The Hero's Way

by Tim Parks

  We bought ice creams, took off our sandals and walked south barefoot along the beach. It’s downmarket tourism here. For all the difference in climate, I was reminded of Blackpool, where I spent my infancy. Working-class families splashing in the shallows. A huge yellow duck was anchored offshore. Young black men selling necklaces and hair clips. Eventually, the sunshades ended. It was slow going on the sand, and we were completely exposed to the sun; Lido delle Nazioni, our destination, was six miles away. We switched to a path through the woods just a hundred yards inland. In the end, I announced, it hardly mattered exactly where they landed, did it?

  ‘For sure you’re not going to find any footsteps in the sand.’

  ‘I miss Hoffstetter,’ I declared. ‘I felt I could rely on him to keep us in touch.’

  What Garibaldi remembered was the look in the eyes of his companions as they gathered on the beach. He had lifted Anita off the boat and carried her through the shallows. There were four boats, he recalls. Which would be seventy or eighty men. Other reports give three, others two. Others again two boats here and three further north. Forbes wasn’t among them. Ugo Bassi was there, Ciceruacchio and his sons, Leggero. Various other officers and men. ‘They were looking at me with the eyes of people asking what they should do.’

  It was a common experience for Garibaldi. But this was the end of the road. Unable to leave Anita, he couldn’t escape with them. ‘Split up,’ he told them, ‘and seek refuge where you can.’ The important thing was to get away from where they were, since the Austrian launches were not far off. ‘Those friends were dear to me,’ Garibaldi remembered. ‘Bassi said he needed to find somewhere where he could change his red trousers. Ciceruacchio said an affectionate goodbye, and set off with his sons.’ None would meet again. Only Leggero stayed with Garibaldi and Anita. Meantime, Vice Brigadiere Sereni, the hostage they had taken, ran off along the beach towards Comacchio, whence he would soon be leading a search party to capture the man who had spared him from being shot.

  Lido delle Nazioni

  We walked on along our sandy path in the welcome shade of the trees. Occasionally bicycles creaked by. To our left, just a few yards through the trees and over the dunes, the shore was barren, sombre. At one point there was a nudist beach. All men in middle age. Sprawled amid the debris the sea throws up. Bleached tree trunks. Rusty cans. But no fugitives. No Austrians.

  There are three versions of the next crucial hours, but they have the same elements in common. The threesome: Garibaldi-Anita-Leggero. Then a man called Battista Barilari, a poverty-stricken beachcomber. A hut thatched with marsh reeds. And a huge stroke of luck in the shape of another man, Nino Bonnet. Juggle these as you will.

  In Garibaldi’s version, he and Leggero carry Anita across the dunes and hide in a field of maize. Anita was muttering that she would never see her children again. Her husband must provide for them. After a while, ‘with no idea what to do’, Garibaldi sends Leggero out to reconnoitre and Leggero comes back with Nino Bonnet, a local patriot who knew Garibaldi, was aware of the drama and had come looking to help him. Bonnet starts to lead them along the coast where they meet Barilari, who Bonnet knows. And Bonnet tells Barilari to take the fugitives to a nearby hut, half a mile inland, while he arranges transport to some safe place.

  In the version of the local Garibaldi Society the field of maize disappears. Barilari witnesses the landing and takes Garibaldi directly to the hut, where two poor people give them peasant clothes to wear. Around nine o’clock Garibaldi sends Leggero off to reconnoitre and he finds Bonnet, who then arranges . . . etc.

  The most romantic and attractive version is Bonnet’s, written up as Garibaldi’s Landing at Magnavacca: historic episode of 1849, and published in 1887. Twenty-five years old, Bonnet was the son of a Frenchman who had set up a salt factory in Comacchio. He had fought the Austrians in Vicenza in 1848 and helped Garibaldi when he was recruiting in Ravenna later that year. A brother, Gaetano, had died defending the Roman Republic. Another brother, Raimondo, was with Garibaldi’s cavalry on the retreat from Rome. We mentioned him leading an exploratory party north of Todi. Wounded, Raimondo had stayed in San Marino but sent word ahead to Nino that Garibaldi might be passing through. Bonnet was rich and well respected by the local people. In his account he describes an anxious night with a crowd of locals, together with papal and Austrian soldiers, on the quayside in Magnavacca, listening to the cannon fire out on the water. Aware, as daylight comes, that some of the boats are going to beach, he has a servant drive him north in his buggy, and is in time to see Garibaldi wading through the water with Anita in his arms. After they meet, Barilari appears . . . and so on.

