The Hero's Way

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The Hero's Way Page 27

by Tim Parks


  Bocca Trabaria

  ‘Time to take my ibuprofen,’ Eleonora sighs. We shoulder our packs and set off from the piazza up a steep narrow road. Via G. Garibaldi. It’s not the road he took. That’s now the main road and a motorcyclists’ favourite, glowingly reviewed on numerous biker sites. We climb steeply through the village of Corposano – Healthybody – then we’re striking up paths through chestnut trees laden with prickly husks, bright green in the morning sun.

  We’ve been worrying a great deal about today’s walk. On paper and on the app it looks the highest and hardest. Four thousand feet. How healthy are our bodies? Eleonora has this pain under her foot. It’s troubling to be beside someone who is suffering for your project. I wonder what kind of things Anita and her José were saying to each other in those days as she began to fade. ‘It’s my project too,’ Eleonora protests. Anita categorically refused to be left behind.

  In the event, the morning is a pleasure. The ibuprofen does its job. The climb is steep but steady and the paths good. There are fields of cornflowers and cow parsley. These woods are nobler, airier. From time to time we glimpse someone mushrooming. Mushroomers are secretive folk, always afraid you’re trying to discover the hidden spots where they unearth their truffles. All the same, one man coming down the path in lumberjack shirt and leather boots lets us take a photo of a big basket full of assorted fleshy fungi. They look like a catch of cuttlefish.

  Back in San Giustino, Garibaldi went into the pharmacy to ask for pen and paper and wrote some orders for those who had been guarding San Leo and then the bridge at San Sepolcro. Scouts reported Austrians on the move. At 9.30 a pistol shot rang out, there was a roll of drums, and ‘in good order’ the men marched out of the village to the mountain road. They climbed five miles and set up camp for the day on a flat area offering ‘the best possible defensive position’. This while Garibaldi waited for Migliazza’s report on the road ahead.

  Hours later the Austrians rolled into San Giustino. Officer Campi’s colleague at the customs office, Natale Calvori, also wrote a personal account for Magherini-Graziani’s Anecdotes. He’s scathing of the garibaldini. ‘Tough nasty types, cursing and even blaspheming, so that I drew back, not wanting to hear.’ The Austrians, in contrast, or the ‘Germans’ as he calls them, filed by ‘in typical order, putting on a good show’. However, on passing the customs house, the Austrian commander looked in, took the cigar from his lips and gave the order, ‘Get the cash box.’ ‘At first I didn’t understand,’ says Calvori. ‘Then I realized they meant the customs house cash and I shouted, No!’

  Too late. All that money so carefully collected was gone. ‘They had two lovely cannons,’ Calvori adds, ‘a smart howitzer, and lots of baggage wagons.’

  Towards ten we passed a tower and an abandoned monastery. The path was a sort of grey grit now. Mossy rocks and tiny white and purple flowers. From time to time a fleeting deer. Then a lovely oak forest, but desperately steep and the soft grey soil crumbling under your feet, so you had to dig in your poles for fear of falling backwards. Suddenly a vast drop opened to our right and for the first time we saw the road that they took, rising from the plain below in endless zigzags. Sick as he was, Hoffstetter was impressed.

  The way up to the Moon Mountains is magnificent. The road climbs in three great sweeps, each with ten or so hairpins, rising wide and solid on thick parapets of rock. The column wound slowly up in gigantic spirals, like a big beautiful snake, Garibaldi riding at the head beside his heroic wife, his chief officers right behind, recognisable from their white cloaks, ruffled by the cool mountain breeze. They were followed by the few lancers who remained from the bold ranks that on 30 April had defeated an entire battalion of Frenchmen under the walls of Rome. Then the new cavalry, two by two, their feathered hats, red shirts and assorted weaponry giving them a wild, improvised look. Light and nimble-legged, all the horses tackled the slope cheerfully, neighing and snorting. Then the baggage team, urging on forty dark brown mules, shouting, cursing and cracking their whips. Then a drove of white bulls with long, curved horns, treading warily. A short distance from the animals, the infantry marched behind. First the three much-weakened cohorts that were all that was left of the Italian Legion, led by the excellent Gaetano Sacchi. Beneath their Calabrian hats, you could still see the same bold, tanned faces that had been Garibaldi’s pride, but were little more than a guard of honour now, their banner shredded with bullets, but still held high. Between these and the Second Legion, four horses pulled our only, much-prized cannon. Forbes led the Second Legion, together with his young son, the two bizarre Britons in their summer outfits, their men wearing light grey with dark kepis on their heads. At the back were the Bersaglieri and the Finanzieri, no more than a hundred men, the Bersaglieri in light blue with red trimmings, the Finanzieri with their famous peaked caps. Seeing them, I was suddenly overcome by a sharp pain, stricken with grief, my eye searching for old comrades. Where is Manara now? Where are Dandolo and Rozzat and Morosini? Fewer than two thousand were climbing the Moon Mountains, and even these must soon be lost. As if to increase my melancholy, the sun set behind us, sending its last pink rays across the fertile hills beneath to strike the white rocks above.

