The Hero's Way

by Tim Parks

  DAY 14

  17–18 July 1849 – 7 August 2019

  Palazzone, Cetona, Sarteano, Chianciano Terme – 20 miles

  Cetona

  If it was a show it was a good one. In brilliant sunshine after the night’s heavy rain, a small party of cavalry galloped into Cetona to check out security. It’s a spectacularly picturesque town, a walled cluster high up on a ridge, topped by a monastery and tower. The people hurried down the slopes en masse shouting, ‘Evviva Garibaldi, Re d’Italia!’ The mayor was with them. This time the whole community was united. They insisted that the General and his men all come into the town and sleep in their homes.

  Here’s Belluzzi: ‘What a milling of bodies, what excitement in the streets and houses of the lovely little town, especially around the old well spurting jets of plentiful fresh water from its artistic spouts! Oh, the happy throng crowding around, the men eager to wash themselves and their dirty clothes after so many days of punishing marches! The local men and women looking on smiling and doing all they could to meet the soldiers’ every request.’

  It’s one of the rare moments when Belluzzi lets slip that he himself was once a garibaldino. ‘If the reader has ever been in such a situation, he will know how wonderfully rewarding it is for the young volunteer to feel that people understand, how a woman’s words of compassion or an older man’s encouragement and even envy will caress his young ears and slip sweetly down into his eager, passionate heart.’

  Born in 1839, Belluzzi had deserted from the papal army in 1859 when ordered to fight against Garibaldi. In 1866 he volunteered to fight with Garibaldi against the Austrians in Trento, then followed him in the 1867 campaign that ended in defeat at Mentana. He was captured and imprisoned. The rest of his life he would spend in Bologna as a schoolteacher and social activist, encouraging a positive sense of Italian identity and becoming first director of the city’s Risorgimento Museum. His account of the retreat from Rome is his only full-length book.

  ‘I wonder,’ Eleonora asks, ‘why he chose to write about the retreat, which happened when he was ten, instead of the things he experienced himself.’

  It’s an interesting question. We have stopped a moment to watch a flock of big white geese marching in determined formation across a rough hillside, passing through a scatter of grazing sheep. Both species endearingly express their collective spirit: the sheep are desultory, shabby, woolly, entirely content to be chomping dewy grass in the morning cool. The geese are wired up on their webbed feet, spick and span, orange-beaked, waddling forward with great urgency. You wonder if either group is remotely aware of the state of mind of the other.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I suggest, still thinking of Belluzzi, ‘he was attracted by this journey, the thought of seeing so much of Italy. The same way we are. Or perhaps it was too depressing to write up that awful defeat he experienced, and too easy to enthuse about the glorious victories of the Thousand in Sicily. Everybody had done that. He wanted to visit all these out-of-the-way places, hear people’s memories of forty years before. He used up all his summer holidays through the 1880s, corresponding with hundreds of people. And he travelled in company.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘He only acknowledges it once or twice. They moved in horse-drawn coaches for the most part, staying in taverns or with local politicians. He just mentions “my young friend”.’

  ‘Male or female?’

  For better or worse, Italian noun endings – amico, amica, compagno, compagna – make it hard to disguise gender. You can’t just say ‘my friend’.

  ‘Male. Towards the end he mentions his unhappiness that his friend has died.’

  ‘Younger, you said?’

  ‘Yes.’

  We move on, sobered but also heartened to think that others have shared our fascination with this adventure. We are a species, moving through the landscape in the peculiar way our species does. And now we find that the country lane we’re walking along is called Strada di Donna Morta – Dead Woman Street. We also discover, stopping to drink, that Eleonora has left her water bottle in Palazzone.

  Fortunately Cetona isn’t far now. Around 9.15, we march into a square which is recognisably the same place that Hoffstetter and Belluzzi describe. The well where the men washed their clothes is still there, with its ‘artistic spouts’, four grotesque fishy faces around a central stone column above a broad basin. ‘It would be the first night and the last,’ Hoffstetter observes, ‘that all the men slept inside in people’s homes and ate and drank their fill.’

