The Hero's Way

by Tim Parks

  We tried the handle of the museum, found it open and walked in. No one was around. The stairs were right in front. Beautifully renovated. Polished wood, whitewashed walls. We walked up.

  ‘As I laid my woman down in the bed, I thought I saw death on her face. I took her pulse. It wasn’t there.’

  The room is modest with a window over the courtyard. The floor is terracotta. The walls are plastered, though here and there strips of the old brickwork have been allowed to show through. Cordoned off in the corner is a narrow single bed with high wooden head- and footboards curling back in carved scrolls. A dry wreath lies on the blue bedspread. Anita was gone.

  Garibaldi broke down. By all accounts it was an extraordinary scene. Renowned for his composure under fire, the General howled and sobbed. He covered the corpse with kisses. Out in the courtyard everyone heard. Everyone understood. The fugitives’ cover was blown. The others in the room tried to pull him away. He wouldn’t let go of the corpse. Two men arrived from Ravenna, sent by Giovanni Montanari, head of a clandestine group of patriots. Garibaldi must leave with them at once. The Austrians were everywhere. ‘For your children,’ Leggero pleaded. ‘For Italy.’ Garibaldi began to rave about embalming the body, preserving the body. He got halfway down the stairs then ran back up to throw himself on her again. ‘All his soul dissolved through his eyes in bitter tears,’ reported one witness. He begged that she at least be properly buried. He stripped the coat off her, pulled the ring from her finger and offered them in payment. Suddenly exhausted, he asked if someone could be so kind as to give him a piece of bread.

  There was nothing else to look at in the room. Downstairs, a little museum had a few mementos. A red shirt. A 1904 painting of the death scene which borders on the comic, as if we were looking at amateur actors not quite sure where to stand or what to do with their hands. Outside, in the courtyard, we found a man in his seventies talking to a young couple with a toddler. Apparently, he was the museum guard and guide; the couple were on holiday, taking a day off from the beach. The guide was shocked that we had managed to sneak in and see everything without the pleasure of his company. He had taken a coffee break and hadn’t locked up. Like the garrulous man who made us wait so long to see Donatello’s Madonna in Citerna, he had evidently set himself up as keeper and protector of Anita’s pathos. No man must get to the heroine but by him.

  We stood by while he explained that very likely she had died not of malaria but sepsis, due to the death of the foetus. The young couple listened dutifully. ‘Of course they couldn’t give her a proper burial. The family were terrified one of their workers might betray them. After dark they wrapped her in a sheet, carried her a half-mile into the country and dug a shallow grave.’

  The guide was astonished when I added that the man who dug the grave was paid with the gift of the mattress she had died on. He looked at me suspiciously. The young man shook his head. ‘Different times,’ his wife observed.

  We walked along a narrow lane between shady cedars to the burial place. There were low hedges around a modest monument. The grass was dry and limp. ‘Here, buried in secret, lay the body of Anita Garibaldi, 4–10 August, 1849.’ The man rewarded with the mattress hadn’t dug deep enough. A hand emerged, and a little girl had the shock of her life seeing human fingers gnawed to the bone. The story came out with the body. An autopsy suggested she had been strangled. Garibaldi was a murderer. The farmers were accomplices. They were arrested. Bonnet was arrested. Even today, Risorgimento revisionists like to believe that Garibaldi killed her. A re-examination of the body showed no sign of foul play. The farmers were released. But not Bonnet. ‘He has been taken to Bologna to be shot,’ announced a local newspaper.

  This should have been a quiet place, but someone was using a chainsaw in the next field. It droned and rasped. There was a smell of hay. Life goes on. The young couple appeared, having escaped the guide. They wanted to chat, and we told them about our walk. They were envious. If only they didn’t have their little girl . . .

  ‘Where next then?’ the man asked.

  It was a good question. We could have followed Anita’s body to the cemetery in Mandriole, where it rested until 1859, when Garibaldi had it exhumed and moved to his home town of Nice. Or we could walk west to Sant’Alberto, where the General spent the night in a tailor’s house and watched from the window as Austrian soldiers marched past in the street. But I felt enough was enough.

  ‘It’s game over for us.’

  ‘We have a hotel in Ravenna,’ Eleonora said.

