We can be heroes: in Garibaldi’s footsteps from Arezzo to the sea | Italy holidays

Your hour in the train from Florence will give you a glimpse of picturesque Chiantishire: hilltop clumps of cedar and cypress, terraced vineyards and terracotta tiles. This is not what you’ll be seeing on your hike. Quaint Tuscany ends in Arezzo. Likewise the region’s great art.

So, by all means take a day in this sublime city to slake your thirst for beauty. Piero della Francesca’s battle scenes in the Basilica di San Francesco. Cimabue’s astonishing crucifix in San Domenico. Never was suffering more glamorous. Nor could you hope for a more seductive mix of stony pomp and shady portico than Arezzo’s Piazza Grande. We spend the evening in the Antica Osteria L’Agania, studying our trekking app over pears poached in wine.

Arezzo closed its gates to Garibaldi. The Austrians arrived and shooting began. Under cover of night the garibaldini struck east up the valleys. But their route is now a major road. We leave at dawn, walking the hilltops above it. These are wild, wooded slopes climbing to 1,200 metres, with occasional clearings of tall thistles and gorse. It’s wise to carry plenty of food and water. But where to stop and eat?

Noon finds us toiling through stunted trees laden with lichens close to the border with Umbria. The cracked soil is prickly with creeping grasses. All around are broken rocks, fallen trunks, green lizards, thick cobwebs. The kind of place a knight might go to fight a demon in an etching by Dürer.

But as so often in Italy, when you least expect it, providence provides. Nailed to a tree is a scribbled sign on bare board: Il Cappello di Paglia (the straw hat). It’s a farm, with restaurant and bar, in the middle of nowhere, complete with vegetable garden, geese and turkeys. We order drinks on a long veranda with an unbroken view of hills rolling away towards our goal, Umbria and the medieval borgo of Citerna.

The village straddles a high ridge above the Tiber valley. Garibaldi placed his one cannon at a monastery window, and trained it on the pursuing Austrians. His wounded men were tended in the church of San Francesco beside. They couldn’t have known that the statue of the Madonna watching over them, encrusted with the dust of centuries, was a Donatello. “A must see!” says the padrona of the bar where we collapse on arrival, shattered after our 19-mile trek. She tells how the masterpiece was recently recognised and restored, almost chiding us for our languor over bowls of ice-cream. “Go before it closes!”

You pay €5 for the services of a garrulous guide determined to tell you all he knows before he unlocks the church. But the Madonna is worth waiting for. A little more than a metre high, with a red dress, white headscarf, golden hair. Her baby is nude and plump. The two possess each other wonderfully, his hand on her neck, her cheek touching his temple. Helping with the wounded men in the church that day in 1849 was Garibaldi’s wife, Anita, six months pregnant and worn out with weeks of flight. This vision of supreme maternal ease must have seemed so enviable.

On day two we cross the broad Tiber valley, then climb to the high pass at Bocca Trabaria, Italy’s watershed. Twenty miles. In the pre-dawn moonlight, irrigation pumps fling sparkling white arcs over dark stands of tobacco plants. There’s a fragrant summery tension in the air as the earth braces itself for the heat of day. The Tiber here is no more than a brownish stream, overhung with elms and myrtle. Garibaldi’s men had to ford it, slipping between enemies approaching from both sides. In San Giustino, nestling below the mountain, they stocked up on the local cigars and hurried on. We cross the river on a modern bridge, then enjoy a cappuccino in Piazza Municipio where a plaque tells how “the glorious survivors of the Roman Republic rested here, among villagers overcome with reverence and astonishment”.

This is a marvellous walk. A steep climb on good paths through fields of cornflowers and cow parsley. Higher up, the woods are nobler and airier than yesterday’s. From time to time we glimpse someone mushrooming. A man in a lumberjack shirt lets us peer into a basket where fleshy fungi look like a catch of cuttlefish.

At the pass at 1,049 metres we meet the road that crosses from Umbria to Le Marche. It’s a bleak place, where the garibaldini arrived after midnight, sleeping on the bare ground. “Garibaldi and Anita,” says a plaque. “These valleys still hear the echo of their irrepressible yearning.” What we hear is the echo of thunder. The peaks are dark with rain. We quicken our pace to reach the only refuge Google can find in the vicinity: the ValdericArte Creative Residence.

