The Hero's Way

by Tim Parks

  Water. How important it suddenly becomes when you realize you are running out. The tongue grows drier and saltier. The saliva thickens. A growing urgency overtakes all other concerns. At every corner or roadside shrine, you look out for those fountains Trevelyan mentions, or simply water taps in stone walls. There are still a few around. When you spot one, the relief is immense. You drink and soak your hat and splash the water over your head. You fill your bottles to the brim. The weight doesn’t matter.

  Over the coming days we will visit local museums in Todi and Orvieto and various Tuscan towns from Montepulciano to Arezzo. Invariably there is a fine collection of artefacts from pre-Christian times, Etruscan, Greek and Roman. As regular middle-class museumgoers, we move between the display cases thinking aesthetics, history of art, anthropology. We read captions that fill us in on trading routes and cultural influences, colonization and burial practices. Only in Arezzo will it finally occur to me that almost all these artefacts were designed to hold water, or wine, or oil – vases, pots, pans, urns, perfume bottles, medicine phials, amphorae, ewers, jugs, bowls, craters, carafes, demijohns – as if the supreme concern of any human being and goal of all technology must be to preserve a supply of liquid.

  Finding no water in Cantalupo and none in Torri in Sabina, the next village along the way, the garibaldini approached Vacone, the point of maximum military danger, in a state of some desperation. Parties of cavalry had to be sent back to gather up stragglers. Then, in Vacone, which really is a stinker of a climb, the town’s one stream was dry and the fountain reduced to a trickle.

  We too are experiencing some minor desperation. Minor for me, major for Eleonora. The web has failed to turn up any place to stay. At the bottom of the climb to Torri in Sabina a woman standing at the open door of an isolated building turns out to be a doctor doing her surgery hours. No one has turned up. We ask her if she knows of any B & Bs. Like the barman in Cantalupo, she starts to make phone calls. Evidently it’s a pleasure to show a stranger that you have acquaintances who can help. But her friends just give her other numbers to call, to show that they too have their connections. We’re wasting time.

  We walk swiftly now through a golden-green landscape still shiny with yesterday’s rain, and I remind Eleonora that we do have a tiny, superlight tent with us. ‘It’ll be exciting!’ But she has read that this is an area where wolves are thriving again. ‘Why is Cantalupo called Cantalupo?’ Sing wolf. Not to mention wild boars. She won’t even consider sleeping out.

  This seems mad to me. Dogs may be dangerous, but a quick search on Google will tell you no man has been killed by a wolf in Italy since forty-nine years before the garibaldini started their march. The year 1800. Nor do wild boars look for trouble with people in tents. Hoffstetter, Ruggeri, Belluzzi, Trevelyan never mention these animals. But Eleonora is adamant. She’s not sleeping outdoors.

  To keep us off the main road as we approach Vacone, our app suggests we turn left into the valley whence the French might attack, then right up a narrow lane which eventually becomes a stony track climbing steep as a staircase to a dilapidated jumble of brick and terracotta perched on the top of a darkly wooded hill.

  Just before turning into this track, we pass a poster advertising Villa dei Fiori, a holiday farm. I call the number, but no one answers.

  As we climb, last energy ebbing, a low stone structure built into the hillside appears to our left. An arch and a shadowy grotto with water trickling steadily into a deep stone basin, green with moss and slime. A plaque tells us that this same spring was the subject of a poem written by Horace over 2000 years ago. The verses are inscribed on the wall, in Latin. It’s the kind of curiosity that Eleonora insists we stop and decipher, even at an anxious moment like this. Fortunately, Horace is right on theme. The Latin is a struggle, but here’s a rather twee translation from the nineteenth-century American poet, Eugene Field.

  FOUNTAIN of Bandusia!

  Whence crystal waters flow.

  With garlands gay and wine I’ll pay

  The sacrifice I owe;

  A sportive kid with budding horns

  I have, whose crimson blood

  Anon shall dye and sanctify

  Thy cool and babbling flood.

  O fountain of Bandusia!

