The Hero's Way

by Tim Parks

  ‘Complimenti!’ I told him.

  He drew himself up straighter. ‘An old man of ninety,’ he said. They knew he couldn’t survive alone. They lured away anyone who came to cook for him.

  ‘You should see a lawyer,’ Eleonora suggested.

  ‘The lawyers are on their side.’

  I wondered if it wasn’t paranoia.

  ‘They’re evil! Il Padre eterno is evil for letting such evil people walk the earth. May they be swallowed up in hell! Reduced to crawling on all fours. Like animals. With their snouts in filth.’

  We were astonished. He looked at us, and now he noticed our backpacks, our sweat, and his eyes cleared. He prodded his stick more gently on the stone. ‘Forgive me, signori. I never thought I would say these terrible things. But I have no one. I have bored you, signori. Forgive me.’

  I assured him he hadn’t bored us. Shocked us rather. We would think over what he had said. ‘Coraggio,’ Eleonora said. We shook his hand and were on our way.

  ‘So much,’ I muttered, ‘for the Città equosolidale with the bandiera arancione and the Culture of Olive Oil.’

  Garibaldi stayed a full day in Cetona, marching to Sarteano at four in the afternoon of 18 July. Fifty years on, eyewitnesses told Belluzzi that the column had announced its departure with a roll of drums. Garibaldi sat on his horse in the packed square and drew his sword to make a speech. He thanked the Cetonesi for their hospitality and offered a gift of a tricolour and a pennant of the First Italian Legion. Blade glinting in the sunshine, he promised he would dedicate his entire life to freeing Italy from foreign domination.

  It was quite an event. People had flocked in from the countryside. ‘The General’s men were as if reborn,’ Belluzzi says. ‘They were spoiling for a fight,’ Ruggeri tells us. Then they marched just three miles to Sarteano.

  Garibaldi was not in a hurry. He needed to give his cavalry parties a day or two to reach, contact and confuse the enemy before he decided what to do next. He needed to see if this local enthusiasm could be transformed into serious military support. Ruggeri is more alive than Hoffstetter to the complicated psychology of the situation. Garibaldi knows that if he stops and fights with just his 3000 poorly armed and equipped men, they will soon be surrounded and overcome. He must have the local people on his side. On the other hand, his men have volunteered to fight, not to live on the run. They want action, victory; then home. They have got the idea that a battle in Tuscany was always the General’s goal. So when is it going to happen? And they are not aware how heavily the cards are stacked against them. Garibaldi would be crazy to tell them. The mood is getting more excited and unstable by the day.

  Then there were the two cavalrymen imprisoned in Chiusi. ‘I feared for them in the clutches of these descendants of Torquemada,’ Garibaldi writes in his memoirs. Torquemada was a fifteenth-century Spanish inquisitor. The General sent a prominent citizen of Cetona to demand their release, but the Bishop of Chiusi refused. So on the evening of 18 July, having identified a monastery involved in spreading anti-rebel rumours, he dispatched a group of cavalry to round up all the monks and bring them to Sarteano. They arrived the following morning. Twenty-four of them, according to Hoffstetter, ‘unctuous and dripping with sweat’; no more than ten, according to Belluzzi, ‘big bellied and unused to marching’. ‘You have struck the sparks of a civil war,’ Garibaldi told the monks. ‘You call yourselves ministers of God, when in fact you are ministers of the Devil.’ They would march with the column, he ordered, until his two men were released. And if they were not released, the monks would be shot.

  A ring of bonfires was prepared at a distance of some two miles from Sarteano, to be lit by sentinels in the event of an attack. ‘It is admirable,’ Generale De Rossi remarks in the Cavalry Review, ‘how meticulous Garibaldi was in preparing against all surprises.’

  Chianciano Terme

  We pushed on to Chianciano Terme. To our right, in the distance, across vineyards and cornfields, we could clearly see Lake Trasimeno, all five miles of it. Perugia was beyond, whence Colonel Paumgartten is sending his men towards Chiusi. To the left were the hills separating the Val di Chiana from the Val d’Orcia, and fifty miles further that way you reach the sea. Müller is heading in that direction to confuse D’Aspre. All around us were the usual hilltop villages, the sporadic winking of distant windows in the sunlight, the countryside slowly unfolding to the click of our poles.

