The Hero's Way

by Tim Parks

  Now there was a field of dazzling white flowers, now an ascent that felt like climbing a dry mountain torrent. The trees along the way were indeed oaks, small and gnarled and alive with spiders. At last, across a ploughed field full of broken roots and pecking crows, we had our first view of the Most Serene Republic of San Marino. The city is arranged in parallel lines atop a high ridge running north–south, as if a huge ocean liner were beached in the plain just beyond the mountains. It looked so near. And it was only ten o’clock. But we would not be climbing on board till four and gone.

  Pleased to have the goal in sight, we took time out to gather blackberries. Or rather, I persuaded Eleonora to join me gathering them. She had never done this before. Italians, who love to gather herbs and mushrooms and wild asparagus, for some reason ignore blackberries. We filled our Tupperware box, scratched our wrists and shooed away the wasps.

  Now there were white long-horn cattle, which made me wonder if the garibaldini still had any oxen with them. The big animals were sprawled in full sunshine with an air of utter resignation. A man moved along a line of beehives wearing all the gear. We had reached Cuccagna.

  Perhaps there was once an immense forest here. No longer. It’s a high, open plateau, with mowed pastures sloping downwards on either side of the road and a couple of ramshackle farm buildings. A woman appeared walking a dog. She took it down into one of the fields and started shouting commands. Heel. Fetch. Then came the clip-clop of three riders on horses. They had climbed up from the San Marino side and were suffering the heat. The horses too seemed sluggish and disheartened. It was partly the heat, says Belluzzi, that undid the garibaldini on the morning of the 31st. And their tiredness. But above all the cannon. The cannon they’d hauled 350 miles and never fired.

  I was aware of having various things in my pack we had not used so far. Our emergency lightweight tent, for example, and five thick paper maps. Thinking of the cannon, I pulled a map out now and unfolded it on the grass to see if it was any help. We needed to decide whether to go fairly directly to San Marino, approaching from the south-west, where Hahne’s men were camped, or, as I wanted, to climb Monte San Paolo, right ahead of us. That way we would be able to approach San Marino from the south and hopefully find the very place where the cannon’s undercarriage finally snapped. And the artillerymen, so proud of their vital weapon, insisted on stopping to make repairs.

  The map was no help, and our app was at a loss when it came to Monte San Paolo. The route it gave was impossibly roundabout. Google Satellite suggested that the site of the battle, at the bottom of the valley, on the very border of San Marino, was now a residential area. Eleonora said she needed an ibuprofen. Anita, I remembered, had been through hell that morning.

  I looked east to where the mountain gathered itself above the plateau. A hawk was circling, gliding with wonderful grace in slow circles over the wooded slopes. Then it came down like a stone on some invisible prey.

  ‘Let’s leave it,’ I said. ‘We can come back some other time.’

  ‘Citizen President,’ Garibaldi told Captain Regent Belzoppi, ‘my troops, chased by overwhelming Austrian armies, and devastated by forced marches across mountain and chasm, are no longer fit for battle; we have had to cross your border for a few hours’ rest and some bread to eat. The men will lay down their arms in your republic, where, in this moment, the Roman War for Italian Independence ends. I come to you as a refugee; accept me as such and accept the burden of becoming guarantor of the safety of those who have followed me.’

  ‘The refugee is welcome,’ Belzoppi replied. ‘This hospitable land, dear General, will take you in. Rations for your soldiers will be prepared; your wounded will be housed and cared for. In return, you must spare this land the hardships and disasters that we fear. I accept the mandate you give me to mediate; it’s a humane duty and as such I am glad to undertake it.’

  Could it really have been so simple? So noble? These are the words that have come down to us, first through eyewitnesses, then reported in the historian Pietro Franciosi’s account many years later. Whatever the case, the meeting was interrupted by a warning that the column was under attack. Hoffstetter was beside Garibaldi.

  Returning in haste, we heard shots. Despite the steep, stony, dangerous roads, we galloped headlong down towards our men. But they were running, frightened to be caught in the gorge, followed by Austrian infantry . . . Reaching the steepest part, we saw the general’s wife, alone, blocking the flight of the running men, cracking her whip and ordering them to stop and turn.