  The Dog-star’s hateful spell

  No evil brings into the springs

  That from thy bosom well;

  Here oxen, wearied by the plow,

  The roving cattle here

  Hasten in quest of certain rest,

  And quaff thy gracious cheer.

  O fountain of Bandusia!

  Ennobled shalt thou be,

  For I shall sing the joys that spring

  Beneath yon ilex-tree.

  Yes, fountain of Bandusia,

  Posterity shall know

  The cooling brooks that from thy nooks,

  Singing and dancing go.

  If there were cooling brooks when Horace wrote his poem, there certainly weren’t any when Garibaldi’s men passed. Perhaps in 1849 the summer Dog Star had indeed cast a hateful spell. It’s curious too, in this poem, how blood and water flow together; the goat must be killed to thank the gods for the gift of water. As if life had to be paid for with other life. But these are weighty matters and we too must ‘hasten in quest of a rest’ that for the moment is far from certain.

  The sun is dipping below the horizon as we step onto the cracked cobbles of Vacone. It’s the least promising of the towns we have seen. We follow a twisting alley through dingy housing and eventually reach an open terrace that looks back over the countryside, pink with a goat’s-blood sunset. Miraculously, there are people here. Three to be precise. Two women, one old, one young, mother and daughter perhaps, sitting on a low wall with their backs to the panorama, and a man in his sixties astride an ancient scooter. Opposite the women is a poky little grocery and above that a tower with a coat of arms under a big clock, which surprises us by showing the right time. Late.

  ‘Buona sera. Is there a café?’

  ‘Buona sera. No.’

  ‘Really, no café?’

  ‘There is a bar, but it opens later in the evening. For the men to play cards.’

  Eleonora explains our predicament – on foot with nowhere to stay – and the Garibaldi project that got us in this mess. The three locals are entirely uninterested in Garibaldi but very eager to show off their knowledge of possible accommodation in the area. The problem is, the older woman explains, that all the B & Bs and holiday farms down in the plain have been occupied by a group of Americans. ‘Archaeologists,’ says the man, his face red with the sinking sun. ‘They come here for the summer and take all the places available.’ ‘They are digging,’ says the younger woman. ‘In a Roman villa.’

  ‘Horace’s villa?’ asks Eleonora.

  They don’t seem familiar with the name.

  All three launch into the rigmarole of phone calls to friends and relatives whose friends and relatives may know other relatives and friends who have a B & B. Or whose mothers or aunties have B & Bs. As they talk, a little girl dashes onto the terrace from some hidden aperture in the general stoniness and rushes to be hugged by the older woman. ‘Zia!’ she shouts. ‘Gioia mia!’ the woman cries. The girl runs off again.

  The sun is almost gone. The calls go on. And now a little boy comes running down the steps beside the clock tower and goes straight to grab the older woman’s knee.

  ‘Zia!’

  ‘Gioia!’

  The older man, straddling his scooter, shakes his head from his phone call to the younger woman who shakes her head from hers. Despairing, Eleonora leaves me to it and goes into the grocery for some food. The younger woman follows since it turns out she is the shopkeeper. A rather older boy strides onto the terrace and shouts, ‘Zia!’ ‘Gioia!’ she replies.

  ‘Complimenti,’ I tell her. As if to say, what a lot of nephews and nieces.

  ‘All the children call me Zia,’ she explains.

  ‘And you call all of t
hem Gioia.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Another phone call comes to nothing. ‘There was an advertisement,’ – I decide to get involved – ‘ for a holiday farm, Villa dei Fiori. We saw it down on the road. I called the number but the phone was off. Perhaps I should call them again. Do you think?’

  They are unimpressed. Obviously they know the place, but would never have thought of sending us there.

  I make the call anyway. A woman’s voice answers at once.

  ‘Pronto?’

  ‘Pronto. Do you have a room for the night? For two?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where are you exactly?’

  ‘Via dei Casali.’

  The road we came up.

  ‘How long will it take us to walk from Vacone?’

  ‘Twenty minutes.’

  Easy as that. Our helpers look a little peeved. When I question them, they won’t tell me anything about Villa dei Fiori. They don’t want to talk about it.

