by Tim Parks
‘We could walk in there now,’ Hoffstetter insisted. ‘We wouldn’t lose more than ten or twenty men at most.’
Garibaldi said it could wait till morning and sent everyone to sleep. Hoffstetter was disgusted.
We were sleeping in a loft at the top of an old palazzo. There were four floors of stairs, no lift, and once inside you had to climb a ladder to the bed. It was right under a roof that had been in the sun all day. I wished we were sleeping outside the walls.
DAY 19
23 July 1849 – 12 August 2019
Arezzo
Arezzo seemed a good place to take our first full day’s break since Terni. The garibaldini spent a day of high drama here. Eleonora was troubled by tendinitis under her right foot. The heatwave was supposed to peak at forty degrees. And then, Arezzo is Arezzo, city of Piero della Francesca, of Cimabue, of Vasari, of Guido Monaco. There is much to see.
Yet I could not enjoy it as I meant to. I was plunged so deep in the Garibaldi story. In churches and museums I found it impossible not to see everything in relation to that adventure of 170 years before. Cimabue’s astonishing crucifix in the Basilica di San Domenico made one think of the dazzle and lure of martyrdom. San Domenico is one of those places where you have to put in a coin to have the nave light up for a couple of minutes. We hadn’t realized this and were craning up into the gloom where the great crucifix hangs when someone paid, and the painting glowed with its sumptuous reds and dark blues, its elegant contortions. Pain was never more beautiful. One almost understood those few garibaldini, natives of Arezzo, who begged the General to lead them to their deaths rather than endure the shame of a home town that had sided with Austria.
Leaving San Domenico, there was an exhibit at the door inspired by the present migrant crisis. Some children had built a model sailboat of the kind Garibaldi planned to use to reach Venice. On the white sail was written, Speranza. Hope.
In the Basilica di San Francesco it was impossible not to look at Piero della Francesca’s True Cross battle scenes – the horses, the swords, the spears, the flags – without thinking of the mayhem of a band of men attacking a town. Many of the Crusaders have red tunics. A trumpeter wears a fabulously tall white hat; how not think of Forbes? One man has a sword sunk into his skull, which will be the fate of one of Garibaldi’s cavalry captains, though not in Arezzo. Overall, it is the grim glamour of the scene that captures the imagination: men getting history done. Which sets off a train of thought that has been with me for some days now: that although the garibaldini had fought no battles since leaving Rome, nevertheless they were doing the hard work of the Risorgimento, forcing people to think, to take sides, unsettling the mental landscape as they marched across the physical.
Other scenes in the True Cross sequence remind you that some things never change. A man is lowered into a well to force him to talk. Where did you hide Christ’s cross? Many of the garibaldini, deserters and stragglers, faced all kinds of brutality to get them to talk.
Climbing to the top of the town and the duomo, up an arrow-straight street called Piaggia di San Lorenzo, you can turn and look down to an arch right at the bottom where once there was the southern gate and beyond that, across a narrow valley, to the low hill that rises above the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie. It was here, on top of the hill, that Garibaldi set up the rebels’ cannon on the morning of 23 July, its barrel trained on the gate, ready to pound it to pieces at a moment’s notice.
Hoffstetter woke at four to find Garibaldi had sent Ugo Bassi to parley. In vain. The General stood a hundred paces back from the walls, in case of snipers. Tell them, Garibaldi instructed Bassi, that if they don’t want us to attack, they have six hours to provide food in abundance and enough money to keep us going. He ordered the main column of men away from the Castiglion Fiorentino road and had them assemble half a mile to the east on the hillside above Santa Maria, very visible to the town, poised for attack or flight. Hoffstetter was given the task of establishing a rearguard to defend the western valley, whence the Austrians might arrive from Castiglion Fiorentino or Foiano at any moment. Sure enough, shortly after midday cavalry scouts reported Paumgartten’s men just a few miles away.