  We looked down on the scene from Poggio del Romito, the peak, eating our bread and cheese. You could glimpse the winding road through the trees, hear the distant rumble of lorries, the drone of a bike. The day was clouding over, the air heavier by the minute, the landscape a play of light and shadow. Eleonora remembered the pink morning sky and grew anxious. I laughed and said it wasn’t going to rain on us today. We turned right, down a path that dives through thick woods along the border between Umbria and the Marche, to meet the road at the pass, Bocca Trabaria.

  ‘Garibaldi, Anita, Ciceruacchio, Ugo Bassi . . . From valley to valley, these lands still hear the echo of their irrepressible yearning.’

  So says the stone by the roadside at Italy’s watershed. Standing in that bleak place, with cars flashing by and the valleys echoing mainly with combustion engines, the words feel like empty rhetoric. But this really is where they slept, towards midnight, after their long climb, stretching themselves out on the bare ground. ‘Although it was July, a bitter wind blew across those crags,’ remembered Ruggeri, ‘nor stream ran or spring rose to wet the lips of the exhausted soldiers, whose memory of that cold bleak night, I am sure, will remain with them, as it has with me, all their lives.’

  Those who survived.

  ValdericArte

  We were definitely not going to sleep beside the road, but we had had trouble finding a place to stay. In the end, way off the beaten track, Google Maps turned up the ValdericArte Creative Residence. ‘THE ISLAND OF EVERLAND,’ says the website.

  The quick way was to walk five miles down the road, crossing the regional boundary into the Marche, then another mile, to the right, into a narrow valley where the Creative Residence seemed to be the only building. But the road was all hairpin bends and heavy traffic. Our app proposed a great elephant’s ear of a diversion. Eight miles, circling east, then north, then back to the west.

  Eleonora grew more and more irritated that I wasn’t taking the coming storm seriously. Distant thunder boomed. I teased her. She protested: ‘Don’t tempt the gods!’ I looked up at the sky and shouted, ‘Bring it on! I’m ready!’ Lightning flickered. What had got into me?

  The path was easy, but long. We stepped up the pace as the thunder echoed back and forth. Four miles, five. The sky was heaping dense billows over the mountain tops. ‘It won’t rain on us,’ I laughed. ‘Never!’

  We had circled right round our destination now and were approaching it from the east, descending steeply on grey shaley tracks, when two things happened at once. We realized that our app hadn’t actually found a path to the Creative Residence. The last half-mile was simply a dead-straight line. It’s an infuriating thing that this app does from time to time. When it can’t find a path to a point you’ve touched on the map, it gets as close as possible, then draw
s a straight line. Which in this case crossed a wooded ravine. Just as we appreciated that we had a problem, with a terrific crack right above our heads, the rain came down.

  We had our routine. Back to back, we raised the groundsheet on our poles to make a big umbrella. But today we were on a steep slope. And the rain fell torrentially. For ten minutes. For twenty. Suddenly the track was a stream, a landslide. Grey slime was flowing over our shoes. Then the wind rose and our flimsy shelter was tugged this way and that. The rain swept in underneath. ‘Just accept we’ll be drenched.’ I pulled in my poles. ‘Let’s move.’

  ‘Tempting the gods on Mount Jupiter,’ Eleonora said. ‘Not smart.’

