Smoke (and Mirrors) Without Fire?

This year is the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Giuseppe Garibaldi, born in Nice in 1807. When Garibaldi was born there, Nice (or Nizza) was Italian-speaking and had been ruled by the House of Savoy (Casa Savoia) since 1388; it was ceded to France in 1860 as a trade-off in the Unification of Italy under the Savoy monarchy. Thinking perhaps of the lack of self-interest and the talent for self-effacement that he shared with Roman Republican hero Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, British historian A. J. P. Taylor declared: “Garibaldi is the only wholly admirable figure in modern history.”

Cincinnatus was appointed dictator in an emergency in 458 B.C., when Minucius was besieged by the warlike Aequi tribe on Cold Mountain (Mons Algidus) in the Alban hills. He defeated the Aequi but, despite invitations to stay on, he resigned his dictatorship after sixteen days and returned to the relative obscurity of his farm across the Tiber. In Garibaldi’s case, the place he went to to step out of the public eye was the barren wind-swept little island of Caprera off the northeast shore of Sardinia, where you can still visit his house and his tomb.

A. J. P. Taylor’s enthusiasm for Garibaldi has not always been shared by contemporary historians. It was certainly shared by George Macaulay Trevelyan, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, who devoted a classic trilogy—Garibaldi’s Defence of the Roman Republic (1907), Garibaldi and the Thousand (1909) and Garibaldi and the Making of Italy (1911)—to the Hero of Two Worlds, as the Italians know him. Come to that, the whole of the Italian Risorgimento has met with a mixed reception from the revaluators or professional debunkers.

This week’s New Yorker magazine (July 9 & 16, 2007) features a review, entitled “The Insurgent: Garibaldi and his Enemies,” of another academic historian’s somewhat jaundiced view of Garibaldi. The reviewer is novelist and essayist Tim Parks, author, among several other fine books, of Italian Neighbours: An Englishman in Verona (1992), who lives and teaches in Italy and knows Italian mores like few others. The volume under review is Lucy Riall’s  Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (Yale, 2007, published more or less simultaneously in Italian by Laterza), which presents Garibaldi’s career in Brazil and Uraguay—the two countries recently issued commemorative postage stamps—as well as in Italy as so much smoke and mirrors, a well-managed Victorian publicity stunt. Parks defended General Garibaldi against another skeptical account—cultural historian Daniel Pick’s Rome or Death: The Obsessions of General Garibaldi (Jonathan Cape, 2005, Random House, 2006)—in the July 21, 2005 issue of the London Review of Books. There, Parks’ article, which discussed among other things Garibaldi’s support for a well-meaning but anti-historical public health project to reroute the Tiber away from Rome, was entitled “Stewing Waters”.

As Parks points out, there was certainly no need to defend Garibaldi against his followers. Garibaldi fancied himself as an author of historical fiction, and one of his admirers was a literary colleague, the most important Italian fiction writer between Alessandro Manzoni and Giuseppe Verga. Ippolito Nievo (1831-61) joined the Expedition of the One Thousand and fought alongside the General in Sicily. He died in fact at sea between Palermo and Naples, carrying the records of the Sicilian campaign back to the north, when the ship on which he was a passenger foundered. His ironically named Confessioni di un septuagenario (he died at 29) was published posthumously in 1867. The work was partially translated into English as The Castle of Fratta and is available in a Greenwood Reprint.

Nievo dedicated a naively enthusiastic poem, entitled “The General”, to his commander and companion in arms.  It goes in part like this: “He has something in his eye / that shines forth from his soul / and seems to incline people / to go down on bended knee; / even in a thronging square / I have seen him step courteously and humanely through the crowd / and offer his hand to the girls. // Whether on flower-strewn streets / or in the midst of songs and music / or among whistling bullets / and the blasts of cannons, / he was born with a smile / and he cannot change his nature. / Only to the enemy is his eye terrible, / and to the coward. // Exhausted, in disorder, / they sometimes mill around him, / the soldiers press him. / With a word he revives them, / he shares their many hardships, / he shares their scanty sleep, / and never once did it occur to him / to observe that they were ragged. // His horse, aware perhaps / of who is in the saddle, / gallops over all terrain / and never sets a foot wrong. / Sometimes, white with foaming lather, / he halts, and on either side / the jostling soldiers / applaud their living god.”

