The second leading general in the campaign was Enrico Cialdini, a Modenese suspicious of Lamarmora and other Piedmontese generals, whom he regarded, in most cases rightly, as inferior commanders. He had served in Lombardy in 1859, but his earliest military experiences had been acquired in the fiercer circumstances of Spain’s first Carlist War in the 1830s. The previous chapter has described the invasions of 1860 and the savagery with which he overcame any type of resistance in the Papal States and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies: the declarations of martial law, the burning of villages, the summary executions of peasants caught with weapons, the pitiless bombardments of Ancona, Capua and Gaeta. He treated the inhabitants of states with which Piedmont was not at war as if he were wreaking vengeance on a barbarous people rather than hoping to persuade them of the merits of Italian unification. For his role in expelling the Bourbons in 1861, he was rewarded with a dukedom, as if to imply that as a commander he ranked alongside Marlborough or Masséna, Duke of Rivoli. Soon afterwards he returned to Naples as the king’s lieutenant-general to deal with the civil war his actions had done so much to promote.
In the summer of 1866 the Italian army was divided: Lamarmora had the bulk of the army in Lombardy; Cialdini commanded a substantial force at Bologna; and Garibaldi led his volunteers in the Alpine foothills. This arrangement, a consequence of the jealousy and distrust among senior generals, made cooperation difficult. Lamarmora met Cialdini to discuss the campaign but failed to establish a joint plan. In the event he advanced without waiting for the others and marched his troops towards the fortresses of the Quadrilateral. Believing the Austrians to be east of the Adige, he crossed the River Mincio without making an effort to reconnoitre. He was thus astonished to discover, on the east bank of the Mincio, an Austrian force, which attacked his advance guard at Custoza and drove it back. Giuseppe Govone, the best of the Piedmontese commanders, counter-attacked with his division and regained some ground but could not retain it without reinforcements. Desperately he appealed to the general to his rear, Enrico Della Rocca, to send his fresh divisions to the front, but his colleague refused to help. More of a courtier than a soldier, Della Rocca stuck to earlier orders from Lamarmora instead of following the elementary military rule of marching to the sound of gunfire.
Throughout the day Lamarmora himself panicked. His army was strung out over a considerable distance, and he galloped madly from one unit to another so that his subordinates were seldom able to find him; for some reason, inexplicable even to himself, he ended the fight about thirteen miles from the battlefield. A message was sent from the king to Cialdini ordering him to come to the rescue, but the general refused; he had in any case been positioned too far away to reach the battlefield in time to affect the result.
Both the senior generals mistook a reverse for a rout and chose to retreat. Yet Cialdini could have led his men towards the Po and threatened the Austrian flank, and Lamarmora could have regrouped on the Mincio and counter-attacked with the divisions that had not fired a shot during the battle; he had lost fewer than 1,000 men at Custoza, and his army was still far larger than the enemy’s. His excessive and unnecessary retreat – the Austrians were not even pursuing him – added embarrassment to the humiliation of the defeat and deepened the demoralization of a nation that had been told victory was inevitable. The actions of Lamarmora, Della Rocca and perhaps Cialdini deserved examination before a court-martial. None of them faced one. Instead of being condemned as the incompetent general that he was, Lamarmora was posthumously rewarded with the magnificent statue in Piazza Bodoni.
Turin’s military monuments were not all erected to commemorate individual kings and commanders. Some of them are collective memorials, representing units of the armed forces, principally the bersaglieri (who are always shown running) but also the cavalry, the carabinieri and the Alpine regiments. Only one monument, that dedicated to the men who went to the Crimea, contains a statue of a sailor.
Piedmont had no nautical traditions; indeed, until it was given Liguria by the Congress of Vienna, it possessed no coastline except around Nice. Its insignificant navy did little in the early wars of the Risorgimento and was never required to fight a proper battle. United Italy, however, had an extremely long coastline. Since it also had aspirations to join the Great Powers, it set about building an impressive fleet, though its only plausible enemy was Austria, which had little naval history or ambition of its own. By 1866 this new fleet included twelve new ironclads and was commanded by an admiral, four vice-admirals and eight rear-admirals. The Austrian navy was smaller, slower and less well equipped: it possessed only seven ironclads. The Italian force was thus superior in all material respects though generally inferior in most human ones, most markedly in the abilities of the admirals in command.
