by Tim Parks
Nino Bonnet arrived in Bologna the day after Hoffstetter left. Ominously, he was placed in the same cell Ugo Bassi had occupied. But just as his appearance on the scene had been a massive stroke of luck for Garibaldi, so he now got lucky himself. Gorzkowsky was replaced by Strassoldo, who had been constantly criticizing his predecessor behind his back. Strassoldo felt Hahne had been right to take a softer approach. And Bonnet was freed. Life or death was the whim of a general.
We had given ourselves more than an hour for the change of trains in Bologna, not wishing to miss our high-speed Freccia to Milan. We walked past the waiting room where in 1980 a terrorist bomb had killed eighty-five people and went out into the big square, Piazza Medaglie d’Oro. It is one of those places where all nations and classes meet and petty crime no doubt thrives. The busy road that joins the piazza on the opposite side from the station is named after Angelo Masini, another patriot who died on the Gianicolo defending the Roman Republic. His body was never recovered.
We sat to eat ice creams on a bench facing the big iron sculpture that dominates the centre of the square. Placed between two lines of four flagpoles, alternately flying the tricolour and the EU’s yellow stars, it’s a portentous thing, a great round disc of rusty metal that purports to show ‘the moment in which amorphous material takes the shape of the wheel, symbol of mobility and freedom’.
It was around six o’clock on a busy Friday afternoon with crowds on the move to get away for the August weekend. We were just settling into our bench when a half-dozen ragged young North African men arrived, each with a half-litre bottle of beer. One sat next to me. They called to each other across the benches, laughing and joking. Very likely they were having the same effect on the good citizens around them that the garibaldini would have had on people after a couple of weeks on the march, living rough. Not company you ordinarily seek out.
Two policewomen walked by. One stopped. ‘You shouldn’t be drinking beer here,’ she said. The young men grinned. ‘There’s a fine of a hundred euros.’ The policewoman was calm and collected. ‘We don’t have any money.’ The boys were laughing. ‘We couldn’t pay.’ ‘Arrest me!’ the boy beside me suddenly demanded. He tipped his bottle to drink right in her face and wiped his mouth with his wrist. ‘I want to be arrested! Please! Do it!’ The policewoman hesitated, half smiling. A dozen paces further on, her companion was beckoning to her. ‘Then I’ll have somewhere to sleep tonight!’ he said. He seemed delighted with the idea. ‘Don’t let me see you here again,’ the policewoman muttered and hurried on.
The men laughed. The Italians who had witnessed the scene were silent.
‘I’ve nowhere to sleep,’ the boy beside me said, matter of fact. ‘I really wouldn’t mind being arrested.’
‘Have you been arrested before?’
‘Sure. You sleep pretty well in a police cell.’
There was a short silence, as if we were surprised to find ourselves speaking to each other.
I said, ‘I suppose if you committed a proper crime they’d be obliged to arrest you.’
‘Like what?’ he challenged.
I laughed. ‘I don’t know. You could have tried to kiss the policewoman. She looked nice. I think she liked you.’
He chuckled. ‘There are limits,’ he said. More seriously, draining his beer, he added, ‘You see, I’m not a criminal.’
We set off to find our train. The high-speed section of Bologna’s station is deep underground. First stairs, then a lift, then escalators, then more stairs. A great concrete cave. This so that trains can run straight through under the city. The long, famously divided peninsula can now be travelled in a matter of hours, at least as far as Salerno. But the air is cold and damp down here, and there are not enough benches. Our train was twenty minutes late.
At last it arrived and we were on board and in our allotted places. Each person finds his seat and withdraws into himself for the journey. Or herself. Any talking is between those travelling together, and is perceived as a disturbance by those beside them. Or there are loud phone conversations. The older woman beside Eleonora grimaced as someone behind her chattered on and on in grating dialect. Most passengers defended themselves with headsets, computers, games. The occasional book. Garibaldi would have found neither harmony nor disharmony here. Public space has become a purgatory where you wait to be released into the freedom of your private life.
Fortunately we were on a fast train. Two hundred miles an hour. Nobody bothers with the landscape. It’s a blur. The wheel may have given us mobility and freedom, but it cuts us off from the world. Eleonora settled down to read about the political crisis on her mobile phone. I opened our little computer and tried to wrap up the Garibaldi story. In my mind at least. What had become of the men we encountered on our trip?
Doctor Nannini, who had been able to do nothing to save Anita, would be a medical officer in Garibaldi’s 1860 expedition to Sicily.
