The Hero's Way

by Tim Parks

  Then Müller’s news arrived. The French were approaching Orvieto, but were not there yet. So the column would march west. But not along the main road, where the eggs had been seized, which ran beside the Tiber and the shores of Lake Corbara. To be surprised down there on the flat between the lake and the hills would be fatal. Instead they would climb a thousand feet and more to cross the rugged plateau to the north. And our problem was that there is nothing up there; no borghi, no cafés, no shelter for twenty-five miles. With another very hot day forecast. My rash and blisters. Eleonora not feeling at her best. And the first and only place we’d found to stay was not in Prodo, a tiny village towards the far side of the plateau where the garibaldini camped, but a holiday farm well beyond, just short of Orvieto: Poggio Boalaio.

  Were we up for such an arduous walk?

  We ordered another beer to talk it back and forth. The light was falling. Above us Garibaldi tucked his beard in his chin and watched. It was hard not to glance up to him from time to time.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ Eleonora said.

  DAY 10

  13 July 1849 – 3 August 2019

  Todi, Pontecuti, Prodo, Poggio Boalaio – 23 miles

  Pontecuti

  Order of the day – no photos.

  We’ve taken to a little role-playing. It fills time on the road. I wanted to be Hoffstetter. He’s the one I identify with, a man anxious about his foreign accent, always worried about logistics, always seeking to impose his agenda.

  Eleonora wouldn’t hear of it. She couldn’t be Garibaldi, she said. Or the expansive Ciceruacchio. Or the holy Ugo Bassi, who is anyway still in bed in Cesi. But she refused to be Anita either. Anita pregnant, Anita with a shadow hanging over her – ‘perhaps like the light of the setting sun she foresaw her death’. Eleonora is not superstitious, but she doesn’t like to tempt fate. So I had to be Garibaldi and she Hoffstetter. ‘Deep down you know you want to be il Generale,’ she told me.

  Over breakfast by a coffee machine in the empty, echoey convent, I gave my order of the day. No photos except with the General’s explicit permission.

  Taking photos is slowing us down. Our marching rhythm is broken. We have a long day ahead.

  ‘It will be a hard order to impose,’ Hoffstetter feels. ‘The country is so beautiful.’

  ‘I expect my men to be disciplined, Gustav.’

  Your pack, they say, is as heavy as your fears. And today we are afraid, with peaches and tomatoes and bread and cheese and various emergency rations weighing us down. And there will be even more weight when we fill our water bottles at the fountain just outside the convent door. These outside sources offer sweeter, fresher water than you can get in a hotel bathroom. At 5.30 we close the heavy door behind us and walk out in the dark morning. The fountain is dry. Nothing comes out.

  ‘I can’t believe this. Why wasn’t it checked?’

  ‘Marocchetti’s fault,’ Eleonora says. The real chief of staff.

  Whatever the case, we can’t tackle the main walk over the plateau without water. ‘We didn’t find a spring till we got to Prodo,’ Hoffstetter records. Fifteen miles away. The door to the convent is locked and it’s far too early to ring the bell.

  ‘There’ll be a shop or a café,’ Eleonora thinks. ‘Permission to take a photo of the departure?’

  We leave the city by the northern gate, then circle round the western wall to the south and the road descending to the Tiber. So we have the valley falling away to our right and medieval walls looming to our left when, in the dawn light, for the first time in my life I see a badger. A black ball spins on the green bank under the walls, shows a flash of white snout and scampers off into a hole at the base of the bastion. I stop and stare, hoping it will poke its nose out again. It doesn’t. Eleonora reminds me that we’re supposed to be making good time. Refusing to budge, I whisper an anecdote from Garibaldi’s 1859 campaign against Austria. Leading volunteers through the dead of night on a mountain path between Bergamo and Brescia, he halted the whole column to listen, cupping an ear. The men feared they had stumbled on the enemy. Instead it was a nightingale.

  The badger doesn’t show. My thoughts return to our water shortage. I am getting seriously worried and a little irritated that Eleonora is so relaxed.

  ‘You’re not in character. Hoffstetter would be extremely concerned.’

  ‘Hoffstetter would have sent horses off in all directions.’

