by Tim Parks
Dangerous to whom? Gustav doesn’t explain, but it’s interesting he remembers, and repeats, only the ‘shapely’ girl’s name. Carolina.
What most endears me to the German, though, is his prickliness about his accent when speaking Italian. He hates to be criticized. On 9 June, as the siege was beginning to bite, Manara organized an evening sortie to unsettle the French cannon positions. Hoffstetter was to be in charge and had spent many hours devising a complex two-pronged attack. However, at lunch – and they were eating well so as to have plenty of energy for the battle – a junior officer passed a comment about his Italian. Everyone laughed. The German observed that it was hardly polite to make fun of a foreigner who was risking his life for their cause. They kept laughing. Hoffstetter stalked off without his coffee. Worried about bad blood between the men, Manara removed the German from his command. Without him, the attack was botched.
I too am sensitive about my accent. Over the years Eleonora and I have noticed that when we order drinks in certain cafés, the price will be higher if I do the ordering and the barman picks up my foreignness. Which was why, in Tivoli, when we finally found the energy to get off the bed and go out and eat something, it was she who ordered for us both at a tavola calda – tomatoes stuffed with rice and flavoured with garlic, mint and basil, a Roman speciality, for which we paid an extremely modest price. Small victories.
I have to confess I had bad thoughts about Italy in Tivoli. And about our trip. The small town is a mix of narrow streets and steep steps – Rome’s antiquity in miniature – then more modern, open, nondescript areas, for which we must thank some heavy Allied bombing in 1944. Overall, the feeling is of a place imperfectly spruced up for tourists, entirely focused on marketing its key assets, those wonderful villas and waterfalls.
Away from the central pedestrian areas, the traffic is oppressive and the road king. We had imagined ourselves exploring the town through the afternoon and evening, visiting its picturesque castle, moving at ease through graceful piazzas and shaded gardens. In the event, footsore as we are, our curiosity takes us no further than Piazza Garibaldi, which turns out to be a deserted, sun-scorched expanse dominated by a twisting arch of steel and bronze some twenty feet high by sixty long. A plaque tells us that this is THE ARCH OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS, made in 2009 by the sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro.
Contemplating this incongruous structure, you wonder if anyone passing by is ever prompted to think of the seventy-five founding fathers who wrote Italy’s post-war constitution. Why should they be? Why isn’t the statue of Garibaldi in Piazza Garibaldi?
‘I’m beginning to worry about our walk,’ I tell Eleonora. ‘I’m afraid we’ll never get away from the traffic. We’ll blow the whole summer in a haze of carbon monoxide.’
She laughed and took me to a gelateria and back to the B & B to rest, and it was there, booting up the mini-computer that has all our source materials stored in it, that I read again of Garibaldi’s decision in Tivoli. Dump the carts. Use mules.
Why?
Garibaldi had left Rome determined to keep a flame alight and revive the bonfire of revolution in the provinces. But reviewing his men on 3 June, he had to recognize that this was not the army he had hoped for. The night’s desertions were a wake-up call. Nor, for all their generosity with food and drink, were the people of Tivoli queuing up to join the fight. Barely out of Rome, Garibaldi realized his project could soon end in fiasco. On the other hand, he was committed now. If some men had sneaked off, thousands of others were looking to him for a way forward. What to do?
Buy time. Keep the enemy in a state of confusion as to your whereabouts. The French army would soon be after them from Rome. Over the Apennines to the east a Neapolitan army was busy reasserting papal power in Abruzzo. There was also a considerable Spanish army to the south of Rome. Garibaldi was not ready to fight them.
Egidio Ruggeri, whose account is much shorter than Hoffstetter’s, claims that Garibaldi had letters from Florence, ‘promising, in the liveliest colours’ that the whole of Tuscany was on the brink of insurrection. As a result the General, as his men always called him, decided to turn north, leaving Tivoli in the afternoon after just a few hours’ rest and spending the night near Montecelio eight miles to the north. This is the route you see on maps in history books and museums.
Hoffstetter is more detailed. Having slept off their food, they left Tivoli at four, he says, taking the road to Naples, southwards; at nightfall they stopped and slept some more, then, in the small hours, set off again turning sharply north. This to deceive any informers in Tivoli. By the following evening they were settling down in the grounds of monasteries in Mentana and Monterotondo, twelve miles to the north-west.
