The Hero's Way

by Tim Parks

  So dawn sees us walking north and slightly west out of Terni beside a single-track railway line, heading first for Acquasparta, then tomorrow Todi. As ever the Spanish are beyond the hills to our right, the French beyond those to the left, while the Austrians are now in Foligno to the north and east of Todi. And all these foreign armies are feeling bullish because the war is going their way; all are enjoying regular meals, decent beds and laundry services. Garibaldi has to move fast if he’s to squeeze between them. Meanwhile, we’re trying to get used to using our trekking poles in the proper fashion. Before sleeping in Terni we watched three YouTube videos in which expert walkers tell you how it should be done.

  Of course I’d got it wrong. I’d been setting my poles down every other step. Instead you have to do it every step. This means moving your arms pretty briskly. We experience a clumsy half-hour in the grey early light, tripping on our poles and feeling stupid, but by the time the sun is up, we have it. Back forth, back forth. You feel the difference at once. The need to move the arms with every step locks you in a rhythm. The support of the poles straightens the back. The weight of the pack eases. All of a sudden, we’re not walking, we’re marching. And we’ve fallen into step, our poles are striking the ground in synch. From now on, even when one is behind and the other ahead, we will know from the sound of our poles that we’re moving together. It brings a special intimacy, something soldiers must know all too well.

  Leaving Terni in the evening, the garibaldini marched just two miles to Cesi, a small borgo up the hillside to our right, setting up camp beside an adequate spring and stopping for a few hours’ sleep. But water wasn’t all they drank. ‘At eleven o’clock,’ says Hoffstetter, ‘we were surprised by a deputation of citizens bringing us a huge barrel of the best wine I’ve ever tasted.’ Drinking, he was able to smile at the dismay of Forbes’s men – 900 of them – when they discovered there would be nothing to eat until the next morning. And they couldn’t believe it when they saw that the great Garibaldi would be sleeping with them on his saddle blanket under the stars. ‘They’ll get used to it,’ the General laughed.

  He was wrong. Forbes’s men deserted in even greater numbers than those who’d survived the siege in Rome. The cavalry in particular, Ruggeri remarks, were sorely tempted by the money they could make selling their horses. But desertion wasn’t always a wise choice. Many were picked up by the French and would spend long years in prison.

  A steep track of chalky rubble draws us upwards through scrub of pines and brambles to a cluster of houses on a ridge. It’s a first opportunity to take the rubber tips off our poles and thrust the sharp points into the stones. This brings new knowledge of the ground – hard, soft or crusty – a direct transmission of landscape to nervous system.

  A half-hour later we are just wondering why the delightful Cesi has not been awarded borgo più bello status when we realize there is no café. There are shady alleys with little tunnels and fancy brick paving, plaques to long-dead benefactors and a street with the charming name of Santa Maria della Bottega – Saint Mary of the Shop. But no café. So soldier on.

  Still heading north, we descend the hill slantwise to San Gemini Fonte, source of one of Italy’s most famous mineral waters. Tall railings surround a pretty park beside industrial buildings of Fascist inspiration. All closed. But round the corner on the fast main road by the petrol station, Le Ragazze del Coyote Ugly is doing brisk business. Above the entrance, they have a glossy still from McNally’s film: nightclub girls in red corsets. KITSCH CAFFÈ another sign announces. Inside, behind the bar, stands what Italians call a stangona, a tall, solid, flagrantly sexy woman. Her hair is ash blonde, her lips are mauve and she has a bunch of men buzzing round her. When I ask for orange juice, she enquires in a deep voice if I have ever tried it mixed with lemon. It will give me more zing, she promises.

  Carsulae

  From contemporary New York to ancient Rome is but another mile of scorching trail. Garibaldi, Hoffstetter and three or four others were galloping together across these low hills on a reconnaissance mission when they ran into an ancient stone arch rising from the parched grass. They had set off from Cesi before dawn, travelled twenty miles north and east, then circled west before returning. Worried about an enemy attack, they were pleased to find the hills thick with bushes and frequently broken with stony landslides. No place for a regular army. But the landscape ‘didn’t only please the military eye’, Hoffstetter remembers.

