The Hero's Way

by Tim Parks

  But Bassi was in danger himself: the Austrians were approaching the town’s southern gate. He left his food unfinished and rode off.

  We finished a plate of ice cream in Bar Citerna and left our packs there while we explored the town’s three streets. Heartened by my rapid recovery, the padrona insisted that the one thing to see in Citerna was Donatello’s terracotta Madonna. This is in the church of San Francesco, a stone’s throw from the bar, though the church is locked, and the Madonna is hidden in a vestry which is also locked. You have to go to the town hall, once the monastery, beside the church, and ask to be accompanied by a guide, at a cost of five euros.

  This elderly man now took over our afternoon. We found him sitting alone and disconsolate in a drab office. Our presence brought him to life. He began to talk. Nineteen to the dozen. We must understand the history of Citerna. A thousand years of it. Over the next hour he would show us absolutely everything there was to be seen and tell us everything there was to be told, before finally pulling out the huge key that would let us into the church to see the only thing we wanted to see.

  Not quite the only thing. Belluzzi describes visiting the monastery and examining the opening in the southern wall, under a portico, where Garibaldi placed his cannon so that it could fire down on Monterchi. No sooner were we through the door of the town hall than I recognized the place: across the courtyard, a thick wall with big arched apertures, through which you can gaze down onto a cluster of towers and terracotta roofs where the Austrians placed two much larger and more powerful cannons, pointing up at Citerna.

  Garibaldi? Our guide had seen, in the town hall archive, he said, IOUs that Garibaldi left in his own handwriting, alas later stolen by souvenir hunters. Of course people steal everything, he complained. That was why the Madonna had to be under lock and key. He patted his pocket. He had us in his power.

  Fifteen minutes into the visit, he took us down stone stairs to a labyrinth of vaulted cellars under the monastery/town hall to see the huge water cistern that had given the town its name. Perhaps. The idea, back in the 1300s, was to gather rainwater through ducts and conduits, and store it in one central place. This supply, together with huge stores of grain in the cellars, would enable the borgo to resist a siege more or less indefinitely. We looked down into dank water.

  In the church there was a huge amount to see before we could even dream of approaching the locked door and Donatello’s Madonna. A thirteenth-century crucifixion. A Deposition. An Annunciation. A Madonna in Glory. San Nicola of Bari, San Carlo Borromeo, Sant’Antonio with his lily in his hand.

  And how do you imagine it is, our guide asked, that a tiny place like this has so many wonderful works of art? We give up, I told him. It seemed a certain Vincenzo Vitelli, a mercenary commander of the sixteenth century who fought the Turks in Malta and at Lepanto, had a cultured lover, a nobildonna, who chose paintings for him to bring back to Citerna, which the Pope had given him to govern in payment for services rendered.

  We moved along a line of altars. San Michele speared the dragon. The Holy Family showed off their baby. From a painted niche San Francesco looked on. ‘Did you know that San Francesco performed two miracles, right here in Citerna? He freed an oak tree from infesting ants and rid himself of a woman who was bothering him. Fancy that.’

  Indeed. I began to show signs of mutiny. No doubt our guide was practised in gauging exactly how much a visitor could take before moving on. In any event, he at last produced a shiny key and let us into a small, bare, white room to one side of the nave.

  ‘La Madonna di Citerna!’ he announced with flourish. ‘Di Donatello. In terracotta.’

  She was worth waiting for. After seven years of restoration work in Florence, they had set her up in the centre of the room on a polished wooden block surrounded by low ropes. She’s about four feet high, wearing a long red dress and a white headscarf. Her hair is golden. Her baby is nude and plump and his hair is also golden. The same gold. Same hair. Same skin too. The two possess each other wonderfully, his hand on her neck, her cheek touching his temple. There’s a serene complicity between them, a quiet grace that spreads into the space around. It seems extraordinary that such a beauty should be locked away in this empty room, waiting for this garrulous man to turn the key.

