The Hero's Way

by Tim Parks

  La Crocetta

  Badarlon makes no mention of other guides, but his detail on this last part of the trip is scarce, suggesting he was no longer running the show. He had promised to stay with the General as far as the small town of Gatteo, where he would hand over to a trusted friend for the last dash. We managed to find a farm track off the busy main road and began the last descent of our trip, 500 feet down to La Crocetta. An elderly man was climbing the slope towards us, carrying a red bucket full of fat green figs, each one tipped with white sap. I asked if I could take a photo and he insisted on giving us a handful. It was 7.17. The sun was high, and he was full of good cheer. The figs were luscious and dreadfully sticky.

  Things were getting more civilized now. Which is to say, restricted. We ran into the usual PRIVATE PROPERTY signs. Threatening images of dogs and guns. An abandoned farmhouse beside a marvellous bank of feathery grasses bore the sign AREA VIDEOSORVEGLIATA. I doubt I would have noticed if it hadn’t been for the conversation in the café.

  But now, with the hills at last behind us, we had to cross the Via Emilia. This is the old trunk road that leads from Bologna to the Adriatic, running along the base of the Apennines, the road Gorzkowsky would have travelled the evening before, 31 July, heading south to Rimini. For anyone wanting to intercept a group of men making a break from hills to sea, this was the place to watch out for them: a long straight Roman road with no cover. The town of Savignano al Rubicone, nerve centre of the plain here, was just a mile to the south. Garibaldi divided his men into two groups of ninety and told Forbes to take command of one and cross a little distance to the north.

  2 August, General Gorzkowsky in Rimini to Field Marshal Radetzky in Monza

  As soon as I came to the considered conclusion that Garibaldi would try to break out of San Marino to the north and cross the plain to reach one of the small seaports, I dispatched an order to Colonel Ruckstuhl, at that time in Forlì, to march down the Via Emilia with his infantry battalion, half a cavalry squadron and two six-pound cannons and to watch the area around Santarcangelo [where Hoffstetter sold his horses]. I expressly warned him not to forget Cesenatico.

  With that admirable zeal typical of Colonel Ruckstuhl, he set off on 1 August and marched 22 miles to Savignano al Rubicone [where Ugo Bassi and Forbes went after leaving Hoffstetter and before finding Garibaldi in Musano].

  Thanks to the negligence of General Hahne, Garibaldi managed to cross the Marecchia, reached the heights of Sogliano, and went down into the plain via Longiano. No sooner had Colonel Ruckstuhl, in Savignano, received credible reports that Garibaldi was in that area, than he took the lamentable step of setting off for Longiano with all his men, leaving no reserves at all in Savignano or along the main road. His idea of attacking Garibaldi with all the force at his disposal was mistaken and never materialized. Garibaldi had stolen a small lead and was already beyond Longiano when he arrived.

  The forced marches of the previous day [from Bologna], then this evening expedition up into the mountains, had tired Ruckstuhl’s troops to the point that he did not feel it was possible to follow the enemy that night.

  However, the fact that he then let his men sleep until six in the morning is quite unjustifiable. When I arrived in Savignano I didn’t find a single soldier.

  If Colonel Ruckstuhl had kept his head in Savignano and, using the cavalry that he had, had considered at what point Garibaldi might be crossing the Via Emilia the rebels would inevitably have been captured.

  If ifs and ands were pots and pans, my mother used to say, there’d be no trade for tinkers. What Gorzkowsky doesn’t mention, in poor Ruckstuhl’s defence, is the role played in the affair by the Mayor of Savignano. Named after the man who famously crossed the river that ran through his town, Giulio Cesare Ceccarelli was a patriot. Receiving warnings from the Mayor of Sogliano, in the hills, that Garibaldi had passed, and again from the Mayor of Gatteo, in the plain, that Garibaldi was expected to pass through later that day, warnings that came with injunctions to alert their Austrian masters as soon as possible, Ceccarelli, in the larger, more strategic town, not only did not tell the Austrians, but deliberately put about a rumour that Garibaldi was spending the night in Longiano. In particular he made sure that people who would inform the Austrians heard this rumour. And they did inform the Austrians.

