The book Il piccolo GARIBALDINO

The book Il Piccolo Garibaldino, by Captain Giuliano Masè was inspired by
the real story of a young twelve-year old boy who had taken part in the
expedition of the Mille with his father, but unlike reality the story has a
different ending:

And it seemed to her that her beloved Hector regained the pedestal and
that Italy, for whom he had died, enveloped him once again in the folds of her
purple cloak.
The feelings aroused by the dream in the sleeping woman were enough to
startle her awake, her eyes full of tears. She sat on the bed, clasped her hands
together, raised her eyes wet with tears and exclaimed:

- If my dream tells the truth … God almighty, thank you for allowing my
only son to sacrifice his life for his country.
When the sad news arrived and she learnt of her son’s glorious death, she wept
copiously and felt her heart would break; but when she had no more tears, when
reason triumphed over sorrow, she thought of her son’s heroism and repeated in
a strong voice the famous phrase: A good death honours an entire life!
In actual fact we can’t say for sure whether the film script is based on
Giuliano Masè’s story or whether the book had already been written when the
brochure was published. In fact, the date of the final draft (next to the
signature) is January 1910, while the film had already come out, at least in
London (the opening night had been December 24, 1909).
Certainly, there are remarkable similarities. It’s possible they both used the
same source, a story, perhaps, a play or a song. But there are differences too, for
instance the names of the characters: the real father and son who took part in
the expedition of the Mille were called Luigi Giuseppe Marchetti and Giuseppe
Marchetti. In the film, they’re called Anselmo and Augusto, while Masè calls
them Carlo and Ettore Paselli. This seems to confirm that the script of the film
is not based on Masè’s book, while his description of the events would suggest
otherwise: that the film produced by Cines was indeed based on the book.

A female dimension?
Despite the fact it’s a small oeuvre, the film is well put together and proves
that care was taken during shooting, especially of the details. It also shows
that it was well organised, that the director was good or at least that the team
worked well together. We’re not referring here to the structure of the
“storyline” which could have been decided prior to shooting, but rather to the
merger between reality and myth. In his article Giovanni Lasi points out that
the film helps to create a parareligious mystique around the concept of nation.
There is also a female dimension and sensibility in the film, for instance the
figure of the main character who becomes the intermediary between the male
world of battle and the sword, and the female world of the family and the
mother almost replaced in the finale by the figure of the mother country.
In fact, the main character is a young boy who in the first scene, in the family’s
sitting room, clearly shows he wants to run away. He gets even more excited
when he reads Garibaldi’s appeal in the paper. The adults, middle-class people
shown moving around in an almost ridiculous frenzy, stop him from speaking
until his father bursts into the room wearing the uniform of Garibaldi’s
volunteers to say goodbye. In this scene, the boy stands between opposites: left
and right, male and female. On the left, the adults, almost always sitting down,
who stop him from participating because they consider him still a boy. On the
right, his mother, who only speaks to the female servant or young daughter and
doesn’t even want her husband to take part in the expedition. The boy moves
from one side to the other, feeling he belongs nowhere, until his father comes
into the room. His father is a dynamic figure who influences everything around
him: he occupies centre stage and makes sure his son fits in, that the people
there admire him and finally he makes a place for his son next to him.
The following scene is the departure of the Mille, shot outdoors. The male
symbols are combined with images of freedom. The priest blesses the rifles,
the men carry the flag. The women are dressed in large billowing skirts that
echo the romanticism of the red shirts of the soldiers, their flags and
handkerchiefs flying in the wind. The boy embraces all these symbols in a
ethereal choreography and stylised, almost female movements: for example,
his sighs to show how much he wants to go with them.
The next scene shows the boy at home busily preparing to go with the
volunteers. He pulls out his precious Garibaldian symbols, his beret, red shirt,
flag and finally his gun. Then he writes his farewell letter to his mother: “… I’m
going to join daddy….” His emotions overcome him and he falls asleep. He
dreams of glory, of Garibaldi crossing the plain with his men and wants to be
with them. The director uses a rather new technique for this scene: cross fading
takes us from the boy’s home, decorated with a small painting of the seaside, to
the same home with a crack in the wall. This seems to suggest the subliminal
metaphor of the breach of Porta Pia: an image of violation heralding the
imminent revolution instigated by Garibaldi and represented by the soldiers and
their bayonets, whereas when the father entered the room in the previous scene
he seemed to portray Garibaldi’s actions as a “storming” of sorts, as a fracture or
change in the daily life of the lower middle-class in Italy. In that metaphorical
crack – or breach – in the wall, the battlefields appear behind the sleeping boy,
like a back projection. Upon awakening the boy rubs his eyes and raises his arms
towards his dream as a sign of surrender and union.
Da L a p r e s a d i R o m a a I l p i c c o l o g a r i b a l d i n o