  Eleonora and I are still discussing which of these versions makes most sense when, towards evening, we arrive in Lido delle Nazioni. The beach is busier here with much flesh on display among the sunshades. In the town itself, a sprawl of funfairs and dodgem-car circuits. Then, a few hundred yards beyond the centre, the hut. It’s a tiny thing with white walls and a thatched roof, a relic from another age protected by a high fence, dwarfed by surrounding apartment blocks. The tricolour is flying, and on the fence there’s a poster advertising a Garibaldi 3 August celebration: a bike ride to the various places where the heroes hid that day, a garibaldino band and choir, free fried fish, watermelon and wine. But when we try to get down to the beach, officially reckoned to be the place where they landed, we find only tall railings and a locked gate. It’s private.

  We’re disappointed. There is something messy and inconclusive about our day. Trying to cheer ourselves up with a Prosecco while waiting for the bus to Comacchio, we decide that Bonnet’s version can’t be true. It would be too extraordinary that he, watching events unfold beside Austrian soldiers, then manages to arrive at the beach exactly as Garibaldi has Anita in his arms in the water, while the soldiers are nowhere to be seen. It’s a film script. But however they met, Garibaldi reckoned it the greatest stroke of luck of his entire life. He needed a saviour, and a saviour appeared. ‘I at once put myself entirely in his hands.’ It is one of the sentences that most struck me, reading Garibaldi’s memoirs: a man accustomed to command realizes, in a space of seconds, that he must now submit entirely to the judgement of another. And does so.

  Carts, carriages, wheelbarrows and donkeys now enter the story. Bonnet comes and goes. Parties of Austrian soldiers are all around. Schiffsleutenant Scopenich reports that his men landed soon after the garibaldini and set off to search the dunes and woods. Gorzkowsky explains to Radetzky how he ordered the garrison in Comacchio to ransack the area. Vice Brigadiere Sereni has already arrived in the town and is ready to lead them. A 10,000 lire reward is offered to anyone who will help capture Garibaldi. Shortly before noon the fugitives leave the hut.

  Bonnet moves them separately, Garibaldi in a small buggy, Anita on a white donkey, Leggero walking. Limping rather. A half-mile to the first farm. Roused by some broth, Anita begs José to shave his beard. Another mile and a half inland along tiny paths to another farm. It’s five in the afternoon. Leggero climbs a tree, hides in its leaves, keeps watch. Bonnet tells Garibaldi he must give up any thought of Venice. The only hope is to the south, Ravenna, where there is a strong patriot network. Garibaldi acquiesces. But when Bonnet says that to have any chance of survival, he must part with Anita – the farmers will look after her – he baulks. Anita refuses to be left behind. ‘I owe her an immense debt of gratitude and love,’ Garibaldi explains. It seems he’s apologising for a weakness. Bonnet sees the two will only be separated by death.

  Comacchio

  Our bus took us back along the coast and turned inland towards Comacchio. The marshy water of the lagoon was to our left, the great green emptiness of the plain to the right. Garibaldi, Anita and Leggero covered this ground in two boats. Bonnet had hired men to row them along the streams and waterways, without saying who their passengers were. At one point the boats had to be lifted out of the water and carried over a causeway. Towards midnight they rested, half a mile from Comacchi
o. It’s a picturesque place of red-brick bridges and dark canals in a lovely muddle of medieval, Renaissance and seventeenth-century architecture, all paved with porphyry, carefully preserved and regularly swept, with plentiful restaurants on the waterside, swarms of mosquitoes and a very distinct smell of fried eel. We struggled, studying menu after menu, to find anything vegetarian.

  ‘We’d have to be less fussy if we were on the run,’ I observed, settling in a place whose chalkboard promised ravioli di burrata con pomodoro.

  ‘But we’re not on the run!’ Eleonora laughed.

