The Hero's Way

by Tim Parks

  A great wet cloud is held up at the corners above olive groves and gravel pits, like a sagging sheet. It must burst soon. We have a mile or so of main road to walk, back towards the Tiber, before turning off on a tiny track to link up with the main body of Garibaldi’s column at a town called Passo Corese, seven miles to the north. ‘No, it’s too early to stop,’ I tell Eleonora as we pass a service station with a big café. Two minutes later, the wet sheet splits, the heavens open, and we’re dashing back.

  This is the first of a number of occasions over the coming weeks when we’re prodded to think of providence – the café right there, a single isolated building in an expanse of open country, exactly as we needed it. ‘I’ve always had some faith in luck,’ Garibaldi admits in his memoirs. And ‘when it comes to war, you need luck on your side, or a very superior genius’.

  With no claims to genius, we’re sugaring espressos contemplating a steady downpour through plate glass. The scene in the café is familiar. The Italians are avid Sunday trippers. They rise early, move straight from bed to car and grab themselves a quick breakfast standing at the counter. Not having a car to escape in, we sit at a table studying maps and weather forecasts. Eleonora observes that there’s a mile or so along the route our app is proposing that doesn’t appear on Google Maps. The satellite image just has a broad stain of dark green. It’s odd.

  Cut now to an hour later and two figures standing on a narrow road under a makeshift shelter. The rain is coming down so hard that the drops bounce merrily about their feet. Each uses one hand to hold up a trekking pole whose point passes through an eyehole in the corner of a plastic groundsheet stretched above their heads; the other hand pulls the sheet down behind them, so that the water runs off the surface in a chuckling trickle beyond their ankles. Fortunately, the only car that passes them in twenty minutes slows down and veers away. Even so the spray tickles their shins. ‘Thank God there was no wind,’ the woman remarks when finally the rain eases and they can fold the soaking groundsheet.

  Another mile down the road, and the sheet is stretched over the trekking poles again as the couple press their backs against the wall of a barn. Thunder rolls over low hills. Through the teeming rain they spy the same car returning. It’s moving cautiously, wipers racing. This time it stops; the window slides down. ‘Buon giorno. Can I offer you a lift?’

  It’s 9 a.m. Sunday morning. The driver is wearing a suit and tie. On his way to mass.

  It’s our first temptation. To abandon the quaint pathos of the viandante, out under all weathers, and return to the contemporary convenience of the combustion engine and the warm sedan.

  ‘We’re fine,’ Eleonora says. ‘We’re walking.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll be soaked. Let me take you to the village at least.’

  I’m not sure which village he means. It would take a while to explain to him about Garibaldi.

  ‘No thanks.’ We shake our heads. And he shakes his; he seems puzzled.

  ‘Buona domenica,’ we all sign off.

  Towards 10.30, with hints of sunshine brightening the clouds, it looks like we’ve got away with it. The road is flat, empty, easy, the landscape a relaxing palette of dull greens framed by distant hills. We are planning to walk twenty and more miles today. To Poggio Mirteto. All good, then, until a yellow sign with bold black lettering announces, ZONA MILITARE. LIMITE INVALICABILE. In short, No Entry. However, the sign is old and faded. There’s no fence or barrier to block our progress.

  The hell with it.

  Another hundred yards and the road deteriorates. Asphalt crumbles to clay. We’re skirting brown puddles. More signs appear, with interesting variations. ZONA MILITARE. DIVIETO ASSOLUTO DI ACCESSO. Not just forbidden, but absolutely forbidden. ZONA MILITARE, SORVEGLIANZA ARMATA. Armed surveillance. Why didn’t our app know about this? But to turn back now would mean retracing our steps a mile and more to take the road by the Tiber with its heavy traffic.

  Once invested in an attack, Garibaldi comments, even if you realize it was a mistake, the only thing to do is to go on. Eleonora is hesitant; those signs are so threatening. But they’re also very old, I point out, rusty even, and we haven’t seen any hint of military activity.

