The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (75 page)

He was in for a surprise. The Romans, although they had little hope of defending their city against a trained and well-equipped army, were busy preparing themselves for the fight. Their own forces, such as they were, consisted of the regular papal troops of the line, the
carabinieri
–a special corps of the Italian army entrusted with police duties–the 1,000-strong Civic Guard, the volunteer regiments raised in the city amounting to some 1,400, and–by no means the least formidable–the populace itself, with every weapon it could lay its hands on. But their total numbers were still pathetically small, and great was their jubilation when, on the 27th, Garibaldi rode into the city at the head of 1,300 legionaries which he had gathered in the Romagna. Two days later there followed a regiment of Lombard
bersaglieri
, with their distinctive broad-brimmed hats and swaying plumes of black-green cock’s feathers. The defenders were gathering in strength, but the odds were still heavily against them and they knew it.

That first battle for Rome was fought on 30 April. The day was saved by Oudinot’s ignorance and incomprehension. He had brought no siege guns with him, and no scaling-ladders; it was only when his column, advancing towards the Vatican and the Janiculum hill, was greeted by bursts of cannon-fire that he began to realise the full danger of his situation. Soon afterwards Garibaldi’s legion swept down upon him, swiftly followed by the
bersaglieri
lancers. For six hours he and his men fought back as well as they could, but as evening fell they could only admit defeat and take the long road back to Civitavecchia. They had lost 500 killed or wounded, with 365 taken prisoner, but perhaps the humiliation had been worst of all.

That night all Rome was illuminated in celebration, but no one pretended that the French were not going to return. The French had now learned that Rome was to be a tougher nut to crack than they had expected; nonetheless, they intended to crack it. Little over a month later–during which time Garibaldi, with his legionaries and the
bersaglieri
, marched south to meet an invading Neapolitan army and effortlessly expelled it from republican territory–Oudinot had received the reinforcements he had requested, and it was with 20,000 men behind him and vastly improved armament that, on 3 June, he marched on Rome for the second time.

Advancing as he was from the west, his primary objectives were the historic Villa Pamfili and Villa Corsini, high on the Janiculum hill. By the end of the day both were safely in his hands, his guns drawn up into position. Rome was effectively doomed. The defenders fought back superbly for nearly a month, but on the morning of 30 June Mazzini addressed the Assembly. There were, he told them, three possibilities: they could surrender; they could continue the fight and die in the streets; or they could retire to the hills and continue the struggle. Around midday Garibaldi appeared, covered in dust, his red shirt soaked in blood and sweat; his mind was made up. Surrender was obviously out of the question. Street fighting, he pointed out, was also impossible; when Trastevere
²⁴⁵
was abandoned–as it would have to be–French guns could simply destroy the city. The hills, then, it would have to be. ‘
Dovunque saremo
,’ he told them, ‘
colà sarà Roma
.’
²⁴⁶

Strangely enough, the majority of the deputies disagreed, choosing a fourth possibility: not to surrender, but to declare a ceasefire and remain in Rome. This was a course which Mazzini appeared not to have previously considered; eventually, however, he decided to adopt it himself. The French, who had been led to believe that he was a hated tyrant, were astonished to see a man who walked fearlessly through the streets hailed and greeted with respect wherever he went, to the point where they did not dare to arrest him. But Mazzini knew that even if he remained at liberty he would henceforth be powerless, and after a few days he slipped back to London. ‘Italy is my country,’ he used to say, ‘but England is my home–if I have one.’

Garibaldi, meanwhile, appealed for volunteers. ‘I offer,’ he declared, ‘neither pay, nor board, nor lodging; I offer only hunger, thirst, forced marches, battle and death. Let him who loves his country in his heart, and not with his lips only, follow me.’ Four thousand men hastened to join him, though it was to be little more than a handful that a month later, having escaped the attentions of no less than three enemy armies, dragged itself to refuge in the little republic of San Marino.
²⁴⁷
There the troop disbanded, and Garibaldi, with Anita and a few faithful followers, set off for the only Italian republic which was still fighting for survival: Venice.