  And Colonel Ruckstuhl, who had already marched twenty-two miles that day not to mention forty miles the day before, duly set off to climb a further five miles to Longiano to grab the glory of wiping the rebels out, only to find Garibaldi gone. And when in the small hours of 2 August Gorzkowsky arrived in Savignano, having travelled the ten miles from Rimini through the night, he found that Ceccarelli had gone too. Into hiding. The mayor would be relieved of his duties the same day. Finding no one to punish, Gorzkowsky launched a kick at Ceccarelli’s assistant, Signor Bertozzi, who was explaining that it would be impossible to find horses and carriages to speed up the Austrians’ pursuit to Cesenatico because all the town’s vehicles had gone off to the market fair in Verucchio.

  Comedy.

  ‘It’s funny too,’ Eleonora observes, ‘that though nobody actually joined Garibaldi along the way, there were always people ready to help in an emergency. Even at the risk of their careers and lives.’

  Towards six that evening both Garibaldi and Forbes with their separate groups crossed the Via Emilia unscathed. Ruckstuhl had left some men on the road, but they were at Ponte Ospedaletto, a village about two miles to the north. They weren’t out on patrol. We crossed the road unobserved at 8.05 a.m. in the vicinity of a huge animal-feed factory – M B MANGIMI, QUALITY THAT PAYS – a great cathedral of grey and green silos, massive steel pipes, cranes and scaffolding. A hundred yards to our right, where a small lane left the main road to cut across the fields to Gatteo, stood one of the case cantoniere. These simple brick houses – always a door and four windows, two up two down, always the same dull red, iron-oxide colour – were built at intervals along Italy’s main highways in the 1830s to provide homes for the cantonieri, the men responsible for maintaining the road surface. ‘S.S.N9. Via Emilia, KM 16,’ said an old white identification stone on the upper storey. On the opposite corner of the lane, behind rusty railings, in the deep shade of a few old pines, another stone records the General’s passing: 1 agosto, 1849. Our app had got the route spot on.

  Gatteo

  Two miles to Gatteo now. Flat fields of maize, every bottle-green plant erect as a palace guard. A handsome cock crowed in the clutter of a farmyard but didn’t want to be photographed. Then, right in the middle of nowhere, a sign on a post: ZONA CONTROLLO DEL VICINATO. Neighbourhood watch. A graphic silhouette showed a man with holster and military cap stretching his right arm round another man’s shoulders while linking his left to a woman, smaller of course, holding a child.

  ‘Odd there’s not a neighbourhood in sight,’ Eleonora remarked.

  Gatteo is an old borgo, pretty but surrounded by modern suburban sprawl. Avoiding hostile surveillance, the garibaldini passed through the main square as the shadows began to lengthen. For Badarlon it was the end of the road. He handed over to his friend Giuseppe Rossi, who was ready, waiting. ‘We’ll meet again in ten years’ time,’ Garibaldi promised him. ‘In happier circumstances.’ It had become a mantra. In fact they met again less than an hour later. ‘Retracing my steps, a peasant whose house we’d stopped at to drink showed me a telescope Garibaldi had forgotten.’ Tired as he was, Badarlon raced back to return the precious instrument to its owner and was thanked with a ‘vigorous handshake’. ‘I wonder how many of those men will make it home,’ he remembered thinking.

  We made it to the red plastic tables of the Bar Europa and ordered two espressos. Despite this culminating moment in our heroes’ drama, we were feeling a little flat. Like the landscape. Aware that we would be home all too soon. A perfunctory mood had suddenly imposed itself, as if we were stamping a last ticket. No battle to rouse us. Eleonora’s tendinitis was bothering her again. The sun seemed hotter do
wn in the plain. We rubbed cream into our calves and studied the map. Once again, while the garibaldini were avoiding their enemies, our key concern was the traffic: how to get to Cesenatico while avoiding the major roads.

  Cesenatico

  At 9.45 we crossed the Autostrada Adriatica. There was nothing for it here but to trudge over a busy four-lane overpass. With no pavement. After days of freedom in the mountains, it was back to the fear of being wiped out by van or lorry. At last the app gave us a narrow lane to the right, straight as an arrow along an irrigation ditch, flat empty fields and marshland either side. You can see why Garibaldi was wary here. A man on a horse could see to the horizon. There were a few pines in the distance along the coast, the famous pineta, but before that nothing.