  Having turned away from Monte San Paolo, we began our long flight down from Cuccagna to San Marino. It felt rather like slow-motion flying, as when the plane banks right and left and gradually what seemed so far below grows closer and closer. San Marino on its crag. The sea beyond. Hills and villages coming into clearer and clearer focus. Ever so gradually. One hour, two.

  Our track was white stones, winding this way and that. A tractor ploughed between vines. There was a shabby little shrine and withered flowers where long ago a child had died. Donkeys trotted across a paddock wanting to be fed. A pomegranate tree was so full of fruit its branches sagged in the sun.

  Frequent water breaks. More blackberry-picking. And then . . . providence again. Having not seen a single place of refreshment since Mercato Vecchio, we marched into the village of Pieve Corena just before one o’clock and found, with everything else closed, the Caffè ABC open, empty and well stocked with ice and cedrata. Sitting outside, we ate the old lady’s sandwiches in the shade and rested.

  Never rest till you’re home and dry. That must be the moral of this tale. On the other hand, how incredibly unlucky, after dragging that cannon 350 arduous miles, that the steering bar of its undercarriage should break just as the men began to haul it up from the bottom of the last gorge towards the city of refuge. A loud crack and a couple of tons of cast iron started to slip back down the slope. The men dashed to halt it.

  Clarification. If the Roman Republic held out as long as it did, it was largely thanks to the artillery men who manned the few rebel cannons on the city walls, firing for hours on end while under heavy fire themselves. These were professional soldiers. Many died. The small party that had joined Garibaldi on his long march, bringing just one small cannon, were extremely attached to their weapon, maintaining it with obsessive care, knowing it could be decisive in battle. When, towards ten o’clock of what was already a sweltering hot morning, the steering bar broke, they would not hear of abandoning it. It must be repaired.

  The artillerymen had a certain authority. Their fellow soldiers were exhausted and only too glad of the break. The last four days had been an endless sleepless whirl of extreme weather conditions, alarms and endless marching. In particular they had just walked nine hours through the night. Who would not forgive a man who falls asleep in such circumstances?

  Garibaldi.

  Repairs took two hours. By the time the cannon was ready to move, the advance guard had already reached San Marino, while the rearguard had long since caught up with the column at the bottom of the gorge and was resting with them. No guards had been set. The men were totally exposed, when all at once the trees above and behind them were alive with white uniforms.

  Once again we were looking at a steep descent followed by an arduous climb to end the day. San Marino raises this experience to new levels of masochism. Seen from the west across the gorge, the ground falls sheer away, while on the other side you have the impression of a vertical rock face, whitish brown, occasionally mottled with bushes; you turn anxiously to your app to assure yourself there really is a path up there. Not for nothing is it called Mount Titan. Of course we could have followed the road from Pieve Corena, a busy road that snakes down to the north then approaches the city where a neck of land leads less steeply to the heights. But we were determined that at least this gorge we would cross more or less as the garibaldini did. Towards two, with the sun sizzling, we found the gap in the road’s crash barrier where the path began
and went over the top.

  These are badlands. Fit for goats. You mustn’t put a foot wrong. Dry, greyish grass at the top, then thicker and thicker brambles and thorns. A woodsman’s stone cottage, long abandoned, in dense vegetation. Finally we heard the tiny river at the bottom. The San Marino. Would there be a bridge?

  No.

  We took our shoes off. ‘Only a few still had shoes,’ Hoffstetter observes of the garibaldini at this point. The air was damp with that rhubarb-like growth you find at the bottom of gullies. And thick nettles. There were snails on tree trunks and twigs catching at your clothes. You could feel the gritty squelch under your toes. But the cool of the water was delightful. We had just got our shoes back on and were ready to tackle a narrow path climbing vertically into the brambles when we heard, to our amazement, the heavy tramp of boots coming down. For a moment I shivered, thinking how vulnerable we were here.

  It was a man in his fifties. ‘Last time I forded this,’ he said, ‘I slipped and broke my ankle. You can’t imagine how long before they got me out of here.’