Generals Washington or Wellington could hardly have asked for greater adulation. But then, maybe Nievo was part of the scam.

If it isn't too late you might want to add a day trip to the walled city of Ferrara (or an overnight stopover) to your summer itinerary. Less than half an hour north of Bologna on the line to Padua and Venice (all trains between Rome and Florence and Venice therefore pass through it), the intriguing and elegant medieval and renaissance city center with its magnificent Castle and Cathedral is only five minutes from the station by bus. From the Middle Ages till the end of the sixteenth century, the lords of Ferrara were the Este family. Like the other noble families of Italy, the second sons often went into the Church, and the Este produced a number of cardinals. The splendid Villa d'Este in Tivoli near Rome with its fantastic fountains was built by one of them, Ippolito d'Este. At the turn of the sixteenth century, between 1492 and 1510, Duke Ercole d'Este revolutionized the city's layout hiring architect Biagio Rossetti to design the broad and elegant streets lined with sumptuous palaces (the unmissable Palazzo dei Diamanti modern art museum is one of them) of the so-called Addizione Erculea. The family were great patrons of art and letters, and yesterday, July 4, an important exhibit, Cosmè Tura and Francesco Del Cossa, l'arte a Ferrara nell'età di Borso d'Este was inaugurated by Francesco Rutelli, Minister of Culture, in the Church of Santa Marta. (Controversial Vittorio Sgarbi, an art historian and TV personality from Ferrara who served in the former Berlusconi government, was conspicuous by his absence.) In October 2007, by the way, the gallery of the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg is planning to open an Italian exhibition space in Ferrara. Cossa and Tura collaborated with Ercole de' Roberti and a team of Ferrarese painters (including Baldassare, a bastard son of Duke Borso) to complete the cycle of frescos in the Salone dei mesi at the summer palace of Schifanoia (it means something along the lines of "Begone, Dull Care") in an whirlwind two-year campaign (1469-70). For centuries, these and other Quattrocento Ferrarese masters took a back seat to the Florentine hegemonists pushed by Mannerist painter Giorgio Vasari until University of Bologna art historian Roberto Longhi rediscovered them in his Officina ferrarese (1934). The frescos at Schifanoia inspired some of Ezra Pound's Cantos. If Ezra was an antisemite (despite his biblical name), the Este family were not, and in 1492 they invited the Jews exiled from Spain to settle in Ferrara. Ferrara still had a thriving Jewish community in the 1930s, when Giorgio Bassani (a novelist from Ferrara we recently met in Acquerello italiano) wrote about the plight of Ferrara's for the most part "assimilated" Jews, capturing their consternation when their Fascist neighbors decided after nearly 500 years that they were after all different and shipped them off to Auschwitz. Some of the greatest names in renaissance Italian literature--Matteo Maria Boiardo, Ludovico Ariosto, authors of delightfully long narrative poems (you don't want them to end) celebrating the feats and follies of the knightly hero Orlando (Roland), as well as the hapless Torquato Tasso, author of an epic poem on the First Crusade, Jerusalem Delivered, that influenced John Milton--are associated with Ferrara. Tasso, born in Sorrento, actually went crazy there and you can visit the cell where they locked him up. Ferrara has a place in the history of Italian cinema too. Luchino Visconti, just back from France, where he served as assistant to director Jean Renoir, the son of the painter, set his magnificent Ossessione (1942), his take on James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice (and far and away the best film version), in the countryside outside Ferrara. It is the provincial capital where the protagonists Clara Calamai and Massimo Girotti buy the insurance on her husband. Another of Ferrara's native sons is Michelangelo Antonioni (who has his own museum), the poet of late 20th-century alienation (L'avventura 1959, La notte, 1961, L'eclisse 1964, Blow Up 1966) and exquisite industrial decay (Deserto rosso 1964). Not far from Ferrara is the Po Delta and the Adriatic beaches of the Lidi ferraresi and the Lido di Spina, a Greco-Etruscan port dating back at least the fifth century B.C. (if not to the descendants of the Argonauts), which, legend has it, witnessed the fall of Phaethon who mishandled the chariot of the Sun and Icarus who flew too close to it and melted his waxen wings. Hot stuff!