  The piazza is surprisingly big, a long, open, cream-stuccoed rectangle. There’s easily room for a couple of thousand men to crowd in. Anita was admired for the way she handled her horse on the steep streets with their uneven stone flagging. Was she beautiful? ‘Not at all,’ remembers a certain Ettore Marziale. ‘Her complexion was very dark, her features hardly regular and markedly scarred with smallpox. All the same you couldn’t help looking at her with admiration and growing sympathy.’ Amalia Gigli, the mayor’s wife, felt the same. The two spent the day together, and she had Anita measured for clothes to match her condition; a dress of dark green silk was cut and sewn in a matter of hours.

  But not all was sweetness and light that morning. A garibaldino managed to get himself caught stealing a gold earring from a jeweller. Inevitably, when the case was brought before Garibaldi, he ordered summary execution. He knew that many of the men had been dismayed to read accounts in Tuscan newspapers of their supposed looting, raping and stealing, often in places where they had never been. But the goldsmith and his wife were horrified. They just wanted their earring back. The wife hurried to the mayor’s wife and she to Anita, and all the women begged the General to relent. In the event, he seemed glad to back down. All observers noticed he was in a special mood these first days in Tuscany. He thought the uprising was going to happen. It was now or never. ‘A frenzy mixed with joy was visible on his face and in everything he did.’

  He was doing a lot. He ‘multiplied himself everywhere’, Belluzzi says. First he wrote a polite request for money to the mayor. But then had to alter it. The mayor didn’t want a polite request which, if the Austrians were to see it, might look like something he could have refused. He wanted an order, in threatening language. Garibaldi obliged but must have been discouraged by his host’s fears. Now he assigned fifteen men to each of the town’s gates and sent the top-hatted Forbes to occupy the monastery and keep watch from its tower. Müller returned with news of Austrian positions. Soon all the General’s staff were on their horses, exploring the Tuscan countryside.

  Ruggeri dwells at loving length on the tactics Garibaldi now evolved as they came closer to the Austrians. Cavalry would be sent east, west and north in considerable numbers to make contact with the enemy. Hopefully this would give each Austrian army the impression that they were about to be attacked, encouraging them to assume static defensive positions. Meantime the main column of men could move from one safe camp to the next, arousing public enthusiasm.

  Something went wrong right away. Three miles north of Cetona, along the same chain of hills, is the small town of Sarteano. Garibaldi was riding there on the afternoon of 17 July when he ran into a crowd of people coming towards him with carts full of food. They were helping out their friends in Cetona, they said, with the business of feeding the 3000. But they also told the General that two companies of Tuscan soldiers were stationed in their town.

  Whose side were these men on? Officially, the Austrian side. They were soldiers of the grand duke, who was returning to his realm thanks to Austrian intervention. But they were also Italians. Garibaldi didn’t want to fight Italians. These soldiers, the people said, knew that they were bringing food to the garibaldini and hadn’t tried to stop them. On the other hand, they had quickly left town, heading for Chiusi seven miles to the east, which was in the hands of reactionaries, in particular the Bishop of Chiusi, who had been spreading the most vicious rumours about the patriots. Inevitably, the more people were enthusiastic about Gar
ibaldi, the more frightened and reactionary the establishment became. The situation was polarizing. It wasn’t unusual, Ruggeri tells us, for priests to form bands of armed peasants to fight the patriots, who they spoke of as demons. Garibaldi ordered Captain Montanari to take twenty horsemen to Chiusi to see what was up.

  ‘That evening we rode for a long while,’ Hoffstetter remembers. ‘Our horses were fresh and the magnificent places all around kept us out later than usual.’ On return, bad news. Riding towards Chiusi, Montanari had seen and avoided a first ambush but then pushed on regardless and fallen into a second. Tuscan soldiers had burst from cover twenty paces away and fired. One man was killed, two horses went down and their riders were captured. Garibaldi was grieved and angry. He had hoped the Tuscan army could be brought over to his side. Now this would be more difficult. And he must find a way to get his men back, before they fell into Austrian hands.