But Trevelyan disagrees. Poor Hoffstetter had no idea where he was, he says. He quotes the German’s account of an extremely arduous climb into the hills when the men turned off the road from Tivoli, the ground so steep and the path so poor they had to use ropes to haul up their one cannon and a few remaining carts over rocks and spurs, in the dark; ‘an inhuman effort of heaving and pulling, blaspheming and whipping’.
There are no such hills on the route Hoffstetter thought they took.
‘So where are they?’ Eleonora asks.
We’re going to bed early – it’s barely 9.30 – anxious about the morning to come. We’ve promised ourselves we’re going to do this march in the same time Garibaldi’s men took. But our morale is low too, and if our sores and blisters get worse, our project like theirs risks ending before it has properly begun.
‘Trevelyan says they went through San Polo dei Cavalieri.’
One nice thing about our hiking app is that it gives contour lines and altitudes.
‘Quite a climb,’ Eleonora observes. ‘Two thousand, two hundred feet.’
At last I see the obvious: the General had to dump the wheeled carts in order to go where no one imagined an army could go. In order to disappear. Except, with so much luggage and too few mules, he couldn’t dump all of them at once.
We contemplate Trevelyan’s route, based on notes made by Colonel Gaetano Sacchi, whom Garibaldi had put in direct command of the First Italian Legion, notes later used by a certain Generale De Rossi for an article published in the Cavalry Review in 1902. Whatever the truth of the matter, it makes the trip to Monterotondo, which we intended as our second destination, twenty-two miles instead of fourteen. Twenty-two mountainous miles.
Still, we hadn’t booked a place to stay as yet. We were free to stop where we liked, when we felt we’d had enough. And while a direct walk from Tivoli to Mentana and Monterotondo would be all busy roads under blazing sun, the path to San Polo would be earth and grass and rocks and trees and oxygen.
‘Perhaps even a breeze,’ Eleonora reflected.
The decision was made.
DAY 2
3 July 1849 – 26 July 2019
Tivoli, San Polo dei Cavalieri, Marcellina, Montecelio (Villa dei Romani) – 15 miles
San Polo dei Cavalieri
We had thought we were so organized. We had bought nice pastries for our 4.30 breakfast. In our room there was a brand new Nespresso machine with a generous variety of coffee pods – Arpeggio, Levanto, Capriccio.
The alarm does its cruel job. We dress quickly, pack our bags and drink our juice.
But the Nespresso doesn’t work. The machine won’t turn on. No amount of changing plugs, pressing switches helps. No little red light.
Eleonora refuses to give up. An army marches on its caffeine, she declares. She resorts to Google. Nespresso’s online manual comes up on her phone. At 4.45 a.m.
‘You’re sure you have the right model?’
‘Of course I’m sure.’
In the event it’s 5.30 before we stumble down the stairs and let ourselves out into the dark. Coffee-less. But the pre-dawn hush quickly reconciles me to Tivoli. Everything is softly solemn in the shadowy streets, the air sweet and cool.
‘You just like it now because there’s no one around,’ Eleonora
observes.
We drop down to the road by the river, the Aniene, that feeds the town’s fountains and waterfalls, and set off east, as if towards Abruzzo and the Adriatic. This is the road that Hoffstetter thought was heading south because it leaves from the southern part of town. Then, following Trevelyan, following De Rossi, following Sacchi, we strike abruptly north, leaving the valley and tackling the viciously steep hillside on what looks like an old mule path, an underlying stone base now mostly broken or covered with debris. Could anyone ever have pulled a cannon up here? ‘Others said it was impossible,’ Hoffstetter writes. He had been sent ahead to reconnoitre. ‘But I knew what the General expected of me.’
We climb in silence, ducking under wet leaves, brushing cobwebs from our mouths as the day comes up and the light steals through bushes and pines, turning a grey world to green. When the path comes out of the trees to round a spur, we find Tivoli already precipitously below us, a warm cluster of arches, columns, terracotta and stucco; then the pink haze of the plain beyond, and Rome.