  We stumbled downhill. But quickly stopped. We had no idea which way to go. Thick woodland all around. Glimpses of peaks and valleys. No buildings. No landmarks. We had a paper map but it wasn’t detailed enough. And we were cold. We were shivering. Covering each other with the groundsheet, we rummaged in our packs for our rain jackets. Trying to study our phones, the screens got splashed and went dark. Anyway there was no signal. Eleonora’s battery was almost done.

  ‘Think,’ I said. ‘We have to think.’

  We remembered there had been a signal a few hundred yards back. We floundered up the hill again through the woods as the mud flowed down towards us. Twigs and stones and dead leaves. The whole surface was on the move. Then I understood. Since our app didn’t show the residence, we had inserted a destination guessing from the address shown on Google. We must have got it a fraction to one side of where it actually was. Not as crazy as a professional army using a map ten years out of date, but not brilliant.

  We were soaked. The rain wasn’t letting up. My phone was still out of action. Eleonora’s was on 3 per cent. And Eleonora’s had the app. With the amount of mud sliding towards us you began to wonder if a tree wouldn’t come down. Bending together, we made a shelter beneath our jackets. I opened my pack and used a T-shirt to dry my phone. Carefully. There. It came to life.

  I opened Google Maps and opted for satellite view. It took an age to come up. We were shivering. At last the image formed. We compared it with the app which had the red line indicating the way we had walked. This gave us our bearings. It seemed if we walked back half a mile or so, a path should open to our left. So it did. An hour later we stepped, sodden, into Everland.

  Stella studied fine art in France and the USA. Her mother was an artist. Her father a professor of sociology. They came from Pesaro, on the Adriatic coast. Then retreated from the world. They bought a remote ruin deep in a dead-end valley, a place monks once used as a base in summer to gather logs for charcoal. And transformed it into the kind of fabled sanctuary where wounded heroes go to be cured by elfin queens.

  Herbs, colours, music and painting are the medicine. And excellent food. The rooms have different themes of blue, because ‘blue is the colour that awakens creativity’. There are reworkings of famous paintings. Giotto’s blue. Piero della Francesca’s. Cimabue’s. You can learn to make colours from plants in the valley. There is woad. There is madder. You can dye your clothes with them. You can paint, or etch, or work clay, or play the piano, or the guitar. You can gather herbs and cook with them. Or make cosmetics. You can make honey. There are common spaces full of paintings and sculptures of women. By women. The bathrooms are stony grottos with trees and ivy. A shower head hangs from a branch. Water flows out of a stone wall, on an upturned terracotta roof tile. The towels are deep blue pile. Dried lavender perfumes the corridors. A trough is sunk in the floor for dogs and cats to drink.

  Most of all you can eat. There are just three tables in the sitting room. A young woman tells us she comes here every year, alone, to relax and purify her soul. A couple at the far end keep themselves to themselves. We’re welcomed with a basket of home-made breads. A bottle of Trebbiano. The food comes on curious white plates they’ve crafted themselves, one edge scrolled into a naked woman. Dish after dish arrives. Even Angelino and Massimo, back in Paradiso, never dreamed of such abundance. A long wooden board laden with delicate savoury pastries. Big ravioli wrapped round twigs to look like the bundle a monk puts over his shoulder. A salad dish full of edible flowers. A risotto. Lentil dumplings with wild garlic. Radicchio al forno. Patate gratinate.

  Our defences are down after the drama of the storm. Stella brings another plate. She chats about herbs and flowers and rediscovering the recipes of the Middle Ages. Her mother arrives with a soup. She talks about her paintings. About the retro furniture. The father brings more pastries. ‘From sociology to medieval cuisine’: he gives his biography in a nutshell.

  ‘Studying society prompts total retreat,’ I suggest.

  A young man appears, Stella’s boyfriend, offering an array of cakes. Tomorrow is Ferragosto, he says. As well as cooking for us, they are preparing for fifty guests at lunch. In the garden. Why don’t we stay?

  We fight a rearguard action against grappas, cordials, digestives, nuts and cakes and fruits and sweet wines, and eventually, somehow, stagger back upstairs, past candlesticks, lanterns and vases of fresh flowers into a swoon of Piero della Francesca blue, where, having eaten too much, I sleep badly. But not as badly as Hoffstetter. Worried his fever would come back if he slept in the open on the mountain top, the German proceeded along the road until he found a hut where he could wrap up comfortably in his horse blankets. ‘But I was deceived. Not only was I cruelly surprised by a multitude of pestilential insects, but towards dawn they brought a cavalryman shot while scouting. They laid him next to me and proceeded to dig the bullet from his knee. Despite the icy early morning I went outside in the hope of a little more rest before another day.’