  The upset did not stop everyone enjoying their Cetona evening. They were used to crises and losses. The General and his staff climbed the monastery tower and studied the view beyond Chiusi to Lake Trasimeno in the north-east. Then they ate a sumptuous dinner laid on by the locals and talked till late. It was during this evening that Aristide Pilhes finally caught up with them from Terni, bringing all his men safe and sound into the fold. Glasses were raised. Then everyone slept in a bed, except of course the prisoners in Chiusi. And the dead man, whom nobody names.

  We also explored the views of the surrounding countryside from the high walls around the monastery. East and west the hills stretch away in long wooded ridges. You can see how difficult it would be to keep track of anyone in this landscape, without satellites and air surveillance. You can imagine the anxiety of D’Aspre and the other Austrian generals, wondering how to deal with a rebellion that wouldn’t stay still. What most caught my attention, though, were the flowers of the caper plants, climbing up from a garden beneath the wall. Each presents a trembling butterfly of four white petals, from the centre of which a fine bristle of long purple stamens thrusts up to the light; every one of these – and there must be forty or fifty – is tinily tipped with a royal blue that clashes splendidly with the purple and seems to demand that the sun be even brighter than it already is. So all my amateurish photos are of flowers, not of the lie of the land that a military man must study. Still, I remembered how Belluzzi says that when he tracked down the places Anita set up her tent, they were invariably the prettiest spots. She liked to fill her days with beauty.

  Sarteano

  Military acumen or not, we now stole a march on Garibaldi, something the Austrians never managed to do. This was only because we hadn’t found a place to stay in Cetona or Sarteano. We were booked into a hotel in the spa town of Chianciano Terme six miles to the north of Sarteano, nine miles from here, so we had a long day ahead of us.

  In this regard, should you ever find yourself walking from Cetona to Sarteano, beware of Google Maps. It was one of the rare occasions when Google suggested a short cut, over a steep hill, that our trekking app was unaware of. It looked like an easy white stone track and we were glad of the half-mile or so it would save. We attacked the slope with energy, discussing the dilemma of the Tuscan soldiers as they were forced to choose between Austrians and patriots. Until, after twenty minutes, we ran into a chain across the road and the sign, PROPRIETÀ PRIVATA, VIETATO L’ACCESSO.

  The climb had been stiff and we were invested in this short cut now. We ducked under the chain, slipped our trekking poles under our arms and walked in stealthy silence through the grounds of a handsome villa to our left, praying that if there was a dog it was sound asleep. Nothing stirred but a few faintly humming bees, lazily sampling orange and blue flower beds. We had just begun to whisper again and to congratulate ourselves on our boldness, when the track terminated in a garden shed.

  There is no other way to describe it: Google’s path simply went straight into an open shed full of gardening tools. Beyond the shed was a fence, and then, still climbing steeply, thick woodland with a dense undergrowth of brambles, blackberries and prickly plants. I climbed the fence to investigate. I advanced two yards, three, wielding my trusty trekking poles. Clearly there had been a path here once, and perhaps a week before I would have insisted we push on. But if there is one thing one learns following any of Garibaldi’s campaigns, it is the art of cutting one’s losses and changing plans in a trice. These brambles would tear us apart.

  Mint, lavender and honeysuckle. That was our midday. Beetles and grasshoppers. Giant straw bales and barking dogs. A green glow under young acacia trees. The frequent stops to drink – in the shade of a barn – to wipe the sweat off our sunglasses. Little waves at waving Tuscans. A constant marvelling at the variety and density of leaves and twigs and stones beneath our feet. As compared with the vast blueness over our heads, quite empty but for a hawk or two, waiting to connect heaven and earth in a kill. Crows rising from a ploughed field, cawing, circling. And towards one, the sign, ‘SARTEANO, Twinned with Gundelsheim (Germany)’. It was a Città equosolidale, the sign went on, meaning it promoted fair trade and solidarity; it boasted a bandiera arancione, an orange flag, meaning it respected the environment; and finally it was a Città dell’olio, meaning it was dedicated to the protection of the ‘Culture of Olive Oil’. It also boasts a church with the charming name Cappella della Madonna del Mal di Capo – Our Lady of Headaches.