Gaetano Sacchi, who commanded the First Legion during the retreat, escaped from San Marino to become a ferryboat captain on the Po, then was forced to emigrate to Zurich and later Uruguay after taking part in a failed uprising. Returning to Italy in 1856, he joined Garibaldi in the Alps in 1859, fought at Volturno in 1860, became a general in the united Italian army in 1862 and in 1876 a senator of the Kingdom of Italy.
Hugh Forbes was captured at sea by the Austrians but released after just a few months, thanks to his British citizenship. Promptly emigrating to the USA, he wrote and published the Manual for the Patriotic Volunteer, which led, in the late 1850s, to him being invited to train the revolutionary militia of the slavery abolitionist John Brown. But the two fell out when Brown didn’t pay the colonel the sum they had agreed, after which Forbes betrayed Brown to the authorities. Forbes returned to Italy with other English volunteers in time for the second phase of Garibaldi’s 1860 campaign.
Stefano Piva, who rowed the boat in Cesenatico and served seven years with the Austrian army, fought with Garibaldi in 1859 and 1860 and later became a lieutenant colonel in the Italian army. Likewise Major Cenni, who had suffered from typhus outside Arezzo.
Major Zambianchi, who was shot in the foot while helping Cenni at Arezzo, was to become one of the most controversial figures of the Risorgimento. During the siege of Rome he had ordered the shooting of a number of priests believed to be giving intelligence to the French. Recovering from his wounds in San Marino, he fled to London and Argentina, where he founded a charitable institution for the health and welfare of immigrants. He returned to Italy in 1860 to fight in Sicily, was arrested for seeking to start an uprising in the Papal States, and eventually emigrated again to Argentina, where he became a colonel in the country’s army.
Francesco Nullo, the cavalryman who had taken Garibaldi’s first request for help to San Marino, and was considered by all ‘the most handsome’ of the garibaldini, fought again with his General in 1859, 1860 and 1862, then turned his attention to the liberation of Poland, where he died alongside other Italian volunteers in 1863. Many streets and schools in Poland are named after him.
Of the industrious cavalry commander Luigi Migliazza, not a trace. Always generously mentioned in accounts of the retreat, there seems to be no other record of his existence.
Nor of the Pole, Emil Müller, who betrayed the garibaldini.
Nor of Ignazio Bueno, who deserted outside Sant’Angelo in Vado.
Egidio Ruggeri, our second diarist, is mentioned in one 1976 academic paper, in Spanish, surveying Italian political emigration to South America. In 1850 he responded to a call by the Uruguayan consul in Genoa for Italian liberals to come to Montevideo to fight the Argentinians. Ruggeri must have departed immediately after his account of the retreat was published. Certainly he couldn’t have made his disgust at the political situation in Italy any clearer.
The French cavalryman Aristide Pilhes was among those captured at sea by the Austrians. His older brother Victor was parliamentary representative of the Ariège district in south-western France. A socialist clo
se to Proudhon, Victor was jailed for starting an insurrection when it became clear that French soldiers, in violation of their constitution, would be attacking a sister republic in Rome. Aristide, returning home in 1850, tried and failed to win his brother’s vacant parliamentary seat, then started a newspaper called Le Vote Universel. The only detailed document about him online is an extract from French police records denouncing him as ‘immoral and dangerous’ and listing such crimes as ‘insulting a gendarme’, ‘jumping bail’ and ‘causing anarchical disturbances’.
One could go on. But it is the story of Leggero that most fascinated me as the train raced across the north Italian plain. Having accompanied Garibaldi as far as Tangiers, he emigrated to Central America. Fighting American slave traders in Costa Rica, he lost his right arm and was imprisoned. He worked as a customs officer, fought the slave traders again, was wounded again, losing four fingers of his remaining hand, then trained soldiers in San Salvador. In 1860 he rushed back to Italy for the war in Sicily but arrived too late to fight. Eventually he retired to Maddalena, married and had children, dying in 1871 aged fifty-seven. It was he who encouraged Garibaldi to set up home on the nearby island of Caprera.
Milan
I have one photo from the train ride back to Milan. I must have taken it after shutting my computer in amazement. So much mad life. Such determination to change the world. Such energy, courage and stubbornness. Such violence. My photo shows the sun setting over a distant urban skyline – Milan – with dark fields in the foreground, pylons against a pink sky and a low horizon of chimneys, power stations, factories, apartment blocks. The dull labyrinth of metropolitan life.
