The Hero's Way

by Tim Parks

  We watched a Frecciarossa high-speed train streaking up the valley. Florence-bound. If Ficulle was fifteen miles away and the Freccia travels at 150 mph, it would be leaving the little borgo on its right in six minutes’ time. A walk that would take us six hours.

  DAY 12

  15 July 1849 – 5 August 2019

  Orvieto, Ficulle – 15 miles

  Ficulle

  ‘I was born,’ Garibaldi wrote in 1837, ‘to bust the balls of half humanity.’

  Papal balls, French balls, Bourbon balls, above all Austrian balls.

  Austria, or rather the Austrian Empire – guardian of the status quo, pillar of privileged propriety – was in 1849 what Germany would become after 1870, what the Holy Roman Empire had once been, the ultimate power in Europe. Its territories comprised present-day Austria and Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Croatia and parts of present Poland, Romania, Ukraine, Moldova, Serbia, Montenegro and of course Italy.

  Garibaldi’s first clashes with the empire came in 1848. Milan had rebelled against Austrian domination in August, then, when help from Piedmont was withdrawn, found itself fighting a war it couldn’t win. Freshly back from South America, Garibaldi was placed in charge of a thousand volunteers and won two battles near Varese, north-west of the city, before being obliged to withdraw and escape to Switzerland in the face of greatly superior forces. The man commanding the Austrians was Baron Konstantin D’Aspre, who in a letter to his superior Field Marshal Radetzky expressed surprise at the ‘outlaw’s . . . initiative and energy’. In July 1849, as Garibaldi left Orvieto, heading north, the same man, Konstantin D’Aspre, was the effective ruler of Tuscany, based in Florence. With 30,000 men at his disposal. It was his balls Garibaldi now meant to bust.

  D’Aspre was a hardened campaigner. Born in 1789, he had fought in the Napoleonic Wars; in 1815 it was his daring attack that had finished off Joachim Murat’s army north of Naples, guaranteeing the return of southern Italy to the Bourbon kings. In 1832 he was involved in the repression of patriotic revolutions in Parma, Modena and Bologna. In 1840 he had put an end to a student uprising in Padua with gunfire and wholesale bloodshed. In 1848, retaking Vicenza from Italian patriots, he had the town sacked as a reprisal. In 1849, retaking Livorno, he again had the town sacked with the loss of 800 lives. Any Italian involved in the conflict was shot without trial. There were 317 executions. Surrender, for the garibaldini, was not an option.

  In the early 2000s an Austrian historian and Italophile, Franz Pesendorfer, pieced together all the communications between Austrian generals in Italy during Garibaldi’s march. Published in 2007, this is material that Hoffstetter, Belluzzi and Trevelyan would dearly have loved to get their hands on. Day by day, we have D’Aspre in Florence, communicating with Radetzky in Monza (north of Milan), General Gorzkowsky in Bologna, Major General Hahne in Rimini, General Strassoldo in Ancona, Archduke Ernst in Urbino, Colonel Paumgartten in Perugia, and Colonel Stadion, who has been sent south from Florence through Siena to find the rebels. Occasionally, ministers in Vienna and even Emperor Franz Joseph himself are brought into the conversation. A lot of horses are galloping back and forth.

  In contrast to the officialese of the exchanges and the endless repetition of long honorary titles, the garibaldini are referred to brutally as scum, riff-raff, thieves. To be exterminated. When they begin to pop up simultaneously in many different locations, the Austrian generals deduce that the rabble has split up. Only later do they appreciate that their actions are coordinated. The reports they receive during the first week of Garibaldi’s march give the group’s size as anywhere between 3000 and 18,000. ‘Our spies are hopeless,’ Paumgartten laments.

  At this time, however, the Austrians were more concerned with preventing further rebellions in the cities they had recently reoccupied than in launching an all-out attack on Garibaldi. They discuss blocking actions to prevent the rebels escaping to the sea, east or west. Troops and munitions are moved around. They complain that with the garibaldini active on so many roads, many messages are not getting through. In particular it has become almost impossible to communicate with the French. D’Aspre begins to wonder if the French haven’t deliberately let Garibaldi escape so as to bother the Austrians. He orders all civilians in Tuscany to hand over any weapons in their possession. He threatens house-to-house searches and severe punishments. And he writes to Field Marshal Radetzky, vowing that he will wipe out this mutinous rebel as soon as possible. In his memoirs French General Marcellin Marbot described D’Aspre as ‘smart, but temperamental’.

