by Tim Parks
Moving swiftly, Garibaldi began to set up defences on the slopes all around the point where the track left the road. Forbes was recalled from Mercatello. Scouts were sent to skirmish with the Austrians blocking the road, but the enemy were well hidden among trees and rocks and it was impossible to establish how many there were.
Children were splashing in the river below the road as we marched along the valley. The sluggish water was not inviting. We walked fast and covered the five miles in an hour and a half. The landscape is beautiful, but the traffic incessant, with no space for wayfarers. At last the sign for Sant’Angelo in Vado appeared. ‘Home,’ it said, ‘of the Prized White Truffle’. And ‘Twinned with Mar della Plata’. Garibaldi had fought some of his hardest battles against the Argentinians. Then the main road veered left to circle the town, and we could walk in relative safety to the city gate, Porta Albani.
It’s a pompous thing, built in 1837, with an arched space inside where, in bold black lettering, you can read two disturbing slogans: LIBRO E MOSCHETTO / FASCISTA PERFETTO. Book and gun, the perfect Fascist. And IL CREDO DEL BORGHESE È L’EGOISMO. IL CREDO DEL FASCISTA È L’EROISMO. The credo of the bourgeois is selfishness, the credo of the Fascist is heroism.
The Fascists always claimed that their own credo was the logical continuation of the Risorgimento. Revisionists of the Risorgimento take this as proven and use it to attack the movement that united Italy. There’s an obvious connection, they say, between Fascism’s cult of heroism and the hero worship surrounding Garibaldi. Garibaldi, the First Fascist, is the title of one recent book. But Garibaldi never proposed heroism as a principle in itself. The value he proposed was national self-determination. Once that was achieved, you could forget heroics. In his novel Cantoni, the Volunteer he spells it out. ‘Cantoni is a volunteer, not a soldier. He serves Italy the nation, not its leaders, all more or less tyrants, all more or less sold out to the foreigner . . . Is the country in danger? The volunteers arrive from every part of the peninsula . . . Is the enemy beaten? The volunteers go home to till the fields, or do whatever jobs will provide them with a living.’
There is an abyss between this and Fascism.
But there was another reason I was looking at the gate. I had noticed something none of my sources mention. This is not like the much older gates of Orvieto or Arezzo, where there is, or was, an actual door that could be swung shut and barred. It is simply an arch over the road that you have to pass through to enter the town. This perhaps goes some way to explaining Major Migliazza’s fatal oversight when, on the morning of 29 July he failed to ‘secure the gate’. ‘A cart pulled across the entrance would have been enough,’ Hoffstetter protested. Garibaldi stripped the cavalryman of his command at once.
Beyond the gate, Via Santa Veronica Giuliani quickly morphs into Corso Giuseppe Garibaldi, racing straight as an arrow the 300 yards to the centre of Sant’Angelo. Everything is narrow, enclosed and fast. The buildings seem tall on either side, their bricks grey-brown. Walking into town it’s not hard to imagine the clatter of galloping hooves on the cobbles. The cries of the men must have boomed in the confined spaces. Gunshots and clashing sabres. Only a couple of tight side alleys right and left offer some opportunity to escape. Even the main piazza – Piazza Garibaldi of course – is only a slight widening of the space where three roads meet. It’s not a place you would want to be trapped in.
Our B & B is in one of the town’s finest palazzi by the central Caffè del Corso, whose quaint old street sign has a painted iron garibaldino with a red cap holding a tricolour. And on our palazzo too, which we chose because the claim is that Garibaldi stayed here, there is a plaque with the usual rhetoric: ‘Sublime in the sufferings of his country’ . . . ‘Prophet of better times to come’. But nowhere in the square or the town is there any mention of what actually happened here.
Nor does our landlady know about the massacre. Though she is very proud of the building’s connection with Garibaldi. It’s a fine late-sixteenth-century palazzo, with noble stone staircases and generous common spaces, except we’ve drawn the short straw, a tiny ground-floor room whose barred window gives directly onto the space where so much blood was shed.
‘I’ve never heard that story,’ she says, offering us a glass of water in an upstairs room among the sort of old paintings that don’t invite you to look beneath the varnish. We were sweating profusely. She was disconcerted on all fronts.
