by Tim Parks
Yet now the end is coming – just a matter of days – we feel anxious about that too. About returning to our normal lives. It’s a strange feeling, a kind of nostalgia for adventure before the adventure is over. I wonder if the garibaldini felt this. As when Hoffstetter, watching the column snake up to the pass at Bocca Trabaria, thought that very soon many of these men would be dead. Everyone knew it couldn’t go on much longer. The noble company must disperse. Perhaps they were expecting a Morte d’Arthur moment. Garibaldi’s death even. One man was so disheartened, or in so much pain, he decided not to wait for the inevitable. A witness told Belluzzi how, just outside Macerata Feltria, she saw a straggler sit down on the edge of a ditch and pull off his boots. ‘He inspected his feet. Then he pointed his rifle under his chin and fired.’
DAY 24
30–31 July 1849 – 17 August 2019
Macerata Feltria, Mercato Vecchio, San Marino – 19 miles
Mercato Vecchio
There we are, then, on the road at 5.45. Dawn comes later than at the beginning of our journey. It’s still dark. Or rather, the road is moonlit. There’s a full moon high ahead, over the hills. Then the cool beauty of it is shattered by a tractor dragging some kind of heavy clanking device to destroy the vegetation on the verge. The big vehicle has a couple of spotlights and proceeds slowly and steadily, with menacing military precision.
The road here is a long straight climb. Proceeding steadily and slowly behind the garibaldini, the Austrians mopped up the stragglers. Four men resting in a shed were betrayed to the enemy by the local peasants. One escaped, jumping from a window. Three were shot. Six garibaldini were pulled from houses in Mercato Vecchio. ‘They showed me the point in the road where they were shot,’ says Belluzzi. ‘One dragged himself to a barn and howled all night, but the people were too scared to help.’
The bodies were burned in lime. The priest refused Christian burial. However, in Pietrarubbia another priest offered Austrian soldiers six scudi to spare a man’s life. That’s about two week’s wages. The redeemed garibaldino gave the priest his horse. Forty years on, these stories had become fable. The peasants who betrayed the four men in their barn had stolen money from the corpses. Despised by the community, they all died miserable deaths.
So they say.
The sun, behind us this morning, brought a golden glow to a high rock face beyond fields of stubble. Pietrarubbia. It’s a large monastery beneath a ruined fortress on a crest overlooking the valley that leads from Mercato Vecchio – a half-mile ahead of us now – to Carpegna three miles to the south-west. Occupying the complex during the night, Garibaldi was 600 feet above his enemies and had a panoramic view. An ambush set on the road behind was already in place when Hoffstetter passed after keeping the fires going in Macerata Feltria. Cavalry parties were sent off in the dark to Carpegna, but also northwards, as far as San Marino, and even Verucchio beyond, the main nodal point on the descent to the coast. At 4 a.m. the scouts heading to Carpegna encountered advancing Austrians.
This was one of Paumgartten’s battalions under the command of Major Holzer. It had been on Garibaldi’s trail since Todi. If readers are struggling with the sheer number of imperial armies marching across the Italian landscape, here is Generale De Rossi’s summary of the position on 30 July.
Behind him and to the east Garibaldi now had 17 battalions, 2 artillery batteries and 3 cavalry squadrons. These were the forces of General Stadion and Archduke Ernst, now under the overall command of the archduke. On his left flank, to the west, he had 1 battalion commanded by Major Holzer, while up ahead, to the north and east, beyond San Marino there was General Hahne, with 6 battalions, 1 artillery battery and 7 cavalry squadrons.
Garibaldi decided that if the Austrians from Carpegna wanted to attack, he was ready for a fight. He knew this force was relatively small. He was in a perfect position. The cannon was placed high on the ridge and looked guaranteed to cause havoc. The infantry were deployed in lines. The cavalry were covering the flanks. A short sharp victory would get his men’s tails up.