  The most striking thing about the correspondence, though, is the language it is written in. Since Pesendorfer’s book is published as a parallel text, with German to the left and Italian to the right, the reader is constantly made aware that in 1849 most of northern and central Italy was governed by people who did not speak Italian. And who had a low opinion of the Italians. The highest praise the Austrian generals afford to any Italian individual or community is that they are ‘passive’. Needless to say, the local Italian regimes, including the despotic dukes and grand dukes whom the Austrians were propping up, were treated with carrot-and-stick tactics. They could keep their positions and privileges so long as they toed the imperial line. A great deal of wealth was transferred to Austria. Never once in all this correspondence is there the remotest hint that the men they were chasing might be driven by love of their country, or that the intimacy between a people and their land might justify a struggle for independence. ‘Unhappy Italy,’ D’Aspre writes, ‘when will it be free of these villainous troublemakers?’

  How can a person be unhappy, Garibaldi told Hoffstetter at one point in their march, when you live in a country as beautiful as Italy? The answer was, if you are homesick for somewhere else. Climbing steep slopes away from Orvieto, Hoffstetter reports being cheered and refreshed by a thick hedge of oaks, either side of a narrow path. ‘Suddenly I was transported to my home country,’ he remembers ‘and there welled up within me a yearning such as I have not felt for a long time, so that I rode along slowly and mechanically far behind the others.’

  We managed to be unhappy in a different way leaving Orvieto. Convinced that at 6 a.m. in August there would not be much traffic, we decided to do the first four miles of our walk in the valley, along the main road, then strike up towards Ficulle on the Via Cassia Antica, an old Roman road, now a path, that once linked Rome and Florence.

  We were wrong. By seven we were walking beside a steady stream of vans and trucks. It was too late to change route since there was nowhere now to cross the triple barriers of railway, motorway and river running in parallel a few hundred yards to our right. I become extremely anxious in these situations. There was no space for pedestrians, and since the road was constantly bending I insisted we keep crossing, so as always to be on the outside of the bend, as visible as possible. I also insisted that when we were facing oncoming traffic I should walk ahead, and when we had the traffic hurtling towards our backs I should walk behind. That way I was always the one, so to speak, in the firing line. This behaviour bemused Eleonora, who just could not feel the danger.

  Back and forth then, in the growing heat, for two and a half hours, scuttling across the road, changing positions as we did so, me behind, me ahead. Was this chivalry? I see the coming accident so clearly: an overtaking vehicle will suddenly be forced wide as the truck it is passing swerves to avoid a cyclist, and it comes ploughing right into me. It’s a disturbing thought, but infinitely preferable to the vision of that same vehicle ploughing into Eleonora. Why? Is it that the mental pain in that event – her killed or maimed – would be worse than the physical pain if the car ploughs into me? I’m not sure. Perhaps I want to be the one most at risk, because I stupidly imagine I’m the one taking most care. I wonder, in battle, how many soldiers reasoned like this. Certainly there was always someone ready to throw his body in front of Garibaldi at the crucial moment. The idea of losing him was too painful.

  To get some relief w
e added a half-mile to the walk by taking a diversion through an industrial area. On a support column of the high-speed railway someone had written SEMPRE COL PUGNALE TRA I DENTI – Never without my dagger between my teeth. ‘A forbidden weapon, an Italian weapon,’ Garibaldi wrote, ‘that the foreigner condemns, as though the bayonet and scimitar he has bathed in innocent blood were any nobler than a dagger plunged into the breast of a tyrant.’

  A few yards further on, a Roman viaduct actually passes under the higher viaducts carrying the railway and autostrada. That is, a half-dozen elegant stone arches, sprouting weeds from every crevice, are dwarfed by the great concrete structures of these contemporary thoroughfares. It’s extraordinary how little the pattern of human endeavour has changed.

