The Hero's Way

by Tim Parks

  But even imagining that those graffiti were scratched by someone who had also been with Garibaldi back in 1849, can we really suppose that that takes us any closer to the earlier drama? Such a man would be different, eighteen years on. Garibaldi himself was quite different in 1867, long since transformed from most wanted villain to most popular hero. He’d been saluted by adoring crowds all over Europe. Met the world’s leaders. And was physically in pretty poor shape. Pushing sixty, Garibaldi could not have done the walk that I’m doing at sixty-four. His rheumatism was so severe, he had to be lifted onto his horse. Yet he could still command an army, which I never could.

  The General celebrated his forty-second birthday in Monterotondo, where we hope to arrive by midday tomorrow. Hoffstetter describes him standing with ‘a good telescope’ on a vantage point beside a monastery, gazing down across ‘a landscape of hillocks, lush with vines and crops, beyond which, from afar, the dome of St Peters rose majestically’.

  I’m eager to find this place and to see Rome from where he saw it. The expression on Garibaldi’s face, according to his faithful aide-de-camp, was addolorato, sorrowful; perhaps he was wondering whether he would make it to forty-three or live to see the birth of the child his wife was carrying. Or perhaps, as Trevelyan prefers, he was grieving over Rome, wondering if the city would ever be free of popes and foreign armies. ‘From the vineyard beside,’ recounts Hoffstetter, ‘a boy was singing one of those yearning melodies so typical of this country.’ And hopefully more convincing than Nek’s Sanremo entry.

  But the more I think about all this, lying in Villa dei Romani with the crickets whirring outside the window, the more convinced I am that these are sentimental projections. Whenever he had a spare moment, Hoffstetter was jotting down notes, turning each day into a story. Trevelyan too was deep in his own romantic evocation of Italy and of Garibaldi. And I myself am always looking for the detail that will spin and catch the light.

  But Garibaldi lived in the moment. Looking through his telescope towards Rome, he would have been studying the lie of the land, watching for enemy activity, calculating how quickly bread could be baked to get his men on the road. That sorrowful look very likely had to do with finding more mules to replace their last carts. Garibaldi was interested in doing, not recording what had been done. Which is why the whole of this extraordinary march gets only a half-dozen cursory pages in his memoirs, full of imprecisions. He can’t remember; it isn’t important.

  And it was because he was so concentrated on the moment that he was always a step ahead of his enemies. Right now, after two days on the road, he is about nine miles ahead of us, but tomorrow we will catch up with him, because, as Ruggeri says, the first days’ marches had been ‘devastating’; the men were desperate for rest; and then, to force the General’s hand, the bakeries in Monterotondo couldn’t deliver to the deadline he demanded. It takes a while to produce 4000 rations of bread.

  DAY 3

  4 July 1849 – 27 July 2019

  Montecelio, Mentana, Monterotondo, Tenuta Gran Paradiso – 17 miles

  Mentana

  The pleasure of leaving before daylight. The household still asleep. Sneaking down the stairs, shaking the dust from your feet. You don’t have to have disliked the place. You’re not avoiding any chores. It’s simply freedom. I’m going. And going too early for the grind of goodbyes.

  Or rather we’re going. Accomplices. Free together. Taking with us the boiled eggs the landlady left for breakfast. Two portions of apricot jam. Did Garibaldi’s men feel something of this? The joy of moving on. Not knowing what the day would bring, but knowing it would not be the same as yesterday. Free in the wide world to savour the elegance of the bulrushes and the blue of the cornflowers, the smells of lavender and mint, the bray of a donkey. Striding towards distant hills, at dawn.

  Maybe they did. Or maybe they were just cursing to be prodded from their sleep in the early hours. ‘Getting going is the toughest moment,’ Hoffstetter writes.

  Today we have a list of places to visit. To start with, the monastery just outside Mentana where Anita and Hoffstetter told the monks that the men of the rearguard would be arriving soon. The monks were ‘frightened out of their wits’, having been warned how fierce and evil Garibaldi was, hence were relieved to discover that providing food and wine and floors to sleep on were all that was required. Anita checked the rooms and grounds and decided who would go where, an illiterate Brazilian mother telling the learned celibates what was what. In her approximate Italian. Beside the German officer, with his German accent. In the name of Italian freedom, Italian unity.