  Having found nowhere to stay in Citerna, we walked a mile east to Le Rasse, an agriturismo in a renovated farmhouse where the young owners gave us directions through an extensive wooded garden to a swimming pool. To our delight, this was built right on the southern edge of the ridge, so that again there was a strategic view of Monterchi. Sitting with your feet in the water you could easily imagine aiming a gun at the arriving Austrians. They marched through the night and occupied the borgo at 5 a.m. on the morning of 25 July, just twelve hours after the garibaldini had occupied Citerna high above. Despite General Stadion’s order to attack, they would have seen at once the folly of such a strategy, and instead set up their cannons and prepared for a siege. Their compatriots in San Sepolcro and Città di Castello would surely soon close Garibaldi in from the north.

  So the cannons pointed at each other, but didn’t fire. Ammunition was scarce. As soon as night fell on the 25th, a party of garibaldini clambered down to Monterchi and taunted the Austrians from outside the town walls. Mangiazucche! they yelled in the dark. Pumpkin eaters. Segoni! Wankers.

  On the 26th a large Austrian column from Florence, following the Arno to the north of Arezzo, arrived in Anghiari, where they immediately found themselves skirmishing with Garibaldi’s cavalry. They were overwhelmingly the stronger force and soon occupied the town. Everything was in place now. Some 6000 Austrians had converged on the Tiber valley. They had their man.

  We ate out on the terrace of Le Rasse, which looks out across the valley to San Giustino and the mountains. A full moon sailed through pine trees above the steep scarp.

  ‘So how did they get away?’ Eleonora asked.

  DAY 21

  26–27 July 1849 – 14 August 2019

  Citerna, San Giustino, Bocca Trabaria, ValdericArte – 20 miles

  San Giustino

  How on earth did we escape? Hoffstetter wonders during the morning of the 27th. He’s still feverish, still fearful he may fall off his horse. Most of all, he’s amazed.

  Throughout 26 July, their second day in Citerna, the General’s cavalry continued their scouting and skirmishing between San Sepolcro on the one side and Città di Castello on the other. A handful of wounded men were treated in the church of San Francesco under the gaze of Donatello’s Madonna.

  In the afternoon scouts reported the arrival of the Austrians in Anghiari. Two battalions and accompanying heavy artillery. A showdown was imminent. The soldiers talked openly, says Ruggeri, about what to do if defeated; they knew the Austrians were taking no prisoners.

  Garibaldi watched through his telescope. He was studying a road that climbs the slopes of Monte Giove behind San Giustino, directly across the valley. That road eventually rises 4000 feet to the pass at Bocca Trabaria, crossing the so-called Alpe della Luna – Moon Alps – and descends to the Adriatic. The port of Fano is just sixty miles away.

  But there was no bridge across the Tiber to San Giustino. Just a ford. The soil was loose and sandy, the land flat, exposed. For a bridge, one must go to within a mile of San Sepolcro, due north, then turn back three miles to San Giustino. Surely the Austrians, who held San Sepolcro, would block his path. Garibaldi studied the situation. As yet his scouts had found no Austrians in San Giustino or on Monte Giove. The more frequently used roads across the mountains led north and east from San Sepolcro, or east from Città di Castello.

  The General told no one of his plans. He ordered an ambush to be placed at San Leo, between Citerna and Anghiari. Presumably for fear the Austrians might make a move before nightfall. But they were weary from their long climb. Then an attack was launched on Monterchi. Lots of movement, lots of firing. Lots of men assembled threateningly on the heights of Citerna, visible from below to the Austrians, wh
o watched through their telescopes. Finally, towards evening, another attack was launched on Città di Castello. Shooting at the town walls from across the river. The firing went on intermittently through the twilight.

  It was all sham. In Citerna, as darkness fell, the men who had gathered to threaten Monterchi crossed to the other side of the ridge and went straight down the steep wooded scarp to the Tiber plain beneath. No paths. No lights. A 500-foot plunge. There were accidents. Some men were lost. Some equipment had to be abandoned. But eventually they hit the road at the bottom and set off in silence.

  Garibaldi split them up. Some would ford the Tiber and go straight to San Giustino. Six miles. Arriving with their boots and trousers soaked. The twenty-three-year-old Domenico Piva, later one of the famous Thousand, insisted to Belluzzi that they did indeed take the monks from the monastery in Citerna to prevent them from informing the Austrians. He remembers fat men, complaining bitterly, up to their thighs in the dark river.