  ‘Giuseppe Garibaldi, abandoned by everyone but his own great spirit, took refuge here from the foreigner’s hatred, 19 July, 1849,’ says the plaque by the town hall. The piazza is small, dominated by the dark statue of a First World War soldier in his heavy trench coat and tin hat. He too seems abandoned, melancholy, overdressed in the summer heat. On the loggiato of the town hall the four great architects of the Risorgimento, Mazzini, Cavour, Garibaldi, Vittorio Emanuele II, look down from neat round bas-reliefs with the colourful flags of the town’s contrade beside. The narrow streets are flying blue and white streamers for the festival of the contrada of San Lorenzo. The ancient Teatro degli Arrischianti – Risktakers Theatre – is promising a jazz festival.

  ‘Strange,’ I remark over lunch, ‘how the plaques often make it sound like Garibaldi was entirely alone, while in fact there were still about 3000 men with him.’

  ‘I suppose,’ Eleonora says, ‘they could hardly write 3000 names. Do we even know them?’

  ‘The archives in Cetona give the names and ranks of seventy-one men who made formal requests to the town hall for items of clothing and equipment. Some of the ranks are interesting. Ambulance surgeon. Herald. Quartermaster. War officer. Sanitary expert. Horse vet.’

  Eleonora laughs. ‘Abandoned by everyone but his horse vet doesn’t sound so good. They want the pathos of the man absolutely alone, taking on the world alone.’

  An hour later we met that man.

  We were making our usual quick tour of the town, mindful of the six miles that still separated us from our hotel. Mindful too that we needed to fill our water bottles. Eventually, we came across a fountain in Piazza San Martino. This was little more than a widening in a steeply sloping cobbled alley, with a gnarled mimosa tree and a bench. The bench was occupied by an elderly man, the kind of primly dressed, panama-hatted octogenarian we’d seen so many times. Since he had the bench, we sat on a low wall to drink our fill of water and top up again before hitting the road.

  We were just picking up our packs to go when the old man got up from his bench and walked towards us. It was a slow stiff walk, aided by angry jabs of his walking stick on the travertine paving. He was muttering. And as he came close the word merda was distinctly audible. Then when he was closer still. Forestieri di merda. Shitty foreigners. Or outsiders. Forestieri di merda, di merda, di merda.

  Eleonora threw him a look of protest. Did we deserve this abuse?

  The man stopped. There was an Ancient Mariner glitter to his eyes. ‘Oh not you!’ He jabbed his stick. ‘I’m not angry with you, signori! Ha!’ He managed a grimace of a smile. ‘I’m angry with
il Padre eterno.’ With God Almighty.

  ‘And why would that be?’

  ‘Why? Why? Because he lets so many mean, nasty people go on living.’

  We didn’t know what to say.

  ‘I hope they all go to hell. I hope an earthquake swallows up this town and everyone in it. Like Sodom and Gomorrah.’

  ‘I thought you were complaining about foreigners,’ Eleonora said.

  The man frowned. He had a proud Roman nose, a bristling yellowish moustache. And he launched into his story. While we stood in the sunshine with our packs on our backs.

  ‘When I arrived here fifty years ago we were all poor in this town. Very poor. But we were signori! We had no money, but we had our dignity. Now these rich shits have come along and spoiled everything. They are mean and nasty. I wish them all the fires of hell.’

  ‘What have they done?’

  ‘What?’ He was incredulous. How was it possible we didn’t know? ‘They want me out of my house,’ he snapped. ‘They’ve bought everything. I’m the only one left. Holiday homes for tourists. Forestieri. And it’s never enough. They’ve never made enough money. Or bought enough houses. I’m the last one in my palazzo. They play tricks on me. They stir up everyone against me. They want me in an old people’s home. So they can turn the palazzo into a home for forestieri.’

  ‘Awful,’ Eleonora agreed.

  The man stared wildly. ‘It’s my house. Understand? My house. It’s the only thing I have. The only thing I can leave to my daughter. They won’t rest till they’ve got me out. Villains!’

  ‘What tricks do they play on you?’ I asked.

  His cleaning lady, he said. Every time he found a woman, they got to her and persuaded her to leave him. So he would be alone. He had been alone for seven years, since his wife died. Now he was ninety.

  ‘Ninety!’

  ‘Last May.’