Unto the Sons (25 page)

All the students looked up from their desks at the bearded, brooding portrait of Garibaldi, his saber on his shoulder. His eyes, which earlier had seemed confident, did indeed seem sad.

The portrait of Garibaldi was a worthless work of art. It was amateur in the extreme. But it served Don Achille’s purpose. Convinced that students would relate better to history if they had a visual sense of the historical figures—what they looked like, how they dressed—Don Achille a year before had commissioned an earnest, if untalented, local artist (who happened to be his uncle) to paint portraits of certain kings, warriors, statesmen, and other bygone luminaries whom Don Achille planned to feature in his Jubilee year history of Italy, which would date back to the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans.

When Joseph and his fellow students had attended their first class in the autumn of 1911, they were surprised to discover, hanging across the front wall of the classroom above the blackboard, three garish oil paintings that related to the Greco-Roman period. One showed the muscle-bound Greek warrior Milo, swinging a mace and leading his foot soldiers against the retreating cavalry of the hedonistic colony of Sybaris, which he destroyed in 510
B.C.
Another painting depicted the renowned Roman orator Cicero, reclining with his eyes closed in a steam bath on an estate southwest of Maida, in Vibo Valentia, which the Romans built in 192
B.C.
and the Arabs toppled ten centuries later. Also on the wall was a picture of the bowed figure of Hannibal, the loser in a drawn-out battle against the
Romans, exiling himself from Italy on a small ship crowded with injured and downcast Carthaginians.

“These paintings, and others that you shall see here in the weeks ahead, represent the diversity of the people who once lived among us and played a role in our history,” Don Achille had then explained, as the students looked back and forth at the paintings without comment. “I also hope that these paintings will help you distinguish between the many leading characters who took turns trying to rule us. Because we live in the narrowest part of Italy, with little more than twenty miles of rocky land existing between our nation’s eastern and western shorelines, we have been regularly crisscrossed and double-crossed by seafaring invaders and so-called liberators from every part of the world. And thus we have tended to establish our homes as our fortresses, and to survive as best we could against the intruders at our gates. And yet we have also profited at times from the presence of these outsiders. They have enlarged our sense of the outside world. They have enriched our culture. They have made us more adaptable to change. ‘Change’ is a key word in our history—change for the better, change for the worse—as you will see from the changing pictures on our walls throughout this course.”

Joseph’s mood had also changed regularly as he sat through Don Achille’s classes during the early weeks of autumn, listening to his teacher relate history through the re-creation of dramatic events involving the protagonists. While Joseph enjoyed the stories told about the reign of his favorite emperor, Frederick II, he had nightmares after Don Achille had described the beheading of Frederick’s grandson Conradin. Even Don Achille himself seemed to be affected at times by the persuasiveness of his oratory, turning around one day in class to point an accusing finger up at the portrait of the fifteenth-century Spanish monarch Ferdinand the Catholic—who financed Columbus’s expeditions to the New World—and declaring: “Oh, you tyrant! You master of the Inquisition! Not only did you allow ten thousand people to be tortured in Spain, but you sent your conquistadors to our shores in southern Italy, and what cruelty they brought us under the banner of their religion!”

Don Achille’s face had remained red as he turned back to the class, and it took him a few seconds to gain his composure. “Excuse me, class, for speaking so disrespectfully to the king,” Don Achille then explained with apparent embarrassment to his students, who had been startled by his outburst, “but you must realize that the Spanish invasion of Italy has left a deep and lasting impression. Even now, centuries later, you can see the traces of the old Spanish influence in our architecture, which is similar
to that in Spanish towns. And you can see it in the mantillas our women wear to Mass, and in the strictures of our religion, and even in the fact that I, as a principal of an Italian school, bear the title of ‘Don.’