  DAY 22

  28–29 July 1849 – 15 August 2019

  Bocca Trabaria/ValdericArte, Mercatello, Sant’Angelo in Vado – 14 miles

  Mercatello

  ‘Yet sweet illusions could still arise in fervent minds.’

  So says Ruggeri of the men setting out at dawn from Bocca Trabaria. It was easy walking down a gentle valley. After seven miles they met the river Metauro flowing from the east and could drink. Another three miles and they were in Mercatello, where the inhabitants provided them ‘with every kind of food and abundant forage for the animals’.

  They were back in business. Hoffstetter had got over his fever and was feeling bullish. Arriving in the small borgo at ten they set up camp in a field by the river. ‘We had rested three hours,’ the German recalls, ‘when news arrived that the enemy had been sighted just beyond Sant’Angelo in Vado, five miles ahead. Once again we were trapped, since we knew that forces from Arezzo were not far behind.’

  It was not unexpected. Garibaldi was aware the Austrians had an army in Urbino on the Adriatic side of the Apennines, potentially blocking the path to the sea. In his dispatch of 25 July Stadion had asked D’Aspre to order Archduke Ernst, the Emperor’s young cousin, who was commanding these troops, to march up towards the mountain passes. Just in case.

  So the garibaldini were now in the narrow Metauro valley with enemy behind and enemy in front. They had missed the chance, some miles back, to take a turn north to Sestino, where the Florentine Carlo Corsi had already arrived, on foot, from San Sepolcro. But as Corsi recalls, the Austrians arrived there soon after. ‘The soldiers were so tired and breathless they could barely stand. They cursed these mountains and Garibaldi and anybody who supported him. One captain said: “This devil will dance us to hell, or to Africa at least.”’ But the truth was, Corsi says, ‘the younger officials had begun rather to admire this bold soldier and thought him an outstanding partisan fighter’.

  On hearing of the army approaching from the Adriatic, Garibaldi left Forbes to organize a defensive position against the army behind them and galloped off in haste with anyone who had a saddle on his horse to occupy Sant’Angelo in Vado before the enemy did. He never panicked, Ruggeri remarks. He was never daunted.

  Since we had only fourteen miles to cover today, we decided to follow the ridge that looks down into the Me
tauro valley where the garibaldini walked. It meant a steep climb, then interminable ups and downs on a shaley, slithery path. Some slopes had no vegetation at all, just broken slate and mud. You can see why someone thought of the surface of the moon. Looking around, other ridges and mountains marched away in all directions. Stumbling down to Mercatello, it was already two o’clock when we found a small weathered stone that said, ‘To Giuseppe Garibaldi, in the centenary of his passing, 28 July 1849’.

  Built on the right bank of the Metauro, Mercatello is a mix of narrow alleys, spacious piazzas, grand churches and decaying hovels. The population of 1500 is considerably smaller than it was in 1849. In a café with a shady garden we saw to our surprise, above the fridge near the till, a poster announcing a Garibaldi anniversary party. Three weeks earlier.

  ‘It was a big success,’ the young woman behind the bar declared. People had dressed up as Garibaldi and Anita and Ugo Bassi and even as Austrian soldiers. When we described our trip, her eyes shone. ‘And here I am,’ she wailed, ‘stuck making sandwiches and pouring drinks in a place where nothing ever happens.’ We shouldered our bags and smiled. Out on the street it was thirty-four degrees.

  Sant’Angelo in Vado

  Leaving Mercatello, we were now on the road that Garibaldi and his men galloped down towards Sant’Angelo in Vado, ready for anything. Finding to their surprise that the Austrians had not yet occupied the town, they left some men in defensive positions and rode cautiously on, eastward. The valley widens here for a couple of miles, then closes in again with steep hills on both sides. It was at this narrow point that the Austrians had blocked the road. The extraordinary thing was that a half-mile before that, to the left, there was an old mule track climbing north to the small borgo of Lunano seven miles away. And from there, another road led down to the sea. And the Austrians had not blocked it.

 

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