  Emerging from the dark cave of the shop with bread, ricotta and tomatoes, Eleonora is delighted we’ve found a place. ‘We should celebrate,’ she says, ‘except the only beer they have is warm. So I didn’t bother.’

  I go straight back to the shop and tell the young woman we’ll take a beer anyway.

  ‘Oh you don’t want it warm,’ she says.

  ‘Perhaps there’s one in the fridge, then.’

  She hesitates, then bends to open something under the counter. She gets on her knees and moves things around in the dark down there. When her head reappears, it’s shaking.

  ‘Sorry, we only have a big one.’

  How do these people make a living?

  I take the big icy bottle back up to the terrace and we finish it off in ten minutes. Meantime our welcoming party regroups to watch us eat. They seem fascinated by the clumsy way I use my penknife to slice tomatoes and peaches.

  Between mouthfuls, I ask, ‘So what do people do in Vacone of an evening?’

  The younger woman answers promptly: ‘We sit on the terrace and talk.’

  ‘When we have time,’ the older woman adds.

  ‘Looking for Villa dei Fiori?’

  A tall slim man with red face and very white teeth looks up from the engine of one of those three-wheeled vans Italian artisans use for moving scrap iron and the like.

  ‘Place of last resort!’ he says cheerfully. ‘Had a cyclist last week; he’d given up all hope.’

  There are big dogs at the door, but we’re able to circle round them and enter the scrubbed gloom of a ground-floor flat, furnished, it seems, with the relics of long-dead relatives. The black-enamelled sideboard is right in line with the day’s funereal theme.

  The landlady appears, in her early forties, holding a small can of beer. ‘I thought you might be thirsty.’ We have no cash and she has no credit-card facility, but surprisingly we manage to organize an electronic funds transfer, me rushing out and running the gauntlet of the dogs to get a signal on my phone in the wide open marvel of the starry night.

  Despite our evident tiredness, the landlady sits at the kitchen table to talk while we sip the beer. Yes, she’s from Vacone, she says, but her husband isn’t. He doesn’t really fit in.

  ‘Where is he from?’

  She mentions a village and explains, ‘Ten kilometres over the hill.’

  They work in a factory and keep hens and chickens and sheep and goats. And the B & B, of course. When people stop. Her son works in the factory too and has a passion for mountain biking. She worries that it’s dangerous.

  ‘Perhaps he likes to be free,’ I suggest.

  ‘Yes.’ Her eyes light up. ‘He says he feels free on his bike.’

  Eleonora explains the purpose of our trip and wonders what Vacone was like in 1849.

  ‘I don’t know about the past.’ The woman shakes her head sadly. ‘I didn’t have grandparents.’

  She says it with quiet dignity, resignation and a certain air of mystery, as if with this admission she’d given a clue to understanding her existence, her alienation from the community up on the terrace under the clock tower.

  She stands to leave. ‘By the way, did you see any wolves? They say there are quite a few these days.’

  As soon as the door is shut, Eleonora is triumphant.

  ‘There are wolves!’

  I have to think fast. ‘Good job I found a place.’

  But now we’re sorted for the night, what of the garibaldini? Have they slaked their thirst? In bed we read about tomorrow’s route.

  Disappointed in Vacone, Garibaldi rode ahead with Hoffstetter to Configni, a name that means border, the border between Lazio and Umbria. The locals had told them it was only three miles when in fact it was five. ‘Configni is just one hostelry,’ Hoffstetter observes, ‘but there was a spring with plenty of water and hay in abundance.’ A couple of hours later the main column arrived and ‘all crowded round the natural drink. The horses were the most frantic, thrusting their front hooves into the trough. My black horse was the worst, pushing its head up to its eyes in the water. I’d always thought that drinking so immoderately was dangerous. But it didn’t have any unhappy consequences in this climate. We didn’t lose a single horse the whole march.’

  Hoffstetter, you often feel, was more concerned about the horses than the men. Nothing is said of the mules.

  Lights out, Eleonora reflects that our landlady was telling us she was a trovatella, an abandoned child adopted by others. That’s why she ‘didn’t have grandparents’. She was cut off from the past. And the community. She hadn’t run about as a little girl shouting Zia and being called Gioia.