  At last we reached the locality of Monterubiaglio, where we were to leave the main road. Just before the junction there was a filling station with a little café. We sat outside, calming our nerves, watching a young black man washing people’s cars in the stifling heat. Every person of colour we have seen since Rome has been engaged in menial activities, picking fruit, pushing decrepit folk in their wheelchairs, scrubbing floors. The Roman viaduct was no doubt built by slaves.

  Getting up from our coffees, we find our glasses and hats. Leaving at dawn, we walk hatless, without our sunglasses. And I love this. I feel freer without a hat, happier seeing the world in plain light. But by nine the glare and the heat are too much. And this moment when we pull out the hats always brings with it a feeling of getting serious, knuckling down to the long haul. We have 1500 feet to climb.

  Our app now takes us on one of its most adventurous, vagabond peregrinations through the backyard of an olive oil mill, under the railway, along scrubland by the river, past a group of men who might be Gypsies smoking in the shade of tall bamboo canes. A chorus of barking in the distance grows louder all the time. Louder to the point of deafening. We have to walk through an acre and more of ramshackle dog kennels, assorted wire pens and corrugated-iron roofing. The animals are going wild in the heat, hurling themselves against rickety wooden gates. They are the pets of the provincial middle classes, left behind as their owners head for Majorca or the Seychelles. At last we’re on a narrow walkway over the autostrada – cars racing south to Rome, north to Florence – and beyond that, open country.

  The climb is gentle but steady, the landscape softly rolling, more uniform and homogeneous than on previous days, vineyards laid out like carpets, whitish soil freshly ploughed. The Via Cassia strikes diagonally upwards, following the direction of the valley but rising steadily. It’s an unusually broad track of white stones between low bushes, straight and inexorable as the Romans loved. I won’t pretend you can hear the chariot wheels, but you might occasionally find yourself listening for them. The hillside draws us in, and we settle into a rhythm – one hour, two hours, three. There’s really nothing to look at, nothing to photograph. Just the warm odorous air, the crunch of the stones, the rasping of cicadas. Then, suddenly, a beast crosses our path.

  About twenty yards up ahead, it bursts out of the thick bushes to our right and shoots into the thick bushes to our left. What was it? We stop and listen. Not a sound. Not even cicadas. It seemed too big to be a dog, or fox. Too small to be a deer. Too sleek to be a boar. Who knows what company we’re keeping on the hillside here?

  We push on, alert for another surprise. But nothing; no one passes. Only lizards at our feet, hawks circling above. Since the track is broad, we’re able to walk side by side, which is always a pleasure. Perhaps I should have said that since Eleonora is deaf in her right ear, when we’re side by side I’m always to her left. We don’t have to think of this. It happens, like so much else when one walks: the length of the step, the swing of the trekking poles, the in-breath, the out-breath. We march on. The tug of the slope is steady, the white stones beneath our feet are always dazzlingly the same; all bushes are the same bush and the sky stretched over our heads is rigorously the same milky blue sky from horizon to horizon. Today I feel I could walk for ever.

  Then it’s over. Two hairpins, an olive grove, a stop sign, and we’re turning onto the road into Ficulle. We’re suddenly tired. There are a few modern houses, then the old drystone structures of the little centre. No stucco. No frills or balconies. Rich pinkish-brown colours, as if the soil had been pulled up into walls. A medieval tower. A Bar dei Motociclisti, a plaque with a few lines from Dante’s Inferno that allude to the town. Ficulle’s claim to fame.

  The garibaldini arrived here late. The night was dark. A hedge of hawthorn had to be cut down to open the way into a field where the men could lie down. Great attention was paid to placing lookouts in all directions. The locals offered their help. Anita cooked a rice soup. ‘It was still hot when I arrived,’ Hoffstetter remembers. ‘Yesterday the dew soaked us to the skin, and tonight the same story.’

  ‘All the traditional values have been lost here,’ our B & B host laments. He’s in his forties, his wife beside him. They let us into a tiny terraced house at the top of stone steps brightened with pink geraniums. Yes, it was his parents’ house. They passed away. He wouldn’t want to sell it even if anyone wanted to buy. Which they never would. Who would buy in Ficulle?

