THE HERO'S WAY

The British author and Italian culture expert retraces Italian resistance fighter Giuseppe Garibaldi's flight toward freedom for a contemporary audience.

Parks set himself a daunting task in this travel memoir, challenging both his physical stamina and literary gifts. In the summer of 2019, he and his partner, Eleonora, set out to retrace by foot the flight of the charismatic leader of Italy’s 19th-century unification movement after his troops lost a critical fight to hold Rome for liberation. Parks and Eleonora tried to follow the exact 400-mile route of Garibaldi and his exhausted men—and at the same time of year, blazing July. They hiked up to 20 miles per day from Rome toward Garibaldi’s destination: the Adriatic Sea, where he and his troops hoped to escape three separate armies (French, Austrian, and Spanish) called upon by Pope Pius IX to capture them. Parks followed his route along traffic-clogged freeways; through beautiful Tuscany, “an English dream of quaintness in a Mediterranean climate”; and over Italy’s Apennine Mountains. They met clueless tourists, vicious dogs, and Italians disgusted with the tarting up of their historic districts for the tourist trade. The author does an exemplary job weaving together different historical accounts of the march, and he brings Garibaldi’s charisma, determination, and desperation to vivid life. He is less successful at interpreting the present. His descriptive passages of the Italian countryside sing, but he provides little context for the politics and economy of contemporary Italy. After eavesdropping, he re-creates the overheard conversation without follow- up or amplification. Italy’s beautiful old villages, he notes, have been wantonly transformed into “centres of upmarket culture,” and his overheard speakers seem to agree. Is there a counterpoint to this argument? Not in this book. Students of historic and contemporary Italy will enjoy the author’s vivid revival of Garibaldi’s ordeal, and his dry wit is on full display, but he missed an opportunity to make this dramatic story more accessible to general readers.

An account that ably retraces the flight of a revolutionary but offers limited insights into Italy's present.