  Gilded by the rays of the rising sun, amid the lively green of the vineyards, rose Cesi, Terni, Narni and San Gemini, while from distant mountain vapours ever more castles emerged around the wide horizon. On the spot where we were riding an old Sabine city had once stood. Scattered here and there, in this lonely, secluded place, lay broken fragments of great millstones, wells and columns. A stately arch rose alone in the midst of the ruins. The General passed under this arch on his horse. Did this cloaked man, I wondered then, lack anything but a helmet to be a Roman consul? Garibaldi was solemn and taciturn. No one dared say a word. Everyone was dreaming. And in truth our lives, our doings, were as extraordinary and poetic as lives can be. Fatigue, hunger, thirst, privations and dangers of every kind – and then the most sublime joys of the spirit.

  I wanted to pass under that arch myself, if it was still there. I wasn’t expecting sublime joy, but maybe we could savour, in distant echo, that curious apprehension of anointment that Garibaldi evidently felt at moments like this. Throughout his life people had assured him he was destined for great things. He believed them. Sitting astride his horse under the Roman arch, he was inviting his men to dream.

  The scatter of white stones that are the ruins of the Roman town of Carsulae lie like old bones to the left of our track. Surrounded by iron railings. On the right is a modern reception centre. Inside, behind an impressive stone lion, the three or four staff have nothing to do. There are no visitors. We pay our five euros and are told that before visiting the site we would do well to watch the introductory video. Since this is being shown in a cool dark room, we do so.

  It’s impressive. First there are all the usual computer reconstructions of amphitheatre and baths, forum, necropolis and arrow-straight Roman road, then comes the dramatic enactment of a major battle fought right here between opposing Roman consuls. So we have the pleasure of seeing men in red cloaks and silvery helmets galloping into battle. And I was struck by the thought that for thousands of years the warrior on his horse remained the fastest and most flexible agent of death, so that there was a substantial continuity from the classical era right down to our Garibaldi moment in 1849; then an abyss between those times and our own. In eight days’ walking, we have yet to see a man on a horse.

  To enter the ruins you slip your ticket into an electronic reader and go through a turnstile. Today it’s broken and we just push through. Perhaps it’s always broken. Beyond, we’re in a wide expanse of parched, wispy grass and old stone blocks. There’s no relief from the sun. When we reach a stone arch it is suspiciously high above the ground, perched on top of a low wall, so that you can’t imagine riding a horse under it. Nevertheless we climb up and take photos of each other, trying to feel some connection with the past.

  Further down the hill, three people on their knees under floppy hats must be archaeologists on a dig. We start to walk towards them and are quickly warned not to pass a red plastic ribbon stretched on the ground. A woman in shorts and bra gesticulates. Eleonora tells them we’re looking for the arch that Garibaldi passed under in 1849. ‘Was it that one?’ A man shakes his head; even at this distance I can see the look of pity on his face. Isn’t it obvious, he asks, that that section was recently rebuilt? The one intact, authentic Roman arch is at the northern end of the settlement. Over there.

  So we walk back whence we came, then a few hundred yards along a bigger path made of shiny old boulders half covered with grass. And finally, there it is. A grey arch, ten feet wide by twenty-five high, made of neatly squared blocks with no cement. We stand under it,
knowing this time that the hero really did stop his horse here, while his companions watched and wondered. Beyond the arch, around the sunken tombs of the necropolis, are a dozen hardy oak trees that very likely witnessed the scene. As unimpressed then as they are today.

  We sit on a bench in the shade with the fierce heat and old stones all around. All the people who lived and loved and fought in Carsulae are utterly gone. For some reason this makes us feel extremely affectionate towards each other. We hug and I recite a few lines remembered from my English O level.

  The champaign with its endless fleece

  Of feathery grasses everywhere!

  Silence and passion, joy and peace,

  An everlasting wash of air—

  Rome’s ghost since her decease.