  Ravenna

  It would take Garibaldi and Leggero four days to travel the eleven miles to Ravenna, moved from house to house by patriots, spending long hours in remote huts or hiding in undergrowth and fields of corn. ‘You’d have to have seen it to believe how efficiently those young Romagnoli set about saving me. How it grieves me now not to be able to consign their names to the page.’

  We turned down the offer of a lift from the young couple and walked four miles to the coast on a track beside the canal. Every few hundred yards there was a wooden hut built out from the bank, suspended over the water, with poles to lower nets and pull up fish and eels. It seemed a mean way to make a living, but the huts and nets had a lovely Van Gogh look. Otherwise there was precious little to see. Waterside vegetation. Dragonflies. We had thought it might be fun to get in a last swim while we were near a beach. But again melancholy overtook us. We grabbed a sandwich in the tiny resort of Casal Borsetti, then another bus to Ravenna.

  The coast is marred here by the Marcegaglia steelworks. A mile of piping, chimneys, grey walls, scaffolding, fences. Did Garibaldi guess that the stars had factory work in store for him? After Ravenna there would be another three weeks of flight, another 200 miles, westward this time. Across the Apennines again. Always in the hands of his minders. On the morning of 2 September he and Leggero were rowed out to a ship off the Tuscan coast. Once in Piedmontese territory, he was beyond the reach of Austria at last but so popular as to be dangerous to the authorities. Crowds gathered wherever he went. General La Marmora, governor of Genoa and later prime minister, had him arrested but was impressed when he met him. ‘He is very discerning . . . It was a terrible mistake not to make use of him.’

  Allowed to see his children in Nice, Garibaldi was unable to tell them Anita was dead. He sank into depression. The Piedmontese sent him off to Tunis, but the Tunisian government didn’t want him. Gibraltar rejected him. Parked on the tiny island of Maddalena, Leggero’s home, he tried to recover some peace of mind before being moved to Tangiers. Then it was Liverpool and finally, in August 1850, New York. Crippled by rheumatism, he had to be carried off the boat. He declined all celebratory dinners, speeches, rallies. There was nothing to celebrate. Instead he wrote short biographical accounts of comrades who had died. Anita. Ugo Bassi. On Staten Island, to make ends meet, he accepted work in a friend’s candle factory. ‘I therefore spend my time making wicks and handling tallow with unbelievable skill. By the boilers the temperatures are almost Cuban.’

  In Ravenna the temperature was falling. The day had clouded over and a thin drizzle was in the air. The city, with its soft yellows and greys, was as beautiful as ever. But the Risorgimento Museum was closed and looked as if it had been for quite a while. We did the rounds of the churches and the mosaics, sharing Henry James’s amazement that ‘while centuries had worn themselves away and empires risen and fallen, these little cubes of coloured glass had stuck in their allotted places and kept their freshness’. Returning to the hotel, we made a detour through Piazza Anita Garibaldi to check out the monument to ‘the people of Ravenna who died for liberty, on the scaffold, in prison, in war or in exile and to Anita Ribeira dé Silva di Merinos, from Laguna (Brazil)’. Above a bas-relief of a woman on a rearing horse, the inscription reads, ‘How well the name of Anita Garibaldi sounds here.’

  DAY 30

  23 August 2019

  Ravenna, Bologna, Milan

  As I begin these final pages we are in the fourth week
of lockdown in Milan. For Covid-19. After a year thinking about freedom it has been taken away from me. Suddenly and drastically. It could be, then, that the note of wistfulness that has crept into these last chapters has as much to do with what is happening in Italy now as in 1849 or last summer. Day by day, looking at the photographs we took and the notes I made, our walk seems more and more fabulous. I study the people in the street, the packed restaurants, the open roads, with a sense of wonder.

  The present changes the past. The same would be true of the event that came to be known as the Retreat from Rome. In 1849 Garibaldi would never have claimed it was anything but an abject failure. Like the whole 1848 experience. He hadn’t inspired a revolution. He hadn’t made it to Venice. He hadn’t saved his companions. He had lost Anita. The patriots in general had lost. Venice fell to the Austrians on 28 August. The old order prevailed.

