by Tim Parks
The landscape is gentler north of Acquasparta; the hills curve softly, as though sculpted by the plough lines that turn them brown or ochre. On the skyline a farmhouse peeps from a cluster of lindens. A shale track leads through tunnels of overhanging willows. This was the day when the Brazilian maverick Bueno, who was supposed to be providing an advance guard with his cavalry, contrived to disappear, so that both Garibaldi and Hoffstetter wasted hours trying to find where he’d got to, only to discover he’d never bothered to leave San Gemini. He was disgruntled because, unlike Major Migliazza or Colonel Müller, he hadn’t been chosen for the more adventurous missions, making contact with the Austrians in Foligno or the French in Civita Castellana. One thing Garibaldi couldn’t hide was an indication of those he trusted and those he did not. But Bueno’s disobedience almost proved disastrous.
Life is full of unexpected discoveries. After a couple of miles we cross the main road, the superstrada, hoping for refreshment at the little village of Colvalenza. Who would have thought that this insignificant Umbrian settlement could be home to one of the most spectacularly ugly buildings I have ever seen. In the 1950s a Spanish nun, María Josefa Alhama Valera, announced that God had told her to build a basilica at Colvalenza. Water would be found here, she prophesied, deep beneath the basilica, water that would heal pilgrims from cancer.
A Spanish architect was engaged and duly offered the worst that early-60s design could dream up, a massive central building formed of a dozen cylindrical brick silos supporting a flat concrete roof and boasting a dramatically protruding porch and plaza area of the kind one expects to find at a Las Vegas Hilton. In case anyone travelling in the vicinity might miss the sight, a slim brick campanile rises a couple of hundred feet beside the basilica, topped by slabs that look like the radar arms on airport control towers but are meant to represent Christ’s cross. Closer to the ground is a huge photo reproduction of María Josefa Alhama Valera, otherwise known as Maria Esperanza of Jesus.
Water was indeed found more than 300 feet below the sanctuary; a number of large baths were built, coachloads of pilgrims were bussed in and miracles occurred. But the greatest miracles of all were, first, an ‘incredible rain of money from heaven, in the presence of many witnesses’ and, second, the appearance of a cardboard box with 40 million lire in it. In both cases the sums exactly corresponded to the amounts required to pay the restless building workers.
Nearby, in the Bar Marisa, a man assures me that actually the sanctuary was financed by General Franco, who like many dictators saw the advantages of this kind of religious fervour. While Eleonora is in the bathroom I try to find corroboration of this unpleasant slur from Google, but there is none. It does tell me, though, that Pope John Paul visited the sanctuary in 1981, shortly before Maria Esperanza’s death, and that the church now boasts a relic of John Paul consisting of a piece of cloth soaked in his blood.
‘Incredible,’ Garibaldi remarked, ‘that in these modern times people believe in miracles and cling to relics.’ He was referring to the miracle of the Neapolitan San Gennaro, whose congealed blood, held in a small glass globule, will liquefy, or not, at three appointed periods of the year, according to whether the saint is happy, or unhappy, with the state of affairs in the town. In September 1860, when Garibaldi arrived in Naples during the triumphant campaign that ended in Italian unity, the holy blood seemed reluctant to liquefy, and the Neapolitans were beginning to draw their conclusions. Garibaldi let the priests know there would be serious trouble if San Gennaro didn’t oblige and the following day the blood liquefied.
Todi
I’m enjoying the small miracle of the recovery of my feet, which if not blister-free are only mildly sore. On the other hand I’m cursing myself for not appreciating more quickly that the rapidly worsening irritation where right thigh meets groin must be a fungus. I know, dear reader, one should not mention these unpleasant details, but I feel I owe it to the garibaldini, who with their woollen shirts and difficulties with hygiene, must have suffered much worse.
The need to purchase some anti-fungal cream makes it all the more tantalizing when Todi appears in the distance, seemingly so near but actually a couple of hours away. We’re walking along a high ridge on the east side of the north–south valley and the main road. For one long stretch our narrow track is perfectly straight, with lines of olive trees in the dry grass each side. On and on, straight, straight, straight. With Todi floating up ahead like a hallucination or one of those model cities that saints raise up to God on silver plates in Renaissance paintings.