‘There is,’ she went on, ‘a small monument to the garibaldini, and the cannon they abandoned here, along the road to Urbania.’
‘Cannon?’ I almost fell off my chair.
‘About five kilometres away. It’s just a few minutes in the car.’ She frowned, remembering our circumstances. ‘I could lend you a bicycle if you like.’
When I explained that the garibaldini marched with only one cannon and had not left it near Sant’Angelo, she was indignant. How could I, a complete stranger, know about something that happened here in Sant’Angelo, where I’d never been, and so long ago? Was I saying the cannon was a hoax?
I was conciliatory. After all she had promised to be up for 6 a.m. to serve us breakfast. ‘We must go and look,’ I said.
But we were too tired to walk the three miles now. Stretched on the bed in our room, we opened Google Street View and clicked our way out of Sant’Angelo, over a brick bridge across the Metauro and west into the valley, which first widens, just as Hoffstetter describes, then, after a couple of miles, narrows, the hill to the left rising sharply from the edge of the road.
But no cannon. No monument.
Eleonora got bored. I clicked back and forth. This must have been the point, I realized, where the Austrians blocked the road. On the morning of the 29th a group of Garibaldi’s cavalry, pushing a little further towards the enemy, had fallen into an ambush; those who escaped said three men had been taken prisoner. It made sense there should be a monument here.
Suddenly I had it. The cannon was half hidden under trees. You had to click at exactly the right point. But there it was. A few yards of grass beside the road. An old stone memorial to the fore, then a large, more modern wall behind with a bas-relief. The cannon was to one side. Zooming in, I saw a slick Second World War howitzer.
Now it took only a moment to find out more. The wall with the bas-relief was a memorial to men of the Corpo Italiano di Liberazione who had died freeing Sant’Angelo from the Nazis in 1944. But it had been placed close to an old stone recalling the death of three unnamed garibaldini. The captured men had not been prisoners for long.
I would like to tell this drama exactly how it happened, but all the sources have different versions. We explored the small town and the winding streets that the General’s men once fled along, diving into any doorway that would open for them. The scene by the river has a languid charm. The deep shade of the alleys is welcome. Posters promised a bank holiday concert at 9 p.m.: ‘Music with Alfio, one of the Pirates’.
Towards eight, sitting outside the Caffè del Corso, we consulted a menu that was strong on white truffles. Three Arab women in burkas walked by, following an Arab man. And a large family of Indians. We hadn’t seen anything like this in the mountains before.
Garibaldi spent the 28th gathering his troops on the road between Sant’Angelo and the Austrian road block. Time was needed to gather provisions because there would be no food up that mule track. Back in Sant’Angelo he searched for guides and spent time consulting them. Forbes arrived with Anita, bringing the Second Legion. The men settled down for a tense night. Twenty-four Austrian battalions were encircling them. Intermittently, shots rang out.
And Bueno chose this moment to desert. He slipped off up the mule track in the small hours. With the army’s money chest. And twenty horsemen, says Hoffstetter. Ruggeri says seven. De Rossi, quoting Sacchi, says fifty. In any event, it was a severe blow. Bueno was an officer and close friend of the General’s. Who could the men trust now?
‘God be praised he’s gone!’ Hoffstetter has Garibaldi putting a bra
ve face on it. Others describe him as deeply upset. The reactions don’t seem incompatible. The two men went back a long way. Bueno was Brazilian, like Anita. A big, impulsive man, courageous and combative but hopelessly undisciplined. ‘His idea of military service,’ Hoffstetter tells us, ‘was to ride ahead, arrive first where we planned to camp, and get horizontal.’ Since Garibaldi was still hoping for news from Müller, knowing nothing of his desertion, he promoted Migliazza overall cavalry commander.
The honour would not last till lunchtime. The plan had been for an early-morning departure, but the horses and mules had to be watered, and the drop to the river was steep and exposed. It took time. Everything had to be done in the awareness that a battle could break out at any moment.
