Eleven years before Giuseppe Garibaldi landed with his "red shirts" near Marsala on the west coast of Sicily on May 11, 1860 to liberate southern Italy from the Bourbon rule with the "Train of a Thousand", he had already marched through half of Italy.

On July 2, 1849, the Roman Republic, whose army he commanded, was about to capitulate: “I am leaving Rome.

Anyone who wants to continue the war against foreign rule can come with me,” the revolutionary shouted in the morning in his famous speech on St , eight hundred cavalry and one cannon, with which he, pursued by French and Austrian troops, advanced through the interior of the country to Cesenatico on the Adriatic Sea and on to Ravenna.

Andreas Rossman

Freelance writer in the feuilleton.

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“He had forty-eight hours to prepare.

We've been thinking about this journey for at least a year." This is how Tim Parks' "The Hero's Path" begins is.

In the same time and, as far as possible, with the same stages and on the same routes: 650 kilometers in 29 days.

Based on historical sources, in particular the "Diary from Italy 1849" by Gustav von Hoffstetter, a Bavarian officer who volunteered to fight for the Roman Republic and accompanied the extraordinary retreat as "Garibaldi's aide-de-camp".

But also supported by the navigation app and Google Maps and much better equipped: With six kilos of luggage in the backpack,

Scorching heat and torrential rain

At 4:30 a.m. the piazza is “deserted”, “no one came to say goodbye to us”.

Finding the way out of the city takes hours, pedestrians are not allowed on the streets, loose chippings, mountains of garbage, suburban fumes of carbon monoxide.

The freedom of no longer having to cross borders is restricted by other obstacles.

The climbs are steep, Tivoli being the first stop, then the route turns north, passing through Lazio in the Tiber Valley, to the south-west of Umbria and the south-east of tidy Tuscany (“every photo is good for a postcard”), again to the Tiber and through a corner of Umbria, over the watershed in the Marche to San Marino and on to Romagna.

Grandiose views and picturesque ruins: sleepy mountain towns and famous art cities (Montepulciano, Orvieto, Arezzo) are on the way,