by Tim Parks
Once again, the General didn’t hang around. By late afternoon the column, the cannon and the cavalry were all gone. He needed to put the lowland behind him before the Austrians arrived. There was still the Chiana Canal to cross, an artificial waterway running north–south, draining the waters of the marshes down into Lake Trasimeno. It was not a place to be caught.
Meantime, in the centre of town, we checked into a dim room, whose heavy furnishings had no doubt been chosen by someone long defunct. And where Garibaldi had met with birth and new life, when we went round the corner to the trattoria our landlady had recommended, we found the notice, CHIUSO PER LUTTO – Closed for mourning. Between our room and the trattoria was a church. The doors were open a crack. In the dark interior a coffin was surrounded by four or five seated figures.
Never mind. All in all, Foiano proved a more cheerful town than either Montepulciano or Torrita, one of the few Tuscan places that seemed neither a self-parody for the benefit of international tourism nor a ghost town. It was full of Tuscans. Rather than offering vaguely medieval music for a cosmopolitan elite, the evening promised a home-grown beauty contest – Miss Reginetta d’Italia. At eight in the evening we bagged ourselves seats outside Caffè La Costa di San Rocco.
This is the scene. In the centre of a labyrinth of narrow streets at the top of a small oval-shaped hill is Piazza Cavour, a generous rectangular space with the usual town hall and church, flags and memorials. In the middle of the piazza is a melancholy bronze statue of the Unknown Soldier; the man leans forward stiffly in his First World War uniform, hands pulling open the top of his shirt to display the wounds that have done for him. He has been so placed that his helmeted profile can be seen from outside the square through an arch under the clock tower. Leaving the square through this arch, you go down a flight of white travertine steps, perhaps sixty in all, between the Banca di Firenze on your right and the Unione Banche di Italia on your left, to a larger, more open square, where Corso Vittorio Emanuele meets Via Cairoli. Caffè La Costa di San Rocco faces across this square, so that from our table we can look up the steps between the banks to the sad soldier exactly framed in the arch at the top.
The girls eager to become Miss Reginetta d’Italia are going to parade fifty yards or so down the steps, leaving the pathos of the dead warrior behind them and displaying their charms to the judges and spectators seated on rows of wicker chairs at the bottom. Between the stairs and the spectators a band plays syrupy covers on a rectangle of red carpet.
But that’s looking ahead. These August shows never get under way until darkness has fallen, after nine. Then the girls will be caught in a criss-cross of searchlights as First World War soldiers often were when they went over the top in night-time assaults. For the moment, what we’re seeing from our vantage point, munching salad sandwiches and sipping icy beer, is some last-minute coaching. An ex-reginetta in white trousers and black silk blouse is instructing a half-dozen girls on how to walk down the steps, how to hold their shoulders and arms, how to point their fingers, where to look, when to smile.
She climbs to Piazza Cavour at the top, stands for a moment in statuesque silhouette below the silhouetted statue behind, then begins to move. It’s quite a performance. Step by coquettish step she minces, she sways, she swings her right hand back and forth from her elbow. It takes time. She’s in no hurry. She’s enjoying it. At the bottom she pauses, pushes out her breasts, shows her head off in profile, first left then right, then comes past the band, looking sassily over the empty seats where the jury will be, allows herself a knowing smile, puts a hand on a cocked hip, swivels with a proud toss of jet-black hair, struts between the band and the front row, then, hand on hip again, swivels once more to walk away to the other side of the band so that now we can all get a load of her curvy back. At last, with a wiggle and a flounce, she’s done.
‘Così!’
It’s challenging. The debutantes have a go. They’re not in their smart dresses yet. Or their bikinis. They’re mostly teenagers, awkward and self-conscious. Heaven knows what induced them to volunteer. Two or three mothers are present, shouting advice and encouragement. The ex-reginetta watches, arms folded, pouting. Occasionally she intervenes. ‘Not like that, per l’amor del cielo!’ She tilts a girl’s chin up, shows her the haughty look. ‘You have to conquer them!’ Now she rearranges a hand on a hip, pushes out a pelvis. ‘You don’t want them to feel sorry for you!’ The participants giggle.