  The road curves steeply down to the Tiber through cypresses, oaks and brambles. At last, right by the bridge in the small settlement of Pontecuti, at a quarter to seven, there’s the miracle of a café with the charming name of Il Ponte delle Fate – the Bridge of Fairies. Even more charmingly, it’s open. We push through the door, surprising four grizzled farmworkers over their breakfast, and purchase two 1.5-litre bottles of water.

  The bridge was built in the seventeenth century, so we can be sure it’s the same one the garibaldini crossed, the only bridge for miles in either direction. We sit on the parapet for a moment to gaze at the muddy Tiber sliding south under the arches. Ten days ago we had been sitting beside the same river at Ponte Sisto, below the Gianicolo. We’ve covered all this distance on foot. For the first time I’m aware of a feeling that I can only describe as accumulation. It has been creeping up on us for some time; an awareness of the uninterrupted intensification of physical contact with the land. Perhaps immersion is a useful word. Or continuity. Even purity. It is hard to pin down new feelings. With it comes an edge of anxiety. We don’t want this accumulation to be interrupted. We want to go on and on walking across the unbroken landscape, never surfacing from its enchantment.

  Beyond the bridge the main road runs left and right along the Tiber valley. But opposite a narrow lane strikes straight up the hill to the high plateau. ‘This good road,’ wrote Trevelyan in 1907, ‘did not exist in 1849. A roughly paved bridle-path climbed steeply through the thin oak copses of the mountain, and enough of it still remains for the modern pedestrian to experience for himself parts of the route by which the half-starved and thirsty men made their way.’

  Trevelyan is laying it on. The men were hardly half-starved after all those eggs and chickens. ‘We almost never went hungry,’ Hoffstetter assures us. Our trailblazer app indicates sections of path that I suspect correspond to that old track, but I sincerely doubt we will make it to the Poggio Boalaio holiday farm if we take them. Garibaldi had had to remain in Todi to resolve some last money issues, so it was Hoffstetter who commanded the column that day, with orders to go as far as possible towards Orvieto and to camp in a safe place. ‘Our road,’ he writes, ‘was nothing but a steep narrow mountain path that frequently disappeared altogether. Fortunately, we had a good guide. The General’s lady rode at the head of the column, which stretched out for miles since we were often forced to march in single file. But we had a magnificent view of Tuscany to one side and Romagna to the other, since we were walking for the most part on the mountain ridge.’

  He’s wrong about the views. From the top of the plateau you look south back across Umbria to the now-distant Lazio and north again across Umbria, perhaps with glimpses of Tuscany to the north-east. Romagna is too far away to be seen from here. The German Hoffstetter, as Trevelyan remarks, never quite got his Italian geography straight.

  Our first magnificent view came towards nine at a turn in the road and a scatter of houses called Quadro. Here we found two wooden benches and a picnic table between tall cypresses. Behind them, looking back whence we’d walked, Todi’s distant skyline was in silhouetted profile against the dark Apennine chain behind. A hazy romantic sight. You felt you could reach out across the Tiber and lift the town off its hilltop onto a silver tray for golden-robed clerics to offer up to the Almighty. We munched bread and white peaches then moved on, conscious we’d managed only a quarter of our march.

  Conscious too that we were not going to visit all the places the garibaldini passed. Ruggeri, for example, strayed some miles north with a group of cavalry to an isolated mona
stery and asked the monks for bread. They said there was none. This seemed strange, and the officer walked boldly into the building. Passing a line of prayer cells, he came across the communal oven. At this point a door opened and a monk unleashed two ferocious dogs, one of which leaped on the cavalryman and set its teeth in his clothes. Things might have ended badly had not the yelling and snarling alerted a companion who shot the dog dead. Entering the room whence the dogs had come, the soldiers found enough bread for a hundred men.

  Prodo

  Onwards for three hours, constantly up and down, where deep gorges, dark with lush vegetation, score the plateau. Otherwise the land is parched blonde, with occasional old farmhouses, for the most part abandoned, though one place has dazzling white bedding hanging from an upstairs window. Or there are wide fields of stubble with a scatter of cylindrical straw bales. Distant hills in blue haze. A heavy, humming heat now, full of crickets and cicadas. Small purple butterflies fluttering or still. Feathery grasses. A leaning signpost at a tiny crossroads has four blue arrows: Orvieto, Prodo, Todi, Montecastello.