On arriving in Milan, Hoffstetter did a soldier’s duty by his lost friend and superior Luciano Manara, going straight to visit his widow. She was prettier than he had expected. Stories were told, tears shed, then the German returned to Switzerland, where a distinguished career as a military administrator awaited him. We hurried through the vast hall of Stazione Centrale with its aura of Fascist grandeur, down into the metro and onto a green-line train. The second stop is Porta Garibaldi. The city’s northern gate had originally been named after Emperor Francis of Austria; it was here that Garibaldi entered the city in 1859 after liberating Como. As the train’s doors were closing, three adolescents rushed in. They were tanked up. They had a huge boom box and turned the volume up full. In the enclosed carriage it was deafening, intimidating. They knew it and enjoyed it, shouting their pleasure. No one reacted.
Alighting at the end of the line, we were almost home, eager to see if all was well in our flat, looking forward to wearing some fresh clothes and sleeping in our own bed. How strange it felt to fish the house keys from the bottom of my pack, where they had lain untouched for the 400 miles of our walk, and find that each one turned perfectly in its lock, as if we’d done no more than gone out for a pleasant passeggiata.
And now I look back on all this, eight months after our great hike, from a situation where we are scarcely allowed out of the house. The passeggiata is punishable with fines of up to €1000. On the building opposite ours a tricolour has appeared. On two or three occasions the national anthem has been heard, words written by a man who died fighting for the Roman Republic. Our prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, having avoided an election and kept Salvini out of power, appears on our screens to tell us we are ‘at war’ and Italy is ‘the admiration of the world’. In a flash the revisionists have disappeared. Suddenly it’s clear to everyone that Italy is a nation and we are in this together. Covid-19 has revealed that the Risorgimento patriots didn’t die for nothing. Yet only this morning I received a worried letter from a friend. A university professor. A cultured woman. ‘Our only hope after this catastrophe,’ she writes, ‘if we are to avoid sliding into South American anarchy, is Germany. I fear the south and its corruption. I feel closer to the French and the Germans. I don’t mind surrendering “sovereignty” to them.’ Four hundred miles away, on the tiny island of Caprera, Garibaldi turns in his grave. ‘Like a nightmare,’ he wrote, ‘Italy is weighed down by a terrible conviction of its own weakness . . . especially among those classes accustomed to a comfortable life.’ But he added, ‘A people not disposed to bend the knee is invincible.’
This story will run and run.
But let’s leave ours with Garibaldi running. Smuggled to a remote point of the Ligurian coast on 2 September 1849, he surprised his rescuers by making a dash across the stony beach to the sea, pulling off his boots and paddling like a child in the water. A fishing boat was approaching. ‘He looked like a captive lion whose cage has been opened,’ one witness wrote. Garibaldi thanked the men with him profusely. And added, ‘On the sea, I fear no one.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Warm thanks must go to all those who read the book as a work in progress, Eleonora Gallitelli first and foremost, my brother John, Chris Greenhalgh, Edoardo Zuccato, James Bradburne. Also to the historians David Kertzer and Alessandro Barbero, whose work was particularly illuminating and who were kind enough to correspond. To John Ochsendorf of the American Academy in Rome for his warm hospitality and to the historian Claudio Fracassi, who generously showed us round the battleground on the Gianicolo. And, more generally, to all our B & B hosts, the waiters, hoteliers and café proprietors who offered succour on the way.
Also by Tim Parks
Fiction
Tongues of Flame
Loving Roger
Home Thoughts
Family Planning
Goodness
Cara Massimina
Mimi’s Ghost
Shear
Europa
Destiny
Judge Savage
Rapids
Cleaver
Dreams of Rivers and Seas
Sex is Forbidden (first published as The Server)
Painting Death
Thomas and Mary
In Extremis
Non-fiction
Italian Neighbours
An Italian Education
Adultery & Other Diversions
Translating Style
Hell and Back
A Season With Verona
The Fighter
Teach Us to Sit Still
Italian Ways
Where I’m Reading From
Out of My Head
Italian Life
Copyright © 2021 by Tim Parks
First American Edition 2021
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact W. W. Norton Special Sales at [email protected] or 800-233-4830
Jacket design: Jaya Miceli
Jacket art: (Garibaldi at Mentana) Alamy Stock Photo; (landscape) Ian.CuiYi / Getty Images; (brushstrokes) EloPaint / Getty Images
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Parks, Tim, author.
Title: The hero’s way : walking with Garibaldi from Rome to Ravenna / Tim Parks.
Other titles: Walking with Garibaldi from Rome to Ravenna
Description: First American edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, 2021.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021013011 | ISBN 9780393866841 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780393866858 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 1807–1882—Travel. | Italy—Description and travel.
Classification: LCC DG552.8.G2 P275 2021 | DDC 945/.083092—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021013011
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