The Hero's Way

by Tim Parks

  ‘And the corgi makes you think of him!’

  ‘Carrying severe disabilities but absolutely up for a fight.’

  Sogliano al Rubicone

  Towards midday, following a narrow lane, we reached a crossroads with a fingerpost that indicated Sogliano al Rubicone a half-mile to our left, Borghi three miles on and Savignano al Rubicone eight miles on. So this must be the place Belluzzi describes where Garibaldi stopped about an hour after daybreak, having marched all night. Anita collapsed on a heap of gravel. Ciceruacchio together with a few officers went into the town and found Doctor Bonaventura Sabbatini, a patriot. Food was brought out. Fresh bread and watermelons. A priest, Badarlon recalls, ran back and forth, bringing bottles of wine. Sabbatini later told Belluzzi how Anita pulled her dagger from her belt, sliced a watermelon and simply sank her face into its red fruit. She was suffering from constant, acute thirst. Garibaldi ate little, drank less and spent most of the time conferring with the locals about the route. On parting, he gave the doctor some of his cigars.

  ‘The group was smaller when we set off again,’ Badarlon observes. The gruelling walk had done for many. ‘Some men took off their incriminating red shirts and slipped away into the fields.’ Garibaldi let them go and pressed on, still insisting to Badarlon that they avoid all villages and proper roads. ‘He began to point the way himself: it was as if he had always lived in the country here. He had the nose of a dog, the eye of a hawk.’

  Everyone was tired, sweating, scorched by the sun. Many of the horses had to be abandoned; they couldn’t keep up. And Badarlon speaks the only harsh words I have ever seen written about Anita. ‘She made you sorry for her. But angry too. She shouldn’t have insisted on following her husband given the state she was in. There was a danger we would have to stop and everyone’s safety would be compromised. She was hanging on to life by her teeth. In desperation.’

  Borghi

  We were in a somewhat better state, but suffering nevertheless. The temperature was in the mid-thirties. We had brought no food with us today and were low on water. It was August, in an area with no tourism. Everything was closed, shutters down in the blazing sunshine. Empty streets. At last, around 1.30 in the village of Borghi we found the Bar Osteria Centrale open. Sort of. The cook was on holiday, the padrona explained. They weren’t serving food. Only drinks. We begged. No doubt the state we were in was eloquent. The good lady sat us outside at one of a scatter of plastic tables and eventually served two huge focacce with half-melted cheese inside.

  Nibbling, Eleonora asked me what had become of Hoffstetter.

  ‘He’s down there,’ I said, pointing across the road to the plain and the sea.

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Panicking.’

  Having climbed to Torriana – the first hill – and failed to find Garibaldi, Hoffstetter, Forbes and Bassi and their sixty men had decided they should head straight for the emergency rendezvous at Savignano. They descended to the river Uso and, instead of climbing up to San Giovanni in Galilea, walked along its dry bed down into the plain, arriving at ‘about an hour’ from Savignano while Garibaldi was still up in the hills. The General had mentioned a canonica, a priest’s house, beside a church between Santarcangelo and Savignano. But when Hofstetter’s party reached the area, no one had seen Garibaldi. Meantime the sixty men had dwindled to twenty, meaning they could hardly defend themselves, even in a minor skirmish. Bassi, Forbes and the German conferred. Hoffstetter assumed that Garibaldi had been intercepted by the Austrians, who the peasants told them had a garrison in Savignano. The situation was hopeless, he said. They should switch to civilian clothes, split up and hide. ‘It seemed the other two agreed,’ Hoffstetter remembers, ‘but they wanted to go to Savignano first to see if it was true the Austrians were there. I waited for them to come back. In vain. They must have run into the enemy and fled for the hills.’

  Hoffstetter was now alone with his young servant Ramussi, the boy who had slept on sacks of forage outside the monastery in Terni. He decided to change his clothes, find someone to buy his three horses and disappear. Belluzzi is scathing. ‘Overcome by a loss of confidence as sudden as it is strange, he sells his generous horses, which Garibaldi had given him, for a mere 125 lire, buries the weapons that he says he holds dear, dresses himself in civilian clothes (brought along with this in mind?) and assisted by local patriots sets off towards Milan and Switzerland travelling the whole way by hired carriage.’