  The man is earnest, nostalgic. His name is Luca. No one plays in the street now as he did as a child. There’s no community any more. He lives in Orvieto these days, runs a factory in the industrial estate we walked through. As he speaks, his wife is pulling back curtains, opening cupboards, turning on the gas. She runs upstairs. The ground floor is one chintzy room with kitchenette. Steep stairs lead to a bedroom barely big enough for the bed, then there’s a ladder to a loft and roof terrace. Thick stone and closed shutters have kept the place cool, if not airy.

  Luca is agog at our journey. ‘I’m so envious.’ He can barely take a week’s holiday, he says. ‘Last year an Australian woman stayed here for three months. An artist. Determined to change her life. So courageous. ‘We’d love to do the same. We’d love to help Ficulle recover its old spirit. People work too hard. Then one day you go mad.’

  His wife comes back downstairs, a reassuringly fleshy, practical woman. She listens to her husband with a mix of sympathy and alarm.

  ‘I’m sure our guests would like to take a shower,’ she says.

  In the afternoon, with a little detective work we find the field where the garibaldini slept, now an open space beside a sports centre. Having gone to bed at midnight, Hoffstetter woke, he says, soaked with dew, at 3.30 to the sound of trumpets and drums. In the pitch dark, the camp was on maximum alert, in case the French should attack from Orvieto, or the Austrians come down from the hills. No one could understand quite why neither enemy had made the killer move.

  ‘In a war like this,’ the German reflects, ‘there’s no point in fussing over strategic places like Perugia, or commanding converging roads. You have to find the enemy and attack him where he is.’

  The truth was that the Austrians had been waging a campaign that involved retaking rebel towns, one after another. Undisturbed by any opposition in the country, they marched their big armies and heavy guns to the next town on the list, where the local rebels obligingly waited to suffer their inevitable, glorious defeat. As in Rome. Now for the first time D’Aspre and his fellow generals were facing a determined non-local volunteer group on the move. They weren’t sure how to respond.

  Two oxen were butchered and cooked. The French didn’t show. They were leaving it to the Austrians. Relieved, the garibaldini came into Ficulle to enjoy themselves. Wine was provided. ‘Everything about them,’ Belluzzi heard tell years later, ‘their looks, behaviour, chatter, suggested a collective joy. No one showed signs of suffering or fatigue.’

  Can this be true? According to Ruggeri, morale was low, though there is no talk now of desertions. Perhaps the unhappy ones had already gone, and the remaining 2500 were the better for it. Or perhaps the men were pleased that Ugo Bassi was back. The monk had caught up, quite where or how none of my sources say, but people in Ficu
lle remembered him. They also remembered Garibaldi sitting on a stone bench surrounded by excited children. ‘When you’re ready, little Italians,’ he told them, ‘you can play your part.’ Later, a farmer came and kneeled at his feet, complaining that some soldiers had damaged the property he rented from the Church. Garibaldi was in his tent. He told the man to stand up and reassured him he would be compensated. All the while, ‘the General was unwinding tallow-soaked rags from the many bleeding sores on his feet, without ever complaining or cursing’.

  We read this passage before falling asleep.

  ‘What is tallow exactly?’

  ‘Boiled animal fat,’ Eleonora said.

  ‘If only I’d known.’

  DAY 13

  16 July 1849 – 6 August 2019

  Ficulle, Salci, Palazzone – 13 miles

  Salci

  We talk about all kinds of things in our long hours on the road, but one subject keeps coming back: fear. Banally, fear of traffic, fear of dogs, fear of not finding a bed for the night. More seriously, the fear that keeps everyone in their places in life: fear of not finding another job if I leave this one, fear of not having enough money if I leave my partner, and so on. Fear is the great enemy of freedom. Any self-respecting despot knows this. Konstantin D’Aspre was no exception, promising calamity for anyone who supported the cause of Italian self-determination.

  But how humiliating, Garibaldi always insisted, to live in a climate of fear, governed by despots, and even worse foreign despots. If only everyone would rise up, these tyrants could be chased away. And of course there had been a moment when the people did rise up. In January 1848 the Sicilians had chased out their Bourbon masters. In February the Neapolitans forced their despotic king to give them a constitution. A week later the Tuscans chased out their duke, and in March the citizens of Parma and Modena did the same. Most spectacularly of all, Milan and Venice chased out the Austrians.