-awaited Garibaldi’ and wished him ‘new glory, for his glory is our glory, and is Italian glory’.9 Although little glory was to be won in his campaign against the Austrians near Lake Maggiore, his enthusiasm for the cause and his belief in its righteousness remained absolute. In the following spring he fought heroically in Rome until, overwhelmed by foreign armies, Mazzini’s republic collapsed. Garibaldi himself refused to capitulate and insisted on carrying on the fight in the hills of central Italy. His departure from the city illustrated his dramatic sense of occasion and his understanding of how to transform defeat into propaganda. While others yielded or slipped out of Rome with a British passport, he had his proto-Churchillian moment, sitting astride his horse in St Peter’s Square, offering the republican army nothing but hunger, thirst, heat, cold, battles and forced marches – all without pay. Some 4,700 men accepted his unappetizing offer and marched with him that evening out of the Porta San Giovanni. Many later deserted and many others d
ied (including Anita, who had insisted on accompanying him even though she was pregnant), but Garibaldi eluded his pursuers. On reaching Liguria, he was arrested by the Piedmontese army and released on condition that, after visiting his children in Nice, he left the country. After spending some time in North Africa wondering what to do, he crossed the Atlantic and reached Staten Island.

  In exile Garibaldi resumed his trade as a merchant seaman. Acquiring a ship in Lima, he traded between China, Boston, the Philippines and South America; once he sailed from Peru to China with a cargo of guano only to find that the Cantonese did not want it. From afar he despaired at the plight of Italy, ‘its servitude and the passivity of its sons’, but he found some solace in 1854, when, on being allowed to return home, he bought his farm on Caprera, an island of granite boulders and an aromatic scrub of lentisk, cistus and stunted juniper. There he extended the house and created rooms with high ceilings; there he planted olive trees and cleared the land to make fields for his sheep and corn. When he was on the island, consoled by the solitude and the sweet-smelling breezes, he lived privately and frugally with his various children and (at different times) two of their mothers, one of them a nursemaid employed by his daughter Teresita, the other a peasant woman who became his third wife, Francesca Armosina. Before dawn he dictated letters and in the daylight he spent his time tending the farm. Although he served wine to his guests, he himself was a teetotaler, drinking only water at lunch and cold milk in the evening. Like Mazzini, he seemed to exist on coffee and cigars; his chief relaxation was to play the piano and sing arias from the operas of Vincenzo Bellini, the Catanian maestro of bel canto.

  After this second return to Italy, Garibaldi broke with Mazzini, joined the National Society and in 1859 fought successfully with his volunteers against the Austrians in northern Lombardy. At the end of the war the Piedmontese government gave him command of its forces in the Romagna but removed him after he urged an invasion of the Papal Marches. The years 1859–60 were the most dramatic of his long career; they were also the most tumultuous in his crowded and colourful private life. In the space of eight months he had a child with one woman (a peasant), proposed unsuccessfully to a second (a baroness), fell in love with a third (a countess), and married a fourth (the teenage daughter of a marquess), whom he discarded soon after their wedding on discovering that she was pregnant with someone else’s child.