  We enter the woods. This is the enigmatic green stain on Google Satellite. The path begins to climb. Bushes and brambles narrow in. Cobwebs cling. Branches spring in our faces. I’m using the trekking poles to beat a way through now. Water sprays off the leaves. Beneath our feet the path is becoming a ditch, a stream. Nobody has been this way in years. Why? Are we about to come across some top-secret installation? Or will it be target practice? Could we plead that we didn’t see the notices, we were so concentrated on our app? Will the military men be interested in our enthusiasm for Garibaldi, who after all gave his name to any number of Italian battalions and regiments? Though it has to be said the hero himself was categorically opposed to the existence of professional armed forces. Armies, he thought, should only be formed ad hoc to confront a despot or foreign invader. ‘I would fight against the Italians themselves,’ the General declared, ‘if they tried to deprive another people of their liberty.’

  I can’t imagine getting into all this, should a shot ring out.

  Eleonora’s cheerful gameness amazes me. I’m so ready to feel like a bully, if only she would complain. But she won’t. Not even when her hair snags on thorns. We’re fighting through a jungle now, climbing over fallen tree trunks, ducking under low branches. Any hope of staying dry has long since been abandoned. A brown foam swirls and bubbles over our trekking shoes. ‘You don’t want waterproof shoes,’ the expert in Milan told me. ‘They’re so much hotter.’

  ‘How much further?’ she asks. I reach in my pocket to consult my phone. But it isn’t there.

  MY PHONE ISN’T IN MY POCKET!

  My left pocket. I always put my phone in my spacious left pocket. It’s not there.

  This is not the same as being shot at, but nevertheless a bombshell. Aside from all the normal problems when one loses one’s phone, there are the photos I’ve been taking, any number of photos, which amount to my notes on the trip. Not backed up anywhere, since my Google photo allowance has long since been exceeded.

  Eleonora is calling my phone from hers. It doesn’t ring. The rain is getting heavier. As I scurry back down the path – where did I last consult the thing? – not even bothering now to avoid scratches and soakings, it crosses my mind how carefully Hoffstetter and Ruggeri and Gaetano Sacchi must have looked after their diaries on that march, kept them in safe dry places, never abandoned them even in extreme circumstances.

  The phone is in a black case, which hardly makes things easier, given the gloom under the thick vegetation. I stop, panting, turn 360 degrees, then go on. I poke in some weeds. I feel I’m in the zone. I’d been checking the thing every ten minutes.

  THERE IT IS.

  Oh, the pleasure of finding something you feared lost! My dear dear Huawei, all the way from China to the Tiber valley. As I pick it up, it starts to ring. Sweet sound! I don’t give a damn that my feet are soaked, my knees bleeding, my jacket torn. I have my phone, my photos.

  ‘Got it, Ele!’

  And onward. The vegetation begins to thin, the path broadens. True, there are more stern warnings that we absolutely oughtn’t to be where we are, but as long, I decide, as there isn’t a fifteen-foot barbed wire fence between us and the road when we get there, all will be well.

  Just as we turn a bend into a last steep slope, the dogs appear. Two great white Dobermann-type creatures. They are standing on the track above us looking down. For some reason, the fact that they are not barking makes them all the more ominous. As if they were professionals, informed of our imminent, unlawful arrival.

  Eleonora grabs my arm. The dogs seem in no hurry. They are studying us, predatory heads pointing, smelling the air. There’s a static, dreamlike feel to the scene. As if we had conjured it from our fears.

  ‘It’s completely fine,’ I announce. ‘They’re just two du
mb dogs.’ Shaking off her hand, I walk straight at them in the rain.

  They don’t move. Big animals. White with pinkish noses and eyes. They seem fascinated by my effrontery. I advance at a steady pace, stupidly remembering that the Austrians wore white uniforms. Always have your enemy understand that you are absolutely determined, Garibaldi insists. You will not turn back, whatever your losses. The white dogs watch me approach with growing interest. Calmly determined, Garibaldi qualifies, lucidly determined. One animal begins to paw the ground.

  I’m ten yards away when a voice calls from the distance, off to my right. It’s a man’s gruff voice from beyond the trees where a meadow is opening up. The dogs hesitate, as if caught between competing duties, then race off. A moment later I glimpse two men with shotguns.

