The French slowly pressed forward. Their easiest option would have been to move against the Gianicolo walls head on but they were prevented by the survivors of Giacomo Medici’s Lombardians who, despite constant shelling and repeated bayonet charges, held out in a small but strategically placed villa just beyond Porta San Pancrazio – the Vascello – which they defended almost to the end. As a result the French were forced to focus on a bastion to the south, slowing their progress. But they had all the time they wanted. Gradually, their siege guns reduced the ramparts to rubble and their trenches zigzagged forward. Almost three weeks after they took Villa Corsini, Oudinot’s soldiers broke through and seized a section of the walls by today’s Villa Sciarra park, yet they still found themselves held. Garibaldi had established a new defensive line a few hundred yards further back, using a stretch of the 1,400-year-old Aurelian Walls.
Here, heavily outnumbered and outgunned, the Romans showed a courage that would have impressed Livy, holding out for another nine days. In the midst of the fighting Garibaldi’s pregnant wife Anita appeared unexpectedly from Nice, determined to be at her husband’s side. By now he was fighting Mazzini as much as he was the French. As usual, the two fell out over strategy. Garibaldi the guerrilla fighter wanted to take what remained of the Republic’s forces and lead an insurrection in the hills of central Italy. Mazzini the spin doctor wanted to fight on in Rome to the last so that the Republic would be seen never to have surrendered. Matters were finally decided on 30 June after another French breakthrough. Garibaldi, who had just learned that his bodyguard and friend Aguyar had been killed by a shell, appeared before Rome’s assembly stained with dust and blood, his sword so buckled from use that it would only fit halfway into the scabbard. The assembly offered him three options. The Republic could surrender, it could continue to fight on in Rome, or it could take the battle to the hills. Naturally Garibaldi chose the hills, declaring, ‘Dovunque saremo, colà sarà Roma’ – ‘Wherever we go, there will be Rome.’
Two days later his army assembled in St Peter’s Square. Garibaldi was so besieged by well-wishers that he could hardly get through to his troops. The moment inspired one of his most celebrated speeches:
Fortune, who betrays us today, will smile on us tomorrow. I am going out of Rome. Any who wish to continue the war against the foreigner come with me. I offer neither pay nor quarters nor provisions. I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles and death. Let him who loves his country in his heart and not just with his lips follow me.49
After two months of resistance and almost a month of continuous fighting the battle for Rome was over. Later that same day Garibaldi and some 4,000 volunteers gathered by San Giovanni. They included most of the survivors of the city’s defence, as well as Ciceruacchio and his two sons, and Anita, wearing the red shirt of her husband’s legion. Slowly they marched out of Porta San Giovanni and left the city behind. Garibaldi’s offer of the morning would prove all too accurate. His resistance in the hills quickly became a flight to escape, in which his army was steadily whittled away. Ciceruacchio and his two sons – the youngest only thirteen years old – were captured and shot by the Austrians and pregnant Anita died of exhaustion and disease. Only Garibaldi survived to fight again.
The day after he and his army left, the French entered Rome, and so began two decades of restored papal rule. Of the seven attacks described in this book, without doubt this one was least like a sacking, and the city suffered little or no material damage, yet it was terrible in its way. The French broke up the elected Roman assembly with fixed bayonets, disarmed the population, tore down all emblems of the Republic, expelled foreigners who had served it, and began hunting down leading figures in Mazzini’s government. Many were saved by the British and American consuls who, to the disapproval of their governments, issued passports by the hundred. Mazzini, who was too well known for the French to arrest, stayed in the city for several days, hurriedly setting up an underground resistance.
He was probably behind the Romans’ response to the French occupation. Margaret Fuller saw a resistance pamphlet that appeared the day after the French entered the city and which called on Romans to treat them with icy disdain. They were to ignore any French soldier who addressed them; when they entered a cafe or restaurant all Romans were to leave; windows should be closed when they passed, and any Romans who fraternized with the French – especially any Roman females – would be cursed. As the pamphlet declared, ‘Let the liberticide soldier atone in solitude and contempt for having served priests and kings.’50
A French visitor is set upon by patriotic citizens and their dog, engraving from Illustrated London News, 6 October 1849.