Alas, the vessel in which they sailed was intercepted by an Austrian warship. Garibaldi was forced to disembark on a remote stretch of the coast–now known as Porto Garibaldi–and before he could reach the Venetian lagoon his beloved Anita died in his arms. Temporarily, the spirit went out of him. Once again he left Italy, and a few weeks later arrived in New York, there to begin his second period of American exile.

Even if Garibaldi had managed to reach Venice, there was little that he could have done. All through the previous winter, despite an intermittent Austrian blockade, Daniele Manin had concentrated on building up an effective army–a task which he entrusted to General Pepe, who cheerfully proclaimed his readiness to give his life for Italy and the Venetian Republic. As a Calabrian, Pepe proved able to recruit a large number of officers and men formerly in the Neapolitan army; the result, by the beginning of April 1849, was a reasonably disciplined fighting force some 20,000 strong, which gave the Assembly the confidence to publish a heroic decree: ‘Venice will resist Austria at all costs. President Manin is invested, for that purpose, with unlimited powers.’

The blockade continued until May 1849, when the Austrian commander finally accepted that a lagoon ninety miles in circumference could never be completely cordoned off, while a city of some 200,000 inhabitants would take a long time to starve; there was nothing for it but a full military siege. The first target was the fort at Malghera (now Marghera), at the mainland end of the railway bridge. After three weeks’ bombardment it finally gave in, but the bridge itself, with several other makeshift forts along its length, somehow held. Early in July the Austrians had the extraordinary idea of trying to drop bombs on Venice from a fleet of large balloons; the experiment proved a fiasco and gave the Venetians at least something to laugh about–but they had very little else. The siege had at last given rise to a serious shortage of food, and as the month wore on they found themselves on the brink of famine. Even fish–the Venetian staple–was in short supply, since the amount furnished by the lagoon was hopelessly inadequate for the city’s population. Bread rationing was introduced, but the situation continued to deteriorate. On 28 July Manin formally asked the members of the Assembly whether it was possible for Venice to resist any longer; his hearers, however, were determined to fight to the end.

On the night of the 29th, the bombardment of Venice began in earnest. It was confined to the western half of the city, if only because the Austrian guns, even when raised to their highest elevation, could lob their cannonballs no further; the Piazza was fortunately just out of range. Fortunately, too, the vast majority of the projectiles were merely balls, and not shells that exploded on impact. The Austrians frequently made them red-hot before firing, but there were not enough furnaces to heat them all and the occasional small fire that resulted could normally be dealt with by the Venetian fire brigade–which now included Daniele Manin as one of its members.

Nevertheless, the sheer intensity of the bombardment over the next three and a half weeks could not fail to take its toll on Venetian morale, and by now the city had fallen victim to the greatest scourge of all: cholera. By the end of July the disease was raging in every quarter of the city. In the heat of August it grew worse still, especially in the hideously overcrowded easternmost region of Castello, to which most of the people from the exposed western areas had fled. The grave-diggers could not hope to keep pace–burial is anyway a difficult process in Venice–and the corpses awaiting their attention remained piled up in the
campo
of Venice’s old cathedral, S. Pietro di Castello. The smell, we are told, was asphyxiating.

It was plain that the end was near. On 19 August two gondolas set off for Mestre flying white flags; three days later, agreement was reached. The Austrian terms were surprisingly generous. Their principal requirement was that all officers and all Italian soldiers who were subjects of the Empire and had fought against it should leave Venice at once; forty leading Venetians were also to be expelled. On 27 August the Austrians reoccupied the city. That same afternoon the French ship
Pluton
sailed from the Giudecca. On board were, with thirty-seven others, Guglielmo Pepe, Niccolò Tommaseo and Daniele Manin.