“You must never forget,” he went on, “that our ancestors in this part of Italy lived for the better part of three and a half centuries under rulers who were linked to the Spanish crown. Except for the brief rule of Austrian royalty in the early 1700s, and the even briefer reign by Napoleon Bonaparte’s relatives in Naples in the early 1800s, southern Italy was governed by viceroys who were members of the noblest families in Spain, most of whom had come to Naples after service in Rome as Spanish ambassadors to the Pope. So cruel were these Spanish authorities that even our word
spagnarsi
, meaning ‘to be afraid,’ refers to the Spaniards. When we are afraid we say,
‘Io mi spagno.’
When we say, ‘Do not be afraid,’ it is:
‘Non ti spagnare.’
But if we used these phrases in Rome, or Florence, or Milan, or other northern Italian cities that were never under Spanish rule, we would not be understood.”

Dedicated as Don Achille was to enlightening his students about the Hispanicization of southern Italy, Joseph found this part of the course a bit boring and confusing at times (too many successors to the Neapolitan throne were similarly named Ferdinand or Francis); but when Don Achille’s lectures focused on the challenges to the Spanish Bourbon leadership, especially those challenges fomented by the red-shirted volunteer army led by the fearless
Gesù guerriero
named Garibaldi, Joseph suddenly was riveted while his teacher’s stirring words seemed to reverberate within the wooden frame of Garibaldi’s portrait, enlivening its face and figure, and transferring Joseph back to another time and place far more exciting than anything he could imagine in present-day Maida. Indeed, for five successive weeks, from November through mid-December, Joseph hurried to class each morning to the fancied sounds of reveille being blown by a red-shirted bugler; and even on
this
particular morning, when Joseph came to school enraptured by the possibility of escaping to Paris with Antonio, he nonetheless knew he would be saddened to leave Don Achille’s school. And particularly saddened to no longer hear the daily episodes of the great Garibaldi, for, as Don Achille said, the war against the Spanish Bourbons was coming to a close; King Francis II had just sailed out of the Bay of Naples, abandoning the palace to Garibaldi and his Redshirts, who would in turn relinquish it to a newly arrived king from northern Italy, Victor Emmanuel II—doing something that Joseph, had
he
been in Garibaldi’s position, would never have done. Why should Garibaldi step aside for Victor Emmanuel II? It had been Garibaldi and the Redshirts who had
driven the Spanish Bourbons out of Italy, and to these victors belonged the prize of the palace and the right to rule. Who could have stood before the Italian people more majestically than Garibaldi? From Don Achille’s description, Italy had never produced a greater hero; and disappointed as Joseph was that his teacher’s lectures on Garibaldi were coming to an end, he knew that he would carry forever within him the story of this hero that each morning Don Achille had re-created so realistically, beginning at the beginning, when Garibaldi was no older than any student in the classroom.

Don Achille’s Story of Garibaldi

Our hero was born on July 4, 1807, in a house on the seashore of Nice—which, alas, had once been part of Italy … and like most of you in this classroom, he spent much of his early youth in frivolous pursuits, sometimes happily, and sometimes in tears. In his memoir he admits to us: “I was fonder of play than of study.” His mother was very pious. She insisted that he be tutored by monks, but their strictness exasperated him. His father, a sailor, was often away from home, leaving young Garibaldi free to wander with other boys and to experience things that many of us might have experienced ourselves: “One day I picked up a grasshopper, and brought it into the house. The leg of the poor insect got broken in my hands, causing me such distress that I shut myself in my room and wept for hours.… Another time I accompanied a cousin on a shooting expedition, and we came upon a poor woman who was washing clothes along the water of a ditch. How it happened I do not know, but she fell headforemost into the water, and was in danger of drowning. I jumped in after her, and succeeded in pulling her out. In after-years, I have never shrunk from helping any fellow creature in danger, even at the risk of my own life.…”

At the age of sixteen, our hero goes to sea as a cabin boy with his father … and he remains a seaman for the next ten years of his life. In 1833, when he is twenty-six, we find him working as a crewman on a large cargo boat headed toward Constantinople … a boat that is also carrying a dozen red-robed, long-haired men who have just been banished from their native France as undesirable citizens. He introduced himself to these men, who called themselves Saint-Simonians. They were part of an organization
that had been founded in the period of the French Revolution, and they hoped to create a society that provided equal rights for women, welfare for the poor, and greater personal freedom for everyone. Garibaldi spent much time in their company during the twenty-three-day voyage to Constantinople. The Saint-Simonians were polite, well educated, and excellent traveling companions. Although Garibaldi at this time of his life was feeling alienated from his religion and his homeland, he resisted the temptation of joining the Saint-Simonians. But he was forever influenced by their idealistic outlook, and by a book that they had given him that expressed their credo. The book would be near his bedside nearly fifty years later at the time of his death.