  But already there were signs this assessment would change. What press had remained free in Italy, notably in Piedmont, contrasted Garibaldi’s resistance with the collapse of their own armies. He hadn’t surrendered. He had restored Italy’s military honour. Throughout the month of August, when nobody knew what had become of him, newspapers reported sightings all over Italy, even in Venice. Historians are unsure whether these were mistakes or deliberate attempts to mislead his pursuers. On 21 August the satirical paper Il Fischietto – the Whistle – published a cartoon that became notorious, showing Garibaldi cocking a snoop at idiot Austrian soldiers. On 7 September the Tuscan paper Concordia announced with jubilation that Garibaldi had arrived safe and sound on the Ligurian coast. ‘How he saved himself this time,’ La Marmora wrote, ‘really is a miracle.’ Meantime, Europe’s liberal press expressed disgust at the execution of Ugo Bassi. Buried in unconsecrated ground, his remains immediately became a place of pilgrimage, heaped with flowers, until the Austrians had the body exhumed and hidden.

  Never once in the dispatches between Austrian generals is there an open acknowledgement of the failure to capture or kill Garibaldi. But there is plenty of sniping at each other’s inadequacies. Posters and newspaper pages offering rewards for the ‘notorious criminal’ only broadcast the occupying army’s frustration and enhanced Garibaldi’s image. The ruthlessness that Gorzkowsky in particular showed towards Bassi and a score of others, all shot without trial, began to look like impotent rage. Stadion, writing to D’Aspre, claimed he would have finished the job, if only Hahne had let him. D’Aspre, writing to Radetzky from Florence, continued to purr about the Grand Duke of Tuscany’s willingness to wear an Austrian uniform at public events. Radetzky, reporting to the minister of war, Ferenc Gyulay, in Vienna, was unimpressed; other sources had told him of the grand duke being ‘visibly embarrassed’ and the people cold. Just once, writing to Emperor Franz Joseph on 5 August, Radetzky uses the expression ‘this Garibaldi catastrophe’. And he asks for Gorzkowsky to be moved from Bologna to the Veneto. In October he would be forcibly retired.

  We would be changing trains in Bologna on our way home. But first we spent the morning completing our checklist of Ravenna’s treasures. The city is unspeakably beautiful, though it’s conveyor-belt tourism, with crowds and queues. We had a wait of fifteen minutes or so to climb four steps and peep over a red-ribbon barrier into the tiny mausoleum where Dante’s bones lie. I was impatient, my mind elsewhere. Eleonora insisted we hang on. Dante too, she reminded me, lamented a divided Italy, overrun by foreign powers. And she quoted from the Purgatorio:

  Ahi serva Italia, di dolore ostello,

  nave sanza nocchiere in gran tempesta,

  non donna di provincie, ma bordello!

  Ah, vassal Italy, home to grief

  Ship without a pilot in great tempest

  No lady of the provinces, but a whore!

  When you finally get to the top of the steps and the open door, your eyes need a moment to adjust to the gloomy marble interior. Everything you are looking at – the tomb, a bas-relief of the poet, the decorative stone inlays – was made centuries after his death. The bones of course, so often moved back and forth lest they be stolen by others eager to appropriate the bard’s celebrity, are not in view. By the time you are able to see things clearly the people in the queue behind you are humming and hahing eager for their turn.

  I stepped back and we headed for the National Museum of Ravenna. A question occurred to me that I had not seen written in any book: how long had the myth of Garibaldi been in the making? Posit a ship without a pilot and inevitably you conjure up a possible pilot. An able ship’s captain. Posit a country divided and overwhelmed, and immediately you conjure the man who might unite and liberate it. A valiant warrior. I remembered the famous conclusion of The Prince where Machiavelli tries to flatter Lorenzo Medici by imagining him as Italy’s saviour: ‘You can see the country is praying God to send someone to save her from the cruelty and barbarity of these foreigners. You can see she is ready and willing to march beneath a flag, if only someone were to raise one up.’ That was 1514. More than three centuries later, after the events of 1849, depictions of Garibaldi began to appear that fused the iconography of military hero and messiah. A man of sorrows and miracles. However disastrous for him personally, the story of Anita’s passion and death had lent him a new charisma.