  ‘Harsh,’ Eleonora thinks.

  ‘You can see Belluzzi is actually rather pleased.’

  ‘That the man who was much closer to the General than he ever was, nevertheless was not a true hero?’

  ‘Right. And there is something in what he says. You can’t imagine Leggero doing this. Or Ruggeri if he’d been there. Quite a few stragglers headed for Cesenatico individually and managed to rejoin Garibaldi there. But all alone, in unfamiliar territory, surrounded by enemies, Hoffstetter suddenly remembers he is a German military man with a promising future. He doesn’t need to die in Italy. So he opts for out. In the end, the reason he writes such an excellent account of the drama is that he’s not as passionately engaged as Ruggeri or Belluzzi. His book is not a tract. It’s a description.’

  ‘And Forbes, and Bassi?’

  Two plaques would tell the story for us. Having filled our water bottles in the café, we wrapped up a good half of our focacce, stowed them in our bags and set off. Borghi is a long ribbon of modest modern housing, at the end of which we found Via Ugo Bassi, and on an ugly cement wall holding up the garden of a villetta, these words:

  1 August, 1849, avoiding enemy ambush,

  Ugo Bassi was given food and sustenance here

  on his way to join Garibaldi in Musano.

  ‘No Forbes.’

  ‘Forbes was there, just he never gets mentioned. There are no streets named after Forbes or Hoffstetter.’

  Musano

  The small settlement of Musano was three miles away. Always the same narrow lanes, shrivelled oaks, scorched stubble, meagre shade, endless hills. There was no traffic that afternoon. It was siesta time. We walked in a torrid hush. First the climb up to Castellaro – a scatter of houses, cars tucked in the shade – then down again to the Rubicone, so famously crossed by Caesar, now the most meagre of trickles, its dank water barely visible through thick bushes. I took a photo of an extraordinary spider, perhaps an inch and half across, black and white, suspended in the bright air between two stalks of dead grass. At last there was a stretch on the flat, turning back alongside the river through farmland and thickets of bamboo to Musano, where, amid weeds at the edge of a car park, beside a tiny church, we found these words, engraved in stone.

  Guest of Don Pompilio Fiorentino,

  in the church close by, exhausted from his long journey,

  the great spirit Garibaldi found refreshment.

  1 August 1849

  Don Pompilio, the local priest, would spend the rest of his life talking about how generous he had been that day; it was he who arranged for the memorial to be set up. He would tell people how Garibaldi and Anita had spent the night in his house while the garibaldini slept in his church. However, his storytelling could not begin until after Romagna was annexed to Piedmont in 1859 and so ceased to be part of the Papal States, where Garibaldi was anathema. Before that, shortly after the General’s departure in 1849, the priest held a ceremony to reconsecrate the church, which had been defiled, he said, by the infidels who had forced their way in.

  In any event there was no question of a night’s sleep. The garibaldini arrived in Musano around 1 p.m. and left towards three. It was here that Bassi and Forbes, realising the General must still be in the hills, caught up with him. They brought a handful of others. Altogether there were now about 180 men left. And Anita. We took a photo of the church – a modest, low red-brick building – at 15.30 sharp. We had been on the road ten hours. Our feet were sore and our arms and legs ablaze. Fortunately we had a place booked in an agriturismo in Cento,
just one more mile away. We would leave till tomorrow the further fifteen miles that the garibaldini travelled that same afternoon.

  ‘So when did the General sleep?’ Eleonora enquires.

  ‘It’s a mystery. Looking at the whole time since they left Sant’Angelo in Vado, I can’t find more than the occasional hour or two when he could have rested.’

  And the heroics were yet to come.

