GARIBALDI'S DEFENCE

OF THE

ROMAN REPUBLIC

INTRODUCTION

MOST of us, when we visit Rome, go up on the morning after our arrival to the heights of the Janiculum, and, standing on the terrace in front of San Pietro in Montorio, look back across the Tiber at the city spread beneath our feet, in all its mellow tints of white, and red, and brown, broken here and there by masses of dark green pine and cypress, and by shining cupolas raised to the sun. There it all lies beneath us, the heart of Europe and the living chronicle of man's long march to civilisation; for there, we know, are the well-proportioned piazzas with their ancient columns and their fountains splashing in shade and sun around the sculptured water-gods of the Renaissance; the Forum won back by the spade; and the first monuments of the Christian Conquest. There rise the naked hulks of giant ruins stripped of their imperial grandeur long ago by hungry generations of Papal architects; and there, on the outskirts of the town, is the Pyramid that keeps watch over the graves. As we look down we feel the presence of all the centuries of European history, a score of civilisations dead and lying in state one beside the other; and in the midst of their eternal monuments mankind still swarms and labours, after all its strange and varied experience, still intent to live, still busily weaving the remote future out of the immemorial past.

B

And then, raising our eyes to the far horizon, we see the well-known shapes of those hills of great name, shapes moulded by the chance spasms of volcanoes, as they sank namelessly to rest long ago, leaving against the sky ridges and peaks to which in after days Consuls, Emperors, and Popes of Rome looked every morning as on familiar faces. There, to the north, is the spine of Soracte, famous for no reason except that Horace saw it from Rome-and yet so famous; to the east, grey, gaunt Lucretilis pointing at the blue sky and hiding the valley of his Digentian farm; to the south, the Alban Mount itself, the shape of which, never long out of sight, is like the presiding genius of the city-Alba haunting us still as it haunted Romulus and those who left its wooded slopes to colonise the Tiber bank, and Garibaldi as he ordered the battle day by day for a summer month on this very Mount Janiculum.

Across the fifteen miles that lie between the roofs of the capital and this great semi-circle of sacred hills, rolls sea-like the Campagna in waves of bare, open country. Over it, from the day when the Consul Aulus led out his host to the Porcian height yonder, to the day when Italy entered Rome under Victor Emmanuel, the armies of many nations, in many ages, for many causes, have come and gone, and each could have been seen slowly crawling over the vast plain. In the solemn hush of the distance on which we gaze, through the clear morning air, it seems as if that semi-circle of mountains were the seats of a Greek theatre whereon some audience of patient gods were watching an endless play, as if Rome were the stage on which their looks were centred from the distant hills to north and east and south, while behind, in the west, meet sea and sky, a background before which the short-lived actors move. It was in this, the greatest theatre in the world, the Eternal City, 'Sul teatro delle maggiori grandezze del mondo, nell' Urbe,' as Garibaldi called it, that the most significant and moving scene of the Risorgimento was played out.

'See Clough's Amours de Voyage, end of Canto I, written during the Siege, 1849. 2 Mem. 223.

And yet among the English visitors who go on from the platform of San Pietro in Montorio to view the colossal equestrian figure of Garibaldi which holds the Janiculan sky-line, not many are aware how very close to this statue raged some of the fiercest fights in which he ever took part. For his sake, or for Italy's, turn aside a few steps to the Porta San Pancrazio. Standing under its archway we look out of Rome westward, up a country road, which runs straight for two hundred yards, and then splits off to right and left. At the forking of the ways our view from the city gate is blocked by the entrance to a beautiful garden, the grounds of the Pamfili-Doria. Inside that garden we see a slope of grass, with a path running up it to an ornamental arch, which now stands where the Villa Corsini once stood. Between the Porta San Pancrazio and this other archway on the hill top, some four hundred paces away, Italy poured out her best blood. On that narrow white road, and up that green slope, and in the old battered Villa Vascello on the right of the roadway (still left like Hougoumont in honourable ruin) were mowed down the chosen youth of Italy, the men who would have been called to make her laws and lead her armies, and write her songs and history, when her day came, but that they judged it necessary to die here in order that her day should come. was here that Italy bought Rome, at the price of their blood-here at the San Pancrazio Gate, in 1849, that her claim on Rome was staked out and paid for; twenty-one years passed, and then, in 1870, the debt was acquitted.