Garibaldi also saw Todi from a distance and wondered why he hadn’t received a report from Bueno as to whether it was safe to enter or not. His plan was always to arrive in a town before the main body of his men to reassure the local authorities and organize accommodation and food. He hesitated, then got Hoffstetter to send a company of dragoons ahead, just in case. Galloping up to the town, the horsemen surprised an advance guard of a hundred Austrians, who took one look at the advancing redshirts and withdrew. In the town people scrambled to get the band together to come out and greet the garibaldini.
Now Todi floats over a field of sunflowers, all turning their big round faces towards us in golden mockery. It hovers and shimmers and never seems to be any closer. Until at last there is the steep climb down into the valley, under the superstrada – filthy puddles, tin cans and urine smells – and then the even steeper climb up into town, the stoniest, most intensely medieval town I have ever visited.
We have booked into an ex-convent, Hotel Casa Vacanze SS Annunziata, which, at the time of booking, I wrongly believed to be where Anita had stayed for two nights. In fact she was at the Monastery of the Cappuccini just a few hundred yards away; Garibaldi had a straw hut built for her in the garden, so as not to offend the monks with her female presence.
It’s the pleasant female presence of Alessandra who meets us at Reception. Since the convent’s website offers a ‘Profile of the Typical Guest’ which begins, ‘Singles, priests, nuns . . .’ and finishes with ‘boy scouts, girl scouts,’ I was worried that eyebrows might be raised at the odd couple we are. Not at all. Alessandra is all smiles and spinsterish solicitude. To oil the wheels, Eleonora confides that three of her aunts are nuns. Alessandra tells us what a pleasure it was to work with the Servants of Maria Riparatrici, but they left the convent last year, handing over its management to a Perugia-based consortium. They were too old, too few. All over Italy convents are closing.
Nevertheless, the SS Annunziata remains exactly as it was when the Servants of Mary were here. Alessandra leads us to our room through winding corridors, past a grand refectory whose long wooden tables sit under the frescoed lunettes of a low vaulted ceiling. Then halls, chapels and more corridors. Big white walls, brass lamp fittings, impeccably polished items of furniture. Whatever one thinks about the church’s hostility to the Risorgimento, it’s hard not to feel a certain melancholy seeing these once-busy spaces now echoey and abandoned.
Out in the streets we search for a cash dispenser. Not all Italian shops and bars accept credit cards. Thinking of the ease with which one refreshes one’s wallet these days, I realize it’s time for a word on the garibaldini and money. Who was paying for their long march?
They had a ‘war chest’, Hoffstetter says, with enough paper money to pay the soldiers and to buy food for about four weeks. This wad of cash had been given them by the constituent assembly on leaving Rome and was readily accepted in Tivoli and Monterotondo during the first days of their journey. Garibaldi prided himself on paying for food rather than requisitioning. He didn’t want bad blood with peasants and shopkeepers.
However, once the French got a grip on the capital, they demanded that all paper money issued under the republic receive their official stamp in order to be legal tender. When Garibaldi heard this, Hoffstetter claims, he had his money taken back to Rome on horseback and submitted to the authorities for stamping by people who would not arouse suspicion, then returned to his escaping army. It�
�s hard to believe, but I haven’t been able to find any other account of how they dealt with this emergency.
In any event, on arrival in Todi, aware that Roman paper money would be worthless when they reached Tuscany, Garibaldi persuaded the local authorities to accept what he had left in exchange for coin. He asked for 1000 scudi – the gold coins of the Papal States – but the councillors were only able to give him 728 because, on hearing of the rebels’ arrival, the chief tax collector, Tommaso Mancini, had that very day dispatched all the town’s money to the Austrian authorities in Perugia. Garibaldi threatened to have the man shot, but relented. The alliance between local bureaucrats and foreign occupiers was a serious obstacle to national self-determination. The Austrians astutely understood that by financing the pet projects of local bigwigs, they could win their loyalty and stifle any incipient patriotism.
