Page 134 - General Giuseppe GARIBALDI - english version

132 GENERAL GIUSEPPE GARIBALDI

The first to violently pursue the enemy were the divisions of Captain
Cenni, then the others, brought forward by Garibaldi in person for a decisive
raid on Como. It was 9.30pm when the volunteers burst in mass into the city
from the slope of Val di Vico, among the blare of trumpets and the cheers to
Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel by the population transported by the rapid
succession of events, while the city was brightening and the bells were ring-
ing the tocsin. Moments of sublime enthusiasm, of which are left episodes
narrated with intense emotion by the witnesses of those days. The first
moment of the overwhelming enthusiasm was like the explosion of a mine,
wrote Garibaldi twelve years later: “ it was a scene impossible to describe and
that deserved to be illuminated by the sun”.
While the volunteers entered the city by Porta Sala, later called Porta
Garibaldi, that the enemy was unable to blockade or overcome with his
artillery, the Austrians went out of Porta Torre, later called Porta Vittoria,
went up the road to Camerlata where all of them, quickly, managed to get on
trains and find shelter in Monza. When towards midnight the tireless Medici,
with part of his regiment, occupied Camerlata, from which shortly before
harmless rockets had been launched on Como, the enemy had escaped, leav-
ing in the hand of the Garibaldians a lot of equipment, the storehouses, all
the accounting materials and about fifty prisoners.
The enthusiasm of the exhausted Hunters and the frenetic manifestations
towards Garibaldi “kissed, blessed, touched as he were a saint, carried in tri-
umph to the Municipality building” did not for a moment distract his
thoughts; already before dawn he had occupied Camerlata with the entire
Brigade. And together with the praise to his braves, jealous as he was of their
good name with the people and also the enemy, he did not fail to stigmatise
bitterly an isolated act of vandalism, the looting of a store house carried out
by one of those tired and hungry soldiers.
And so it was that 3000 volunteers, with no artillery, had the better of reg-
ular and solid troops that on this occasion were not less than 8000 guns with
2 squadrons and 16 pieces.
The Hunters lost about sixty men, among which 5 officers, the imperials
about 120.

The extraordinary velocity of Garibaldi’s moves from the Dora to the
Sesia, to the Ticino, to Varese and Como and the bravery demonstrated by