by Tim Parks
‘Our clothes are wearing out,’ Eleonora remarked as we prepared for bed.
Indeed, our shirts were fading. She had a hole in the side of a shoe. The tread was getting thin.
‘Ten more days,’ I told her.
‘God willing.’
‘Meantime there’s another development you should know about.’
22 July, General D’Aspre in Florence to Field Marshal Radetzky north of Milan
Information on Garibaldi is frustratingly confusing, provided by frightened people with no notion of military matters . . .
The rural population are in good spirits and the people around Foiano seem determined to defend themselves from the rebels . . .
Garibaldi is taking a large number of hostages with him including a magistrate from Montepulciano, presumably in order to have some negotiating power if forced to surrender . . .
The main group of rebels is in Torrita, though a small detachment of 70 cavalry is already in Murlo, just south of Siena. Their commander, a certain Müller, who claims to be Polish, realising that he had been cut off from the others, has presented a petition of surrender to the governor of Siena who has passed it on to General Stadion.
‘No!’
‘Yes.’
Müller deserted. Taking seventy men and their horses with him.
‘But why?’
We lost half an hour’s sleep discussing this. Why would a man who had fought a two-month siege, then signed up for a desperate guerrilla war, always behaving with great efficiency and valour, winning the praise of a leader he greatly admired, suddenly do a deal with the enemy? He can’t really have been worried about being cut off from Garibaldi. On horseback these men could easily have found a way through the hills back to the main group. Just as Pilhes had. One party of cavalry which hadn’t been seen since Todi finally caught up with the column late in the evening at Castiglion Fiorentino. An absence of ten days.
‘Because he was a foreigner, perhaps. Deep down he didn’t care.’
‘And Hoffstetter? And Forbes? Pilhes was French.’
‘Perhaps he just lost faith.’
‘Eternal disgrace to the traitor!’ writes Ruggeri, who has Müller selling his men and horses to the Sienese authorities and escaping on a ship to America. Assessing the situation in 1893, without the benefit of Austrian archives, Belluzzi chooses not to believe this. There must be some mistake, he thinks. The brave Pole was simply lost. But now we have the Austrian documents.
‘Didn’t you say the Austrians shot any rebels they got their hands on?’
‘In fact D’Aspre was furious.’
General Stadion explains himself in a letter two days later.
I didn’t negotiate an official surrender with this isolated group. I just explained to Major Müller that if his men laid down their arms I would spare their lives, except in the case of any deserters from the Austrian army. Then since they had no money I let them sell their horses, which were in a miserable state and would have been of no use at all to our cavalry. My only goal was to neutralize a bunch of riff-raff who had been terrorising the local population, the better to concentrate my efforts on the main group of rebels.
‘And does Garibaldi know?’
‘Not yet. But we never learn when he found out, and he never spoke of it.’
DAY 18
22 July 1849 – 11 August 2019
Castiglion Fiorentino, Arezzo – 16 miles
Arezzo
‘We must die if ’48 is to end with any seriousness: to have our example serve for others, we must die.’
Such were the words that the 24-year-old Luciano Manara, commander of the Lombard Bersaglieri, wrote to his lover, Francesca Bonacina Spina, in the last days of the siege of Rome. Not long afterwards, he was shot by a sniper and died after hours of agony.
Now the same dilemma was in the air. How to end the weary retreat from Rome seriously? How to turn this prolonged resistance into an example that would count?
Without dying.
Time and again historians criticize Garibaldi for his naivety and recklessness. ‘His eternal instinct,’ ironizes David Gilmour, ‘was “When in doubt, charge with the bayonet.”’ ‘He fought by intuition,’ says David Kertzer in his excellent book on the Roman Republic, ‘guided in no small part by emotion.’ Of gentle disparagement by wise scholars there is no end. The man is made a force of nature rather than a thinking protagonist. The next few days will show how wrong this portrait is.
Not that Garibaldi was afraid of dying. ‘Nothing would please me more than to die for Italy,’ he said. But if a goal could be achieved without dying, all the better.
How?