We arrive soaked to the skin, plastered in mud. Deep in a remote valley, this is an old stone building monks once used to store logs for charcoal-making. Now an eccentric artistic family have transformed it into the sort of sanctuary where wounded heroes go to be cured by Elfin queens. We bathe in a grotto of a bathroom complete with trees and ivies. The food, from medieval recipes and flavoured with local herbs, is beyond exquisite. Back on the high pass, the garibaldini had nothing to eat that night, which is why they set off so early for the 14-mile march down to Mercatello and along the banks of the Metauro to Sant’Angelo in Vado, where disaster struck.

This area is called the Mountains of the Moon. Trekking along high ridges of broken slate and white dust, you can see why. But the valley is lush and welcoming. At midday, Mercatello is a chiaroscuro of dark alleys, sunlit churches and decaying hovels. In the afternoon we follow the river five miles to Sant’Angelo which announces itself as “Home of the Prized White Truffle”.

An arched gate leads to a narrow street that shoots straight as an arrow to the central piazza. It’s not hard to imagine a clatter of galloping hooves on the cobbles. Loud cries and clashing sabres. The departing garibaldini had failed to secure the gate and were surprised by a squadron of hussars. Forty men lost. We stay in Palazzo Santinelli, a 16th-century mansion turned B&B that boasts a plaque claiming Garibaldi rested here.

From Sant’Angelo you could walk straight down to the Adriatic at Pesaro, taking in Urbino on the way. But finding his path blocked by another Austrian army, Garibaldi turned north to Macerata Feltria, trudging along the bed of the River Foglia – dry in high summer. We try to follow, but slip on slimy stones and sink in the mud. Back on more civilised paths, the heart lifts to the vastness of these rolling uplands, where distant crags look like they might be castles and remote tracks snake away into fluffy cloud. You top a ridge and Macerata Feltria appears below, perched on the edge of a gorge, another breezy mountain borgo of ancient streets, statues, pizzerias.

Next morning, climbing from Mercato Vecchio to Villagrande, we turn to our right and see, far below, a long sunny sparkle on the horizon. The sea! Our goal today is San Marino. It’s the most spectacular of these walks, through a fluid landscape whose great slopes seem to shift with the ever-shifting cirrus above. You can never be sure how near or far anything is, because of the gorges that fall suddenly away where you thought there was solid ground. In a turn of the head you move from the tame bucolic landscapes of Samuel Palmer to the wild romance of Caspar Friedrich. Orchard to precipice.

The biggest plunge of all is the last, 450 metres down to the tiny San Marino River, then a dizzying zigzag climb up Monte Titano to where the city perches like a fairytale fantasy. With his men at the limit of their endurance, having been caught in another ambush at the bottom of the gorge, Garibaldi took advantage of San Marino’s neutral status to open negotiations with Archduke Ernst of Austria, who was threatening to bombard the city. We check in to Hotel La Grotta and marvel that the wealthy little republic should exploit its postage-stamp sovereignty to display and sell automatic weapons on its main shopping streets.

From here on it’s up to you. Rimini is a 15-mile downhill stroll, where beach and ombrelloni beckon. But if you still have the energy, Garibaldi offers two more days’ arduous hiking. Escaping at night with 300 stalwarts and the ever-faithful Anita, he used another dry riverbed to sneak across the Austrian lines and march 20 miles north through rugged hills and dusty villages – San Giovanni in Galilea, Sogliano al Rubicone, Longiano – before dropping down to Cesenatico and commandeering a fleet of fishing boats. All I can say is, if you do make that trek, the smell of the sea and the tinkling ice in your spritz on the lungomare, not to mention the fabulous moment when you dip your heroic feet in the dazzling Adriatic, will seem all the more miraculous.

Tim Parks is the author of The Hero’s Way: Walking with Garibaldi from Rome to Ravenna (Harvill Secker, £20), which is available at the Guardian bookshop