  Garibaldi mentions Dante three times in his memoirs. In 1838, having piloted his storm-tossed ship through reefs off the Uruguayan coast, he rowed ashore, looking for provisions, and found in a tiny isolated house a beautiful Italian poetess who charmed him by speaking of Dante and Petrarch and gave him a volume of ‘the lovely poems’ of the Spanish patriotic writer Manuel José Quintana. In 1848, recruiting soldiers in Ravenna (the occasion of him meeting Nino Bonnet), he says, ‘Clustered round Dante’s mausoleum in Ravenna, I witnessed something unique and encouraging, a truly wonderful harmony between different classes of citizens.’ It was as if the presence of the great poet’s bones had inspired a community spirit. ‘Such a harmony is the key to achieving liberty and independence for our country, its absence the origin of all our misery.’

  Austrian dispatches support his view. On 21 August 1849 General D’Aspre wrote to the new governor of Bologna, General Strassoldo, asking that the Count of Carpegna, a borgo to the west of Macerata Feltria, be allowed to keep his hunting rifle despite the newly imposed restrictions. The count had offered invaluable spying services and generous help to Austrian troops as they tried to nail Garibaldi in the mountains. In an earlier dispatch to Gorzkowsky, on 31 July, General Hahne had spoken of ‘extremely useful intelligence given spontaneously by the Lawyer Amadei, whose pro-Austrian sentiments have led to his suffering much persecution’. It is hard to achieve independence if your potential governing class is happy to be ruled from abroad.

  And the third time Garibaldi mentions Dante? The General had promised his supporters he would be back in ten years’ time. In February 1859, hindsight having transformed the Retreat from Rome into a glorious act of resistance, Count Cavour, Prime Minister of Piedmont, who by all accounts loathed Garibaldi and feared his popularity, nevertheless invited the hero, now based on the island of Caprera, to form a volunteer corps to aid Piedmont in the forthcoming war against Austria. Reflecting on why he, a republican, agreed to fight for a monarchy, Garibaldi explains that the priority had to be making Italy, not its form of government: ‘Wasn’t that the idea of Dante, Machiavelli, Petrarch and so many of our great men?’ In a string of hard-fought battles through the spring of that year the General led 3500 men without cavalry or cannon from the river Ticino west of Milan as far as Lake Garda, liberating Como, Bergamo and Brescia, and relieving the pressure on the main Piedmontese army to the south. Commanding the Austrian troops was Ferenc Gyulay, the minister of war to whom Radetzky had been reporting in 1849. Radetzky himself was dead by then. Hahne was dead, falling from his horse in 1853. D’Aspre died in 1850, shortly after replacing Gorzkowsky as governor of the Veneto. Gorzkowsky died in 1858. Strassoldo died in 1855. Of all Garibaldi’s direct enemies of 1849, only Archduke Ernst was ali
ve to regret not having finished him off when there was a chance. In a private letter Cavour wrote, in French, his preferred language, ‘Garibaldi has rendered Italy the greatest service a man can render. He has given the Italians confidence in themselves.’

  There was a large group of French schoolchildren in the station café in Ravenna, but it was the Italian waiter who refused to heat my muffin for me. The logic of the muffin, I told him, was that you served it warm. ‘I’m not turning on a big oven for just one muffin,’ he complained. Apparently there was no microwave. Nor much harmony. But never mind, the train to Bologna was announced on time. We were on our way.

  Bologna

  Hoffstetter also passed through Bologna on his way back to Milan and eventually Geneva. He didn’t have quite such an easy time of it as Belluzzi would have us believe. Stranded near Savignano on 1 August, it took him three days, moving from hiding place to hiding place, to cover the sixty miles to the city, arriving on the evening of the 4th, right around the time Anita died. He was running a high fever and tormented with back pains and stomach aches. Parting from Garibaldi had filled him with regret. ‘Separated from my General, whom I loved and admired more than anything in the world, cut off from him without a goodbye or a handshake, uncertain whether he had escaped the many perils that beset him, anxious for my companions, I couldn’t sleep.’

  For him too, the present situation was rapidly changing his perception of the past. ‘Every day of the last months, from Rome to San Marino, presented itself anew to my spirit. Drifting in and out of slumber I thought I was in the mountains again, I saw our column disheartened, hunted down, and suddenly I sat up in bed, imagining the General had called me.’

  Unable to continue his journey, Hoffstetter found a doctor and took a room in a tavern, only to be warned two days later that Ugo Bassi and a dozen other garibaldini had been brought into town on open carts to face public derision and soon a firing squad. Sick as he was, Hoffstetter dressed at once and left, counting on his old Swiss army papers to get him through the passport checks.