  Hoffstetter chooses that day in Sarteano to introduce a poignant addition to our dramatis personae, someone whose services would have been extremely useful when we arrived in Chianciano. Gaetano was Anita’s servant. He was from Bologna and just thirteen years old, but ‘extraordinarily serious’. ‘When everyone else was joking and laughing,’ Hoffstetter says, ‘Gaetano scarcely moved his lips.’ He was always on hand, his little red pony always the first to be saddled. And his job was to make sure that Anita had food to cook for herself and the General. Not just the bread, supplied by the local people, or the meat, which came from their own cattle, but fruit, vegetables, poultry, sweets even. ‘If Gaetano couldn’t find something,’ Hoffstetter assures us, ‘no one could.’

  How had such a young boy, from Bologna, found himself in the Roman Republic, 250 miles to the south? We’ve no idea, but paintings of Risorgimento battles often show young boys carrying messages or banging drums and generally looking pleased with themselves in makeshift uniforms. The other boys, Hoffstetter says, showed Gaetano great respect and did everything he asked. If an older man or an officer made a joke at his expense, he wasn’t afraid to hit back with a sharp gibe. ‘But if Gaetano liked you, you might find yourself on the receiving end of a cigar when no one else had one.’

  Cigars were a kind of currency among the officers. ‘Good when you needed to stay awake,’ Hoffstetter thought. Likewise coffee. Garibaldi did everything possible to make sure he started the day with a fresh cup. ‘Bread, wine, meat and salt were not indispensable,’ remarked Giuseppe Bandi who served the General in Sicily in 1860, ‘but Garibaldi had to start the day with a cup of coffee.’ Usually around 3 a.m.

  We weren’t looking for cigars or coffee in Chianciano, but a light evening meal to wind up a long day. It proved hard to find. Garibaldi didn’t actually stop here; he bypassed it to the east, heading straight to what was then the far bigger centre of Montepulciano. Chianciano is a spa town that grew enormously in the post-war period when eager-to-please Christian Democrat governments made thermal spa cures freely available on the Italian public health service. Many of those who abandoned the tiny borgo of Salci came to Chianciano to cash in on the resulting bonanza, which ended in the 2000s, when the financial crisis came along and austerity set in. Now Chianciano is full of dowdy hotels offering full board at low prices. Our hotel offers a set menu, rich in meat, and a dining room full of elderly folk. We headed into town.

  It was eight. The shops were closed. The centre of the spa side of the town is relatively new, a wide-open, 60s-looking plaza, bright with flower beds between rigid lines of trees and benches. The Hotel Continentale looks on. And the Hotel Excelsior. The Grand Hotel Ambasciatore looms. The Grand Hotel Milano isn’t far away. Or the Grand Hotel Admiral Palace. Everything is grand without being inviting. A pub called Le Fonti spreads out across the plaza with a vaguely seaside sprawl of armchairs under sunshades but no customers.

  ‘How did Gaetano do it?’ Eleonora wonders.

  ‘He kept going. He badgered the locals.’

  The locals pointed us along the busy Viale della Libertà towards the older city centre. It was only half a mile.

  We were tired. My feet were sore. Half a mile suddenly seemed a long way. And we would have to walk back. In desperation, we poked our noses into the kind of stained-concrete development you might expect in windswept Wigan or on the Neasden section of London’s North Circular. Between closed shops there was a place called Pizza al Volo – Pizza in a Rush. In a poky room with no air conditioning a woman was putting together takeaway sandwiches. There was a
fridge with Coke and beer. There was an electric pizza oven. But unlike Wigan or Neasden, stepping out of the back of that tiny room, you were on a small tiled terrace with four tables and a hugely satisfying view of the valley below. She couldn’t bring the food out to us, our lady of rushed pizzas apologized, because she had no restaurant licence. On the other hand, if we just happened to eat our takeaway on her terrace, that was fine.

  We sat watching the darkness steal across the fields. The food was wholesome and, as ever after the day’s exertions, very welcome. The beer was icy.

  ‘This is where Gaetano would have brought us,’ Eleonora decided.

  ‘If the young lad could find me a cigar,’ I agreed, ‘I’d smoke it.’

  We clinked our bottles to a boy who disappears from history as soon as he’s introduced. ‘A few days later,’ Hoffstetter says, ‘Gaetano fell sick, and we were obliged to leave him behind.’