One problem was that many of the garibaldini felt as the young Manara had. They wanted to go out fighting. The drama of battle was more attractive than the hard slog of forced marches. After 17 days and 250 miles, not to mention the siege that had come before, these were hardened men. But they were not professional soldiers. They had lives, perhaps jobs, families. Now more than ever they needed to feel there was some point to what they were doing. They had seen the pamphlet Garibaldi had published. They had seen that there had been no response. They had read Tuscan newspapers that described the patriotic cause as lost and the ‘patriots’ as a rabble of thieves. The only way to make sense of what they had been through would be to fight, gloriously; all their rhetoric, all their aspirations pointed that way. Again and again in his memoirs Garibaldi observes how rashly volunteers will rush into battle. The ‘eternal instinct’ of the bayonet charge was theirs, not his. He sought to exploit it as best he could.
So how to avoid a rout on the one hand, a meltdown on the other?
On 22 July the men were up before dawn, expecting to resume their march, but the General had them wait while he rode up into the hills and explored the possibility of heading directly east, avoiding Arezzo. The Apennines here are formed of two grand mountain chains, each some twenty-five miles wide, running up the spine of Italy – that is south-east to north-west. Between those two chains is the upper Tiber valley, some ten miles wide, the river flowing south towards Perugia. Garibaldi’s concern had to be that Paumgartten, with his base in Perugia, would realize that he meant to head to the Adriatic, to reach Venice, and send a substantial force of men up the Tiber valley to cut off his route. Was it better to move now, over the rugged highlands and beat him to it? With the risk that, once alerted, Paumgartten would react swiftly. Or to head north for Arezzo, giving the impression that the town was his objective, and so draw Paumgartten up this side of the Apennines to defend it? From Arezzo there was a good road across the mountains; Garibaldi would make better speed and, crucially, at this point Paumgartten would be behind him.
‘We were preparing for the climb,’ records Hoffstetter, ‘when the General returned around 1 p.m. and ordered an immediate march to Arezzo along the broad main road. By 11 that evening the whole column was within a cannon shot of the city’s southern walls.’ And he adds, ‘Exactly where the Consul Flaminius lay in wait for Hannibal in the second Punic War.’
‘Do not go to Arezzo by the main road.’
The previous day we had stopped in a sports shop in Castiglion to buy fresh rubber tips for our trekking poles. The owner was a hiker himself. The road was dangerous and polluted, he said. He told us about a high path, 2500 feet, over the mountains. Wasn’t there something lower, we asked, on the hillside above the road perhaps? We would have our fill of mountains soon enough. He said there were paths, but he had never gone that way. No one did.
‘We’ll try,’ we said.
It wasn’t easy. As always, when a path is not spectacular but simply a way of getting from A to B without using the road, people have ceased to use it. They have their cars. Almost at once we were confronted with such a forbidding tangle of barbs and nettles that we had to drop down to the road, then climb up again. Then drop down again. One particularly disheartening moment was presided over by a big white cat sprawled on the branches of an olive tree. The creature
yawned in the early-morning sun. I felt like throwing a stone.
Towards 8 a.m., down on the road outside the Hotel Planet, the kind of place you see near major airports, a crowd of Indians was loading bulky suitcases into a sleek silvery coach from Krakow, Poland. Many of the women were wearing saris. A little further on, outside a factory producing terracotta pots and animals – lions, cocks, pigs and frogs – a tall Snow White gathered all Seven Dwarves under her blue cloak. We took stock in the Bar Centrale of the roadside village of Rigutino, learning from the television that Salvini was threatening to bring the government down and call new elections.
It was a hot, hot day, a day when our shoes seemed too flimsy for the paths we were on, when seventeen miles seemed interminable. The hillside was pretty, but rugged, thorny. The cicadas mocked. Near the tiny village of Santa Maria a Pigli an elderly couple tying up their tomatoes asked us where we were going. ‘You’re now on the old Via Romea,’ they said proudly. ‘The pilgrim trail to Rome. Only you’re going the wrong way!’ People only went south on this path.
In stony woodland higher up we did cross paths with a pair of hikers following the pilgrim trail. They had walked from Forlì, they said, eighty miles to the north; the Apennine crossing was hard, they warned, but there were convents and monasteries where you were sure of a bed every night. As they spoke, I found myself studying their backpacks, their shoes, their equipment, appraising, criticizing, wondering.
‘They were carrying an awful lot of stuff,’ Eleonora remarked.
‘Heavy, heavy boots.’