  The men’s immediate instinct, Ruggeri writes, was to get out of that dangerous place as soon as possible. He offers the most sympathetic account. One suspects he was in the fighting, though he never speaks of his personal role. Hoffstetter was merely disgusted, first that the men allowed themselves to be caught napping, then that they ran. It wasn’t exactly running, says Ruggeri. Or not running away. The officers were trying to get the men to higher ground on the San Marino side, in part to gain a vantage point where they could turn on their attackers, in part to keep the path to safety open.

  This clearly wasn’t Anita’s impression. The first men had already started climbing. The cannon was near the bottom but repaired now and ready to roll when the enemy Jäger came pouring down through the trees. And began to launch their rockets. Searing light, loud bangs and flame.

  The garibaldini ran. More than a thousand men in a tight space. Like sheep. But the artillerymen stayed put, returning rifle fire. They tried to defend their baby. They took casualties. Anita, already higher up the slope, pregnant and exhausted, turned her horse, yelled, lashed out with her whip. ‘She was furious with this cowardly flight,’ Hoffstetter says. ‘That incomparable woman,’ Garibaldi remembered years later, ‘just couldn’t believe that men who in the past had fought so courageously should now be so afraid.’ After all, he went on, ‘those famous rockets, the Austrians’ favourite toy, never hurt anyone’.

  Forbes distinguished himself. The ineffable Forbes in his white hat. He was beside Anita trying to stem the tide. Isolated and overwhelmed, the last artillerymen abandoned the cannon and ran. With the return of Garibaldi and his staff, some order was re-established. A rearguard was set up where the ground levelled out, while Anita was given the task of leading the column up endless hairpins to the city walls.

  With the advantage of the slope, the line now held. Once again the Austrians pulled back. They didn’t want to take losses. In a dispatch to D’Aspre on 1 August, Stadion presented the attack as a huge success. ‘The rebels fled in total disorder at the sight of a few rockets. Their one cannon and much of their camping equipment was seized.’ He does not mention his own side’s failure to follow up. ‘In the end, although it might have looked like a rout,’ Ruggeri concludes, ‘we only had a few light wounds.’ Garibaldi mentions deaths among the artillerymen, but does not say how many. The column topped Mount Titan towards midday in blistering heat.

  ‘There were two thousand of us,’ wrote Captain Raimondo Bonnet years later, ‘dead tired, not so much from hunger and hardship as from the disheartening awareness that the Italians had so quickly forgotten the holy cause of independence.’

  Oreste Brizi, a pro-Austrian member of the San Marino elite, was beside the road watching.

  One thousand five hundred infantry made up the Cosmopolitan Garibaldi Band. More than 300 men on horseback and no small number of beasts of burden. You could see boys of 12 to 15 still terrified from their last battle, when they threw down their arms to run faster; you could see horsemen walking and infantry men on horseback; uniforms of various colours and styles, filthy, in tatters, all higgledy-piggledy; heterogeneous weapons, black with rust; horses exhausted and poorly harnessed. Soldiers with daggers at their sides and cartridge belts across their chests. Like bandits. Red caps with shredded feathers, white cloaks and long beards; but no cannons, and no discipline.

  Quoting this, Belluzzi is beside himself with indignation.

  This writer, who is so scornful, so pleased that the ill-starred Roman Republic has finally fallen, is nevertheless obliged to confess it took only two of Garibaldi’s officers at the San Francesco gate, to deter this ‘unruly horde’ from entering the city, steering them to the nearby convent of the Cappuccini. And in his whole malicious account he is unable to record a single theft, or killing, or even a serious argument.

  It took us an hour and twenty to climb Mount Titan. Stopping every few minutes to get our breaths in the heavily scented air. At the edge of town, almost the first thing we saw was one of those big steel containers where people can donate their old clothes. I imagined the garibaldini dumping their filthy red shirts. Which not so many years later would become collectors’ items, displayed in museums all over the land.

  We dropped our stuff in our B & B, a half-mile outside the walls, showered and rested, then climbed the last stretch in the early evening. It’s spectacular. From Porta San Francesco, on the city’s west side, the men would have been able to look out across the broad panorama of the Apennines, and down to where the Austrians were camped in the plain. They had escaped by the skin of their teeth. The convent where most of them were housed is 200 yards to the south, just outside the walls, but entirely safe from attack, because perched, like all the city, over precipitous rock faces. Shortly after they had been led there, Garibaldi sat on the steps outside the building, borrowed a drum to put on his knee, stretched a piece of paper over its skin, and with an old stub of pencil wrote the order of the day.