  Five more minutes and we’re at the end of our track, where, sure enough, defended by a high fence, there is a long low military building. But this is to our left. There is no obstacle to our reaching the road on the right. LOGISTICAL ARMY COMMAND, reads a large notice. POLYFUNCTIONAL EXPERIMENTATION CENTRE. There are no soldiers on sentry duty. Hoffstetter would be appalled. The path, it seems, has been closed for no reason at all.

  By Italian standards Passo Corese is a recent settlement. It grew up where the Rome–Florence railway crosses the river Corese, a tiny tributary of the Tiber. There would have been next to nothing here in 1849. When we ask two passers-by Where is the piazza? they respond, Where exactly do you want to go? The main piazza, we say. They give complicated instructions. Second on the right, a flight of steps, first left, then ask somebody else. We can’t find the steps. It seems the piazza must be at the top of a kind of hillock in the middle of a maze. We have to ask three times. Under their umbrellas, people are puzzled. But why do you want to go to the piazza? We want to see the church, Eleonora offers. There are wry smiles.

  The steps, when we find them, are many and steep. Arriving, we discover, yes, there is a piazza, and a church, but no café. It’s a big space entirely given over to a car park, which is empty because mass is over. The church is a modern brown brick pile. The Lego-like bell tower reminds one how beautiful such buildings used to be.

  Back at the bottom of the hill, we’re barely through the doors of a spacious modern café when a monstrous deluge explodes, something that will radically alter walking conditions for days to come. As the rain pours down we slip into the bathroom to change into dry clothes.

  Ponte Sfondato

  ‘The winners tell one story,’ says an elderly man in the grocer’s in Ponte Sfondato, ‘and the losers another.’

  It’s now mid-afternoon. Five miles on. The grocer’s in Ponte Sfondato doubles as a bar. With just two tables.

  ‘The truth is,’ the old-timer proceeds, ‘Garibaldi didn’t beat the Bourbon army in Sicily. The soldiers had been bribed not to fight.’

  It’s also a newsagent’s, and a tobacconist’s.

  ‘He would never even have landed in Sicily if he wasn’t protected by Jewish bankers and English lords.’

  Once again providence has provided us with a refuge from the rain.

  ‘How can you believe,’ our man spreads his arms ‘that he took the whole of southern Italy with a thousand men? It’s a fairy tale!’

  Needless to say, we’re responsible for having sparked off this tirade.

  But first let’s get our bearings. As we said, the garibaldini marched nine miles due north beside the Tiber from Monterotondo to Passo Corese, which was where I suspect they had their swim. After that the Tiber drifts off north-west, while the General proceeded north to Poggio Mirteto, a further ten miles on, in the direction of the larger and more distant town of Terni. This walk took them through the hamlet of Ponte Sfondato, where Trevelyan is convinced they had their swim, in the Farfa, not the Tiber. It hardly matters.

  Ponte sfondato means broken bridge, and this is odd because in 1849 the famous bridge, or rather geological feature – a huge natural arch of stone created by the erosion of the little river that passes under it – was still very much intact. Indeed the road to Terni ran over it. The bridge only collapsed in 1961, having featured in various films, including The Return of Don Camillo and Totò and Carolina. Even the retreating Germans crossed it in the summer of 1944. The name Ponte Sfondato actually derived from the older Monte Sfondato – Broken Mountain. A change of one letter to draw attention to the only interesting feature of the place. A couple of centuries later, when the bridge, alas, fell into the river, there was at least the consolation that the sfondato now made sense.

  One curiosity of the walk from Passo Corese has to be mentioned. We found a country lane that climbs away from the town between olive groves and tall electricity pylons. At a corner, a large sign pointing to our left declared, AMAZON. Not a reference to Anita, but to the Amazon Logistics Centre, a development of over 700,000 square feet employing more than 2000 people which sends millions of products all over Italy. So this nondescript provincial dead end is in fact at the nerve centre of a billion clicks, as people from Trieste to Taranto seek what they want in cyberspace and wait until someone in Passo Corese slips it into a package so that it can be whisked off to the nearby autostrada and rail connections. Five hundred hectares of olive grove and archaeological park were levelled to build the facility, which is at once the biggest local employer and a powerful expression of modern society’s aspiration to be done with any reliance on the local. Here I must confess in passing that we bought all our clothes for this trip online. And they all come from abroad.

