The Hero's Way

by Tim Parks

  Marcellina

  The world is full of surprises. The territory is never as you imagined. Your app tells you to take a short cut along a pretty-looking path. You proceed pleasantly enough, steeply downhill, until all trace of the path is lost amid waving grasses and dense brambles. You climb back up the hill under the pitiless sun, cursing. But then, around the long bend that your short cut was meant to avoid, an extraordinary sight awaits. Built against a rock wall that rises sheer from the road is a huge grey-brown industrial complex including a half-dozen cylindrical silos, each a hundred feet high. And on the rounded concrete surfaces of these now abandoned structures someone has painted six enormous black and white images of workers’ faces. The effect, as these faces loom twenty feet above us, staring away over our heads, is eerily striking. The whole area, it seems, has for centuries been quarried for stone to crush into lime for cement. When Mussolini ordered the construction of extensive new suburbs in Rome, this cement factory was built to meet demand. It closed in 1975.

  The inevitable explanatory plaque is long enough to fill two pages and comes complete with a garbled English translation. The artwork on the silos is entitled The Gold Mine. ‘With an alchemical idea, artist Romolo Belvedere turns these stones into gems of gold. To all those who pass by, it will be difficult to take their eyes off. The golden-mine is blinding!’

  This is not the case. Shaded by the hillside, the cement works are the only gloomy element in this otherwise dazzling day. Speaking of gold, though, there is an awful lot of glittering going on. Looking back to San Polo, now high above us, or down to Marcellina, a couple of miles below, we are constantly aware of intermittent gleams of light, as if the sun were catching scattered mirrors, dozens of them, but fitfully or perhaps rhythmically. It’s an unsettling effect and seriously undermines that picture-postcard look one’s learned to expect of ancient Italian towns.

  Entering Marcellina, the mystery is solved. Almost all the chimneys have been fitted with spinning stainless-steel chimney cowls. Turning in the breeze, their shiny blades catch the light on and off. What can one say? In a flash, as it were, a simple industrial product transforms an ancient landscape. Garibaldi, Hoffstetter tells us, was immensely careful about not attracting attention from afar. Fires must not be lit at night. Cigars must not glow. Bayonets must not glint in the sun. Meat must only be barbecued in daylight. He would have abhorred the revolving stainless-steel chimney cowl.

  In Marcellina we grab a drink in the Roxy Bar. It’s 12.30. WIN FOR LIFE invites the lottery advertisement, in English, on the window. Spensierati e sistemati (Carefree and sorted). One can’t imagine a more alluring message for a tired soldier. Inside, the bar is pleasantly air-conditioned. A calamitously overweight woman is squatting at a low table trying to help her little girl with some summer homework. Above the two, the TV plays a song by the singer Nek, an entry (so Eleonora tells me) at this year’s Sanremo Song Festival. Mi farò trovare pronto, he sings – I’ll make sure I’m ready. Not for the General’s call, but for love. It’s the typical, slightly hoarse, earnestly straining voice of the Italian male singer-songwriter, virile and vulnerable.

  Sono pronto, sono pronto, A non esser pronto mai. Ready never to be ready. Garibaldi, we discover in his memoirs, was having serious misgivings about Italian masculinity in the first days of this long march. He wondered if his men would ever be ready for the task ahead. ‘When I compared the constancy and abnegation of those South Americans I’d lived with,’ he remembers, ‘men who put up with any kind of food, or none at all, forsaking every comfort to survive for years in forest and desert . . . with my faint-hearted, effeminate fellow citizens, who couldn’t go a month in the wild without a city-dweller’s three meals a day, I felt ashamed to belong to this degenerate progeny of a once great people.’

  Hard words. But the General never showed his disappointment to his men at the time. By all accounts he was constantly praising their fortitude, galloping up and down the long column of marchers, always seeking to encourage and inspire. He worked with what he had.

  ‘Two cedratas, please.’