‘Sort of school for flirtation,’ I suggest. ‘How to be a vamp.’
Eleonora is harder: ‘Whore more like.’ She says one of the greatest embarrassments of her life was when her older brother used to organize beauty contests and push her to participate. She never would.
One girl trips. It’s tough walking down old stone steps in high heels. At the tables to our left a group of adolescents snigger and groan.
‘To think Anita might have ridden her horse down there.’
Faces appear at windows round the square. A man and his wife in their seventies are up on the third floor, he in a red vest, she cleaning her glasses on her negligée. There are a dozen girls practising now. The seats are filling up. New arrivals will have to stand. It may be crass, it may not be politically correct, but there is something fascinating about the show. Perhaps because the participants are so inept.
But no! One girl has it. A small slim creature in a black minidress with an explosion of curls on her head. She flounces down the steps exactly as instructed. She swivels in perfect imitation of the ex-reginetta, who claps, delighted. She does the strut and the final flounce with growing relish, then bursts out laughing, hands over her open mouth. All the other girls cheer.
Eleonora shakes her head. ‘Would Garibaldi have approved?’ she wonders. ‘Is this what they did it for?’
‘I suppose he’d be happy that it’s Miss Reginetta d’Italia, not Miss Tuscany, or Miss Austrian Empire.’
In any event it’s time for us to go. On our way back to our room, we find the door of the church still open and, peeking inside, see candles have been lit. A silver crucifix glimmers over the altar. The wake will go on all night, to the din of the band cranking out summer pop.
DAY 17
21 July 1849 – 10 August 2019
Foiano della Chiana, Castiglion Fiorentino – 11 miles
Castiglion Fiorentino
On the evening of 21 July Garibaldi saw the opportunity for an easy victory that would raise morale. The column marched out of Foiano shortly after five in the afternoon, preceded by Major Migliazza and forty of the best horsemen to check that all was safe. Garibaldi had told the people of Foiano that they were heading straight to Arezzo, seventeen miles up the valley to the north-east, but after five miles he left the main road and turned due east, crossed the big canal that presented the main obstacle before the hills and marched just six more miles across the plain to Castiglion Fiorentino on the first low ridge. It offered excellent defences in case of a surprise attack.
However, as they approached the town, Migliazza reported that an Austrian soldier had been captured carrying an important dispatch. In fact, the man was an Italian from Trento. He was wearing plain clothes, his Austrian army uniform stashed in a bag. In his possession was a message from the small Austrian garrison in Arezzo to Colonel Paumgartten in Perugia, with an urgent request for reinforcements. This message had already been delivered, and the messenger was now returning to Arezzo by post coach with the answer to the request scribbled at the bottom of the same piece of paper: ‘Four companies are on the march and should arrive in Arezzo tonight.’
Garibaldi was astonished. He made it a matter of policy always to respect the enemy and consider him capable of acting intelligently, even brilliantly. But to write the response to a cry for help on the same piece of paper was folly. If they had to write anything at all, Hoffstetter observes, they could have given the man a piece of paper with the single word ‘Granted’. Now Garibaldi knew that there was an Austrian garrison in Arezzo, that it was desp
erately weak, and that about 600 Austrians would soon be passing on the road from the south which led right by Castiglion Fiorentino. He quickly gathered a few hundred men of the First Legion under the command of Gaetano Sacchi and took them a couple of miles along the road that the Austrians must be coming along. In the vicinity of the village of Montecchio he found a small bridge over a stream and an elaborate ambush was set. The Austrians would be allowed to cross the bridge and march on for a few hundred yards, unaware of the garibaldini hidden behind hedges and in ditches. Then they would be confronted by a line of fire. Turning, they would be fired on from behind the hedges, while another company of garibaldini would occupy the bridge and block their retreat. Lines of apparent escape would be left where there were cottages beside the road, but the occupants had been moved out for the evening, substituted with more garibaldini.
We left Foiano before six in the morning, walking in a misty half-dark between lines of cypress trees leading to the cemetery and beyond. Here a sign written in a strange mix of English and Italian points the way to ‘Foiano della Chiana War Cemetery, Tombe di Guerra del Commonwealth’. It contains the bodies of 256 British and South African troops who died when the retreating German army made a stand outside Arezzo in June 1944. Deciding not to visit, we nevertheless found it hard not to think of the carnage the garibaldini envisaged in setting up that ambush.