  But when we arrive in Via del Conventino on the outskirts of the town, the monastery is now a hotel, a picturesque pile behind a high wall, glimpsed through a thick cover of pines, oaks and magnolias. It’s 8.20. We could press a buzzer on the gate, of course, and ask to be let in. We could walk up the drive to Reception, explain that we’re conducting enquiries into a thousand and more guests who checked in without a booking on the evening of 4 July 1849, etc. But I feel discouraged. It’s just an old monastery turned hotel. Where is the piazza! Where is our coffee?

  This had been an easier walk, which is to say a gentler climb, through varied farmland and fast criss-crossing roads. There were horses in the fields and monumental piles of cylindrical straw bales, golden in the early sunshine. On the uncultivated slopes the vegetation is a massed collage of light and dark greens, gloss and matt, rounded volumes and spiky thrusts, watched over at strategic points by tall, sombre umbrella pines, angular and aloof. Gathering and unfolding as you progress, always more depth than surface, this endlessly varied plant life soaks up and satisfies the walker’s attention in a way that is wonderfully calming.

  But once in the ramshackle clutter that is Mentana, there’s not a piazza worthy of the name. Behind the town hall, the so-called Piazza Garibaldi is no more than a gritty cul-de-sac where the Birra del Borgo serves us coffee and croissants. No orange juice. We eat up fast and move on to the next place on our list, the Mentana Garibaldino Museum, which we have reason to believe opens at nine. And so it does. Monday to Friday. But not on Saturdays. On Saturdays it opens at 3 p.m.

  It’s Saturday. We console ourselves with a large mural in a steeply sloping cobbled street – Via Roma – that shows Garibaldi alone on a white horse, riding into Mentana. The town is clustered Cézanne-fashion towards the top of the painting while Garibaldi in a red shirt, his white poncho transformed into a wizard’s cloak, has neither weapons nor saddle and seems too big for his horse, his body bent and broken, mouth glum. The consequent aura of victimhood is vaguely reminiscent of Christ on his donkey riding into Jerusalem; it’s a pathos that has more to do with current taste than history.

  Around the corner a road sign points to the State Middle School G. Garibaldi. In the main street a plaque rather too high up on a stuccoed facade reads,

  These the hills of Mentana,

  Here the unequal fray,

  Here the anguish of

  GIUSEPPE GARIBALDI,

  in 1867.

  We hurry on. Mentana, it seems, has nothing to boast but this one lost battle. The hero’s previous passage through the town is forgotten.

  Monterotondo

  Where once towns began with outlying monasteries, then walls and bastions, Monterotondo is announced by superstore and shopping mall, walls of steel and glass rising behind slopes of dry grass and bamboo. Never mind. The town centre is as gracious and hospitable as Mentana was shabby and discouraging. A deliciously shady walk through a garden, typically mixing children’s playground and war monuments, leads us to a piazza where two tall cedratas are already winking on a yellow tablecloth before we realize we are sitting in the Caffè Garibaldi. Impossible to escape the man.

  As we shoulder our packs to leave, a voice accosts us: ‘How can you walk in this heat? And carry all that stuff!’

  It’s an elderly woman. She falls into step with us, wearing a summer dress on a thin frame, shins and ankles mottled with age,
a bulging carrier bag in her hand. ‘The summers didn’t use to be so hot,’ she says. She’s eager to talk. ‘I remember hoeing all day under the sun out in the fields. Now I have to run home and hide.’

  When Eleonora tells her where we’re going, the woman shakes her head in dismay. ‘You young people! Do be careful, please.’ For me this comes as the first sign that we are growing used to the heat. It’s not so bad. The key is to keep moving. A steady pace generates the slight refrigeration required not to shrivel up and die. Never stand still in the sunshine.

  A quarter of an hour later we’re at the famous convent whence Garibaldi stared at Rome through a telescope. It’s on a south-facing slope just beyond the old centre, and no doubt there would be a view across ‘rich vineyards’, as Hoffstetter puts it, all the way to Rome, were it not for the fact that the town has spread out and all we can see are the white walls and orange-tiled roofs of brash little villas strung beside the road. When at last a corner opens up the view southward, Rome is invisible in a simmer of pollution. There is nothing to feel here except the foolishness of having imagined there might be anything to feel.