The Italian commander was Carlo Pellion, Count of Persano. Unlike Garibaldi, who was a seaman both by birth and by aptitude, the Piedmontese Persano had seafaring neither in his blood nor in his upbringing. He came from the inland rice-growing area of Vercelli and was apparently unable to swim. Some people believed he chose to be a sailor because there was so much less competition for posts in the navy than there was in the army. He himself owed his very rapid promotion not to his exploits but to his talent at flattery, intrigue and making himself popular at court. He managed to ingratiate himself with Cavour and became an unlikely friend of Azeglio, possibly because that amorous statesman was attracted to his English wife. A vain and quarrelsome individual with a taste for fighting duels, Persano was both frivolous and irresponsible: he once asked Azeglio, who was prime minister at the time, to give him a false passport so that he could pursue a ballerina in Austrian-held Milan.20 His friend refused to help.
Persano’s seamanship could be embarrassing. In 1851 he ran his ship aground outside Genoa harbour when carrying Piedmont’s contribution to the Great Exhibition in London. Two years later, even more embarrassingly, he ran aground again, this time while transporting the royal family to Sardinia for a hunting trip; apparently he was trying to take a short cut and hit some rocks that were not marked on his charts. Although he was arrested and reduced in rank for six months after this episode, the setback did not harm Persano’s career. In 1860 Cavour entrusted him with the job of shadowing Garibaldi and stirring up trouble in Palermo and Naples, and in the autumn of that year Persano assisted Cialdini in the capture of Ancona by bombarding the papal port from the sea. Over the next two years he became a parliamentarian, the minister of the navy and the admiral who in 1866 found himself in charge of the fleet at Ancona under government orders to defeat the Austrians and rescue Italy’s reputation after the fiasco of Custoza.
Persano was not, however, eager for combat and, although he had only brought his ships up from Taranto, claimed that they needed an overhaul. To repeated orders from Agostino Depretis, the current naval minister in Florence, he responded with a range of reasons for delay: the fleet was not ready, the crews were not trained, water had got into the cylinders and something was wrong with the coal; most important of all, the Affondatore (the Sinker), the best and newest ship, was still on its way from England, where it had been built. When Depretis told him to make himself master of the Adriatic, Persano replied that he had no proper charts of the one conceivable sea where his navy might fight. While the fleet was still being overhauled after its voyage from Taranto, the audacious Austrian admiral Wilhelm von Tegetthoff appeared with his navy off Ancona, fired a few salvoes and waited for the Italians to come out and engage him; when they remained in port without returning fire, he sailed away and claimed a moral victory.
An exasperated government eventually used the threat of dismissal to force Persano out and attack the island of Lissa off the Dalmatian coast. The navy was duly shelling the Austrian batteries on the island and preparing to land its troops when Tegetthoff reappeared and made a reckoning unavoidable. While Persano was organizing his line, the long-awaited Affondatore steamed up, its arrival persuading him to abandon his flagship, the Re d’Italia, and direct th
e battle from an armour-plated turret on the new vessel. Most of his captains were unaware, however, of the changeover and continued to look for signals from the Re d’Italia – until it was rammed and sunk by Tegetthoff’s own flagship. The simultaneous loss of another ship, which caught fire and exploded, convinced Persano that the battle was lost, even though he still easily outnumbered the Austrians and could have carried on the fray. Like the generals at Custoza, he converted a setback into a disaster and, as with Lamarmora, ordered an unnecessary retreat, leading his ships back to Ancona, where expectant crowds were waiting to cheer captured Austrian vessels.21
Lissa ended the career of Persano, who was accused of cowardice but cashiered for the lesser sins of negligence and incapacity. The defeat had other repercussions, especially for the future of the Italian navy, which henceforth tried to avoid battles on the open seas; one consequence of this was the disaster of November 1940, when the British disabled half the fleet that lay anchored in the harbour of Taranto. Yet the most insidious effect of the 1866 war was its impact on the psyche of the Italian nation. The very names Lissa and Custoza became reproaches, incitements to redress and redemption. Instead of persuading Italians not to attempt to become a Great Power, they encouraged them to try even harder. As Austria seemed the obvious place to seek such redemption, Victor Emanuel suggested to Bismarck in 1878 that a joint attack on the Habsburgs would give each of them victory and new territory. When the chancellor replied that Germany was big enough already, Italy abandoned the idea, became an ally of Austria and embarked on colonial adventures in Africa. Yet the defeats of 1866 rankled and continued to do so well into the twentieth century. The obsession with amends was a fundamental motive in the decisions to take part in the world wars in 1915 and 1940.