  Child of the south, Eleonora chooses a southern drink. It’s a refreshing, faintly soda-like concoction made from the Calabrian cedro, a large yellow citrus fruit, and served in a small bottle that you pour into a glass crackling with ice. I’ve had a couple of cedratas before this trip, but never in the overheated state I’m in now. I raise the yellow swirl to my lips and, wham! Citrus-sharp, ice-enhanced ecstasy. The world is what you bring to it. Come with your hunger, and the most modest food is exquisite. Bring parched lips, and the cedrata is elixir. Pampered city-dweller that I am, I’m going to be wanting more of these.

  One learns from one’s mistakes. And makes others in the process. It had been an error, we decided, to try to hurry to Tivoli yesterday, before the sun was hot. We had been anxious and neurotic. Today we would take things as they came, accepting the heat, stopping more often, drinking more, resting in the shade and only booking a place to stay, from our phones, when we were sure how far we could get. But we had reckoned without the fact that Marcellina, Montecelio, Mentana and Monterotondo are not tourist towns. Checking Booking.com and Airbnb in the bar in Marcellina, we could find nowhere to stay along our route.

  It was a problem. We could hardly, like Garibaldi’s men, simply walk into a monastery and tell the monks we were going to sleep in the grounds.

  ‘Villa dei Romani,’ Eleonora eventually proposes. ‘Artistic, bohemian atmosphere, it says. Only two miles off our route, south of Montecelio.’

  Montecelio

  So now, having dragged carts and cannon, cows and mules and 4000 men up to San Polo dei Cavalieri, then down to Marcellina, Garibaldi turns west back across the Roman plain towards the Tiber. If you’re struggling to get a grip on all these movements, think of a horseshoe. Hold it up sideways with the curve to the right and the points to the left. We have gone first east, out of Rome along the bottom side of the shoe, then curved up, north, into the hills, and now, having disappeared from everyone’s view, we’re walking back along the upper side of the horseshoe, travelling west, so that when we arrive at our B & B this evening we’ll be no more than four or five miles to the north of the road we struggled on from Rome to Tivoli.

  No doubt some of Garibaldi’s men must have wished they’d taken a short cut and saved themselves thirty exhausting miles. Nevertheless the effect of this ruse, in an age when there was no satellite surveillance, was extraordinary. On receiving reports that Garibaldi had left Rome at night from the city’s southern gate, a French army set off towards noon to catch him in the Alban Hills. Overwhelmed by the heat and finding no trace of the rebels, they gave up in Frascati.

  The Spanish, stationed to the south, seeing that the rebels had not arrived, assumed that Garibaldi must be heading for the Adriatic, perhaps planning to commandeer a ship and escape to Venice, where the liberal government was still holding out against the Austrians. They sped east into the hills south of Tivoli to cut him off at a town called Subiaco. The Spanish were renowned for their speed and resilience over rough terrain, and it is true that had Garibaldi headed east from Tivoli, he would have passed through Subiaco. But he didn’t.

  Garibaldi compounded the confusion by a madly intensive use of his 800 cavalrymen. The precise Hoffstetter with his military-school training begged his General to keep the cavalry close by the infantry, to protect the men from surprise attack. Instead Garibaldi split his horsemen into bands of fifty or even fewer and dispatched them on missions twenty, thirty and even forty miles away. There were cavalry in the Alban Hills to lead the French on. There were cavalry on the road to Subiaco, and again on the road to Rieti, forty miles due north of Subiaco. There were small parties of cavalry on all the roads leading east and north from Rome, to watch the enemy’s movements. And all these men spread the news that Garibaldi was coming and that huge quantities of rations must be prepared. This to give the impression that his army was larger than it was. When they came into contact w
ith the French or Spanish they rode off in directions that led away from the main body of infantry. So the Spanish set off to Rieti from Subiaco, travelling much faster than Garibaldi’s men could, but in the wrong direction. On arrival they were so exhausted they hung up their boots for a week.

  ‘When it came to saddles and weapons,’ writes Generale De Rossi for the Cavalry Review in 1902, ‘Garibaldi’s cavalry was poorly equipped, to the point that it would not have been much use in battle.’ But none of the General’s enemies had any experience of such a systematic use of misinformation. Since he didn’t tell any of his cavalry officers what orders he was giving to the others, the only person who knew what was going on overall was Garibaldi himself.