It was not long after meeting this group that Garibaldi encountered a young Italian who was interesting but also very discontented; his name was Giuseppe Mazzini, and he had just formed an organization called Giovine Italia [Young Italy], which aimed to overthrow all the foreign factions that controlled various sections of Italy. Mazzini wanted to transform Italy into one independent nation.

Our part of Italy, as you know, was then still under the control of the Spanish Bourbon monarchy that ruled from the palace in Naples. The land north of Naples belonged to the Pope, and the papal territories extended throughout the city of Rome and up the eastern side of Italy to within thirty miles of Venice. Venice and its environs in northeastern Italy were ruled by the royal Hapsburg family of Austria; and the Austrians also prevailed over much of Italy’s northwest, which included Milan. West of Milan was the Piedmont region, governed by the Piedmontese king in the capital city of Turin, where most of the ruling figures spoke French. The royal family of Piedmont also governed the former Republic of Genoa. South and east of Genoa were the small duchies of Parma, Modena, and Lucca, and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, which included Florence. Most of Tuscany and the smaller duchies were also under the political influence, if not the outright military rule, of the Austrian Hapsburgs, who, because they were Catholic and archly conservative, had the blessing of the Pope.

Since the Pope also enjoyed the loyalty of the Spanish Bourbons in our part of Italy, the only region of questionable fidelity to the political interests of the Pope was the domain of the Piedmontese,
particularly the port city of Genoa, which was the hometown of the young radical Mazzini and the headquarters of many of his antipapist, anti-Austrian agitators. While the Mazzini organization’s bomb-tossing and sniping at the Austrian garrisons that were spread across northern Italy were publicly disavowed by the royal family of Piedmont, its king privately approved of much of its activities because they cast doubts on any illusion that the Austrians were welcome in northern Italy. The Mazzinian anarchic tactics continued even at the times when Mazzini and his new colleague Garibaldi and other young underground leaders were temporarily driven out of Italy, which often was the case between the 1830s and the 1860s.

During these years, Giuseppe Mazzini, a brooding, high-strung intellectual who clothed his small body in black garments and appeared to be in a perpetual state of mourning—and who, as a lifelong bachelor and antisocial idealist, rarely let human contact influence his singular viewpoint and radical solutions—lived at various times in France, Switzerland, and England. From these countries he would occasionally sneak back into Italy to organize a raid and then would slip out again before the Austrian troops, or the Piedmontese police, could capture and punish him. Austria’s foreign minister, Prince Klemens von Metternich, labeled Mazzini the “most dangerous man in Europe.”

Garibaldi was also a frequent fugitive during these years. After joining the Piedmontese royal navy in 1834, he began to recruit sailors for the revolutionary cause, and soon he became involved in a scheme to steal a ship in Genoa for the use of the insurrectionists. But the plan was discovered in advance, and Garibaldi was captured and sentenced to death. Shortly before the appointed time of his execution, he escaped and went to France, where he lived under assumed names for the next two years. The cautious life he was forced to live made him feel unimportant to his radical cause, however; so he soon left for South America, where in 1836 he joined other Italian exiles who had allied themselves with Brazilian rebels fighting against the dictatorship of the Brazilian government.

Garibaldi did not return to Italy until 1848, when sudden political upheavals resulted in an amnesty, which led him to join the Piedmontese king in a war against northern Italy’s Austrian overlords. The Piedmontese king’s army and the radicals were now
working together for the first time to establish a free and united Italy; and while the royal Piedmontese troops would be defeated by the Austrians at the gates of Milan in 1848, and again at Novara in 1849, the volunteer units led by Garibaldi and other officers would invade Rome in 1849, and for five months would rule the Papal City as a republic under the political directorship of Mazzini.