THE RISORGIMENTO WITHOUT HEROES
For many years after 1860, official Italy reiterated the claim that the nation had been made by a ‘generation of giants’, whose names honoured its streets, whose statues ornamented its squares and whose deeds filled its history books. Yet many people experienced doubts, feelings of unease and a sense of disappointment with the performance of the new state. If the Risorgimento had been such a splendid achievement, why was united Italy not more of a success? If the state was on the verge of becoming a Great Power, why could it not feed its own people? Why were so many Italians emigrating to the Americas?
Brain-washing by myth and propaganda may have been successful up to a point, but it failed to eradicate the suspicion that the wars of independence had not been as heroic as was officially claimed. Not many people had died, little glory had been won except by Garibaldi, and the outcome seemed to have been decided by foreign armies. The subsequent weakness of Italian nationalism made people wonder whether the patriotic movement had ever been very strong. Victor Emanuel had spoken of ‘the cry of anguish’ from all over Italy, Garibaldi had heard ‘the groan of despair … from a million Italian throats’, but few others had heard them, at any rate in great numbers. According to the Italian historian Alberto Mario Banti, patriots were inspired by an artistic canon of some forty works – novels, poems, essays, plays, heroic operas and paintings.22 Doubtless these things did inspire literate young men in the cities, but most other Italians were not in a position to read the novels of Azeglio or study the paintings of Hayez. People may have had more opportunity to be inspired by music, although most opera houses were bourgeois enclaves for which the majority of Italians could not afford either a ticket or the appropriate clothes.
Italian historians are still prone to exaggerate the extent of patriotic valour. In a recent biography of Garibaldi the distinguished Neapolitan scholar Alberto Scirocco acclaimed ‘the heroism with which young men from every corner of the Italian peninsula demonstrated faith in Italy’s destiny’.23 Yet several corners were virtually unrepresented: few of the young men came from the south or the islands or the countryside, as Garibaldi discovered when he marched around much of rural Italy without attracting volunteers. Scirocco’s romantic youths were mainly northern, urban, middle-class and educated. The bravery of the Bandiera brothers and others like them is indisputable, but not many patriots were willing to sacrifice their lives: more Italians were killed in a day’s fighting against the Ethiopians at Adowa in 1896 than in all the wars of the Risorgimento put together.
In times of revolution few revolutionaries think that events are moving too fast, but some Italian patriots did later wonder if the process of unification might not have been too swift. The seven kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England had taken four centuries to become one, and a shared sense of English patriotism was forged towards the end of that time in response to the Danish invasions. Yet nearly all the territories of the seven Italian states were moulded into one between the summer of 1859 and the spring of 1861, while the remaining areas were absorbed over the following decade. This was obviously not long enough for a sense of nationhood to develop in a country with many regional traditions but few national ones. Nor did patriots have the assistance of an external danger, for only propagandists could claim that the Austrians were as grim or as aggressive as the Danes in their dragon-prowed longboats. Italian nationalism, such as it was, became real only after the nation had been made.
