In 2019, the great Italophile Tim Parks and his partner, Eleonora Gallitelli, repeated Garibaldi’s retreat — intending to match his route step for step. There was an obstacle, Parks explains in his utterly transporting chronicle THE HERO’S WAY: Walking With Garibaldi From Rome to Ravenna (Norton, 369 pp., $27.95): “Though we know where Garibaldi went, we don’t know how he got there.” A pioneer of information warfare, the Italian general not only faked out his enemies, but he kept his own officers in the dark, sending them to requisition lodging and food in villages where the troops were not going, in order to mislead enemy spies.
Luckily, many of Garibaldi’s contemporaries kept journals and correspondence that recorded the army’s actual trajectory. Parks draws liberally on the diary of the general’s Bavarian aide-de-camp, Gustav von Hoffstetter, who comes to feel like a voluble third member of Parks’s time-traveling expedition. Each chapter covers a successive…