  One of the positive sides to this, as far as our walk is concerned, is that even when we can’t be sure that we’re walking where he and his men walked, or even when we know perfectly well that we’re not, we can always feel consoled that his cavalry probably passed this way. We’re outriders, I tell Eleonora, in time and space.

  The walk to Montecelio was challenging. Bollino rosso the newspaper in San Polo said. Red alert. Hottest July on record. Forty degrees. Infants and old folks should stay at home. We had our water bottles of course, which we filled at fountains in San Polo and Marcellina. We had our hats, our sun cream, our sunglasses. But these are winding roads through low olive groves and grey, bone-dry soil. You could dive into shade from time to time, but most of the walking was in direct sunlight.

  At three in the afternoon we face the steep climb up to Montecelio itself. First hawthorn hedges, shrubs and stunted trees, then shabby little villas with faded awnings over peeling balconies. At a corner I lean on my poles. Am I old enough to be one of those the authorities warn to stay at home? All around not a soul in sight. Everyone hiding from the despotic sun. The heart pounds. The sweat runs down your lenses. Eleonora is way out in front now. Her blue shorts and orange shirt shimmer in the heat. I take off my hat and empty my water bottle over my head.

  At this critical point we realize that the town has two centres, or seems to, one far above to the right, the other far above to the left. Both seem attractively dark and shady in the afternoon glare. But far away. At last we’re in the streets. No pavements here, no frills. Stone, iron, brick. Rusty garage doors. Laundry hanging limp in the air above. Gratings on low windows. Then a wide area of cracked asphalt. With petrol pumps. And a bar. Bar di Montecelio. This time there’s no question of hesitation or choice. We dive in.

  ‘That’s all we’ve got left, signori! But take it all! Whatever you can eat!’

  Two heavily tattooed young men preside, all tight T-shirts and bulging muscles. They joke and laugh in strong local accents over our miserable state, but in a kind way, hurrying to put things on the table, extravagantly chivalrous to Eleonora, eyeing me up ironically. A litre bottle of near-frozen water is gone in a trice. Yes, one says, he often goes running up around San Polo; lovely paths, quite a climb. But not in this heat! No one goes out in this heat. No one goes up to San Polo from Tivoli then down to Marcellina then up again to Montecelio. Who would do that?

  ‘Garibaldi.’

  ‘The man was mad.’

  This was the moment when I learned how quickly the body can recover if only you give it food, water and shade. I had thought I was in trouble, that I might not make it. And in just five minutes of liquids, sugar and soggy pizza, there I am again, up and running. I presume it’s an experience Garibaldi’s men were familiar with.

  I help myself to a Cornetto from the fridge and look round the room. Polished wood furniture. Tiled floor. A clock on the wall says four when it’s five. They’re still in nineteenth-century time. Aside from ourselves, the only other customers are four men playing cards, beer bottles in hand, enjoying their Friday afternoon.

  ‘What language are they speaking?’

  Eleonora listens. ‘Romanian.’

  Young Romanians have flocked to Italy since their country joined the EU in 2007. More than a million. Mainly building workers. In the same period the financial crisis has reduced the Italian building industry to half its previous size.

  Eleonora asks, ‘Were there any Romanians among Garibaldi’s men?’

  There weren’t. But there were Poles. It’s amazing how many Polish military men got around Europe during the 1848 revolutions. A group of 200 fought for the Roman Republic, and what survivors there were joined Garibaldi’s retreat. It’s curious too how the struggle for Italian nationhood was fought idealistically by a multinational, multilingual army. You couldn’t accuse the Risorgimento of being isolationist or excluding. It was a Polish cavalryman, Major Emil Müller, who was given the task of completing French confusion over Garibaldi’s whereabouts. When the ‘horseshoe manoeuvre’ terminated at Monterotondo on the east bank of the Tiber, just fifteen miles north-east of Rome, Müller and fifty cavalrymen rode on westwards, as if the plan had always been to circle the city to the north and head due west for the Tyrrhenian coast, perhaps to cut off the French supply line at the port of Civitavecchia.

  Müller and his men left at nightfall and swam the Tiber in the dark. The bridges were all guarded. Alerted to their presence around Lake Bracciano, twenty-two miles north-west of Rome, the French set off after them in force. Müller led them even further west. The upshot was that Garibaldi was entirely free to move the main body of his men due north up the Tiber from Monterotondo, towards Umbria.