  Through the gates of the monastery you can see the splintering in the white stone door surround caused by a papal cannon ball in 1867, when Garibaldi camped here for the second time. The Pope’s men shelled their own church to get at him. But there is no sign or mention of the place where eighteen years earlier – 4 July 1849 – a man was executed. Hoffstetter reports the event thus: ‘Today we resumed the severe response to insubordination: a soldier was shot. But during the execution something displeasing happened; the criminal broke free and tried to escape. The guard at the convent gate stopped him and he had to die despite the most desperate resistance.’

  Something displeasing? During an execution?

  Belluzzi, who loves Garibaldi with the blind love of the convert, tries to make the incident more palatable and justifiable. Insubordination in his version becomes ‘extremely serious insubordination’.

  What is going on here? Why is Garibaldi, who loathed the Church, obliging us to visit all these monasteries? Why did he so often billet soldiers with monks? And why, given his lifelong belief that capital punishment should be abolished, was he having a man executed?

  The General, as we’ve seen, was trying hard to put off a battle with his enemies, hoping the tide would turn in his favour. But beyond the military conflict, there was a propaganda war to be waged, a battle for hearts and minds. The Pope had come out strongly against a liberal state and a united Italy; such ideas were not compatible with his temporal sovereignty over a large part of the peninsula. This forced the Church and all its faithful into an alliance with the conservative foreign powers propping up the Pope and occupying the country. Consequently, Italian patriots must be presented as evil, a rabble of common criminals whose only purpose was to steal and kill.

  Pulpits were a good place to launch this kind of attack, the tens of thousands of pulpits in provincial Italy. The country priests, Garibaldi knew, commanded the minds of the peasants and encouraged them to spy on him. It was a Christian duty. Every time the garibaldini arrived in a town, they had to seal it off for the duration of their stay, partly to prepare against attack from outside but mostly to prevent informers, very often priests, from reporting their presence. This was one of Hoffstetter’s jobs. It meant keeping dozens of men from their rest, and stringing sentinels along approach roads to intercept each and every traveller.

  At the same time, friction between the volunteer army and the local people had to be avoided at all costs. It would play to the Church’s narrative. The easiest way to do this, Garibaldi told Hoffstetter, was to billet the men just outside town. People could then bring food out to them, rather than have the soldiers invade their streets and homes. None of the authors who describe the march has a single word to say about sanitary arrangements, but these too must have been a concern. Four thousand soldiers are four thousand people who need to pee and crap. If the likes of Belluzzi and Trevelyan don’t want to mention it, Garibaldi certainly had to think about it. Heaven knows, Eleonora and I have to think about bodily needs often enough. But two people alone can pick their secluded spot in the countryside. Or synchronize bowels and cafés. An army is a different matter.

  The monasteries presented an obvious solution. They were usually situated on the outskirts of towns. They were large, with extensive walled grounds, easy to defend. They had bread and wine, vegetables and fruit. And sanitary facilities. There were no women. Case closed.

  However, billeting the men in monasteries was a risk. To upset or offend the clergy would only invite them to step up their anti-Risorgimento rhetoric. They could present themselves as victims. On the other hand, if one could convince the monks that this was no rabble but a well-organized group of idealists fighting for a just cause, then some might be won over. Ugo Bassi, himself a Barnabite monk, was often at the fore when it came to announcing to the holy fathers that they had guests. Likewise Father Stefano Ramorino, another priest marching with the garibaldini.

  The General’s quandary was he did not know his men. When recruiting his Legion in the autumn of 1848, he had conducted personal interviews with volunteers. But there had been no time to vet all those who had turned up that evening at San Giovanni in Laterano. Many might have been criminals eager to get out of the city before papal law was reimposed. Hoffstetter describes how Garibaldi, entering a monastery, would immediately place an armed guard on the vegetable gardens and wine cellar. He did not trust his men not to steal.

  On 5 July, in the early hours, as the column was about to set out on the road north, Garibaldi dictated an order of the day that ran to three pages: ‘Although I have frequently had cause to remind you’ – he wrote, and his officers would have read the words out loud to their battalions – ‘to be rigorously respectful towards all people and property in the places we’re passing through, this for many reasons, but most of all so that you can show yourselves true sons of that republican principle that we all wish to advance at the cost of our lives, nevertheless, I find myself obliged once again and with great regret to recall this duty . . .’