  With nowhere to stop and no photos allowed, the rhythm of our poles on the cracked tarmac casts a spell that cancels time. On and on we walk. And begin to hum. To whistle. In time to the click of the poles. Old songs. Even symphonies. Eleonora studied music and has an excellent memory. The Pastoral has just the speed. Who would have thought? She knows it all. ‘And did those feet,’ is good too, ‘in ancient time.’ The morning hymns by and, towards eleven, the General grants permission for photos. A thousand and more feet down to our left, Lake Corbara has appeared. A distant patch of blue. These precipitous slopes are designated the Tiber River Park; at the bottom the river flows through the lake, which gathers the water draining off the plateau. Prodo should not be far now, the one village on our way.

  We’re not expecting much. ‘A miserable village,’ Hoffstetter wrote. ‘Here, in this “gash of the wind-grieved Apennine,”’ Trevelyan works it up, ‘they spent the night below the old castellated hamlet of Prodo, that seems to shiver with the fear and poverty of centuries.’

  It’s hard to imagine much shivering in August. Nor is there any wind today. But we’re beginning to wonder what on earth this village will look like. There’s no sign of it yet. Unusually for Italy, not a single campanile pricks the skyline. No distant domes or turrets. We’re on top of a wide world that is all dry ditches and stunted olive trees stretching on and on, with the great drop to the Tiber on our left and hills on all horizons.

  Quite suddenly, there it is, clustering just beneath the level of the plateau, as if it had slid a few hundred yards into the gorge, stopping just in time on the brink of a precipice. A small huddle of houses and towers. We turn down towards it, hoping for nothing more than a little shade to eat our lunch in. Instead providence plays another of her generous cards; we are marching into Prodo on the one day of the year when it’s buzzing with life.

  The road dives down to the little borgo, then twists in a hairpin to climb up and out again. From the tip of that twist, the village’s one piazza opens, a broad space of cracked asphalt between modest pink and ochre facades, with the grey masonry of a castle rising at the end. But what matters is it’s full of white awnings where people are setting up stands to sell food. Cheeses and salamis are hanging in the shade. There’s even a café.

  ‘What’s everybody celebrating?’ we ask the barman, ordering cedratas.

  ‘Don’t ask me.’ He’s burly, gruff, bending down behind the counter, searching through dusty bottles. ‘None of this has anything to do with me.’

  There are two tables. Plastic tablecloths with sunflower patterns. In a corner an elderly woman is arranging her artworks for sale. Thick slices of tree trunk with model villages on top, each miniature building a chunk of wood, their roofs, pieces of bark. And you can recognize Prodo! She’s got it dead right. You realize that this business of imagining the community in clustered isolation must be an archetype of the Italian imagination: a circle of buildings turned inwards on a piazza. Us.

  ‘A lot of us ex-Prodo dwellers are trying to do something for the old place,’ she says. She’s called Graziella. ‘We organize this fair every summer.’

  Outside, we ask the men sitting at a long table if they would mind ducking a moment so we can take a photo of the plaque behind their heads. ‘ORVIETO,’ it says, ‘that saw the legendary hero Giuseppe Garibaldi 14 July 1849 . . . On the first centenary of his death.’ Which is to say, 1982.

  ‘Funny it doesn’t mention Prodo.’

  ‘The barman isn’t pleased,’ Eleonora deduces, ‘because the village is being run from Orvieto.’

  The men at the table are excited when we explain why we took the picture.

  ‘He stayed in the castle,’ one enthuses, pointing to the pile at the end of the piazza.

  ‘Same as San Francesco centuries before.’

  ‘Perhaps they slept in the same bed,’ Graziella suggests.

  ‘Saint and hero.’

  ‘Both crazy!’