Three generations after unity, the communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci criticized the Risorgimento as a ‘passive revolution’ because its leaders had failed to ally themselves with the peasants; unlike the jacobins in France, they had thus failed to create a modern national state. Without sharing Gramsci’s simplistic analysis of class behaviour, Piero Gobetti, a liberal and courageous opponent of fascism, came to a similar conclusion, arguing that the Risorgimento had failed because it had been the work of a minority with little popular participation. The arrival of fascism in the 1920s, he believed, was a consequence of the patriots’ earlier failure to win the people’s support or produce a creditable ruling class. The very title of Gobetti’s book, Risorgimento senza eroi (Risorgimento without Heroes), published in 1926 after his death at the age of twenty-five, was considered a heresy requiring ponderous rebuttal. The problems after unification, declared a prominent historian, Adolfo Omodeo, were not a consequence of the Risorgimento but of ‘the progressive loss of the sense of the Risorgimento’. The heroes must still be considered heroes because they had ‘acted for the people’, they had ‘believed in the people and in the nation’. Cavour and his fellow giants had ‘made themselves become the nation’, just as the 7,000 ancient Israelites who had refused to bow to Baal had become ‘the true Israel’. In a passage implying that the historian’s job is not to write history but to preserve historical traditions, Omodeo argued that ‘one must hold firmly to [the giants’] tradition and their spirit. One cannot abandon and destroy foundations laid with such difficulty.’24
Political nationalism may have subsided with the fall of Mussolini, but historiographical nationalism survived the Duce’s exit. The appearance in the 1950s of a myth-breaker in the shape of Denis Mack Smith, a young Cambridge don, was thus highly unwelcome to the academic establishment. In two books, a study of Cavour and Garibaldi in 1860 and a history of modern Italy, Mack Smith fell upon the icons of unification, shattering the status of Cavour as ‘the wisest statesman’ of Europe and of Victor Emanuel as the great patriot king. Even more unpopular were his assertions that the revolts of the Risorgimento were ‘largely social insurrections’ tenuously connected to politics and patriotism, and that the wars themselves, far from being ‘a simple story of deliverance from the Austrian oppressor’, had been a succession of civil wars.25 Although nationalist historians have preferred to ignore the fact, thousands of Lombards, Romans, Neapolitans and Venetians had fought against the patriots, and almost all the Italian blood spilt at the Battle of Magenta belonged to soldiers from Lombardy-Venetia fighting for the Austrians.
Italian critics praised Mack Smith for his mastery of sources, his discovery of new material and his attempt to explain what had been wrong with the Risorgimento and why it had led to colonial defeat and
to fascism. Yet traditionalists were appalled by his iconoclasm, his lack of respect for the idols of the nation. Unable to confute him on matters of fact, the Englishman’s detractors accused him of ‘libellous language’ and complained about his ‘attitude’, his use of irony, the ‘arrogance’ with which he had deprived the Risorgimento of its ‘soul’. A century after unification, many historians still preferred romantic legends to revealed facts. The Risorgimento, proclaimed Professor Rodolico, the guardian of its ‘soul’, ‘was spirit of sacrifice, it was suffering in the ways of exile and in the galleys, it was blood of Italian youth on the battlefields …’ Above all, ‘it was the passion of a people for its Italian identity’.26
9
Making Italians
PIEDMONT COMES TO NAPLES
Even today, when you arrive in Naples by train from the north, you feel you have crossed a frontier and reached another land. As you leave the station and find yourself in the Piazza Garibaldi, the feeling is intensified by the sight of so many foreigners, young men from Africa and Latin America selling bracelets, sunglasses and fake designer bags, young women from Senegal and Brazil selling themselves, standing in clusters around the market by the Porta Nolana, trying to look unobtrusive to the police but obvious enough for potential customers to realize what they are offering. Yet even without the immigrants, the place seems different. There are sensually distinctive qualities about the air and the light, the bay and its vegetation, the way the inhabitants talk and gesticulate, the way they exist.
The Pursuit of Italy Page 29