  All too soon we were oppressed by a mesmerising sense of straightness, the road stretching on and on without a scrap of shade. Telegraph poles each side, in straight lines, carrying their straight wires. Straight lines of apple trees. Straight ditches. Parallel plough lines. Everywhere that imprisoning grid that comes so naturally to man.

  The day was becoming more of a challenge than we expected. The sheer scorching monotony of this exposed lane. Marching in dogged silence, we wanted it to be over now. Over at last, all this endless walking. Nothing more to say. We had both begun to check our phones compulsively for the small satisfaction of seeing how far Google’s blue dot had shifted along the straight line of road.

  Then, wonderfully, a waft of air brought a new smell. The sea. The sea!

  We sniffed and stood tall. Finally, a sign: CESENATICO. And a last obstacle. Strada Statale 16, which is to say, the coast road bypass, taking fast traffic round the town. Our little track fed into it, but with no traffic light and no zebra crossing. There were two lanes each side, the cars speeding back and forth at tight, regular intervals. We stood for ten minutes, waiting. There was no break. It was hopeless.

  We retraced our steps a few hundred yards and followed a side road that promised an underpass. And there it was. A steep dip down with sharp bends immediately before and after a narrow passage between concrete walls. There was barely room for cars to pass in opposite directions, no white lines, nothing to reassure the pedestrian. Traffic was sporadic but fast.

  Mad, I thought.

  ‘Roulette,’ Eleonora said.

  We were still hesitating when a runner appeared from behind us. A man was actually running in this blistering heat. With no hat. A madman. He headed towards the underpass. We called to him. ‘Is it safe?’ He turned, running on the spot in the road, laughing. A man in his thirties. ‘You just have to take your life in your hands,’ he said. ‘I do it every day.’

  It was now or nothing for the garibaldini. They hit the town around eleven in the evening, after a march of twenty-three hours. ‘There were Austrian guards on the road at the entrance,’ the General later remembered. ‘They were astonished when we suddenly appeared in front of them. Taking advantage of their hesitation, I said to the horsemen beside me, “Dismount and disarm them.” A minute and it was done. We walked into the town and took over, even arresting a number of papal police who clearly weren’t expecting us.’

  The police were caught asleep in their barracks. Some sources say four, some eight. The men wanted to shoot them so they couldn’t talk. Ugo Bassi wouldn’t hear of it. At least the commander, some insisted, a certain Vice Brigadiere Sereni. No, Garibaldi said. They would take them as hostages. It proved a costly decision.

  The men advanced along the canal that led to the port and the sea. As always it’s hard to know what to believe. Belluzzi writes, ‘A few German soldiers were sleeping in a kind of shed beside the canal, but when Anita and Ugo Bassi rushed in among them with pistols drawn they surrendered at once.’

  Does this make sense? Wasn’t Anita supposed to be half-dead with pain and exhaustion? Why ask a woman and a priest to disarm enemy soldiers when you still have 180 armed men? Not to mention the fact that they had planned for this. They had taken a rest beyond Gatteo, so as to arrive after dark. Each group, every man, had an allotted task. But then what do I know about what people are capable of in desperate situations? It was night. No doubt there was confusion. The horses clattered along the silent streets. The fishing boats were there waiting for them, tied up along the canal. The so-called bragozzi. Big snub-nosed sailing boats. Each could take around twenty men.

  Garibaldi had the mayor woken up and demanded written permission to requisition some boats. Even in a situation like this he was concerned about legality. At least a piece of paper. Fishermen were dragged from their beds to sail the boats. Now it was a race against time to find provisions and put to sea before the Austrians arrived. Forbes was already organizing barricades at the entry to the town and manning them. He was a safe pair of hands. Everything looked good.

  ‘One can hardly deny,’ Garibaldi wrote in Clelia, ‘that fortune had been favourable to the Solitario in many arduous adventures, but now there began one of the unhappiest episodes of hardship, misfortune and disaster in his entire life.’ Or as he put it more drily in his memoir, ‘Luck finally let me down that night. A storm had blown up offshore, whipping the sea into big waves breaking right at the entrance to the harbour. It was going to be well-nigh impossible to get those boats out.’