Dawn brought mist and cloud. There was rain in the air. The enemy backed off. Aside from skirmishes, the Austrian strategy throughout this campaign was to accept battle only if they had an overwhelming advantage in numbers. Both sides knew that General Stadion couldn’t be far away. Around midday Garibaldi launched a fake attack, under cover of which, on the other side of the hill, the baggage train was sent back north, down through Mercato Vecchio, then on up the steep slopes towards Montecopiolo and Villagrande. A fog came down, then heavy rain, and very soon the whole column was on the move again. Rather than following the rebels, Major Holzer chose to wait for Stadion. Further east, the archduke was approaching San Marino on the far side of the Apennines.
We marched into Mercato Vecchio at seven. Four uphill miles in an hour and fifteen. Not bad. The scattered houses had that shabby weathered look that seems inevitable in poorer mountain villages. There was no sign of a centre or anything resembling a monument, but the Bar Bracci was open for business.
I pushed through a bead curtain over the door. Serving at the counter was an ancient, wizened woman, who I quickly understood must be deaf. Her one customer was yelling at her. The place was tiny. I ordered coffees, then ordered again in a louder voice. ‘Due caffè! Due paste!’ Under wispy grey hair, deep wrinkles relaxed in a smile of welcome. ‘How nice to see a strange face in my shop,’ her voice quavered. ‘And so early in the morning!’ I said we were walking and how thankful we would be if she could rustle us up a couple of sandwiches.
‘He said he’d like a couple of sandwiches!’ the customer beside me shouted. She was a handsome, severe, smartly dressed woman with a strong local accent. When I smiled my thanks at her, she didn’t smile back.
I took the coffees and pastries to one of three tables outside. Looking around, we saw that we were in Via Garibaldi.
Ten minutes later, when I went back in to pay, the old lady had the sandwiches stacked and wrapped. She looked me in the eye and held the contact for a few seconds. ‘I want to thank you, signore,’ she said, ‘for visiting our village. I wish you a lovely day and I hope you will come back some time in the future.’
It seemed excessive. But she meant it. ‘And I thank you, signora,’ I said ‘for being open for us when we needed you.’
The other woman, who seemed a fixture, shook her head.
San Marino
We should really have climbed to Pietrarubbia. The road snakes up the hill to the monastery due south. A half-hour walk, Google said. Photos showed grey stone cloisters, steep grassy paths, a derelict tower built into outcropping rock. But after the climb and another half an hour to explore, there would be yet another half an hour’s steep descent, to Mercato Vecchio. Then the fifteen miles to San Marino, which by all accounts will be hard walking.
We wimped out. And I regret it. Because now, at the climax of this long drama, one wanted to stay as close as possible to the garibaldini’s experience. At the same time we didn’t want to suffer. Really suffer. We had no cause to. No worthy cause. So that I wonder if my regret isn’t more a yearning for a purpose, a real reason to climb to Pietrarubbia, the way those extraordinary plaques in Macerata Feltria and elsewhere show such a longing for some noble collective enterprise and a legendary hero to take the lead.
‘However, I fear we can’t really know the exact route they took,’ Belluzzi observes. Descending from Pietrarubbia in heavy rain the afternoon of the 30th many garibaldini lost their way. The paths were awash, the streams swollen. The cloud had come down and visibility was poor. There were ravines, cliffs, thick woods, waterfalls. Everything and everyone was soaked. The main body of the troops lost contact with the advance guard. The rearguard lost contact with the main column. Our various sources all give different versions. De Rossi has the main body of men spending the night of the 30th in defensive positions on Montecopiolo, just four miles north of Mercato Vecchio and a mile short of the borgo of Villagrande. But with more than a third of the
men missing, he says.
Ruggeri doesn’t seem to know where they were, but speaks of wandering about in a vast beech wood, like children in a fairy tale. The rain had stopped. Garibaldi and some other horsemen, he says, rode tirelessly back and forth to gather stragglers and point the way. Hoffstetter talks about entering the Conca valley at nightfall. That would be north and east of Montecopiolo. Towards eleven the men rested in a high clearing, he says, in an endless forest, while he rode off in search of the baggage train, which he located towards midnight, leading the mules back in the dark. There was hay, he tells us, in a peasant’s barn. But no food. No water. ‘The march resumed around one o’clock, in the most splendid moonlight, and strict silence.’