  Cento

  That mile to Cento was steep. The village was another scatter of white stucco and painted railings. A suburb without a centre. The promisingly named La Quiete – ‘a calm place where you can find refreshment and repose’ – was just beyond the houses, on the hilltop. Stripping off for the day’s ablutions, we experienced one of those strange moments when you both say exactly the same thing at the same time.

  ‘Just one more day’s walking!’

  From the big garden at the back of the house our goal was now in sight. We went downstairs to gloat. La Quiete was not named in vain. The garden was a little paradise of banana trees, bristling agaves, banks of lavender, pines, cedars, roses. And towards the bottom, where the slope fell away, beyond a dozen big tables – two already laid for dinner – a low parapet.

  We looked out and sighed. Far to the right, across the hills we’d walked, was San Marino, sharp against the skyline. Looking directly ahead, we had the whole Romagnola coastline spread before us: Rimini to the south, Cesenatico almost opposite, Milano Marittima to the north. From up here on the hill the three towns seemed just one long band of urban development, each centre marked by a single skyscraper.

  ‘Oh, they all have to have their big buildings!’ the padrona laughed, serving dinner.

  We had offered to sit closer to the house so she wouldn’t have to bring the food too far, but she insisted we enjoy the table with the best view. ‘The skyscrapers were all built in the 1950s,’ she explained. ‘A sort of competition between the towns.’ The one in Milano Marittima was thirty-five storeys.

  Eating early, we were alone. The food was excellent. A board of mixed bruschetta and pizzette, then pasta with herbs and mushrooms. A carafe of pale Trebbiolo. With each dish the light faded, until there was one perfect moment when the sea and the low hills around us were in shadow while a last ray of sunshine found the high peak of San Marino.

  ‘A last thought, perhaps,’ Eleonora suggested, ‘on the men we left behind there.’

  Belluzzi quotes a certain Pietro Fini: ‘I can’t tell you of what distress, fear and unhappiness we experienced that night when word got round that Garibaldi had left San Marino.’ Trevelyan has the men rushing down from San Marino to follow the General, only to be repelled by the Austrians, then climbing back up to the city, surrendering their guns and negotiating their surrender. Austrian dispatches complain that only 300 rifles were handed in, speculating that the men threw their weapons away, or sold them, or sneaked off with them, or never had them anyway. Ruggeri raves that despite the agreement permitting the men to return home, the Austrians now insisted that they go to Rimini first, promising that this was merely for administrative purposes. Eight hundred set off in a column, only to be taken prisoner as soon as they were out of the city. ‘Scum of all nations,’ writes Gorzkowsky to Radetzky, having seen the men himself in Rimini the morning of 1 August. ‘Most of them escaped convicts from the Papal State. Many Austrian citizens, many deserters from the Austrian army. Let me know what I should do with them.’ Two to three hundred hid in San Marino or escaped into the hills, Ruggeri reckons. Many were hunted down and shot. ‘Send them to the fortress prison in Mantua,’ Radetzky sent his orders, ‘to stand trial.’

  ‘In short, some were jailed for years, others were freed that winter. Deserters from the Austrian army were shot. All the same, largely thanks to the good offices of San Marino, there was no mass killing.’

  It was a balmy evening on the terrace. I accepted the offer of a tarte Tatin. Another group had arrived. La padrona was hard at work. We looked down towards Cesenatico.

  ‘Gorzkowsky was furious, of course, that Garibaldi had got away. “And with his wife,” he wrote to Radetzky, “a fanatical woman in an advanced state of pregnancy.”’

  ‘Which I suppose she was in a way.’

  The Austrian dispatches are a testimony to the art of buck passing. ‘General Hahne,’ Gorzkowsky wrote to Radetzky, ‘showed total incomprehension of the nature of these garibaldino types.’ General Stadion wrote to D’Aspre that Hahne and the archduke had let Garibaldi slip away. The rebel, he said, had been seen alone with his wife and three mules, heading for Cesena. A huge reward was offered for information leading to his capture; anyone sheltering him would be shot. ‘When I am back in Bologna,’ Gorzkowsky promises Radetzky, ‘I will prepare a detailed report on the final phase of the Garibaldi adventure, in which I will examine the reasons why it took a turn that was not entirely satisfactory.’