Manin, with his wife and daughter, settled in Paris, where he wrote articles for the French papers and gave lessons in Italian. By now he had given up his republican ideals; his sights, like Mazzini’s, were set on his country’s unification. ‘I am convinced,’ he wrote, ‘that our first task is to make Italy a reality…the republican party declares to the house of Savoy: “If you create Italy, we are with you; if not, not.” ’ He died in Paris on 22 September 1857, aged fifty-three. Eleven years later his remains were brought back to Venice and placed in a specially designed tomb against the north wall of St Mark’s. Outside his house in the former Campo S. Paternian–now Campo Manin–there crouches a huge bronze lion, angrily lashing his tail.

Had the
quarantotto
been in vain? By the autumn of 1849 it certainly seemed so. The Austrians were back in Venice and in Lombardy; Pius IX had returned to a French-occupied Rome; in Naples, King Bomba had torn up the constitution and once more wielded absolute power; Florence, Modena and Parma, all under Austrian protection, were in much the same state. In the whole peninsula, only Piedmont remained free–but Piedmont too had changed. The tall, handsome, idealistic Charles Albert was dead. His son and successor, Victor Emmanuel II, was short, squat and unusually ugly, principally interested–or so it seemed–in hunting and women. But he was a good deal more intelligent than he looked; despite his genuine shyness and awkwardness in public, politically speaking he missed very few tricks. It is hard to imagine the Risorgimento without him.

Yet even Victor Emmanuel might have foundered had it not been for his Chief Minister, Camillo Cavour, who succeeded the strongly anticlerical Massimo d’Azeglio at the end of 1852 and remained in power, with very brief intermissions, for the next nine years–years which were crucial for Italy. Cavour’s appearance, like that of his master, was deceptive. Short and pot-bellied, with a blotchy complexion, thinning hair and spectacles that looked more like goggles, he was shabbily dressed and at first acquaintance distinctly unprepossessing. His mind, on the other hand, was like a rapier, and once he began to talk few were impervious to his charm. Domestically, he continued d’Azeglio’s programme of ecclesiastical reform–often in the teeth of opposition from a pious and conscientiously Catholic king–while doing everything he could to strengthen the economy; his foreign policy, meanwhile, was ever directed towards his dream of a united Italy, with Piedmont at its head.

But what, it may be asked, did the cause of a united Italy have to do with the Crimean War, in which Piedmont allied herself with the western powers in January 1855? Cavour had several reasons. He knew, first of all, that Britain and France were hoping to bring Austria into the war; this in turn might lead to a long-term Franco-Austrian alliance which would effectively destroy his chances of ending the Austrian presence in the peninsula. If, on the other hand, Italy could show the world her fighting spirit, those chances would be proportionately increased; the greater her military glory, the more likely it was that Britain and France would at last take her aspirations seriously. The experiment was not entirely successful: the Piedmontese were to fight in one battle only, and that a relatively insignificant one. Just twenty-eight of them were killed, few indeed compared with the 2,000 lost to cholera by the end of the year. Infuriatingly, too, it was Austria’s threat to enter the war which persuaded the Russians to sue for peace. But if Piedmont failed to impress on the field of battle, she at least earned invitations for Victor Emmanuel to pay state visits to Queen Victoria and Napoleon III
²⁴⁸
in December 1855 and gained a seat at the Paris peace table two months later. It was, moreover, in the course of his conversations with the French at this time that Cavour began to entertain a new and exciting hope: that Napoleon III, after his distinctly unhelpful policies in the past, might now be prepared to assist in the long-awaited Austrian expulsion.

It is a curious fact that what seems finally to have decided the Emperor to take up arms on Italy’s behalf was a plot by Italian patriots to assassinate him. The attempt took place on 14 January 1858, when he and the Empress were on their way to the Opéra for a performance of
William Tell
and bombs were thrown at their carriage. Neither was hurt, though there were a number of casualties among their escort and surrounding bystanders. The leader of the conspirators, Felice Orsini, was a well-known republican who had been implicated in a number of former plots. While in prison awaiting trial he wrote the Emperor a letter, which was later read aloud in open court and published in both the French and the Piedmontese press. It ended: ‘Remember that, so long as Italy is not independent, the peace of Europe and Your Majesty is but an empty dream…Set my country free, and the blessings of twenty-five million people will follow you everywhere and forever.’