If they did get lost, the men now knew that they were heading for San Marino. This tiny independent state of just twenty-three square miles was politically neutral. Theoretically neither the Austrians nor the garibaldini could enter it. The plan, as Sacchi understood, was to use the territory as a shield, passing quickly to the west of the city itself, so that the Archduke Ernst, to the east, on the coast side, couldn’t get at them; then to turn sharply right, through Verucchio and dive down to the sea. However, a message brought during the night changed everything.
Garibaldi still had about 500 horsemen at his service. He was still asking them to perform miracles of reconnaissance and subterfuge. And diplomacy. A party of thirteen horsemen under the twenty-three-year-old Francesco Nullo had been sent direct from Macerata Feltria on the night of the 29th to ask the Captains Regent, the two leaders of San Marino, to grant the garibaldini safe and rapid passage. The Sammarinesi had a tradition of sheltering Risorgimento patriots from the Austrian police. However, in the chaos that was the afternoon and evening of the 30th none of the cavalry parties managed to find their way back to the column. So Nullo, who was to be a hero of the Sicilian campaign in 1860, didn’t manage to bring the Regents’ refusal. Any incursion from Garibaldi, wrote Captain Regent Domenico Maria Belzoppi, would offer the Austrians the excuse for an invasion and very likely end San Marino’s independent status once and for all.
Having heard nothing from Nullo, during the afternoon of the 30th Garibaldi sent Ugo Bassi to San Marino to make the same request. Again the order was to ride as swiftly as possible and bring back a positive response. Again no answer had arrived as the column climbed the steep slopes north and east from Villagrande in the dark.
But one cavalry party did get through. And Luigi Migliazza’s name comes up again. Barely twenty-four hours after stripping him of his command, on the morning of 30 July Garibaldi had sent Migliazza beyond San Marino to check out the town of Verucchio and warn the locals to prepare rations for them. Somehow, in the night, in the endless forest, Migliazza found the resting garibaldini and told the General that Verucchio was already occupied by a large force of Austrians. These were the six battalions of General Hahne. Their encirclement was complete.
As if this wasn’t enough, some hours later another messenger intercepted the column on the slopes of Monte San Paolo. But not a garibaldino. Consoling himself with a glass of wine after the Captains Regent had once again refused the General’s request to pass through their territory, Ugo Bassi looked out of the windows of the Caffè Simoncini, high up on the western side of the city, and saw in the plain below what could only be the campfires of a considerable army. Marching from Verucchio, the Austrians were already in San Marino. With or without permission. Bassi begged the café’s proprietor to find a man capable of reaching the column in the dark, to warn Garibaldi not to approach the state, as planned, from the west.
The messenger’s name was Francesco della Balda. When he finally found the rebels he was taken for a spy and could easily have been shot. But eventually his message got through. Garibaldi does not seem to have given Hoffstetter any inkling of all this bad news. He did not need to know.
Belluzzi made the trip from Macerata Feltria to San Marino on a donkey, during a summer holiday in the 1890s. He gives his route as Mercato Vecchio, Pietrarubbia, Ca’ dei Nanni, Montecopiolo, Serra Bruciata, Monte San Paolo. He had a guide, he says, and it took ten hours. Or rather they had a guide; it’s one of the rare occasions when Belluzzi mentions his travelling companion, and the only time he names him. He tells us that the beech forest Ruggeri speaks of must have been, according to their guide, the oak forest of Serra Bruciata, Burned Mountain. And he was determined to visit it.
I couldn’t find Serra Bruciata on any map, but eventually I hunted down a use of the name on a local website. It was 3000 feet up on a ridge above the Conca valley, four miles east of Montecopiolo. Which made sense. A place that now went by the name of Cuccagna, Cockaigne. Belluzzi writes, ‘So the column rested in the immense forest, where I too, together with my young travelling companion, Engineer Nerio Pancerasi, whose sudden death in Constantinople I still mourn, enjoyed an hour of the most sweet repose.’
Postponing our repose until our B & B in San Marino, we followed the road from Mercato Vecchio to Ponte Cappuccini, then began the steep climb to Villagrande. I remember a magnificent mimosa tree and an ancient man propped on his hoe in a vegetable garden that seemed tropically dense. He raised his wrinkled face for a moment at the click of our poles but did not return our greeting. Further on, in red paint on an ugly prefab that bore the legend ROAD SERVICES, PROVINCIA DI PESARO E URBINO, someone had scrawled THE MOUNTAINS ARE PARTISANS! It was an idea we instinctively understood. In the mountains, there you feel free.