The country is flat as Flanders here. There’s nowhere to hide. We crossed the Chiana Canal and turned north along Il sentiero della bonifica – the Reclaimed Land Path. You walk on a dyke through delicate white marsh flowers with fertile fields stretching away either side, the abrupt slopes of the Apennines closing the horizon. There are storks round the water, squadrons of geese overheard. Turning east, away from the canal towards Castiglion Fiorentino, we came across a man on a mountain bike, sweating profusely, who stopped to ask the way to a place we had not heard of. He was the only person we met in four hours’ walking. Now came field after field of sunflowers, rigidly regimented, the plants alert and silent as soldiers lying in wait. Not even the throb of a tractor or the drone of a chainsaw disturbed the warm air. The countryside is rich and empty, luxuriant and melancholy.
Suddenly Eleonora was dancing. And screaming. Waving her arms, hopping about. There was something in her shirt. She’d been stung. I tried to calm her, helped her off with her pack, then her shirt. She kept squirming and wriggling. As the fabric slipped off, an angry hornet buzzed up into the air and away.
A little later she managed to laugh. ‘Surprise attack!’
Nobody died in that well laid ambush. The garibaldini held their positions in silence through the summer night, but the Austrians didn’t show. They had stopped in Cortona, eight miles away, apparently tipped off. Garibaldi was disgusted. ‘The enthusiasm and joy of a few days before,’ Ruggeri observes, ‘turned to the gloom of disappointment, scoring a deep line in his brow that would never leave him.’ The uprising wasn’t going to happen.
Writing a year after the events, Ruggeri allows himself a rant. ‘They call us enemies of humanity, these Austrian despots who preside over the unburied bones of our martyrs. But we reply with the words of the great exile Mazzini, “If you’re so sure of yourselves, have the courage to prove you’re right; give the people a free vote; withdraw for a while, now you’ve crushed all opposition; install a provisional government to call a plebiscite and let the people decide who they want to rule them.”’
Not an appeal the Austrians were likely to listen to.
Another disappointment was the realization that, though the Tuscan garrisons billeted in these small towns invariably fled before Garibaldi arrived, allowing the festive welcoming parties that had so encouraged him, nevertheless as soon as the column moved on the grand duke’s soldiers hurried back to reassert the status quo. The patriotic effusions were no more than a twenty-four-hour carnival. They had no consequence and required no commitment.
Garibaldi did not take his frustrations out on the captured man from Trento. He resisted requests to have him shot. Instead he had him put on his Austrian uniform and stand before the garibaldini in their camp below the city walls. ‘How painful it is,’ the General told his men, ‘that our oppressors find Italians who are willing to fight their own countrymen. You tell me if this bizarre cap and uniform looks right on an Italian! I grant the man his life, because he’s not worth the bullet that would kill him!’
‘Evviva!’ the garibaldini cried.
We entered Castiglion through Porta San Michele, a reconstruction of the medieval arch destroyed by the retreating Germans in 1944. The stone archangel in the niche above is a copy of the ancient wooden statue now removed to the safety of the town’s civic museum. Michael stands nonchalantly on top of the devil in the form of a dragon, skewering him in the mouth with a long spear. It looks so easy.
Castiglion’s ancient Etruscan fort was also largely destroyed in one war or another. But a solitary tower survives, square and bare in a stony space above the town, seven or eight storeys high. At the top, when your eyes have adjusted to the explosion of light, you have a commanding view of the plain we just crossed. It’s vast and airy. All you can hear is a tinkle of cries from the big municipal swimming pool a few hundred yards to the south.
The topography of Castiglion Fiorentino is complicated. It sits on the first hill rising from the plain, but then there’s a narrow valley before the hills proper. Hoffstetter was given the task of setting up the most elaborate defence arrangements undertaken so far. He fills three pages explaining his plans in case of attack from the various directions. The Austrian war machine was closing in.