Yet it soon became clear that the Romans’ worst oppressors were not the French but papal officials. A month after they took Rome the French handed power to three cardinals who Romans named the Red Triumvirate, in reference not to their politics but their scarlet vestments. So began a prolonged struggle between the French who, for the sake of their own reputation, tried to steer the papacy towards a moderate course, and the papacy, which sought revenge and absolutist control. The papacy usually prevailed. One of the first actions of the Red Triumvirate was to offer an amnesty which excluded so many that it seemed more like a proscription. Among those denied papal forgiveness were all former members of the Roman Republic’s government and assemblies, all its high-ranking military officers, and all those whom Pius had amnestied when he had first been elected, in 1846. Margaret Fuller commented, ‘It seems he cannot rest or his counselors cannot rest till he had recanted every good thing he ever did.’51 During the first eight months after the Republic fell, an estimated 20,000 Romans – or an eighth of the city’s population – left Rome, half of them expelled.
Pius did keep one of the promises of his early radical days. Over the next years Rome became linked with the rest of Europe by telegraph and by railway and the city was finally lit with gas lamps, which were fuelled by a smoke-belching gasworks on the old Circus Maximus chariot-racing course. In every other respect, though, Rome returned to the reactionary days of Pope Gregory XVI. Once again the Papal States became a land of informers, of surveillance, of opened letters and of political prisoners. By 1853 there were more than a thousand of these, many of them held in a special wing of the huge San Michele workhouse in Trastevere. Executions resumed, as did censorship. Theatre and opera productions were meticulously controlled and books on the papal Index of prohibited books were publicly burned on church steps.
For Rome’s Jews, too, life had an unwelcome sense of déjà vu. In October 1849 the papal beagles – the sbirri – claimed that the Ghetto was full of stolen treasure and induced French soldiers to join them in a three-day search, which, though it unearthed no stolen goods, involved looting, destruction and arbitrary arrests. The restrictions that Pius had lifted were enforced again and Jews were banned from almost all trades. In theory they were still permitted to move out of the Ghetto but bureaucratic obstacles and delays made setting up home elsewhere in the city almost impossible. Like Gentiles, many Roman Jews voted with their feet and by 1853 a quarter of the Papal States’ Jewish population had left. By 1860 over half of Rome’s Jews had no property and lived by begging.
Romans, Christian and Jewish alike, sullenly resisted. William Wetmore Story wrote that the city was ‘stricken with a morose silence’.52 Romans secretly passed one another copies of satirical cartoons from their brief revolutionary days. They protested when they saw a chance. In November 1849 Margaret Fuller was in the church of Sant’Ignazio for the annual service for the dead when ‘… a deep voice sounded from the crowd the words, “Peace be with those who perished for their country!” and at the same time a shower of roses and myrtles was thrown upon the catafalk [sic], while the crowd shouted a fervent, “Peace. Peace. Amen.”’53 Though the authorities tried to find the culprits, the crowd would not give them up. The papal authorities frequently found themselves frustrated and plans to purge Rome’s administration of disloyal elements had to b
e abandoned, as nobody would inform on their fellow officials.
Pius himself was left in doubt as to how he was regarded by the Romans. On the day he finally returned to Rome from the kingdom of Naples, in April 1850, an attempt was made to burn down the Quirinal Palace. Shortly afterwards he moved to the Vatican Palace, which – with its escape walkway to Castel Sant’Angelo – was safer. There he received foreign dignitaries, including Odo Russell, the unofficial representative of heretic Britain. Russell considered Pius a vindictive and bloodthirsty old man who was increasingly divorced from reality. In one of their meetings Pius assured Russell that Italians had merely been led astray by foreign, revolutionary agents, and that, ‘When they have suffered more they will repent and return to us.’54 He was also convinced that the British were about to abandon Protestantism and return to the Catholic fold.