These days a small town hardly has any independence inside the nation state. You don’t find a modern town council discussing foreign policy. But in 1849, partly because of poor communications, partly because of the long Italian tradition of the independent city state, the governors of a place like Todi were used to making strategic decisions. On seeing the city’s walls and elevation, Garibaldi, in Belluzzi’s version, proposed to the councillors that his men might stay and defend the town against both the French and Austrians. In Hoffstetter’s account, on the other hand, Garibaldi actually warned his aide-de-camp that any thoughts of staying and fighting in Todi would be a terrible mistake. They would be trapped and eventually thrashed. But whatever was actually said, Todi’s councillors were not enthusiastic. They insisted that the city’s defensive walls were not sound. They did not want the place to become a target for cannon fire. And you suspect that very likely Garibaldi was just testing the temperature of patriotic fervour, aware that fear of a fight would make the councillors more willing to shell out some money to get them on their way. In the event, the garibaldini handed over a pile of deserters’ weapons and ammunition to pay for their food and board, even two cannons that Forbes had dragged from Terni. They also managed to persuade the town’s civil guard to give them 200 modern rifles in exchange for older ones. Then all afternoon the men queued up at the town hall with requests for medicines and fresh soles for their shoes and grooming brushes for their horses, so many requests that the magistrates dealing with them gave up trying to keep account. In the end, the records suggest it cost the town about 3000 scudi to host the garibaldini for just two days.
On the gracious central piazza outside the town hall, with the pinkish-white duomo at one end and the pharmacy I’m so in need of at the other, Garibaldi watched two dogs, one very big and one very small, fighting ferociously on the flagstones. The big dog was like the Austrians, he announced, the small one his column of rebels. A gathering crowd cheered on the little dog.
Meantime, Anita in her straw hut in the monastery garden, received the city’s ‘most distinguished ladies’ and very likely told them the story of how she came to be there. Having left Garibaldi in Rieti, in April, after she fell pregnant, and taken refuge in his family home in Nice, she had begun to worry about the bad news coming out of Rome. Eventually she decided, without telling her husband, to go back and join him. She had taken a boat to Genoa, another to Livorno, then proceeded, entirely alone, by coach and cart through Austrian-occupied Tuscany down into Lazio. On 26 June, with the siege of Rome entering its last days, she walked incognito through the French lines – My husband is wounded, she told them – and found her way to Garibaldi’s headquarters in Villa Spada, then under French cannon fire. Hoffstetter was impressed by the General’s spontaneous joy on seeing her. ‘Dear Anita,’ Garibaldi later wrote. ‘I pressed her to my heart. It seemed everything was just as we wished. My good angel had flown to my side.’
One wonders what the fine ladies of Todi made of this. No doubt they asked about Anita’s three children (a fourth had died in infancy), presently in Nice. Very likely they marvelled at a woman who could drop her domestic duties like this, while pregnant too, and likewise at a husband who did not order his wife to go home, but respected her choice. Did they pick up a whiff of freedom on that hot summer afternoon in the makeshift straw hut in the monastery gardens? Of love even? Anita asked if someone could kindly give her a more comfortable saddle; the South American type she was using was no longer practical with the belly she had. And someone did. Again and again, reading about this march, about the mingling of sedentary townsfolk and vagabond patriots, one can’t help feeling that the generosity so many ordinary citizens showed was the fruit of a deep yearning to live the lives they were afraid of.
The pharmacy was closed for its long lunch break. I would have to wait until four. We ate at a trattoria named after Jacopone of Todi, a thirteenth-century monk and mystic who preached the virtues of poverty to rich Pope Boniface, was imprisoned for it and wrote many wonderful laude, rhyming religious poems, which were popular for centuries. Somehow Eleonora knew all about Jacopone and insisted we visit his tomb in the church of San Fortunato. One descends steep stairs to the crypt, elbow to elbow with French and Japanese tourists. ‘Here lie the bones of the Blessed Jacopone,’ says a stone in Latin, ‘who, mad for the love of Christ, mocked the World with his new art and conquered Heaven.’