Forbes’s infantry was pulled out of Sant’Angelo towards 9 a.m., leaving just Migliazza and fifty cavalry in the town as a rearguard. At ten the baggage train began to wind north up the hill, followed by the First Legion. To draw attention away from the movement, Garibaldi sent a patrol to launch a fake attack on Archduke Ernst’s forces blocking the road ahead. As these men approached, the Austrians fell back. They appeared to be running. The commanding officer gave chase – foolishly, Hoffstetter observes – and was caught in a classic ambush.
‘The three men remembered in the monument.’
‘Right.’
But Migliazza also got caught. He had reckoned he had at least another hour in Sant’Angelo. He had scouts on the road from Mercatello to bring news of the Austrians advancing from the mountain pass. So far nothing. He told his men they could relax in the piazza a while. They could get themselves something to eat.
‘Like we’re doing now,’ I observed. ‘Right here.’
‘You’re winding me up,’ Eleonora objects. ‘Get on with it.’
‘I’m trying to put everything in place. I can’t understand how a guy who had done everything so right for so long could have made such an awful mistake. He hadn’t even ordered the men to keep their horses saddled.’
‘He was exhausted. He hadn’t slept. Promotion had gone to his head.’
‘Ruggeri manages to blame Bueno. For never disciplining the men. Belluzzi says the local people were very welcoming. Offering drinks and so on.’
‘Get on with it.’
Hoffstetter was holding his position at the base of the mule track where the men were filing away up the hill when he saw Migliazza galloping towards him, hatless, in desperate flight, with just a few companions behind. A party of Austrian hussars had burst into Sant’Angelo through Porta Albani.
Hoffstetter and Forbes halted the retreat and organized defensive positions in the last houses outside the town in case the Austrians followed up. Migliazza called for an immediate counter-attack on Sant’Angelo. His men were trapped in there. He himself had barely managed to fight his way out. Hoffstetter said a counter-attack would require an order from the General. It was a delicate moment, with most of the men already climbing the hill and the enemy on the other side less than a mile away. Frantic, Migliazza rode off up the mule track in search of Garibaldi.
Eleonora is getting impatient. ‘Tell me what actually happened in Sant’Angelo!’
Major General Stadion in Sant’Angelo in Vado to General D’Aspre in Florence, 29 July 1849
May I respectfully inform you that yesterday I followed the enemy from Borgo San Sepolcro to a few miles before Ganosa where I camped.
This morning I set out at 4 and at 9.30 came into contact with the enemy’s rearguard in Sant’Angelo in Vado. My cavalry cut a number of men to pieces and captured several horses. In this occasion I must make warm mention of Lieutenant Rehak of the Reuss Hussars.
‘No mention of the cock-up in the Tiber valley?’
‘None.’
‘And where is Ganosa?’
‘Nobody knows. Stadion constantly gets the names of places wrong. But he always says how early he got up, how brave his men are and how hard it is to find provisions since Garibaldi has taken them all before he gets there.’
From our table outside Caffè del Corso we look at the small space around us where it happened. Fifty horses here would have been quite a crowd. Then the men and their gear. Saddles and blankets and sabres and pistols. A survivor described the situation thus:
They had been taking it easy, some in people’s houses, some on the street. No guard had been left at the gate. The hussars, Hungarians, had surprised Migliazza’s scouts, who turned their horses back to the town at a gallop. The Austrian horses were faster. How many isn’t clear. Perhaps only thirty or forty in the first group. They galloped under the arch down the narrow street swinging their sabres.
Opposite us is a shop called Beauty. Then a florist’s and a tobacconist’s. A wine bar called Carpe Diem. And a butcher’s. Belluzzi collected anecdotes. Dragged from his horse and surrounded by hussars with their sabres raised, Captain Orlandi from Perugia surrendered, was pulled to his feet and shot. The same fate awaited another officer, running out of a house. Yet another tried to fire his pistol, only to find the powder was damp. His last disappointment.
Those who avoided the first assault found the hussars had sealed both the town’s gates. One man who fought his way out just in time had to have his hand amputated. Some ran into houses, where they were protected. Some climbed out of windows backing on to the river, forded the water and ran after the column. Others would still be hiding in the village a week later. One posed as a travelling tradesman and sold the Austrians ‘tobacco and aniseed and other things that marching soldiers appreciate’. Responding to warnings of severe punishments for anyone harbouring the rebels, Giustino Brega, a cobbler, informed the Austrians that a man was hiding in his house. The garibaldino was executed. Shunned by his fellow villagers, the cobbler went mad and died.