Romans had reason to hope that they would see an end to their troubles. In part this was because of what they themselves had achieved. Their defence of Rome had been undeniably courageous and it soon attracted notice, being seen as an example of brave patriotism, just as Mazzini and Garibaldi had hoped. Written accounts of the city’s defence appeared and one was translated into English by W. E. Gladstone. Mazzini’s years of patient spin-doctoring came good and Italian unifiers found they had powerful new friends. Among them, rather surprisingly, was the same Louis Napoleon who had brought about the Roman Republic’s defeat. In early 1859, now Emperor of France, he helped Piedmont to eject the Austrians from Italy. His change of heart was caused less by conscience and more by fear. During the late 1850s he survived no fewer than three assassination attempts by Italian patriots determined to avenge the Roman Republic. The third, which took place in January 1859, was the most dramatic. Organized by a former follower of Mazzini, Felice Orsini, it was carried out as the emperor and empress arrived at the opera. Three bombs were thrown, blowing out gas lamps and plunging the street into darkness and chaos. Louis Napoleon’s carriage was destroyed and a number of people were injured, though not the imperial couple. Just two months later Louis Napoleon had French officials hold secret meetings with those of Piedmont to discuss a joint attack on Austria.
Mazzini’s refusal to let Garibaldi pursue Oudinot’s retreating army may have been the right decision after all, as a crushing French defeat would have made support for the Italian cause far harder to justify. Louis Napoleon’s change of heart was a turning point. Within months the Austrians had been ejected from Lombardy and Prime Minister Cavour was organizing plebiscites in Tuscany and other Italian states, that joined them to a new kingdom of Italy in the north. Garibaldi then doubled its territories. Having landed in Sicily with a thousand poorly armed volunteers, he managed, through strategy and enthusiasm, to overcome the professional armies of the kingdom of Naples. His reputation as the nineteenth century’s revolutionary superstar was made. When visiting London a few years later he was greeted by the Victorian equivalent of Beatlemania, mobbed by vast crowds, and scandalous scenes took place as respectable Englishwomen ‘flew upon him, seized his hands, touched his beard, his poncho, his trousers, any part of him they could reach’, conducting themselves in ‘an indecent manner’.55
As Italy became unified and the pope saw most of his kingdom break away and join the new state, expectations rose in Rome. Crowds held up pictures of Garibaldi, hissed papal police, and puzzled them by chanting ‘Viva Verdi’, by which they meant not the operatic composer, but Vittorio Emanuele Re d’Italia (Victor Emmanuel, king of Italy). When they were charged by papal dragoons Romans answered with boycotts, ceasing en masse to smoke, or to buy papal lottery tickets, even refusing to go to the carnival. The Corso was left deserted as crowds instead gathered outside the city walls, near the Porta Pia. Pope Pius replied by trying to scare them into submission, sending the city’s veteran executioner, Giovanni Bugatti, to ride among them.
Pius held on, at least for now. Louis Napoleon may have helped Italian nationalists against Austria but he had no wish to see the pope defeated, so the French garrison stayed. Yet even Pius could see the end was coming. Increasingly he turned his back on the physical world and concentrated on realms from which he could not be deposed. In 1864 he published The Syllabus of Errors, which set the Church against every kind of new thinking, from pantheism and naturalism to materialism, rationalism, socialism, communism, secret societies, Bible societies, liberalism and Masonic sects. Yet if Pius rejected rationalism and science, science proved rather useful to him. Thanks to the telegraph, railways and steam travel, in the late 1860s he was able to summon a council of bishops from all across the Catholic world. It was the first time such an assembly had been held since the sixteenth century and Pius used it to establish a new principle within Catholicism, of papal infallibility, according to which the pope was the only true interpreter of the Church.