  The rest of the column, Garibaldi with them, approached the bridge near San Sepolcro. It was the moment of maximum tension. The Austrians, occupying the town and the road north, had left the bridge unguarded. The men crossed in silence and doubled back along the riverbank. By dawn the entire force was gathered in San Giustino, where they were greeted warmly by the locals, who ‘vied with each other to bring refreshments’. Migliazza and his cavalry were sent off to scout the road over the mountains.

  Ruggeri, so discouraged by the failure to attack Arezzo, enjoys a rare moment of enthusiasm recalling that night-time manoeuvre. It’s true that some mules went under while fording the river and some men were lost in the dark. But the column had ‘slipped the Austrian noose’, and ‘those who admired the General’s sang froid directing operations so dangerous and so sublime, those who had shared with him the endless hardships of this little war, were immensely proud to think their names would figure in the glorious legions that he formed and led’.

  But Hoffstetter simply wondered why. Why hadn’t the Austrians stopped them? And how could Garibaldi have known they wouldn’t? Not a shot had been fired the whole night.

  ‘So why didn’t they?’ Eleonora asks.

  We slipped out of Le Rasse before dawn. These are lovely moments: the deep shadows of the trees furtive and fresh, the grass dewy, air balmy, and all around an atmosphere of quiet vegetable pressure, a fragrant summery tension towards the splendour of the rising sun.

  We didn’t plunge down the scarp, but followed a steep road. In the fields, irrigation pumps flung jets of water across row after row of tobacco plants. Tobacco has been the main crop here for centuries. The water hissed. The garibaldini would stock up on cigars in San Giustino. Ahead, the silhouette of the mountains turns pink. Shepherd’s warning.

  This is easy walking. Flat and fast. We were eager to have the road behind us before people got in their cars. In the centre of the plain is the village of Pistrino, a nondescript, modern sprawl. More fields, then the Tiber. We didn’t have to ford. There’s a bridge now. The river isn’t wide, but the water moves fast and cold through banks thick with bushes and trees. Silver poplars, elms, myrtle. Then, just as the sun rose, at my feet, a corpse. Not a deer, not a mule, not – thank heaven – a soldier, but a big crested porcupine. It was a noble creature, with foot-long spines and a fine snout, but its haunches were crushed and bloody. He’d chosen the wrong moment to cross the road.

  Eluding swarms of surrounding Austrians,

  the glorious survivors of the Roman Republic

  rested here on 27 July 1849,

  among villagers overcome

  with reverence and astonishment.

  Thus the plaque on the town hall in San Giustino. It was 7.30. Five miles behind and fifteen to go. We sat outside a café in the pretty piazza among locals enjoying their coffee. Two men to our right were discussing the sale of some agricultural machinery. ‘Don’t make the mistake,’ one said, ‘of letting friends shaft you with requests for special prices.’

  ‘Astonishment that he had made it across the valley, I presume,’ Eleonora mused. ‘You still haven’t told me why the Austrians let him off the hook.’

  Hoffstetter didn’t understand. Nor Ruggeri. The answer is to be found in a book, 1844–1869: Twenty-five Years in Italy, by Carlo Corsi, published in 1870. Twenty-two years old at the time of Garibaldi’s march, Corsi, a Florentine from a noble family, had already fought in both the Tuscan and Piedmontese armies. Later he would be a military strategist and historian. In Florence in the summer of 1849, hearing tales that the garibaldini were devastating every town in their path, and having relatives in the Apennine village of Sestino, where he feared the rebels were bound to pass, he and a friend decided to go and see for themselves. They reached Arezzo in a post-chaise then hired a carriage and took the road to Anghiari, thinking that this way they could overtake the garibaldini. But on 25 July they ran into the back of the Austrian battalions, marching up to the Tiber valley. An officer climbed into their carriage to question them. The two Florentines explained themselves. The officer told them that Garibaldi was finished and couldn’t possibly make it to Sestino. He was surrounded. The Austrian unfolded a map and pointed to the positions of the various armies to prove his point. Writing about himself in the third person, the historian describes his reaction.