We moved on to Vasari’s house, where I was immediately struck by these words from his Lives of the Artists, quoted on a panel in the first room:
Their names . . . are being forgotten . . . and will soon be altogether gone. To defend them as far as I can from this second death, and to keep them as long as possible in the memory of the living, having spent so much time looking for their works . . . and made such an effort to find their stories in the accounts of older men and numerous books and archives, and having drawn profit and pleasure from all this, I decided it was right, my duty in fact, to make whatever record modest talent and limited discernment can.
The house was suffocating with heat and tourists, while Vasari’s own paintings seemed rather dull after the beauties we had seen earlier on.
Over lunch we discussed their lunch. The mayor set the people to work to meet Garibaldi’s demands, so that by mid-morning a stream of carts was bringing bread and meat and fruit and wine out of the town to the rebels. The Austrian garrison, Hoffstetter reflects, probably gave their blessing, so as not to risk a rebel attack before reinforcements arrived.
Many of the wealthier citizens came to Santa Maria delle Grazie to beg Garibaldi not to storm the town, but others urged the opposite: he must attack at once. There had been protests and resistance, they said, from the ‘democrats’ in the town, who had tried to force the mayor to open the gates. The authorities were making scores of arrests; the General must attack to protect these patriots.
‘I saw people desperate, people crying,’ Ruggeri says. Hoffstetter couldn’t believe that Garibaldi, so famous for his can-do attitude, was not going to use the cannon. What had they brought it for? He left his place in the rearguard, where first contact with the Austrians had now been made, and went to plead with the General. The town could be taken for the loss of a handful of men, he insisted, after which it offered excellent defensive possibilities.
At last Garibaldi explained himself: ‘I’ve been thinking the same thing, but what would we do with the wounded? We can’t carry them, and if we leave them, they’ll be shot by the Austrians. Arezzo may be important for morale, but nothing else; there’s no question of our wanting to stay here. We’d be surrounded in no time.’
Hoffstetter objected that backing off would make a bad impression on those citizens who were on their side, and on his own soldiers too. ‘They need to fire their guns!’ But Garibaldi had made up his mind, ‘and now that I’m in a position to consider the matter more calmly,’ Hoffstetter writes a year later, ‘I realize how right he was. His aim now was to reach the coast and sail to Venice, to do it as quickly as possible, with the least loss of life. Fighting would not only have slowed us down, it would have stirred up the Austrians to greater efforts and guaranteed a grim future for any patriots in the town who took our side.’
‘So he did the right thing,’ Eleonora observes.
‘Ruggeri talks of two hundred “democrats” arrested in Arezzo and still in jail when he was writing in 1850. A survivor from Forbes’s men, Francesco Manfredini, recalls how furious the men were, and says this was the beginning of the end for discipline. The General lost respect.’
‘So he did the wrong thing.’
‘De Rossi reckons the problem was precisely Forbes’s men, who were undisciplined. Garibaldi feared that if they had to fight to get into the town he couldn’t guarantee these men wouldn’t get drunk and trash it – a PR disaster.’
‘So there was no right thing to do.’
It was too hot to be around town in the early afternoon. Returning to our room, we passed Piazza Guido Monaco with its statue to the monk who invented modern musical notation. A little further on we found a plaque on the house where he was born, or so they claim, in 992. Below his name is a line of music with the notes spelled out: ‘Ut re mi fa sol la.
’ Ut, Eleonora tells me, was Monaco’s base note taken from the first word of an old hymn, which provided him with the names of other notes too. Then it was a case of the secular gradually replacing the religious over the centuries.
With music in our minds we whiled away the hottest hours of the day in the air-conditioned part of our loft listening on YouTube to the so-called Inni Garibaldini, garibaldini hymns, another case of the secular moving in on sacred territory. More than fifty songs would eventually be written in honour of the hero, or as marching music for his campaigns. But only one dates back to 1848, Addio, mia bella, addio – Farewell, my beauty, farewell – and it wasn’t specifically written for Garibaldi. Squilla la tromba, begins the last verse . . .
Squilla la tromba . . . Addio . . .
L’armata se ne va . . .