  DAY 15

  19–20 July 1849 – 8 August 2019

  Chianciano Terme, Montepulciano – 6 miles

  Montepulciano

  It’s only six miles from Chianciano to Montepulciano, so we were able to enjoy a proper breakfast in the Hotel Bosco while Garibaldi was on the march from Cetona. We will catch him before lunch at the monastery where he spent the night, two miles from Montepulciano, then enter the city together. Meantime, while a group of elderly folk at the table beside ours are regretting their decision to spend their holidays in Chianciano, we have opened our computer to review the important documents of these make-or-break days.

  18 July, General D’Aspre in Florence to Field Marshal Radetzky north of Milan

  Siena [40 miles south of Florence] is threatened. The grand duke has begged me to defend it. I am sending Major General Stadion with three battalions and a squadron of hussars. If Garibaldi is allowed to become a real power in central Italy the consequences will be incalculable.

  19 July, General D’Aspre in Florence to Colonel Paumgartten in Perugia

  We must put an end to the skulduggery of this rebel. Garibaldi is in Cetona, heading for Montepulciano. Take as many troops as possible, intercept him with forced marches and attack at once. Major General Stadion is approaching from Siena to assist. It is of the utmost importance that Garibaldi be annihilated as swiftly as possible.

  20 July, Major General Stadion to General D’Aspre

  Garibaldi is heading west towards the west coast. Yesterday I sent two companies ahead to the crucial crossroads of San Quirico [30 miles south of Siena]. However, just now I received news that Garibaldi is already in Montalcino [8 miles west of San Quirico, 21 miles west of Montepulciano]. He has beaten us to it, slipped through our fingers. Unfortunately, I can’t follow him this evening because my men are exhausted.

  Garibaldi was not in Montalcino and never would be. Müller was in Montalcino. Garibaldi was in Montepulciano. He brought with him a proclamation he had been working on since his arrival in Tuscany and hurried to have it typeset, printed and distributed.

  TUSCANS!

  Once again . . .! Italy is condemned to wallowing in filth and disgrace . . .! The bondage of twenty centuries goes on!!!

  This generation had promised to break free, but proved false. We will not! We will not bend under the yoke of the usurpers. Shrouded in mourning and riddled with bullets, our banner has frightened the Germans at Luino, the Bourbons at Palestrina and Velletri, the French in the Roman Campagna. The foreigner fled before these children born from our country’s betrayal.

  Forced by the destiny of the Italian cause to choose between exile and the hardships of the forests, we have chosen the hardships, the dangers, the adversities! – if one can speak of adversity when serving such a beautiful homeland!

  We have felt the generous ferment of Tuscany, this most hospitable of Italian peoples. And we have made haste towards those whose hearts beat hard in outrage, tormented and betrayed as they are! The usurpers, the servile traitors, they call us brigands! To their calumny we will answer with our poverty! We will show the scars of their treacherous bullets on our breasts.

  Tuscans! While in the land of Columbus . . . when I was deciding to sacrifice my life for Italy, when I was still fighting for the freedom of other peoples, my thoughts went to Tuscany – I looked to Tuscany as a place of refuge, of friendships dear to my heart – I received a gift sent to me from Tuscany in the name of Italy! A word of love that bound me to You – with the indissoluble knot of an entire life consecrated to You – consecrated to the honour of the name Italian.

  With whatever band of brave men I can find, I will raise over our unhappy land the banner of redemption from traitors and foreigners; we offer ourselves now as a rallying point to anyone who is ashamed . . . of the dishonour . . . the debasement . . . the calamity of our country!!! When the foreigner, the traitors, have divided their unhappy, tormented prey . . .! we will trouble their sleep and sully their glee. With the cry of our hatred, our revenge, our curse!!! we will pursue them and put them to rout.

  Tuscans! Let our battle cry be the one that you were the first to pronounce:

  Away with the foreigners!

  Away with the traitors!

  GARIBALDI

  ‘If exclamation marks were recruits, the battle was won,’ Eleonora reflects.

  To avoid the main road along the valley we struck up a path called Werewolf’s Way. It ran straight and steep up a wooded gully. But someone had been stripping out trees. They had taken the trunks and left the branches strewn on the path, a carpet of thin black branches, perhaps a year old, some brittle, some springy, impossible to put your foot between but hard to walk on because they broke and scratched, or shifted, inviting the ankle to twist.