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That there should ever have been a time when Mazzini ruled Rome and Garibaldi defended her walls, sounds like a poet's dream. In this book I wish to record the facts that gave shape to that dream, to tell the story of the Siege of Rome, than which there is no more moving incident in modern history; and, in the last six chapters, to narrate the events that followed as an epilogue to the siege-the Retreat and Escape of Garibaldi, a story no less poetical and no less dear to Italy's heart, though more neglected

by English writers, because of its smaller political importance. These later events are the march of Garibaldi across Italy, hunted by the French, Spanish and Neapolitan forces through Umbria and Tuscany, into a network of four armies of Austrians spread over northern Umbria and the Romagna; the extraordinary feats of skill and energy with which the greatest of guerilla chiefs again and again disentangled his little band of followers from surrounding hosts, and carried them across the Apennine watershed to the Adriatic sea-board; the final hunting of them into the territories of the Republic of San Marino, by Austrians, close on their heels, cruel as the dragoons of Claverhouse, killing or torturing all those whom they caught. Then the disbanding of the bulk of the Roman forces on the friendly neutral territory of the hill Republic, and Garibaldi's rush to the coast, through the enemy's cordon, with the last two hundred, who would not, merely to save their lives, give up the sacred war so long as Venice held out; their midnight embarkation in the fishing boats at Cesenatico; their fatal meeting, on the way to Venice, with the Austrian gun-boats; the re-landing, among the lagoons north of Ravenna, of Garibaldi with his dying wife in his arms, and Ugo Bassi, Ciceruacchio and a dozen more comrades, all to perish within a few days, except (strangest fortune!) Garibaldi and one other. I shall tell how the man of destiny, wandering in the marshes and the pineforest of Ravenna, among regiments of soldiers seeking for his life as for the prize of the war, was preserved by the strange working of chance, by the iron courage and endurance of the worn Odysseus himself, and by the craft, energy, and devotion of the Romagnuols, who guarded him at peril of their lives, as the West countrymen after Worcester fight guarded a less precious treasure.

All this, and his escape back across the breadth of Italy to the Western sea, and embarkation in the Tuscan Maremma for lands of refuge where he could await his great day, will, together with the siege of Rome, form the principal theme of the book. The first half-dozen chapters

must serve to introduce the subject to those who are not familiar with the history of Italy and of Garibaldi.

I have concealed nothing prosaic and nothing discreditable-neither Garibaldi's mistakes during the siege, nor the misconduct of some of his associates, nor the hostility with which part of the rural population regarded the red-shirts.

Hoping to make the story of the defence of Rome, of the retreat of the Garibaldians and the escape of their chief stand out in all its details of place and colouring, I have not only visited the scenes in the capital and near it, but have walked along the whole route traversed by Garibaldi's column from the gate of Rome to Cesenatico on the Adriatic, and have visited the scenes of his adventures near Comacchio and Ravenna. It would, perhaps, be impossible to find in all Europe a district more enchanting to the eye by its shapes, its colours, its atmosphere, or one more filled with famous towns, rivers and mountains, than the valleys of Tiber, Nar, Clanis, Metaurus and Rubicon, across which they marched. Through this land of old beauty I have followed on foot their track of pain and death, with such a knowledge of where they went, and how they fared each day, as is not often the fortune of pilgrims who trace the steps of heroes. To come, in solitary places, upon the very wayside fountains at which, as the survivors have recorded, they slaked their raging thirst, and at other turns of the road upon springs where they found no water that terrible July; to stand on the hill whence they last saw the dome of St. Peter's, and that other hill where the face of Garibaldi brightened at sight of the Adriatic; to traverse the oak woods through which they marched under the stars; or where they slept through the long Italian noonday; to draw breath in the quiet monastery gardens, perched high over hills of olive and plains of vine, wherein they tasted brief hours of green coolness and repose; to scale the bare mountains up which they dragged their little piece of cannon, and descend the gorge where at the last they

This extremely detailed knowledge we owe, mainly, to two men, Hoffstetter and Belluzzi. (See Bibliography below.)