Moments later our hearts were lifted again by the first sight of the sea. Far, far away to the right, across twenty miles of wooded hills, a long sunny sparkle lit the horizon. We stopped and gazed in thrall to powerful emotions of achievement and arrival: on foot, all the way from Rome, and now the northern Adriatic was in sight. We embraced. And Eleonora reflected that it really was too bad that, with the weather so grim that afternoon, the garibaldini weren’t able to see it. They would have to wait for the following dawn. Hoffstetter:
We had crossed several high open fields, then, always in silence, followed a paved road in a long gully, from which we emerged, as the sun rose, to find ourselves on the eastern slopes of the Apennines.
Magnificent view! Stretching away beneath us was an endless plain, and beyond it the sea, in all its majesty. Like proud swans, gilded in sunshine, a multitude of ships ploughed a surface that shone like a mirror, while dark blue waves gently greeted the long green shore where, in a generous scatter, we could see Pesaro, Rimini, Cesenatico . . . Everyone’s eyes moved anxiously across the redeeming deep towards the same goal, and in our souls we saw, rising from the blueness, our last star, last hope, the city of lagoons!
One surely can’t see Venice from this position. But it was cheering to imagine it. He does say, ‘in our souls’. And writing a year or so after the event, without the benefit of digital photographs, which so usefully indicate the exact time they were taken, he is probably conflating moments that must have been some distance apart. The next paragraph opens, ‘Between the mountains and Rimini, rising perpendicular from the plain is an immense rocky crag. The Republic of San Marino. The city covers just a small part of it, built above a sheer rock wall, while the summit is crowned with two ancient castles . . . Everyone, officers and men, pushed forward in astonishment to admire this splendid picture.’
So near and yet so far. Garibaldi knew now that the chances of fighting his way to the sea were minimal. He was between a rock and a hard place. He had left Rome swearing never to surrender to a foreign power on Italian soil. But now if he did not surrender, around 2000 tired men would very likely be massacred and shot. Not to mention his wife and himself. Once again, he organized his troops for the four hours’ march that remained: first a 1000-foot dive into the deep gorge, at the bottom of which was the border, then 800 feet up the precipitous rocky slopes to the eastern gate of San Marino. They must arrive, he ordered, as soon as possible, before the Austrians completely surrounded the state. Then, taking just a small escort, he rode on ahead t
o plead with the Captains Regent himself. So he was not present when disaster struck.
Towards Villagrande, having used the road to cross all the deep little ravines that slowed the garibaldini down, we left Montecopiolo to our left and struck up north-east on a path that eventually leads to Serra Bruciata, now Cuccagna. It was surely the most spectacular of all our walks, a Lord of the Rings landscape of mountain, crag and forest, everywhere gorse and blackberries, heath and heather. The garibaldini must have felt they were simultaneously in a dream and a nightmare.
We walked through deep woods and across open meadows. The path was stony and rugged and hard on the feet, or it was dusty and black and soft. Sometimes grassy. These uplands are constantly changing, fluid, as if the land shifted with the shifting cirrus, sometimes soft and rolling, but then knotting up in Gothic crags, plunging into dark ravines. Or the turfy surface of a slope breaks into deep crusty scars. You can never be sure how near or far anything is because the gorges suddenly fall away where you thought the ground was solid. In a turn of the head you move from the tame bucolic of Samuel Palmer to the wild romance of Casper Friedrich. Orchard to precipice.
Meantime, the hot sun, hazy air and a general sense of vastness induces a slow stupefaction. You are at once happy and exhausted. You want the walk to last for ever and you want it to end now. Never hope, I told myself at one point, in a voice that seemed to come from some Buddhist koan, that the climb is over. There is always more. It was one of those moments when the ridge you’d set your sights on turns out to be just the beginning of an even steeper slope. The calves stiffen. On the other hand, the voice went on, never fear that the climb will go on for ever. Everything ends. Of course. So just walk. Without hope or fear. Just enjoy.