  While we waited for our order, I studied the town’s street plan and discovered that the running had ended for Ugo Bassi and ten other garibaldini just yards from where we sat. Bonnet had returned to town to make further arrangements for Garibaldi. Hearing that Bassi had checked into an inn, he urged him to leave at once. But the Austrians, guided by Vice Brigadiere Sereni, burst into the room as the priest tried to escape through the window.

  Meantime our ravioli arrived, and with the first bite we tasted anchovies. It seems the people of Comacchio just can’t resist putting fish in everything. I soldiered on, but Eleonora refused. Aside from any vegetarianism, she hates anchovies. And she was hungry. Why hadn’t they been listed in the menu? No need to get upset, the waitress laughed. And we had missed our bus back to Porto Garibaldi. It would be a four-mile walk in the dark. Beside a fast road.

  Garibaldi had other worries, moving round Comacchio and into the lagoon to the south, with Anita stretched delirious on the floor of the boat. It was wild territory, of marsh and empty islands, places Bonnet felt sure the Austrians couldn’t know or search. But at some point the men rowing the boats realized who their passengers were and what they were risking. They took fright, and Garibaldi, Anita and Leggero found themselves abandoned on a muddy island in the north-west corner of the lagoon. It was three in the morning and Anita was dying.

  The night was suddenly chill. After an hour’s walking we were tired and footsore. We couldn’t enjoy the brooding darkness of empty water to our right because of the headlights racing intermittently towards us. At one point they lit up a stone beside the road.

  IN THIS PLACE

  FAR FROM HOME

  THESE MEN GAVE THEIR LIVES

  FOR THE FREEDOM OF PEOPLES

  ANDERS LARSSEN VC

  EDWARD ROBERTS

  STANLEY RAYMOND HUGHES

  ALFRED JOHN CROUCH

  THE COMMUNITY OF COMACCHIO

  REMEMBERS WITH GRATITUDE

  25 APRIL 1945

  We walked the last few hundred yards along Via Nino Bonnet and turned into Via dei Mille.

  ‘Names,’ Eleonora muttered. ‘Endless names.’

  DAY 29

  4 August 1849 – 22 August 2019

  Porto Garibaldi, Mandriole, Ravenna

  Porto Garibaldi

  ‘In my writings, I shall speak mainly of the dead.’ Again and again Garibaldi presents his books as acts of homage. His memoirs are full of lists of dead companions. With brief notes.

  ‘Santo N., Piedmontese corporal, hit by three bullets at Sant’Antonio, his legs broken and his face disfigured. I helped him onto his horse in the retreat, but he didn’t make it to Salto. His body was found next day in the Uruguay.’

  ‘Alessandro – from the Veneto – a good soldier and sailor, killed in Sant’Antonio.’

  ‘Antonio – nicknamed Trentuno – from Liguria – died from cannon fire outside the walls of Montevideo.’

  ‘Mi duole,’ he writes – it grieves me – ‘that I can’t remember them all.’ Or of one partisan who sheltered him at risk of his life: ‘I remember his face as if it were yesterday, but not his name.’

  Modern editions of Garibaldi eliminate these lists. To save space. And because they would bore the reader. It’s not stylish writing. In doing so they miss the point. Freedom and independence were qualified by ‘a sacred duty’ to remember those who had died for freedom and independence. At least to put the names out there. One was bound, as it were, perpetually, by the struggle to be free. A pathos and a paradox. The reader was not merely to be entertained, but challenged. How do I stand in relation to these names? In relation to so many of them. Each with his, or her, own story.

  Or, put another way: freedom was not the freedom of the individual to do what the hell he or she wanted, or to be guaranteed an entertaining yarn, it was a collective endeavour – the freedom to determine our fate together.

  Those 188 names on the plaque in Cesenatico, I told Eleonora, were handed over by the Austrians in the 1880s in response to a request from the mayor of the town. They were the men captured on the boats. Belluzzi points out that many of the names were false, because the prisoners didn’t want to reveal their true identities. But the number was correct. There was a man behind every name.

  ‘So what happened to them?’

  We’re on the bus again, travelling south, with the sea to our left and the lagoon to our right.