  San Marino, 31 July, 1849

  We have reached the land of refuge, and we owe our hosts our best behaviour. That way we will have deserved the consideration due to persecution and misfortune.

  From this moment on I release my companions from any obligation in my regard, leaving them free to return to their private lives, but reminding them that Italy must not remain in disgrace and that it is better to die than to live as slaves to the foreigner.

  These words are now engraved on a plaque on the convent wall. Handing the scrap of paper to his officers, Garibaldi must have been perfectly aware the drama wasn’t over yet. Archduke Ernst had already rejected San Marino’s offer of mediation. Nothing less than total surrender would do, he said. The Pope himself demanded it. If Garibaldi refused, he warned, the people of San Marino must expel the rebels from their city; the Austrians would then exterminate them on the slopes of Mount Titan.

  DAY 25

  31 July 1849 – 18 August 2019

  San Marino

  Ruggeri’s and Hoffstetter’s books are full of small mistakes. Rushed into print in 1850 and 1851, in Genoa and Turin, hastily translated in Hoffstetter’s case, they have been unavailable for 150 years. No new editions. No corrections. Place names are misspelled, explanations offered that cannot be right. Sometimes Hoffstetter gets his dates mixed up. Immediately after the arrival of the column at the Cappuccini convent, he writes, ‘1° agosto’, indicating a new day. I thus assumed that Garibaldi had spent both the 31st and the 1st in San Marino, and in consequence we decided to treat ourselves to a day there. In fact, the General left the city around 11 p.m. on the 31st. He had spent just fifteen hours in the place. When or if he slept we do not know.

  We, however, had time for a leisurely breakfast with our Airbnb hosts, a young Sammarinese and his Russian wife. They had met couch-surfing, they said, and were just back from six months in India with their baby girl. They spoke earnestly of the need to be free, to travel, but felt that Gariba
ldi had made a mistake uniting Italy. The country’s many states should have remained free and independent, like San Marino. When Eleonora pointed out that most of the Italian states had been neither free nor independent and that San Marino had only been allowed to maintain its republican status because it was so tiny, he assured us that sooner or later the other states would have been free. How he did not know. On the subject of the EU, he thought it necessary for its member states to surrender their sovereignty to the union so as not to be overwhelmed by the other great powers, China, Russia, the USA. To each his inconsistencies. Very kindly, he gave us a copy of The Republic of San Marino, Historic and Artistic Guide of the City of Castles. While I was cleaning my teeth, Eleonora found the pages referring to 1849 and read out loud:

  Without dismounting from his horse, Garibaldi rode straight to the Public Palace. The doors of the houses were barred, not a woman was to be seen on the steep streets: the ‘buccaneer’ was in town, the ‘lady-killer’, the ‘red devil’. All at once, a window opened and a mother and daughter appeared. The girl couldn’t contain her emotion and cried: ‘Mother, that’s no murderer. Look, he has the same face as the Nazarene!

  Piety is in the air in San Marino. The streets are obsessively swept, the asphalt brightly painted. Blue and yellow lines adorn every kerb. You always know where you can park, or cross, or turn. Outside Porta San Francesco a tall policewoman stands beside a sentry box deciding who can enter and who cannot. She wears blue trousers, orange shirt, peaked cap and dark glasses. Has a military bearing. Her hand signs are elegant and abrupt. Everyone obeys.

  Behind her, outside the walls and directly below the gate, there is a parking space for about fifteen tourist coaches. Herds climb the steps, following the abundant signs provided. Inside the gate, fifty yards across cobbles to the left is, or was, Lorenzo Simoncini’s café, where Garibaldi spent most of his time in San Marino. Now, beneath a plaque that declares, ‘In this house, surrounded by German arms, Garibaldi refused the terms of surrender,’ a menu of the day is posted on a large board. Top of the list is lasagne. Eleonora shakes her head.