  We nod and smile. Garibaldi didn’t sleep in the castle. Starting hours after the others, he didn’t catch up till long after dark. Hoffstetter had found a space beneath the castle walls, a broad ledge beside a steep drop, and had the men set up camp there. It was sufficiently secluded for fires to be lit without being seen. A rare treat. And there was a spring of ‘the best possible water’. Anita put up her tent on ‘a protruding rock near the spring’ and cooked. She was anxious about José riding in the dark along such a dangerous path. Hoffstetter assured her that he had posted men at intervals all the way. The beloved husband arrived at eleven, inspected the camp and complimented Hoffstetter on his security arrangements.

  We complimented the locals on their stands and bought a piece of Cacio cheese. There were tables under a small marquee and we sliced our rolls and tomatoes beside a group of French schoolchildren eating chickpeas and bacon from plastic bowls. All the revellers were outsiders, their cars parked on the road near the bend. Middle-class metropolitan folk, suffering from the heat. Come nightfall the place would be empty again but for the bats and owls.

  We tried to inspect the castle, but it’s private property. Disappointed, we followed a path round it and looked down to where the garibaldini camped. To one side, in the thick trees, there did seem to be a flat space before the plunge. But the sun was at its zenith now. We went back to the bar for ice creams. Here, for all his grumbling, the local man was doing a brisk trade in mortadella sandwiches. A woman asked him for the key to the bathroom. ‘It’s clean,’ he told her. ‘There’s even paper!’ ‘So, was it clean?’ he demanded when she came out. ‘There was no paper,’ she said. ‘Pazienza.’ Everybody laughed.

  Poggio Boalaio

  After a kind morning, a cruel afternoon. Leaving the garibaldini to sleep, we tried to save a mile or so with a short cut across a gorge. Towards the bottom the path became overgrown and impenetrable. We had to climb back out, cursing, and use the road.

  Expecting it would be downhill from here, we discovered that actually the road snaked up and up. Towards three it was so hot we had to find shade. We crossed fifty yards of dry weeds and stretched our groundsheet under an isolated oak tree. It was hypnotic, on our backs gazing up through dark branches at the blazing sky. A wasp stung Eleonora between two fingers. She stood and screamed. The creature buzzed and threatened. Now our socks were full of burrs and our ankles itched from something in the grass.

  A car stopped by a tiny wayside shrine. In the middle of nowhere. It’s always a pleasure to think of the locals lavishing devotion on these sacred places, sweeping away the dust, bringing flowers, stopping a moment in prayer. Two Singhalese women opened the boot to pull out an assortment of cleaning equipment. They set to work as if it were another office.

  At 4.30 there was a café at a place called Colonnetta di Prodo. Here our tiny lane joined a bigger road for the descent towards Orvieto. A dozen motorcyclists were laughing over beers. A boy strutted among them with a micropho
ne, yelling tuneless songs, shouting stadium slogans. He was clearly challenged in some way or other. The bikers mocked him. Something hostile was brewing. Bringing our drinks, the proprietor yelled – basta basta basta – at the boy. His son perhaps. Every few minutes a couple more bikers would roar up and a couple would leave the bar and roar away. The air was hot and dusty.

  Eleonora phoned the holiday farm, who said no, they didn’t serve food. We asked after a grocer’s and were told they didn’t open till six. A long siesta. Heading down the slope, we realized what the bikers were up to. Two by two they were racing up and down the road, an interminable series of curves and hairpins. These were big bikes roaring at top speed, the riders’ knees brushing the asphalt as they leaned into the bends. Twice we had to jump onto the narrow verge. Nettles and ferns. Two miles of this. It was deafening, frightening. On a short cut between two hairpins, Eleonora was again stung by a wasp. This time on the calf. Not her lucky day. This time the sting stayed in there. A black dot in sunburned flesh. The leg swelled.

  At last there was the turn-off to the left and just half a mile to go. Another short cut brought us to the farm not by the main gate but through the back of a cluttered barn, where a bald, barrel-chested man was tinkering with a tractor. Two dogs trotted at his heels. Another ordeal for Eleonora. The more she shrinks back from them, the more the animals love to sniff her.

  It had been a long day. Twelve hours on the road. We needed rest. Eleonora needed that sting pulling out. But first we would have to meet our extraordinary hosts.