  ‘They were lucky. Because they hadn’t been arrested in papal territory, they were not subject to martial law and hence an automatic death penalty. Unless of course they proved to be deserters from the Austrian army. Initially, they were taken to a fortress prison in the town of Pola on the Croatian coast. Foreign citizens and those from Italian states not controlled by the Austrians or by the Pope were released the following year. Citizens of the Veneto and Lombardy were made to serve in the Austrian army. Domenico Piva, for example, who rowed out the boat when Garibaldi sank the anchors off Cesenatico, was sentenced to seven years’ service in the Austrian army.’

  We had meant to explore Porto Garibaldi in the morning, but we overslept and the bus left at 9.16. We were getting lazy. The trip was all but over. Eleonora protested that, as I’d told the story, Garibaldi never actually visited the town anyway; it was the merest opportunism to change its name because he landed six miles up the coast.

  ‘Perhaps they were fed up with the ugly “Magnavacca”.’

  In the event, we had just twenty minutes to walk up and down the main street and peek at the beach, noticing the inevitable monument in the centre of a roundabout, then various sentimental statues, all quite recent and evidently commissioned with tourism in mind. The best had Garibaldi, in bronze, standing in a flat-bottomed boat that looked like a punt surrounded by tall reeds. These boats were used for harpooning eels in shallow, marshy waters, and when Bonnet heard that his men had left the fugitives stranded, it was to a group of eelers that he turned. This time he told them frankly who their passengers were and paid them handsomely in gold coin. By 8 a.m. on 4 August they had Anita on the boat. She was foaming at the mouth, Garibaldi dabbing her lips with a handkerchief. It was a blistering day, and they had to move quietly through a spectacularly flat, wide-open landscape where the dazzling sky presses down on the watery earth as far as the eye can see.

  Mandriole

  By the early afternoon they had reached the southern shore of the lagoon, where there was a complication. Four hundred yards beyond the bank was the fast-flowing river Reno. The boats had to be hauled up, carried and relaunched. Garibaldi was begging for a doctor. He asked a woman in a cottage to kill a chicken and make some broth. Anita couldn’t hold it down. One of the men ran to the village of Sant’Alberto. An Austrian patrol had just passed. A horse and cart had to be found. The destination was the Guiccioli farm near the village of Mandriole just south of the lagoon. And it was our destination too. The bus dropped us off at the Antica Romea, a café for lorry drivers in the middle of nowhere. Sky, poplars, fields and water. From here it was just half a mile’s walk along a broad canal, following signs that eloquently announced, ‘House where Anita died.’

  From distant Brazil to north-Italian marshland. A few days before her twenty-eighth birthday, this was the end of her journey. It’s a rather lovely place, a wide-open well-kept courtyard with low elegant buildings on three sides. Ignazio Guiccioli, intellectual and landowner, had been finance minister in the Roman Republic and
was now in exile. His tenant farmer, Stefano Ravaglia, was a patriot. Not a person was in sight when we arrived. A purple pedal car had been abandoned beside a bench. Plaques were everywhere. The tricolour hung beside the EU’s yellow stars over an ordinary front door. It wasn’t clear whether it was a museum or a private house.

  Garibaldi found the place packed. Saturday was payday for the labourers. The men were gathered in the yard for their week’s wages. And Doctor Nannini had just arrived from Sant’Alberto. The fugitives turned into the gates around 7.30 on a horse-drawn cart; they had made slow going of the last miles on a rutted track. Leggero limped behind, keeping watch. A one-man rearguard. Having spent pages describing the drama of getting the bragozzi out of Cesenatico, Garibaldi devotes only a few perfunctory paragraphs of his memoirs to the two days between the landing and this fateful moment. The forty-eight hours of Anita’s agony. He doesn’t want to go there. He’d rather be remembering soldiers who died in battle. Or Ugo Bassi – he breaks off his tale – ‘tortured by the priests, before they shot him’. Or ‘poor old Ciceruacchio’, executed with his two sons and seven other garibaldini in the village of Ca’ Tiepolo in the Po delta. ‘All shot and buried by Italian hands, you understand! A thirteen-year-old boy! The foreign soldier giving the orders. And you’d better obey at once or you’d be beaten.’

  But these are digressions. At last he bites the bullet. ‘We arrived in Mandriole, with Anita lying on a mattress in the cart. I said to Doctor Nannini, “Do what you can to save this woman!” And he to me: “Let’s get her into a bed.” So four of us lifted the corners of the mattress and took her to a bed in a room at the top of the stairs.’