  After a last lingering look across the plain to Cesenatico and the sea, it seemed important to head for bed and get a decent night’s sleep before the final act.

  DAY 27

  1 August 1849 – 20 August 2019

  Cento, Longiano, La Crocetta, Gatteo, Cesenatico – 15 miles

  Longiano

  They stumbled on, exhausted, knowing the real action would begin on their arrival in the late evening of that interminable day, last in a string of interminable days. They must be organized. They must be alert.

  We ambled off into a mild summer dawn, with our nice blue backpacks and handy trekking poles, looking forward to an easy downhill stroll, with the prospect of lunch on the beach and a swim in the sea.

  For the garibaldini it had been a month of disappointments, a dream defeated, a terrible reckoning; for us, we both agreed, despite the discomforts and fatigue, the most exhilarating time of our seven years together.

  But we could not have experienced this without them. Our happiness drew nourishment from their struggles. Behind both adventures, albeit in quite different measures, lay the thrill of freedom. There is no suggestion in the comments of survivors that they regretted their choices. They had been themselves, fearlessly. We had discovered new selves, following them. ‘I can’t believe how thick my calves have got,’ Eleonora sighed, lacing up her tattered shoes for the last stretch. ‘And how strong!’

  Longiano is a medieval borgo about two downward-sloping miles north of Cento. All the way we marvelled at the grand show of sea and sky to our right, first a deep indigo beyond the silhouette of low hills, paling in layers over a blurred horizon, then bluing, pinking, until, at exactly 6.19, the first sliver of red fire.

  They covered this ground in the mid-afternoon, the hottest moment of the day. After two hours’ rest in Musano, news of their coming had run ahead of them. People were at their doors to watch. One witness recalled Anita wearing a ‘Scottish dress and black feathered hat’. Can that be true? Enthusiasts came out to greet the General and warn him there were Austrians in Badia, two miles further on. He must turn east now and go straight down into the plain. There is a Giuseppe Garibaldi Roundabout at the entrance to the town, where the General made that call. ‘Advised and escorted by local patriots, he eluded the Austrians,’ says the monument on a mound shaded by two tall pines framing the plain and the sea beyond.

  Today it was Eleonora’s turn to need a bathroom. We were obliged to turn the opposite way, into Longiano. A few hundred yards of tree-lined lane led us into the old centre. On a corner a plaque remembers Cesare Masini, a guide who supposedly saved the garibaldini from going to Badia, taking them by a different route to Gatteo. All false, Belluzzi discovered. Masini was a megalomaniac ne’er-do-well who spent his life spinning stories of his bravery. It is the only plaque in all Italy dedicated to one of Garibaldi’s guides. ‘Così va il mondo!’ Belluzzi comments. ‘Thus goes the world.’

  The only café open at 6.40 a.m. was a smart, round kiosk outside the town hall surrounded by elegant chairs and tables, white sunshades already raised. But would there be a bathroom? ‘Certo, s
ignora.’ The barman took time out from his customers to lead Eleonora twenty yards to the main door of the town hall. Still closed of course. He produced a key. ‘Follow the signs,’ he told her, ‘and lock up after yourself.’ A strange arrangement.

  Strange too to find such upmarket fare at a kiosk. Carefully laid out under polished glass were row on row of large, richly stuffed croissants. Crema, pistacchio, frutti di bosco, mela, cioccolato. Clean chrome was all around. The cappuccinos were lovingly frothed. Italy to die for.

  Six or seven men talked loudly across the tables in strong Romagnolo accents. One in the orange dungarees of a street cleaner. All thoroughly enjoying the fresh Monday morning before work. The subjects of conversation were football and video surveillance. Just as players couldn’t get away with the tiniest foul, so it was impossible for any of us to move anywhere these days without being watched. One man seemed to know an awful lot about surveillance techniques. The others shook their heads, as if they too would willingly have skipped their jobs and made for the sea to commandeer boats for Venice, were it not for improvements in CCTV and mobile-phone tracking.