Across Sicily With Garibaldi's Thousand by Tim Parks (hardcover)

This book is a walk across Sicily, from Marsala on the west coast to Palermo on the north. A travel book then. But our route follows the march of Garibaldi and his thousand volunteers in 1860 in their attempt to support an ongoing Sicilian revolution and overthrow the Bourbon monarchy that governed the island. We walked at the same time of year they did, in the scirocco season, with the heat pushing forty degrees, taking the same paths they did, stopping in the same places. So it’s also a history book.

A curious thing about the story of Garibaldi and the Thousand is that while one knows that in the end they won – after all, so many of Italy’s city streets are named after them – nevertheless at every twist and turn it seems impossible to understand exactly how this could have happened, so large and well equipped was the army they were facing. The incongruity of the whole campaign feeds the many conspiracy theories and accusations of betrayal that are still voiced today.

What I tried to do in Across Sicily was to merge the experience of the walk, through Salemi, Calatafimi, Alcamo and Partinico, then across the mountains into the Golden Bowl around Palermo, with a chorus of the voices of all those involved at the time, bringing together the many diaries of the vollunteers, the communications between the Bourbon generals and their king, the accounts of Bourbon soldiers and officials, and the journals of citizens in Palermo during the three-day long Bourbon bombardment of the city that saw whole districts reduced to rubble and thousands of civilian killed.

Inevitably the book becomes a meditation on the relation between past and present, the Italy that the Risorgimento volunteers dreamed of and the Italy we have today. In the end, the past lives and instructs only in so far as we open ourselves to it accepting all the facts and putting aside our preferences and prejudices. This is what I tried to do in Across Sicily. All I can say is that the story that emerges, when you look at all the contemporary accounts, is beyond extraordinary.