  Eventually we topped the hill and there was Tuscany, beguiling as ever. I can think of no landscape more radically transformed by sunshine; it’s as if the whole world were built with a play of profile and shadow, trees and towers inked against the sky, the chiaroscuro grid of the vineyards tensing the soft sfumato of the hills. In the distance a white path winds towards stony battlements. Everything glints. But if by chance the sun should slip behind a cloud, all the shape and life is suddenly gone. You could be anywhere.

  We reached a small crossroads with one huge cypress and an iron cross beside it. The monastery where the garibaldini spent the night of 19 July appeared to our right. Apparently the men were well received, though none of the sources says how the monks reacted to the fact that Garibaldi had other monks as hostages.

  Montepulciano came into view. Another variation on the hilltop theme. As usual we had to dive into a valley before tackling the ascent. Stopping to drink beside a bench, we read this dedication: ‘In loving memory of Lieut. James De Villiers Browse Gray, Pretoria Regiment, killed in action, 30 June 1944’.

  Another summer, another casualty. Responding to General D’Aspre, Colonel Paumgartten reports unidentified corpses along the road to Chiusi and speaks of information extorted from rebel deserters. Not always accurate. In a further message from San Quirico, General Stadion mentions an English spy who is supposed to be updating him on Garibaldi’s movements. ‘I confess I don’t really trust him.’ ‘Could you send me,’ he winds up, ‘a detailed map of Tuscany, from the Tuscan Ministry of War.’

  ‘Montepulciano,’ Hoffstetter tells us,

  is a lively town in a delightful setting. It’s surprising the luxury and amenities you find in these Tuscan towns, compared to those around Rome. But though for the tired soldier it seems too good to be true to be surrounded by so many demonstrations of friendship and opportunities for refreshment, the attraction soon fades once your bodily needs are satisfied. My mind went back ever more wistfully to the beautiful Roman landscape we had left behind, how its melancholy hush spoke deep to the heart. In Tuscany I sought in vain for those tall, noble figures, the fiery gaze and black eyes that only Roman women have.

  Women aside, Hoffstetter’s words strike a chord. For all Tuscany’s easy beauty, we too are experiencing an unexpected nostalgia for the har
sh countryside around Montecelio and Poggio Mirteto. It had a pathos you don’t feel here. Least of all in Montepulciano. If, in Sarteano, we had run into one poor man holding out against the sharks, we sense at once there will be no such meeting today. Poverty has been removed in Montepulciano. Bought out. The town is a seamless string of beautifully restored facades, shops and restaurants, all focused on giving you an off-the-peg Tuscan experience at Tuscan prices and sending you away with a gift package of Montepulciano wine. Three bottles in an elegant cardboard box. The streets throng with middle-class folk from many nations all clutching the same trophy.

  As soon as we were through the gates, we headed to the main square to sit at a table and contemplate the space where the garibaldini received the most ecstatic welcome of their entire odyssey. ‘The column marched through the town in good order,’ Belluzzi writes, ‘while people yelled deafening hurrahs.’ The men filed out of the gate on the north side and set up camp near the monastery while the citizens crowded round to watch. ‘Garibaldi,’ Hoffstetter remembers, ‘placed his tent at a corner close to the monastery and soon enough was being mobbed by the townsfolk, in particular, as always, the fairer sex. The General mingled with them and quickly fell to talking with the prettiest. His wife thought these ladies’ behaviour extremely inopportune and, throwing a sulk, withdrew at once into her tent.’

  ‘I guess she hadn’t come all the way from Montevideo to be cuckolded by a hussy from Montepulciano,’ Eleonora sympathizes. ‘Especially being six months pregnant.’

  ‘Seems she told José she had a pistol with two bullets, one for the woman who managed to seduce him and the other for herself.’

  ‘Why not for him!’

  ‘He was such a lady’s man, you have to wonder what would have happened to the two of them if Anita had lived.’

  Descriptions of Garibaldi all have him coolly composed and magnetically attractive. Blonde, lightly bearded. High forehead, quick and elastic in his movements. Slow to speak. Rarely expansive, rarely gesturing. ‘More an English gentleman than a passionate Latin,’ one observer remarked. The kind of man who has brown eyes but everyone thinks they’re blue.