‘Good hats though.’
Arezzo appeared, blissfully below us, simmering. You can see how tempting it must have seemed to the garibaldini. A big rich town lying in the fertile upper reaches of the Val di Chiana, dominated by a splendid duomo. Evidently a place of ease and wealth. As we came down to the first outlying village, we encountered the most exotic creature of the day: a tall, slim young woman dressed only in the skimpiest green shorts and black bra, striding at high speed towards us. Her skin was uniformly dark in the pitiless sunshine, gleaming with sweat. Her hair was pulled fiercely from her face in a ponytail. She wore no hat, but had a wristwatch which she checked compulsively every few paces.
There was a peculiar grimness to this woman. Her very litheness seemed hostile. As if extreme behaviour of the garibaldini variety – pushing yourself in the hot sun – were now entirely disconnected from any meaning or purpose, just dogged narcissism. She passed by without returning our Buon giorno, then half an hour later overtook us as we entered Arezzo, still walking at a cruel pace, presumably on her way home.
‘Textbook Amazon,’ Eleonora thought.
‘So unlike Anita.’
There were no suburbs outside Arezzo’s walls in 1849. Garibaldi stopped his men a hundred paces from the city gate. It was shut. Migliazza and his cavalry had been sent ahead to do the rounds of the walls and check the converging roads. Towards midnight the major brought his report. All the gates were closed and guarded. More importantly, he brought a man captured on the Siena road. Once again it was an Italian, this time a civilian, carrying Austrian dispatches. Garibaldi and Hoffstetter got down from their horses and went into a peasant cottage to read.
I shall never forget the bizarrely picturesque scene in that hut; the only furniture was a tree stump on which burned a hunk of candle, shedding a dim light on Garibaldi and the rest of our party. I was kneeling by the candle, translating the dispatches, which were written in German. All round, in the half dark you could see the tanned and bearded faces of the general’s staff and in a corner, half senseless from fear and guarded by two cavalrymen, the captured messenger.
The letter that Migliazza and his men had seized is not in the book of Austrian dispatches collected by Franz Pesendorfer, precisely because it never made it to the archives in Vienna. It was written by General Stadion, now hurrying towards Arezzo from the west, and addressed to Colonel Paumgartten, moving north from Perugia. Once again, the garibaldini marvelled that so much useful information had been made so easily available to them. Not even coded. Stadion believed Garibaldi had 4000 men, the dispatch said, and a number of cannons. Very likely he was planning to go to Venice. Stadion and Paumgartten should join forces as soon as possible to attack. Reinforcements were on their way to Arezzo from Florence, but public support for the rebels was slowing them down.
The General smiled, Hoffstetter says, on hearing all this, pleased that the Austrians were still overestimating their forces and still a day’s march away. Surely, Hoffstetter told him, they should now use the cannon to bring down the gate and enter Arezzo immediately. Garibaldi pondered and asked for the messenger to be brought to him. The man collapsed at his feet, begging for his life and promising never to serve the Austrians again. To every question the General asked, the man responded with more pleas to spare his life. ‘Go,’ Garibaldi told him.
Italian street signs will often tell you not only what a street is called now, but what it used to be called twenty, fifty, even a hundred years ago. Whether this is a form of nostalgia for the older name, or is meant to be useful for someone returning home after a long absence, a ghost even, I don’t know. Walking through Arezzo we swiftly came across these three road signs: Via Garibaldi, già via Sacra; Via Garibaldi, già via dell’Ascensione; Via Garibaldi, già via Sant’Agostino. Various segments of road following the old wall to the south of the city, all with names of religious inspiration, had been strung together and rechristened Via Garibaldi. No doubt he would be pleased to have won this small victory over the priests. We also found three prominent plaques to the hero, recalling his role in the Risorgimento, one remembering how he stopped in Arezzo in 1867 on the way to the Battle of Mentana. But there was no mention we could find of the night when he was in need and found the city barred to him.