Un bacio al figlio mio!
Viva la libertà!
The trumpet sounds . . . Farewell
The army is leaving
A kiss to my son!
Long live freedom
Did Garibaldi’s men sing these words on the long retreat from Rome? None of my sources mention singing. The most famous of the hymns was written at Garibaldi’s request in 1858 by the poet Luigi Mercantini. The first lines are still widely quoted:
Si scopron le tombe, si levano i morti,
I martiri nostri son tutti risorti
The graves open, the dead spring up,
Our martyrs are all alive again
The music is more melancholy than stirring. But the refrain packs a punch:
Va’ fuori d’Italia! va’ fuori ch’è l’ora!
Va’ fuori d’Italia! va’ fuori, stranier!
Get out of Italy! Get out, the time has come!
Get out of Italy! Get out, foreigner!
It’s impossible to sing these songs today. They feel strange to the mouth and the spirit. We’ve tried a couple of times along the road, but after a line or two you stop and shake your head. An abyss opens between present and past; we live in quite different worlds of feeling.
In any event, on 23 July 1849 the garibaldini were not in a singing mood. By 5 p.m., when we left our room again, the Austrians had appeared in force at the opening of the valley that Hoffstetter had been ordered to defend and he had started to fall back slowly through terraced vineyards, shooting only occasionally, as planned. It was a holding operation; Garibaldi did not want to begin the march until after dark. There are two major roads from Arezzo crossing the mountains to the Tiber valley: one south-east to Città di Castello, one north-east to Anghiari. Plus any number of paths. In the late afternoon Garibaldi started to send parties of cavalry along all possible routes to create confusion. But the infantry, the baggage train and the cannon would only move when no one could see where they were going.
We walk down Piaggia San Lorenzo towards the old city gate and Santa Maria delle Grazie, taking in the Archaeological Museum on the way. Happily, there are storm clouds gathering. With luck, it will rain tonight and be cool tomorrow.
The woman on the ticket desk in the Archaeological Museum is sleepy and bored. The place is empty, and wonderful. But again the experience is entirely hijacked by my historical obsessions. Looking back, I find that the first thing I photographed was a glass case displaying votive swaddled baby statuettes, each a few inches of pale stone in the form of a swaddled baby. Apparently Etruscan women offered them to the gods in return for a safe birth. I would never normally dwell on such things, but thinking of Anita, in her seventh month now, the tiny noses and mouths take on a certain poignancy.
Then photographs of vases. Combat between Romans and barbarians. An Amazon with drawn sword. A fragment of war mosaic showing prancing horses. Retreating in the pitch dark, the cavalryman beside Hoffstetter suddenly disappeared. The hillside was terraced. The horse had plunged ten feet or so. ‘It really was remarkable,’ Hoffstetter recalled, ‘that neither horse nor horseman were hurt.’
Next, the skull of an Etruscan ox complete with horns. Knowing there would be few villages in the mountains, Garibaldi had used the money extorted from the mayor to buy more oxen to slaughter on the way.
A marvellous chimera, the museum’s pièce de résistance: lion, snake and goat fused in bronze, and roaring. The most amazing things can be done with imagination and technique.
Finally, very curiously, an array of small bronze phalluses. What were Garibaldi’s men doing for sex? Did some want to storm Arezzo in the hope of finding a woman? There’s nothing in my sources. Not a hint of homosexuality. Most nights the men were marching.
It’s half a mile or so from the Archaeological Museum out of town to Santa Maria delle Grazie. This is flat land criss-crossed with fast roads. A big Burger King rises from a waste of asphalt beside a petrol station. Only a couple of hundred yards away, at the end of a narrow lane, the old convent is framed by tall pines. It’s very beautiful: a long, low cream-stuccoed complex with Renaissance church and porticoes. The whole place breathes peace and quiet. For centuries an Etruscan temple had stood here. Then in the fifteenth century San Bernardino of Siena brought some peasants along to hack it down and replace it with a convent. On one wall a barely legible plaque recalls that Garibaldi camped on the hillside above the building in July 1849. No details are given.