  ‘How much is it?’ I’m at the counter.

  ‘Five euros forty,’ says the big young man, flexing his tattoos.

  My eyes must have widened, because he laughs and asks, ‘Too little?’

  I don’t know what to say. I’d expected at least double.

  He laughs heartily, as if I were the butt of some joke that only he and his fellow barman understand. Then he leans forward and says quietly, ‘We get by, signore. It’s a struggle here, but we do get by. Happy walking.’

  Villa dei Romani

  Our learning curve was steep those first few days. Steep as the Sabine Hills. We had imagined ourselves checking into friendly B & Bs and testing the temperature, as it were, of the country, mentioning Garibaldi and hearing what people thought about the Risorgimento now. Instead, on arrival at Villa dei Romani, a surprisingly gracious house perched on a dry knoll in the middle of nowhere, our only craving was to collapse in our room. It was the merest sense of duty that led me to mention our project to our landlady, and I was immensely relieved when she just nodded vaguely and handed over a key.

  It was exactly the reception we wanted. Still, there is a limit to how early you can hit the sack. To one side of the house the sun was setting in pink over Rome, illuminating Tivoli to the left, Montecelio to the right. We slipped quietly down to the garden to get a better look.

  The grounds, perhaps an acre or so, were utterly barren but for a few gnarled trees and thick fleshy cactuses. Between these stood half a dozen large sculptures of body parts. Villa dei Romani, it turned out, was first and foremost an artists’ retreat that paid for itself with the B & B. There was a scatter of ten-foot-tall hands, made of bright white concrete. With their wrists planted in the ground and fingers spread in the air, they seemed to invite comparison with bushes and trees. On another side of the house an impressive semi-erect stone penis had been given the dimensions and demeanour of a cannon (the scrotum its carriage) and placed so as to thrust out across the plain towards Rome. How could we not be reminded of the cannon Garibaldi’s men were so valiantly dragging around with them? How much does a cannon weigh? Three tons? Four? ‘Our light four-pounder,’ Hoffstetter says, was designed to be drawn by four horses, though the men often ended up using their shoulders to heave it over the uneven terrain.

  Fortunately, Villa dei Romani’s stone penis doesn’t have to be moved anywhere, or shoot at anyone. We smile and take a silly selfie beside it and are just sneaking back to bed when a robust little man emerges from the bushes and is suddenly upon us. We can’t escape.

  If only he had kn
own that we were interested in Garibaldi, he cries. Yes, yes, he is the artist who sculpted the hands and there is something he absolutely must show us. ‘Garibaldi’s men stayed in the cellar here!’

  I look around. The house looks old enough. But Villa dei Romani is some way off the route that—

  ‘Not in ’49! Later. After the battle of Mentana.’

  Mentana is the town we will be heading for at dawn. When Italy was united in 1861, Rome was not included in the package; the Pope kept it for himself. In 1867 Garibaldi led a volunteer army to try to take the city, but was beaten by combined French and papal forces near Mentana.

  ‘Some of the men hid in the cellar here, after the battle. They made drawings on the wall.’

  Intrigued, we follow him into the house and downstairs to a low cellar. The walls are a rough grey limestone, the raw rock of the hill. One area, perhaps four feet by three, is enclosed by a white wooden frame. Inside the frame there are deep scratchings in the stone. Perhaps a few letters in the centre, which someone has tried to rub out with an abrasive and someone else has painted over in white. They’re still visible but not legible. In the bottom right of the frame is a drawing, a vaguely pyramid shape, which our host tells us must be a nearby church.

  ‘To remind themselves where they’d hidden their rifles,’ the artist thinks. ‘If they weren’t caught with their weapons they could always claim they weren’t garibaldini.’

  Later, in the early hours I wake with a start and can’t get back to sleep. We have the two windows wide open and outside the crickets are whirring in the warm air. The sound comes in waves, a rising and falling melancholy. I find myself thinking about the men who holed up in the cellar. Not the same men we’re following of course. Though some did serve in both campaigns.