  Robert Browning, I tell Eleonora. ‘Two in the Campagna’. She remembers the opening to The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, where the narrator visits some Etruscan tombs with friends and family, and one person observes that the Etruscans have been dead so long it’s as if they never lived. But a little girl replies, ‘Now you say that, you make me think the Etruscans did really live their lives, and I wish them well, like everyone else.’

  Wishing the Romans well, we return to the reception centre, where the man behind the ticket desk tells us of a woman in Cesi whose great-great-grandmother kept a diary in which she recorded cooking a crostata for Garibaldi, which he very much appreciated.

  The garibaldini spread out right across the valley below Carsulae, claims Belluzzi, who carried out interviews in all the villages. They were seen in Cesi, San Gemini and Casteltodino. Garibaldi kept them here a full day while he waited for the bread that still hadn’t arrived from Terni. Also Ugo Bassi had run up a fever and had to be carried into Cesi in search of a bed. And there were problems with the mules.

  ‘The mules,’ Hoffstetter tells us ‘were carrying 20 cartridges for every soldier, that is 74,000 cartridges in 74 cases, meaning 2 cartridge boxes each for 37 of the 90 mules we now had. About 130 pounds weight.’ But ‘the cases were hung on ropes over the sort of wooden harnesses they use in these parts. So at every stop the cases had to be taken off the harnesses, then the harnesses off the animals, to give them some relief, and it took far too long to put them all back on again.’

  What the men were trying to do now was to make harnesses that could be removed and replaced at speed, in a single unit.

  ‘Unfortunately, we couldn’t load the animals any further,’ Hoffstetter complains, ‘because they were already worn out with the extreme heat and most had sores as a result of the wooden harnessing. The stench of the exposed sores was so strong that everyone kept away from them.’

  On occasion some loads had to be shifted to the spare cavalry horses, which threatened to compromise their military usefulness.

  ‘It’s not easy to handle mules,’ Hoffstetter continues. ‘They get restless. They kick and bite. So every mule needed two soldiers, one to lead it, one to keep a check on the ammunition cases. And it had to be the same two men, always, for each mule, since if you changed them, the animals got even grouchier. So the men leading the mules were put on double pay.’

  Of money and soldiers’ pay, more anon. Suffice it to say that twenty-two years later Garibaldi would found, in Turin, the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals, which in 1938 was transformed into the present-day National Authority for the Protection of Animals. Perhaps the stench of those mule sores was not in vain.

  I noticed the beginnings of a sore myself that day, walking the last four miles to Acquasparta. In the groin. And foolishly ignored it. We were set on reaching a trattoria for lunch, and wondering what the feverish Ugo Bassi must have thought when Garibaldi went to visit him in a private home in Cesi and told him there was no question of them waiting for him. He would just have to catch up if he could, when he was well.

  Acquasparta

  ‘You don’t need air conditioning,’ a small old man tried to persuade us. ‘It’s really very cool in here.’

  We looked into a small stuffy room whose shutters were drawn against the afternoon sun. Our man was wearing a flat cap of white cotton, as might an aristocrat on his yacht.

  ‘There’s a fan.’ He pointed to two big blades revolving overhead.

  ‘We’ll take the room with the air conditioning,’ Eleonora said.

  This is the first hotel we’ve stayed in on the trip. Bar Albergo Martini. It’s been recently refurbished. The corridor carpets are bright green. The rooms have wrought-iron bedsteads, modern versions of old designs. Below them is the bar, dark and wooden, and outside a half-dozen tables with old men playing cards under an awning and arguing as old men always do when they play cards in Italian bars.

  We wash our clothes and hang them to dry, slipping the hooks of coat hangers into the slats of the open shutters, and strike out to explore another of i borghi più belli d’Italia.

  Acquasparta is a worthy winner. The heraldry of the contrade, the town’s old districts, is gracefully played up. The central piazza has their coats of arms displayed on coloured shields between medieval arches. More shields, marble this time, have been set in the elegant paving as you pass from one district to another. ‘Contrada Porta Vecchia’, says one. ‘Contrada San Cristoforo’ another. And the spirit of the contrada is not just a thing of the past. That it’s still alive you can see, ironically enough, on the death notices, the small black and white posters Italians display when people die. ‘Contrada del Ghetto,’ one proclaims. ‘All contradaioli – members of the community – are close to Raffaela, Claudio and Teresa for the loss of their beloved Ada.’