  Corsi saw, however, that the map did not show the fine, new road that goes from San Giustino to Bocca Trabaria then onwards to Ancona. Laughing, he asked the officer who had given him that piece of paper. The Austrian answered that he had had it from the General Staff. And when he heard the reason for Corsi’s laughter, instead of railing against the General Staff, the officer started saying it simply wasn’t possible that such a serious mistake could have occurred, because the Austrians always kept their maps perfectly up to date.

  The road had been opened in 1840. Nine years before. The Austrians weren’t aware of it. They didn’t ask the advice of local people, or even the Tuscan army. They hadn’t stared at the mountains through their telescopes. When Stadion in Arezzo heard what had happened, he set out himself in mad haste to take command. But he did not tell D’Aspre. It was too shameful. There would be no dispatches to his commanding officer for a full four days now, from 25 to 29 July.

  We were draining our coffee when an argument broke out. The man selling agricultural machinery had loudly remarked what a beautiful morning it was. An older man at the next table said maybe so, but for him the day was over. In another few minutes he would have to clock in at the town hall. Then he wouldn’t exist till evening. He was not a free man. So it had been, he said, eight hours a day, six days a week, for thirty years and more. The machinery man laughed and said something along the lines of it being the other’s fault if he had chosen the easy number of public-sector employment: no pressure, no risk, early retirement, endless bonuses. ‘You’re a slave by choice! A sponger.’ ‘And you’re a barbarian,’ the other man shouted. Insults flew – in jest, in earnest.

  Magherini-Graziani records an exchange between a public employee and a free man in San Giustino on 26 July 1849, some hours before the General made his move. Officer Campi worked in the customs house, collecting duties on trade passing between Tuscany and the Papal States. Hence he wore the uniform of the so-called Finanzieri, a celebrated military corps. Crossing the street, he heard the thunder of hooves. ‘I love the Finanzieri!’ a voice shouted. A cavalry party galloped up; the men reined in their horses.

  Campi recalls the meeting in a letter that Magherini-Graziani quotes in full. Garibaldi’s scouts had just bought cigars in the piazza. They were all smoking, unkempt and wild. ‘The Finanzieri never let me down!’ the leading cavalryman went on. ‘On the walls of Rome you could always sleep sound with the Finanzieri beside you. They were loyal. What I hate is a traitor! It was the traitors that lost us Rome. Not the French. A traitor I think I have the right to kill. What do you say?’

  He reached for his pistol. Frightened, the customs man agreed. By all means, kill the traitors. The
cavalryman stared at him.

  ‘I have reason to think,’ he said, ‘that you are one.’

  ‘Me? But why?’

  ‘The way you’re acting,’ the cavalryman said.

  ‘If I haven’t greeted you warmly,’ Campi protested, ‘it’s just my surprise, and the enormous regard I have for you.’

  The cavalryman shook his head. ‘I’ve just been hearing from your fellow townsfolk that at the customs house you all support the Austrians. Is that right?’

  ‘It’s a slander.’ Campi was trembling now. He added, ‘That’s the sort of envious tale-telling public employees get all the time.’

  ‘Give me your hand on it,’ the cavalryman said abruptly.

  Campi obeyed, but in his nervousness gave the man his left hand, his right being occupied with ‘a good fistful of tobacco’. The cavalryman protested. Campi switched hands. Now the cavalryman leaned down and insisted on a kiss, which he gave ‘with all the fire of Mars’. Then drew back. ‘I’m not convinced,’ he said. ‘A good Italian should hate the foreigner, who bleeds us of the taxes that should be spent on the poor and on our own industries.’

  ‘We just obey and do our jobs,’ Campi pleaded. ‘We have children to support.’

  ‘Those are hardly arguments to persuade a man facing death for his country! You people are too attached to your money.’ The cavalryman stopped. ‘But I’m not here to change your opinions, which I respect. Think what you like, just don’t betray me.’

  At last it dawned on Campi that he was simply being warned not to inform the Austrians of the rebels’ presence. ‘Even if we wanted to,’ he replied, ‘they wouldn’t listen.’