Another half-hour and we top a ridge that allows us to look east towards the Apennines proper, where the Neapolitan army awaits. First a broad patchwork of fields and woodland, then rising lines of dark mountains with the sun climbing behind. The sheer scope of the vista feeds a sense of achievement. We’re feeling good.
When Eleonora is startled by a noise.
A white cow struggles to its hooves in the underbrush and trots off, clattering long horns on low branches. There are others too, lean and melancholy before another day of purgatorial heat. Hoffstetter was surprised and admiring when Garibaldi explained they would be bringing cows along with them on their march, so they could slaughter and eat them as required. The German had never seen this done in a regular army. Garibaldi learned the trick in Brazil.
‘So they would have been dragging cows up here with them?’
Eleonora and I are vegetarians.
‘They had twenty or so cows. And, at this point, thirty-seven mules. Two for Garibaldi and Anita’s personal stuff. Five for the pots and pans. Two for what they called “the ambulance” – stretchers, bandages, medicines. Then rifles, munitions, clothes.’
Following a steep path through dense thickets of oak, we try to imagine 4000 men and hundreds of horses, mules and cattle swarming up the mountainside. Garibaldi, Anita and Ugo Bassi rode at their head. Bassi was a priest and poet whom Garibaldi had met in Bologna in the months before coming to Rome. Garibaldi loathed priests as a rule, but Bassi was entirely committed to the national cause. ‘Our souls have been conjoined,’ the cleric wrote. ‘Garibaldi is the Hero most worthy of poetry I can ever hope to meet.’ Bassi’s ‘soft eyes,’ Hoffstetter observed, ‘his high forehead, curly hair and beard, eccentric clothes and fiery speeches, surprised everyone. No handshake ever did me so much good as his.’
When it came to battle, Bassi moved in the thick of it with total abandon. ‘He saddens me,’ Garibaldi complained. ‘He makes it so obvious he wants to die.’ But perhaps this was the General’s fault. ‘Nothing would please me more than to die for Garibaldi,’ Bassi enthused. ‘Garibaldi is Italy.’
Raffaele Belluzzi, who loves to give every possible detail, has Bassi in a black shirt with a cross swinging from his neck riding a lively horse that had belonged to the British ambassador in Rome. But of the three up front, the best rider was doubtless Anita, who is supposed to have schooled Garibaldi himself in this department. In his memoir Garibaldi tells us she’d had her hair cut the same afternoon they left Rome, so she could look like a man. Other observers report her hair was long. ‘Dressed like an Amazon,’ Hoffstetter says, ‘Garibaldi’s wife road a fine roan and wore the same cap with an ostrich feather as everyone else. She wasn’t usually armed but when we were expecting danger she wore a light sabre that she had used in Brazil.’ Belluzzi has her wearing a red shirt and carrying a pistol and a dagger. All the men had daggers in their belts, he says.
The only weapon we have with us is a brand new Swiss pocketknife, which I use to slice up a peach for a snack. We’ve reached 1500 feet now and there’s a broad clearing where four paths meet. Exposed to the sun, the grass is a parched grey-green, but there’s shade around the edges, and putting our packs down I strip off my shirt and hang it on a branch to dry the sweat. Not woollen like the shirts of the garibaldini – how hot must that have been? – but a marvellously light grey-blue fabric that according to the boasts of its manufacturers shifts the sweat off your body through its tiny holes into the air. It works fine for a while, but there are limits to what tiny holes can do when your body is streaming.
We have light trekking shorts too, while the garibaldini wore grey woollen trousers with a red stripe. And we’ve discovered elasticated, anti-rash athlete’s underwear, for which I am immensely grateful. What wonderful progress has been made in fabrics over the last two centuries! Did Garibaldi’s men even have underwear? I fear not. The more alert I’m becoming to all the places where skin is rubbing, shoes pinching and pains lurking, the more extraordinary their determination seems. I try to picture the men sprawled around the edge of the clearing here, examining their toes, their heels, finding sores, taking precautionary measures. I have a small silicon tube that fits over the fourth toe of my right foot, which is prone to blisters. I suppose they wrapped bits of cloth round theirs. And we have invested in the lightest possible trekking shoes, and the very best walking socks. Just occasionally, our various chroniclers touch on the problem of the garibaldini not having good boots. Socks are never mentioned. In general, the word disagi – discomforts – is made to do a lot of work.