  But speaking of clothes, we can’t afford to get wet again, since we’re only carrying one change. So when, just as we are leaving the grocer’s in Ponte Sfondato, the rain comes down again, we turn back inside. The proprietor, a morose woman in slippers and crumpled housecoat, eyes us from behind her counter. I order a glass of wine to keep her sweet. For one euro fifty she fills me a whole tumbler of something sharp and sour. Later, when I head for the bathroom, feeling nauseous, one of the older men at the only other table takes the opportunity to move in on Eleonora.

  The man’s excuse, I later intuit, was to draw her attention to two photos on the wall showing the old stone bridge before it collapsed. A matter of local pride. Upon which she told him of our Garibaldi project. As I return, he retreats rather abruptly to his seat and his game of cards, and the four men begin to discuss Garibaldi, without addressing us but knowing we can hear them. Which is odd. Their assumption seems to be that we know nothing and need enlightening. Of the four, all in their seventies, one is the type Italians call a dietrologo, a conspiracy theorist.

  Garibaldi, this man tells his mild companions, as he deals out the cards for another game of scopa, was at best an ingenuous frontman for international banks and Anglo-Jewish scheming. At worst a bandit. The fanciful story of his conquering the south of Italy was invented to cover up a Masonic plot to destroy the Bourbon monarchy and place the south under the ruthless sovereignty of the north, which then proceeded to bleed its economy dry and even embarked on a campaign of genocide.

  Taking breaks to throw down cards and protest over his bad luck, or raise a glass of sour wine to his lips, the man goes on and on. None of what he says is new to me. It is part of a now popular revisionism that seeks to rubbish the ‘myth’ of the Risorgimento. Quite why these people want to do this isn’t entirely clear. Initially, you might suppose they were pushing for some new division of Italy into four or five autonomous states, but there’s little real appetite for that these days. Even the once separatist Northern League has now become just the League and looks for votes in the south like any other national party. Perhaps what the proponents of this version of events most enjoy is the thought that there never was any heroism or idealism in the world, a conviction that releases them from the burden of emulation.

  Where Eleonora comes from – Taranto, on the south coast of Puglia – revisionism is particularly strong. The south was miserably governed and much exploited after unification. The bandit bands – the brigands as they�
�re called – were ruthlessly suppressed; Gaetano Sacchi, once accused of being a brigand himself, would be a leading figure in that suppression. A recent movement that refers to itself as the Neoborbonici, the New Bourbons, talks up the Bourbon kings of Naples and claims that a flourishing and entirely viable southern economy was deliberately destroyed by the north. Here there is some truth and much exaggeration, but again, crucially, there seems to be no political direction to this movement. It constructs a moral high ground from which to lay claim to victim status and disclaim responsibility for the dire state of the south as it is today. We can’t do anything because the south was destroyed by the Risorgimento, in which Garibaldi was a key figure.

  ‘He did it for money!’ our man in Ponte Sfondato exclaims. There’s a derisive tone to his voice. ‘Why else? He was a desperado! They stole from churches. Carried off all the gold and silver. What do you think he bought his island hideout with?’

  ‘Don’t,’ Eleonora says. She covers my hand with hers, which has a couple of fresh scratches above the knuckles.

  She’s right. There’s no point reminding them of the famous letter of 1845 in which Garibaldi rejected all payment for his long service to the government of Uruguay in their fight for independence, this while Anita was raising their children in a shack with no chairs to sit on. No point explaining, to these men over their Sunday afternoon card game, that the farm on barren Caprera, off the north coast of Sardinia – Garibaldi’s home from 1856 on – was bought with a small legacy and loans from friends. No point telling these men that after handing over half of Italy to King Vittorio Emanuele in 1861, Garibaldi returned to Caprera with a sack of seeds, three horses and a barrel of stockfish.