  Some soldiers had been stealing livestock and selling the animals on for money, some selling rifles, some taking food without leaving payment. Such actions were ‘unworthy of the name we must all be proud of, the First Italian Legion, a name that is and shall be a great glory for us’. And the General issued a warning: ‘Anyone guilty of theft of any object of whatever kind or value will render themselves subject to the death penalty.’

  Was the soldier executed in Monterotondo guilty of stealing? Hoffstetter calls him a delinquente, a criminal. If so, who had he stolen from, if not the monks? In which case the execution would serve as a demonstration to the monks that a republican Italy would defend their rights.

  ‘His soldiers fear him with the same intensity that they love him,’ Hoffstetter noted in his diary on the following day. ‘They know he has only two punishments: reprimand or death . . . He would have them shot without so much as taking the cigar from his mouth.’

  The General’s order of the day was stamped with the official seal of the Roman Republic, ‘God and the People’. It was important for Garibaldi to believe he had a legitimate mandate for his actions. But thinking the whole thing over as we look through the gates into the monastery, trying to imagine the hectic circumstances in which that execution took place, what strikes me is the absolute confidence of Garibaldi’s decisions and rhetoric. Here is a band of men on the run, last survivors of a failed revolution. They are surrounded by armies far greater than their own. No one is financing them. No one is going to come to their aid. Very likely they will soon be crushed, annihilated. But Garibaldi insists on discipline. And in the teeth of the evidence he declares that one day the First Italian Legion will be a title to be proud of. Glory will come, not in heaven but here on earth.

  And he was right. It did come. Heading back through Monterotondo to pick up our journey north, hugging th
e meagre shade of a stuccoed wall, we look up and see the sign ‘Via Ciceruacchio – Garibaldino Martyr, 1800–1849.’ Here is another of those walking beside us, and one of the many who will not survive our trip.

  Ciceruacchio is a nickname with the sense of Chubs or Chubby. Angelo Brunetti was the man’s real name. Born to a labourer’s family in 1800, he had built up a carting business, bringing wine and farm produce into Rome from the Alban Hills. It was he who guided Garibaldi’s men out of Rome on the first night’s march. He knew the territory. He also ran a busy tavern. But most of all Ciceruacchio was the charismatic, undisputed leader of Rome’s popolino, the mass of ordinary people who became passionately involved in politics in the months leading up to the declaration of the republic. ‘He can hardly read or write,’ Florence Nightingale wrote to her family from the city in 1847, ‘sells firewood to all the English, has not genius, but a common sense almost amounting to genius, and can turn the whole Roman people round his fingers.’

  Vivacious, explosive, expansive, persuasive, throughout the 1840s Ciceruacchio settled local disputes, organized festivals and demonstrations. ‘He is Rome’s first citizen,’ observed the Piedmontese ambassador. ‘He exhorts, pontificates, keeps the peace.’

  When the Pope reneged on his promises of reform, Ciceruacchio was at the centre of the popular protests that followed. Later he was suspected of conspiring to have the Pope’s prime minister, Pellegrino Rossi, assassinated, and even of convincing his eldest son to do the deed. These are suppositions, but we do know that after the Pope left Rome, Ciceruacchio was involved in vandalizing churches and burning confession boxes. Mazzini was appalled, but Ciceruacchio was untouchable; he fought hard throughout the siege and was always in the thick of it.

  So this champion of the people is up there at the head of our column, beside Anita and the General and Ugo Bassi, with his chubby face, goatee beard and wavy moustache. His two sons are travelling with him, the elder under a false name with false papers; the younger is only thirteen years old. All three depend absolutely on Garibaldi, since, should they be caught, summary execution is the only outcome. Yet despite the man’s fame and charisma, our accounts of the march barely mention Ciceruacchio. Ruggeri recalls him generously sharing what little water he had in his canteen at a moment of great thirst. Belluzzi quotes a witness who, forty years on, remembered Ciceruacchio losing his temper with a priest and picking up a rifle to scare him. But that’s about it. Perhaps, at nearly fifty, he was feeling his age, exhausted by the long hours on the road and difficult sleeping conditions. Or perhaps he was appalled by the collapse of all his hopes, the many bereavements, the perils ahead.