  Other less attractive aspects of the past are also alive in Acquasparta. ‘Here we sell Africano,’ says a notice on the door of a gelateria showing a grotesquely caricatured head of an African woman with rings round her neck and huge lips. Africano is a coffee. Grabbing an espresso in the main piazza, we find we’re drinking Tiziancaffè, a brand produced in San Gemini. The name is advertised in bright red letters across our napkins together with an illustration of a steaming cup of coffee; above, a big-breasted black woman carries a broad shallow basket on her head. Coffee beans spill directly from her basket through the red lettering into the cup of coffee beneath. From Africa to the Contrada San Cristoforo; the exotic possessed in safety at home.

  The sense of belonging is so important in Italy. On the main thoroughfare a brand new plaque has been raised to Federico Cesi, ‘Roman prince and Duke of Acquasparta’, who in 1603 at the grand age of eighteen formed, in Rome, the Accademia dei Lincei (Academy of the Lynxes), Italy’s most famous scientific academy. Freedom to question orthodoxy was Cesi’s manifesto. The young duke was a botanist who pioneered the use of the microscope to examine plants. Galileo Galilei became his club’s most prominent member and was supported by the academy throughout his trial for heresy. But our plaque is not interested in the long history of papal opposition to scientific progress. ‘Galileo came here to Acquasparta,’ it proudly proclaims, ‘in 1624,’ and although most of Federico Cesi’s work was done in Rome, i suoi resti mortali riposano tra noi – ‘his mortal remains lie here with us’.

  This is what matters. Where they put your bones. As Garibaldi’s bones would one day be buried, against his will in hallowed ground after a Christian funeral. After death you must accept where you belong, or where society wants you to belong. Independence is over. The plaque to Federico Cesi was placed as recently as 24 March 2019 and is clearly part of the town’s bid to make itself interesting to the cultured tourist. ‘We used to get more people,’ the old hotelier with the white cap tells us when we return to the Bar Albergo Martini. ‘From abroad as well. Swiss particularly. They came in coaches and went walking round here, like you are. But a few years ago, just when we renovated the hotel, they stopped.’

  Upstairs, checking if our clothes are dry, we discover Eleonora’s sports bra has fallen from its hanger onto the awning above the grizzled card players outside. It’s flaming pink, fearfully garish. How embarrassing is th
is? The bra is four feet below the window ledge and the men four feet below that, guffawing and bragging and drinking glass after glass of red wine as they deal their grubby cards through the endless summer evening.

  ‘Go downstairs,’ I tell Eleonora, ‘walk out of the bar, then turn and look up.’

  As soon as she’s out of the door, I extend a trekking pole and lean out of the window. I slip the tip of the pole under a bra cup, and as she appears I flick it out, hard. She reaches up and catches it.

  ‘The old guys didn’t even look up,’ she laughs.

  DAY 9

  11–12 July 1849 – 2 August 2019

  Acquasparta, Colvalenza, Todi – 13 miles

  Colvalenza

  There are towns you don’t see until you’re almost upon them, so that you wonder if you will ever arrive – Terni, for example – and others you see from afar, imagine you will be there very soon, and instead they hover in the distance, slightly nearer, slightly nearer, but still surprisingly far away, and now there’s a valley you hadn’t seen that must be crossed, a gorge even, so that the sight of those towers and battlements, always looming, always beyond reach, becomes a mockery. Todi is this kind of town, a big medieval settlement, high up, not on a ridge but on the very top of a conical hill so steep it was impossible, in 1849, to get wheeled carriages up the streets.

  But whichever kind of town it is, the kind that hides or the kind that teases, it will be a different place if you arrive on foot at the end of a long and dusty walk. Different, I mean, from the town you would have found had you arrived by car, or bus or train. Your body is differently attuned. Your thoughts, your needs. Todi, when finally we passed under the arches of its outer walls, was at once a refuge, a source of shade, a visual delight. In particular I needed a pharmacy.