We have found ourselves a billet in the valley between the town and the higher hills, which is where Hoffstetter had most of the men sleep. Our hosts are giving us the upstairs floor of their 1950s house. There are vases of dried flowers on white lace doilies and purple drapes over the windows tied with elaborate bows. Just beware of the dog, we’re warned. It’s a big Labrador that supposedly guards the space between the front door and garden gate. Today the sun has sapped the animal’s energy, and it barely registers our passage as we scuttle out of the door and off to town again.
The one great glory of Castiglion Fiorentino is the Piazza del Municipio. It’s a harmonious rectangle, perhaps forty yards by fifty, with the imposing fourteenth-century town hall looking across grey stone paving to a long elegant portico. Built in the fifteenth century and restored by Giorgio Vasari in the sixteenth, the portico has nine wide arches open one side, to the piazza, and three the other side offering magnificent views of the hills to the east. There’s a café at one end of the portico, taking advantage of the shade, and a trattoria at the other; in between are the open arches with their wonderful view of the Apennines. The effect is something like being in an airy room with generous French windows over a dramatic drop. We bought a couple of apples and munched them under the portico, studying the terraced slopes where Hoffstetter placed his men so carefully. The blaze of light out there on vines and olives made the deep shade under the portico all the more delicious.
Unusually, the town hall has just one plaque on its rough stone facade. Placed there in the early 1860s, it’s the same plaque you find, word for word, on every town hall in Tuscany.
XV MARCH MDCCCLX [15 MARCH 1860]
11 HOURS 55 MINUTES AFTER NOON
THE SUPREME COURT OF APPEAL
MEETING IN PLENARY SESSION
IN THE PALAZZO DELLA SIGNORIA (FLORENCE)
HAVING HEARD THE MINISTER OF INTERNAL AFFAIRS
DECLARES
THAT FROM THE SUM CALCULATED
DURING THIS SESSION
OF THE PARTIAL RESULTS
OF THE UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE
REGISTERED IN THE MINUTES
THE FOLLOWING FINAL RESULT WAS OBTAINED
TUSCANS VOTING – 386,445
VOTES IN FAVOUR OF UNION WITH THE
CONSTITUTIONAL MONARCHY – 366,571
VOTES FOR A SEPARATE REALM – 14,925
SPOILED VOTES – 4,949
AND THUS ASSERTS THAT
THE TUSCAN PEOPLE BY PLEBISCITE
DESIRE UNION WITH THE CONSTITUTIONAL MONARCHY
OF KING VITTORIO EMANUELE II
In short, ten years after Garibaldi’s disappointments and Ruggeri’s despairing rant, the Tuscans were indeed allowed their vote. Backed now by the French, Piedmont had declared war on Austria, and the struggling empire had no soldiers to send to Tuscany. Italian patriots in Florence forced the grand duke into exile and some months later this referendum was called. About a fifth of the population was eligible to vote. Needless to say, those nostalgic for the small states of the past claim the result was fixed. Certainly the figures look suspiciously one-sided. But many commentators have observed that Italians have a great respect for the way the wind is blowing. Suffice it to say that a month later, on the Tuscan coast, when Garibaldi started to look for volunteers for his Sicilian expedition, he soon had more than his two ships could carry.
We were reading this plaque, reflecting on its bureaucratic fussiness – no triumphalism, no patriotic rhetoric – when the big door of the town hall opened and a small crowd spilled out. It was a wedding, at seven on a Saturday evening, mid-August. Perhaps a dozen people stopped at the bottom of the four steps, turning to wait for the bride and groom. There was a moment’s expectation. We stepped back a little, respectful but curious. And the newly-weds appeared. A Filipino couple. She in simple white dress and sandals, he in a blue suit, white shirt, dark tie. None of those watching was Filipino. The principal guests appeared to be the couple’s employers.
Bride and groom had their photos taken, quickly, under the shady portico with the dazzling backdrop of the hills behind. Since the trattoria just a few yards away had now opened, we went to sit at a table for our usual early dinner, but were promptly told that all places were reserved. ‘Ah, for the wedding,’ I supposed. ‘Not at all,’ the proprietor told us sharply. ‘I have nothing to do with those people.’