  What amazes me is that Eleonora could have come to this conclusion. Nothing in my experience would have got me there.

  DAY 6

  7 July 1849 – 30 July 2019

  Vacone, Configni, Stroncone, Terni – 21 miles

  Configni

  How easy to fall out when you’re hot and weary. Perhaps bicker over trivial issues of power and control. Garibaldi had made Hoffstetter his chief of staff, but the ambitious Colonel Marocchetti, who was fourteen years his senior and had fought with Garibaldi in Montevideo, was upset and refused to take orders from the German.

  What to do about a petty conflict like this in the context of a desperate march by a weary volunteer army shedding deserters by the hour, and much in need of enthusiasm and solidarity?

  Garibaldi explained to Hoffstetter that he would make Marocchetti officially chief of staff while in reality everything would continue as before. After which, Hoffstetter tells us, Marocchetti was charm itself, and whenever anything went wrong Garibaldi would laugh with the German and shake his head saying, ‘What’s this about, is it Marocchetti’s fault?’ And Hoffstetter would reply, ‘Yes, General, all the chief of staff’s mistake.’

  Differences were not so easily settled with Colonel Ignazio Bueno, a Brazilian and another old comrade who had travelled to Italy with Garibaldi in 1848. Bueno was as close to the General as anyone ever was. In February he had carried him on his back into the constituent assembly in Rome when Garibaldi was immobilized by rheumatism. But the big Brazilian was also undisciplined, unpredictable and perfectly capable of disobeying orders. A bear, Hoffstetter calls him. The two avoided each other.

  In reality, the whole column was alive with possible conflict. The men hated it when an old battalion was obliged to integrate with the fragments of another, or others. They liked their old friends and the security of knowing who was who. They were frustrated over the lack of combat and the uncertainty of the expedition’s aims. These were ‘long, ruinous marches’, Ruggeri remembers, and by the time they arrived in Terni the men were ‘shattered and bruised by discomforts and privations’. It was around Vacone, Belluzzi warns us, that the terrain was too much for many of the men’s boots, which began to fall apart.

  My feet are in trouble too. Our trekking shoes are too light for the rockier paths. Perhaps this feeds into a certain tension that is developing between us over who cho
oses the route. Eleonora has the paid-up version of the navigation app on her phone. This gives her a certain control. The app produces and records a red line, which is the actual way we’re walking, and she has to make sure that line coincides with the blue line, which is the route we’ve chosen to take.

  This sets her up for making mistakes. You can’t hold a phone in your hand all the time. The paths are twisty and full of turns. The app doesn’t distinguish between a broad track and what may seem no more than a rut in the ground. We miss turns. We have to go back and forth. So I demand to see the screen, and she feels I’m accusing her of being stupid. I start to rely on Google Satellite as a confirmation of what she’s telling me. I suggest we take Google routes which are more direct. The navigation app is capable of adding a mile of thorny thicket and slimy riverbed to avoid a couple of hundred yards of moderately trafficked road. A situation develops where we each champion the different apps we’re using, as if promoting rival products. Then we notice this and burst out laughing. But when the sun is at its fiercest and we have to turn back a second or third time, a few sharp words are inevitable. We’re under pressure.

  Yet the day couldn’t have started better. Dawn was still to break when we passed some remnants of white stone walls criss-crossing a rough pasture. It was Horace’s villa. Shortly afterwards we glimpsed an approaching figure carrying a red lantern in the half-dark. How romantic! Except, as he grew nearer, it turned out to be a transparent red water bottle that somehow gathered and reflected what little light there was. A young man heading for shift work in a factory, we supposed. But a hundred yards on, here was another, in jeans and T-shirt with backpack and water bottle. Buon giorno, we said, but he was wearing headphones. And now another. And another. All men, all young, at intervals of fifty yards or so, in this narrow lane with thick hedges either side, as the day was dawning. Buon giorno, we said to the fourth or fifth, and this time the young man removed his headphones and said Buon giorno with a strong American accent.