We satisfied our immediate needs in the Antica Osteria Agania, arriving just before the kitchen closed at 2.30. This lively little restaurant is nothing more than a long narrow room running straight from door to counter with eight or nine tables each side. The menu, as Eleonora pointed out, makes no mention of lasagne. The aproned host, a cheerful, bearded Ciceruacchio figure in shorts and orange T-shirt, has the beginnings, under his apron, of what will one day be a noble paunch. The dish of the day was chalked on the board over the counter: LUMACHE DELLA VAL D’AMBRA – snails from the Ambra valley. We settled on pappardelle with greens followed by poached pears in red wine. It was one of the happiest eating experiences of our trip. We were so glad to be out of the sun.
Arezzo in general seems a happy, reassuring place, absorbing tourism without being overwhelmed by it. There’s a pleasant buzz in the streets. We were staying near the Piazza Grande, which has the charm of being built round an uneven slope, the ground falling away diagonally across the big square, creating a seductive mix of stateliness and crooked movement. Everywhere flags, coats of arms, emblems, porticoes, towers. On the corner of the piazza a small souvenir shop was displaying a T-shirt with the words Garibaldi fu ferito – Garibaldi was wounded. A cartoon Garibaldi with a big white beard carries the tricolour and has his foot heavily bandaged. The words are the opening to a famous song describing how the hero was shot in the foot at the battle of Aspromonte in 1862, a wound that left him half crippled for the rest of his life. I did not buy the shirt.
And Arezzo was not at ease in July 1849. Ruggeri again is more attuned than Hoffstetter to what is going on. ‘Arezzo is italianissima,’ he enthuses. Meaning patriotic. Where the German remembers Flaminius and Hannibal, the Italian recalls how the Tuscan town rose up against Napoleon in 1799 and the many volunteers it sent to support the ’48 revolutions. He writes:
We had high hopes. All over Tuscany citizens of every class and kind had hurried to greet and help us, vied with each other to feed us and forage our horses, to give us fresh clothes, new shoes, encourage us. All under the very noses of the Austrians. The people themselves, ever alien to the murky dealings of political parties and the skulduggery of
the Jesuits, were for Garibaldi and for independence. But not the moderates – that infamous sect of Italians, cause of so many of our disasters; and it was this sect that came to the aid of the Austrians in Arezzo.
Antonio Guadagnoli, Mayor of Arezzo, was a moderate, meaning a patriot, but of the cautious, not-now kind: for sure let us eventually arrive at an independent unified Italy, but no fighting, please, and above all no upsets for the wealthy classes. Guadagnoli was also a poet, a satirical poet at that. This didn’t prevent him summoning the town council as Garibaldi approached and convincing them that the rebels were only interested in plundering the town and that anyway any dealings with them would be severely punished by the Austrians.
In truth there were only ninety Austrians in the town garrison, many of them convalescing from previous battles. Guadagnoli proposed to put these few foreigners in control of the town’s defence and bring in peasants from outside the town to serve as soldiers, since the local citizens were generally in favour of Garibaldi. His proposal passed the council by the narrowest of margins, causing fierce protests in the town. Ruggeri describes the column’s arrival on the night of 22 July:
Garibaldi went to the gate himself and was surprised to find a mixed guard of Austrians and Italians defending it . . . A self-styled representative of the town, one of Guadagnoli’s henchmen, in an ill-disguised funk, stuttered something about the people of Arezzo not wanting to compromise themselves with the Austrians and being ready to meet force with force if necessary, but also willing to provide food and drink and anything we needed if only we would agree to camp outside. On hearing these words, the General trembled with rage, but said nothing.
Via Cavour runs into Via Mazzini and both run parallel to Via Garibaldi all just a few yards from the Vittorio Emanuele II boarding school. It was curious, we thought, sitting in a birreria late in the evening, given their different reputations, how the four protagonists of the Risorgimento handled disappointments. Cavour, the great statesman and schemer, would fly into an apoplectic rage, kick chairs around, offer his resignation and threaten to put a bullet in his brain. King Vittorio Emanuele II, ‘the gentleman king’, would swear and blaspheme in Piedmontese dialect, dissolve parliament on the spur of the moment, order his secret police to take revenge. Mazzini, the visionary and ideologue, would sink into black gloom and talk of withdrawing into total seclusion or ‘finishing it all with a rifle in hand’. Garibaldi, the supposedly ingenuous warrior, though not immune from rage or depression, was at his most alert and cool-headed precisely when everything was going awry. Standing at the closed gate, knowing that this refusal would be a huge blow to his men’s morale, he kept his head.