Still the pharmacy wasn’t open. So we climbed the stairs of the town hall where Garibaldi traded paper money for gold scudi, and wandered round the civic museum. I bet, I told Eleonora, there will be a painting of someone serving Todi on a plate to God. And there it was. Or they were. Two paintings. In both cases three bishops offered up the whitish stone skyline on a big wooden tray. It was just the kind of message of humble subservience that Garibaldi hated. Christianity undermined a man’s courage, the General reasoned, inclining the peasants to think this life was less important than some improbable afterlife, and ‘heaven their homeland, not Italy’. But he would have appreciated the glass cases full of tiny Etruscan bronzes showing gesticulating male figures beside captions explaining ‘Mars in attack’ or ‘Hercules in attack’. Also an illustrated map from Renaissance times showing Todi in the centre – a cluster of towers on a mountain – then all the many little borghi in the city’s jurisdiction, scores of them, each shown as a few palazzi perched on a little hill with the Tiber and its tributaries snaking between. Every single borgo is drawn differently, carefully, lovingly – Colvalenza, Acquasparta, Cesi, Cappuccini, Villanova, Massa – and even the hills are carefully distinguished by shape and steepness. You know at once the thing was drawn by someone who had done a lot of walking.
I had hoped the museum would have a section on the Risorgimento. It was relegated to a gloomy corner between two rooms; on the wall, a list of the citizens of Todi who took part in the wars of independence, together with a page of explanation. There was only one proper exhibit. Or there would have been. In a glass case on a small table was a sheet of A4 paper bearing the following bilingual message in bold lettering:
LA SELLA DI ANITA GARIBALDI È IN RESTAURO
ANITA GARIBALDI SADDLE IS UNDER RESTORATION
It seems the distinguished ladies of Todi had kept the saddle she left behind, so that now any passing visitor can examine the leather she was finding so uncomfortable between her thighs. Or could, if it wasn’t being restored.
Thinking of discomforts, we returned to the pharmacy, picked up some anti-fungal cream and dashed back to the cool of SS Annunziata for an hour’s repose. Meantime, on the road east to Orvieto, one of Garibaldi’s cavalry patrols caught up with a convoy of carts carrying 5000 fowls and 50,000 eggs, destined, according to their travel documents, for the French army in Rome. It was fair game. Taken back to the monasteries where the men were billeted, this generous injection of protein somewhat reconciled the monks to their unwelcome guests. ‘What merriment!’ says Hoffstetter. ‘The kitchens steamed all day. Wine was brought up from the cellars.’ Priests and soldiers ate heartily together, and still the men would have boiled eggs in their pockets for the march to come.
A march that was worrying us. A march we knew would be one of the hardest. We ate in the square, or car park, which is Piazza Garibaldi, another place with a parapet looking out across the valley below. There were chairs outside Il Grottino, a sort of cave in a stone wall offering toasted panini. But no beer. We could order beer from the birreria next door, we were told; they wouldn’t mind bringing it to us.
But the chief feature of this dinner was the statue of Garibaldi that kept watch over the square. It’s a beauty. He stands on a high plinth beside an Opel Corsa, his bearded chin tucked down to watch us eating our vegetarian sandwich. He has a round military cap and his famous poncho, which I have now discovered he said he wore partly to hide his dirty shirt. His hands are joined at the waist to rest on the pommel of his sword, the point of which divides his feet. The right foot is thrust forward while the weight rests on the left, the body half turned, a pose that wonderfully conveys that mix of readiness and calmness that all observers attributed to him, even in the most difficult moments.
Behind, by the parapet, is a majestic cypress that Belluzzi claims was planted in 1849 to celebrate the hero’s passing. It’s a good four floors high now, rising just above the old palazzo. The statue has aged, gathering a crust of grime and pigeon shit; the still growing cypress has a wonderful lushness, shining like a dark candle over the landscape beyond. But of the two it’s Garibaldi who looks the more alive.
Todi was the moment of decision. East, directly to the Adriatic, the road was blocked by the Austrians in Spoleto. North, to reach the sea at Ancona or Rimini, the road was blocked by the Austrians in Perugia. West to Tuscany, the road was blocked by the French in Orvieto. Or perhaps not. Perhaps they hadn’t reached Orvieto yet. Cavalry had been sent to find out. Garibaldi would wait a day for their news, moving his men just a few miles north to keep his options open till the last moment. Naturally, other cavalry had been sent out in all directions to create confusion. If there was no further communication, he told his commanders, they were to rendezvous four days hence in Cetona, Tuscany.