  We bought fruit and tomatoes at the first greengrocer’s, and the young girl serving said her father was an obsessive garibaldino who rode the hills on his bicycle revisiting all the places the General had passed. In our hotel, a couple of streets from the sea, the big communal dining room was full of families and pensioners sitting down to the kind of lunch that could slay an ox. We took the remains of yesterday’s focacce plus tomatoes and peaches down to the beach, grabbed a last table in one of the busy stabilimenti along the front, ordered Proseccos and a litre of water and ate our lunch there, surreptitiously.

  I distinctly remember the clink of our glasses. Salute! Arrivati! It was 12.53, 20 August, 27 days 8 hours and 8 minutes after our selfie outside San Giovanni Laterano. Exactly 630 kilometres, our app calculated – 391 miles. As I was paying for the drinks, the TV behind the counter told me the government had fallen. Salvini had pulled his party out of the coalition. He wanted elections. He wanted to govern on his own.

  For someone arriving at the beach in Cesenatico today, at the height of the holiday season, nothing could seem further away than the idea of desperate men fighting to get fishing boats past a barrier of waves. Replete from lunch, we walked down to the sea through rows of sunshades. A dazzling chiaroscuro. Babes on sunbeds. Newspapers spread on paunches. The smell of flesh sizzling in coconut oil. Cries of children kicking sand. Reaching the water, we took off our sandals and paddled in the shallows towards the harbour. Everything is tame here. The beach, seemingly endless, is protected all along by big offshore breakwaters. The water is tepid and still. The sand soft. People swim in their sunglasses, play ball as if in a pool. There are pedal boats, plastic dolphins, floating trampolines.

  The port itself has been greatly enlarged since that night in 1849. A long jetty stretches out into the sea, protecting the entrance. A big marina has been built, where the rich can bring their yachts and their money. The canal has been widened. As we arrive, a smart white yacht is motoring out, its tall sail hanging limp. Turning back up the canal, a quarter of a mile almost, to where the action happened that night, we find an exhibit by the water: ‘Section of the old pier, rebuilt with the techniques of the 16th century.’ It’s a thick chunk of weathered red-brick masonry on wooden piles. ‘They were sunk to a depth of six metres.’ Two of these piers, it seems, projected a little way into the sea, either side of the canal. It was here the breakers were preventing the rebels’ escape.

  In Piazza Ciceruacchio there are kitsch busts of Anita and Giuseppe facing each other by the waterside. Everywhere bicycles, restaurant tables, sunshades. Smart porphyry paving. Lots of investment. Elegance. Boats chugging in and out. A big ferry to Croatia. Busy, happy, summer life. Tanned skin and bright colours. Oste
ria degli Inseguiti, one restaurant is called. Hostelry of the Pursued. Above an arched doorway, over a wreath of dry flowers, hung no doubt on 2 August, a plaque claims, ‘Anita rested here.’

  Belluzzi disagrees. Forgetting her heroics of only minutes before, he has Anita sitting out the night on the bare stone at the dockside, barely conscious of what was going on, occasionally moaning for water. The fishermen were uncooperative; they didn’t want to risk their boats. The garibaldini were building barricades against an Austrian attack or rushing about to find food and water for the journey. The General did his sums and ordered thirteen bragozzi to be dragged along the canal to the harbour entrance. An unlucky number. But how were they going to get through that wall of breakers at the harbour entrance? ‘Garibaldi had to wait ten hours before he could get out to sea,’ writes Gorzkowsky to Radetzky. ‘If only Ruckstuhl had got his men up early he would surely have captured them.’

  In reality it was more like seven hours. And in Garibaldi’s memoirs, of the ten pages dedicated to the retreat from Rome a full three are given over to those desperate moments. It is the only incident described in any detail. The detail of a man who grew up a sailor describing a technical problem and its difficult solution.

  The sea was now our only refuge. We had to get out there. I went on the boats and had some strong ropes tied together and attached two kedge anchors. Then I tried to get out of the harbour in a smaller boat, to fix the anchors out at sea, the aim being to use them to pull the bragozzi through the breakers. The first attempts failed. We jumped into the sea and tried to push the boat through. No good. We urged on the rowers with all kinds of promises. It was no good.