Inside the church there is a magnificent marble altarpiece by Andrea della Robbia and above it, framed in a charming terracotta twine of leaves and fruit, a fresco of a tall Madonna opening her white cloak to gather and protect a crowd of small adoring faithful. It’s the sublime version of that garden statue of Snow White and the Dwarves: the old Italian obsession with a generous figure protecting the community.
Outside the clouds are thick above the hill and there’s a first rumble of thunder. The light is failing. As soon as darkness fell, Garibaldi gathered his community and set off through a narrow gorge, behind the hill, out of sight of the city. First the cavalry, then the baggage, then the men, climbing south-east to the source of the Scopetone river four miles away. It’s a moment when our various accounts of the march differ wildly.
Hoffstetter describes falling back as the Austrians tentatively pushed towards the Italian camp. The problem was to gather the rearguard and the returning cavalry scouts and get them out of danger, with the Austrians to one side and the town walls patrolled with hostile soldiers to the other. In the pitch dark. Garibaldi had left pickets every hundred yards or so to guide them on their way.
Something went wrong. Perhaps, thinking there was no one left, the pickets had moved on. Hoffstetter found himself lost in the gorges and valleys south of the town. He gathered his men at a crossroads and sent horses out in all directions to see if contact could be made. Suddenly there was the sound of shots. The guards on the city walls were firing into the valley. The Austrians behind them were firing. Hoffstetter ordered his men into battle formation and raced up a hill. All he could see were flashes of rifle fire lighting walls and vineyards. ‘Occasionally a spent bullet fell at our feet.’
It was then that the rider beside him, Major Mosso, tumbled down the terraced hillside. One can imagine the confusion, especially since Hoffstetter had insisted on silence. Now he wondered if the hills weren’t playing tricks on his hearing and sense of direction. Had the enemy encircled them? A horseman returned and said he had found Migliazza with a company of cavalry to show them the way. When Hoffstetter caught up with the General towards midnight neither had any idea what the firing had been about.
Ruggeri paints a grimmer picture: men, himself included, lost in the dark, fired on as they rode or marched by the walls of the town. An Austrian cavalry charge. Men killed and wounded. Parties of peasants sent out from the town and surrounding villages to finish off the wounded and kill any stragglers or deserters. ‘Horrible to relate,’ Ruggeri writes. ‘Traitors sold to the enemy.’
Trevelyan repeats Ruggeri’s version, which is excitingly dramatic. He throws in the account of a ‘gentleman traveller’ who ‘that same week’ heard peasants chanting songs in fav
our of the Austrian emperor, to the point that ‘the hills resounded with Evviva la corona del nostro Imperator’. ‘Such, in its effect,’ Trevelyan observes ‘was the political teaching of the Church in the era of Italy’s resurrection.’
Belluzzi talks of a ‘hellish night’ that led to ‘a huge number of desertions’. ‘Greedy peasants scavenging for rifles and munitions abandoned in the fields . . . tying up stragglers and barbarously handing them over to the Austrians who did God knows what with them.’
De Rossi, working from Gaetano Sacchi’s notes, turns it into farce. ‘The armed peasants on the walls, sensing the enemy was fleeing, fired for the sake of firing. The garibaldini, without reflecting that they were actually out of range, responded furiously, as if fighting off an attack. The Austrians, alarmed by the infernal noise and fearing they were being ambushed, joined in, firing wildly. The bloodless battle went on late into the night and it would be hard to know which of the combatants shooting in the dark was most terrified.’
Certainly it’s hard to know which of these accounts to believe. Each writer has an agenda and bends his story to suit it. Ruggeri’s instinct is to denigrate the Risorgimento’s enemies; tales of treachery abound. Belluzzi and Hoffstetter want to present Garibaldi in the most positive light and play down any failures. De Rossi likes to look down on the confusion of amateurs with the wry amusement of the professional soldier. Trevelyan covers all the bases, somehow persuading us that it was both an infernal night and a brilliant move by Garibaldi.