Crying quietly, the boy leaves his sleeping mother and tries to find a berth
on a ship. The port is full of phallic and female figures. The boy is carrying his
clothes in a piece of fabric (his own male alter ego). Frightened and scared he
runs up a crooked gangway onto a boat but is seen by some sailors to whom
he shows his Garibaldian symbols to prove he’s one of them. He kisses the flag
which has almost replaced his mother. As a sign of solidarity, the sailors pick
him up and lead him to the battlefield. As in other scenes, his language,
behaviour and air of patriotic mysticism are prevalently female.
On the contrary, the battle symbolises his male side. The boy is shot and asks
to kiss Garibaldi’s sword before he dies, comforted by his father and two women.
The Hero follows his own destiny without even waiting for the boy to die.
In the last scene, the frantic mother looks at the portrait of her son. A fadeout
shows him on the stairs dressed as one of Garibaldi’s volunteers, next to
the motherland. The happy, transfigured mother has eyes only for him, and he
proudly opens his shirt to reveal the wound on his chest. Only then does she
realise her son is dead and kisses his wound and cheeks. Like a second St.
Thomas, she is won over and converted by this patriotic heroism. Her son
blows her a kiss, goes up the stairs above the symbols of victory towards Italy, a
young Italy, more a sister than a mother, who welcomes him among the clouds
and puts her arm around his shoulders. His mother says farewell and the vision
disappears. Only then does she rub her eyes and look around, deeply moved.
The story comes full circle: family, religion and nation are reunited.
A young nation
Like most stories with a boy as the main character, the film was shot– for
instance the visual effects – especially with youngsters in mind.
The graceful and somewhat mannerist movements of the actor look like those
of a ballet-dancer. Perhaps the young boy was taught by the actress Maria
Gasparini, a former ballet-dancer at the Scala in Milan. Together with the balletdancer
Egidio Rossi, she staged the works of the Compagnia Stabile della
Società Cines. In 1911, she married Mario Caserini, an excellent director of films
about Garibaldi, with whom she had run a film school for two years at the
Galleria Sciarra in Rome. We were able to identify some members of the cast:
Mario Caserini, director and actor at the Cines, was the boy’s father; Augusto
Mastripietri (he played a family friend and supporter of the cause and was later
to play Geppetto in Pinocchio made by Cines in 1911) and Gemma De Ferrari
(the mother). The fact that Caserini acted in the film might make one think he
was also the director, perhaps helped by his partner to whom we probably
owe the choreographic nuances of the acting sequences. But we can’t be sure.
The films Caserini made were less complicated. Another possible director is
Enrico Guazzoni: the scene of the dream and the boy’s apotheosis both have his
‘touch’. Furthermore, his name is generally associated with films involving
nature and realistic settings. All the sites and characters involved in the
expedition of the Mille are well portrayed in Il piccolo garibaldino: the call to
93
Notes on the restoration of Il Piccolo Garibaldino  Irela Nuñez
arms, the supporters of the expedition, the chaplain Fra Pantaleo blessing the
troops, the symbols associated with Garibaldi, the rock in Quarto, the landing in
Marsala and the battle of Calatafimi.
Last but not least, several sources attribute production to Filoteo Alberini.
Undoubtedly the narrative structure of the “frames” echoes that of La Presa di
Roma. However, Alberini had stopped working for Cines in September 1908.

• Login or register to post comments