At the very moment Pius made himself a dictator of dogma his actual kingdom fell apart. The doctrine of papal infallibility was agreed in July 1870. Days later the French army mobilized for war with Prussia and within weeks Louis Napoleon had withdrawn his garrison from Rome. In September, at the battle of Sedan, he suffered a disastrous defeat and was himself taken prisoner. With no French to guard it, Rome was ripe for the taking. Pius refused to negotiate a compromise with King Vittorio Emanuele and now it was his turn to find himself alone: no great power would come to his aid and when he appealed to the Romans only 200 offered to fight for their pope. Pius looked for help from elsewhere. Though old and overweight he took himself to the Santa Scala steps near the Lateran, which, like innumerable pilgrims before him, he climbed on his knees, praying.
It was of no use. On 20 September 1870 Italian guns blasted a modest-sized hole in the Aurelian Walls close by Porta Pia and soldiers swept into the city. Of the many invasions Rome had experienced this one was unquestionably the mildest and the only casualties were Romans who succumbed to stray bullets, or to a few shells lobbed into the centre by an overenthusiastic Italian commander. Within hours, papal troops had surrendered and were escorted to the Vatican by Italian soldiers, who protected them from angry crowds.
The Italian authorities had envisaged Pius retaining a miniature kingdom that would include the Vatican, the inhabited Borgo area beside it, and also the green stretch of land beneath the Gianicolo walls, but in the end even this was not possible. The population of the Borgo had no wish to remain under papal rule and angrily demonstrated, forcing Pius into the humiliating position of having to ask the Italian authorities to send troops to protect him. The occupation became permanent after plebiscites were held to approve Rome’s union with the rest of Italy. The main part of Rome voted yes by 40,785 to 46 while the Borgo, whose inhabitants had a separate vote, agreed by 1,566 votes to none at all. Pius replied, a month later, by excommunicating everyone who had helped take away his kingdom.
Romans had a final chance to show their feelings towards their former ruler in the early hours of 13 June 1881. Pius, having spent his last years sequestered in the Vatican plotting for the reconquest of his lost state, had died three years earlier, leaving a problem. He had given instructions that he wanted to be buried not in the Vatican but in the church of San Lorenzo on the far side of Rome. After three years of delay the Italian prime minister Agostino Depretis decided the moment had come to move Pius’ corpse to its new home. Depretis decided it should be done in the middle of the night, in the hope that nobody would notice.
He was mistaken. Word spread and by midnight a crowd of 100,000 thronged the area around St Peter’s Square. The burial procession, which included devout Catholics, chanting and carrying candles, became a moving battleground as it was set upon by Romans, who had not forgotten or forgiven the shells fired on their city in Pius’ name. Stones were thrown and when Pius reached the Ponte Sant’Angelo there were shouts of, ‘Into the river with him.’ His bones eventually made it safely to San Lorenzo, but without much dignity. To escape the crowd his cortège had to speed up and cross the city at a brisk trot.
It w
as the first time Pius had left the Vatican for eleven years. Had he been able to see the city, he would have found it was changing so fast that some areas were already barely recognizable. Rome was undergoing yet another great metamorphosis, now as the capital of Italy.
CHAPTER SEVEN
NAZIS
I
THE VILLA ADA Savoia, in the affluent north-east suburbs of Rome, does not look like a place where anything important would have taken place. Today it is the embassy of the Arab Republic of Egypt and a couple of bored-looking soldiers keep watch over the main entrance. It lies at the edge of the Villa Ada, one of Rome’s great parks, where locals enjoy Sunday picnics and walk their coiffured dogs. The building is not old, dating from the later nineteenth century, nor is it especially grand. Square in shape and with a fake medieval tower just beside it, it could be a game show host’s Tuscan holiday home. A glance around the area, however, soon offers clues that it once belonged to someone of significance. An abandoned building just behind, now boarded up and covered with graffiti, was once a stable filled with pedigree horses. Also nearby is an ornamental garden, a tiny amphitheatre overlooked by a dilapidated summerhouse and, most telling of all, a large underground bomb shelter. If one had not already guessed from the building’s name, all is made clear from the coat of arms on the fake medieval tower: that of the royal House of Savoy. In the summer of 1943 this was the private residence of the king of Italy, Vittorio Emanuele III.
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