These are experiences that change a community and force people to take sides. But the most remarkable story is that of Captain Jourdan, the garibaldini’s chief engineer. He was with Migliazza, strapping the saddle on his horse, when the whirlwind fell upon him. Hooves and cries and blades. Pulling a pistol from his saddlebag he shot his first attacker dead, only to be struck down by a storm of sabre blows. One sliced the nape of the neck to the bone. Left for dead in a pool of blood, Jourdan dragged himself through a house and across the river to join the rearguard.
‘How he was on his feet with that terrible wound I couldn’t understand,’ says Hoffstetter, ‘yet he stood perfectly erect and was able to tell me in a calm firm voice what had happened.’ He wasn’t able to sit on Hoffstetter’s horse, though. Four men were dragging the captain up the hill when the enemy attacked again.
Suddenly, the Austrians were all around. ‘We would have been caught, had not Forbes and the Bersaglieri counter-attacked, then held the line in a farm building till the enemy withdrew.’ Finally a stretcher was found and eight men hauled Jourdan up the slope to where the garibaldini’s doctors were treating others. They pronounced him a hopeless case.
‘And?’
‘They carried him along anyway.’
‘I mean did he survive?’
‘We’ll see.’
Eleonora shook her head. ‘You’re teasing.’
The Austrians followed at ‘a respectful distance’, says Hoffstetter, but it was not the kind of terrain where they could deploy their heavy equipment, and the garibaldini had the better of it now. Forbes and his men, Ruggeri says, showed tireless determination and courage. At this point the column was straggling over miles on the steep narrow track. As soon as there was open ground, higher up, Garibaldi ordered a halt, got the men to regroup and addressed them all together. Hoffstetter doesn’t reveal what he said, only that he was ‘cheered more warmly than ever’. Before moving on, ‘the General shared his last cigar and some fruit with us’.
We drained the last of our beer and went to hear Alfio play his music. He was standing under an old-fashioned lantern a hundred yards from our palazzo. A middle-aged hippy in jacket and jeans, with long blonde hair. He’d set up a console for his
backing tracks, a microphone and four big speakers. And he was singing old pop songs. A few people in chairs outside the bar opposite were half listening, and that was it. Eleonora sang along to ‘Attenti al lupo’ – ‘Beware of the Wolf’. Alfio jived, swinging his mike back and forth. There was a curious feeling about the performance, cheerful and pathetic. As if he hadn’t quite given up hope an audience might turn up later.
Eleonora was still humming along as we climbed into bed. There was no double-glazing on the windows so the music was still very much with us. Lying awake, I thought of Migliazza. Reduced to the ranks, he accepted his disgrace. He didn’t desert. Garibaldi let deserters slip away because there was no point, he said, in hanging on to men who weren’t determined. Except in moments of battle when your comrades were counting on you; then a deserter must be shot. Over the coming days the Austrians shot any fugitives they could find. Stadion made a point of informing D’Aspre of his severity, perhaps to excuse himself for his lenience with Müller. In general the townsfolk protected the rebels, at great risk to themselves, but in the country the peasants were happy to steal the men’s weapons and hand them over to the Austrians.
This reminded me – and now Alfio was singing ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ – of something I’d read in Linda Colley’s great book Britons. When the British government launched a huge appeal for volunteers to meet the threatened Napoleonic invasion of 1797, they had expected the conservative country folk to respond, not the radicalized workers of town and factory. Instead the opposite was the case. Where people read newspapers and talked politics, where they had learned to criticize those who governed them, they could see the importance of not being overrun by a foreign power. They had a stake in the nation. When the police raided one group of political radicals in London, they found them trying to decide which regiment to volunteer for. Arguably, that patriotism earned those men the social reforms of the post-1815 years. It was the same consciousness that Garibaldi was seeking to form in Italy: the dream, the gamble, of self-government. Years later, when he visited England, he got his warmest welcome and raised the most cash among the dock workers of the north.