We follow a long flat path winding through dense woodland, blissfully shaded and alive with birdsong. Then at last, through a break in the trees, San Polo appears. We had thought we were almost there, our app had promised a walk of just two and a half hours; instead the little town is still dramatically above us, tower, turrets and sun-soaked facades outcropping from dark green foliage the other side of a deep gorge.
How beautiful and how disappointing. We’ve already walked more than three hours. Obviously the software doesn’t take sufficient account of the ups and downs and the quality of the paths. Garibaldi’s men were not even told where they were going, never mind how long it would take to get there. They just walked.
It’s that time of the morning now when the heat intensifies, and in a matter of minutes the quiet countryside is transformed by the urgent clamour of the cicadas. One strikes up in a tree above us, a rasping rhythmic whir, then another and another and another, until a harsh, hypnotic chorus fuses with the oven-hot air in one vast summery stupefaction.
I have a pair of trekking poles attached to my pack. I’ve never used poles, but friends insisted they would be useful. Eleonora thought them a pointless expense and unnecessary weight. I unhook them now and adjust the length without really knowing what it should be, and start to use them without really knowing how. At once I think of pilgrims and shepherds in children’s picture books, never without their elegant sticks or crooks, and I wonder if the garibaldini were sometimes tempted to use their rifles for support. Probably not. They were too precious. For me the poles are a revelation. It’s a pleasure to swing the arms and push down hard on the rocky ground. Energy surges with the roar of the cicadas.
‘We have to get you a pair,’ I tell Eleonora as we swing into San Polo at quarter to ten. ‘Like it or not. General’s orders.’
The garibaldini had no backpacks. There hadn’t been time to find them. They carried their day’s ration of bread tied to a string round their necks. Arriving in a village, they could hardly expect the local hostelry to serve all of them. Fortunately we can travel light because we know there’ll be sustenance along the way. Our only fear, approaching a place as small as San Polo, is that the café we’re counting on may not materialize, and our first question, on coming across a native, is Where is the piazza? since that is where the café will surely be.
But San Polo is not so small after all. Its piazza is
generous and breezily elegant. And it has two cafés, not one. We turn this way and that, considering. Invariably two cafés in an Italian piazza will distinguish themselves by one being upmarket, one down, one for the sophisticated folks and one for the rough and ready – borghesi here contadini there. It is received wisdom that the Italians, unlike the English, have little sense of class distinction. How this notion gained currency I can’t imagine. It takes no more than two seconds in San Polo to spot on the one side the unshaven men in vests playing cards around early glasses of wine, on the other the shabby chic of well-to-do housewives still drinking their breakfast coffee.
We choose the smarter bar, for its terrace, which has dazzling white sunshades and offers the opportunity of looking down over a parapet across the landscape we’ve just walked through. Inside, a pleasant lady promises freshly squeezed, fridge-cold oranges. ‘It’ll take a while though, because I do it by hand.’ In the event, it’s fifteen thirsty minutes before the juice is brought out together with coffee and pastries on a tin tray carried by a dreamy, distracted boy.
As our young waiter retreats, we call to ask if he could bring some sugar for the coffee, but he doesn’t hear. He doesn’t hear another customer call either. Barely fifteen, he has gone to stand at the parapet and gaze out across the wide world. Very likely if Garibaldi passed now, he would sign up in a trice. He’s waiting for the call, any call. There were hundreds of adolescents among Garibaldi’s men. They formed a group called the Compagnia Speranza. Hope Company. French boys, in particular. They were excellent soldiers, Garibaldi felt, even when fighting their own countrymen. Fervently idealistic, never complaining. While we eat and drink in the gentle breeze of the terrace, Eleonora turns the pages of a local newspaper and points to an article complaining about teenage motorcyclists using the hairpin bends between San Polo and the neighbouring Marcellina as a racetrack. It’s something we’re going to have to get used to over the coming weeks: young men in possession of fabulous technology and as ready to die, it seems, as Ugo Bassi, but for no other reason than boredom.