Of great help in quieting the passions of the lower orders was the people’s tribune, Ciceruacchio, who had not put on black cloth clothes, or asked for the ministry of war, or of fine arts, according to the usual wont of successful tribunes.  Ciceruacchio had the sense of humour of the genuine Roman popolano, and it never came into his head to make himself ridiculous.  His influence had been first acquired by works of charity in the Tiber floods.  Being a strong swimmer, he ventured where no one else would go, and had saved many lives.  At first a wine-carrier, he made money by letting out conveyances and dealing in forage, but he gave away most of what he made.  He opposed the whole force of his popularity to a war of classes.  ’Viva chi c’ia e chi non c’ia quattrini!’[4] was his favourite cry.  Once when a young poet read him a sonnet in his honour he stopped him at the line ’Thou art greater than all patricians,’ saying that he would not have that published:  ’I respect the nobility, and never dream of being higher than they.  I am a poor man of the people, and such I will always remain.’

When the siege came, Ciceruacchio was invaluable in providing the troops with forage, horses, and even victuals, which he procured by making private sorties on his own account during the night; his intimate knowledge of every path enabling him to go unobserved.  He planned the earthworks, at which he laboured with his hands, and when fighting was going on, he shouldered a musket and ran with his two sons, one of them a mere child, to wherever the noise of guns directed him.  No picture of Rome in 1849 would be complete without the burly figure and jocund face of Angelo Brunetti.

The republican government found Rome with a mere shadow of an army; the efforts to create one had been too spasmodic to do anything but make confusion worse confounded by changes and experiments soon abandoned.  Perseverance and intelligence now had a different result, and the little army, called into existence by the republic, proved admirable in discipline, various and fantastic as were its components.

Towards the end of April, Garibaldi, who had been stationed at Rieti, was ordered to bring his legion to Rome.  Those who witnessed the arrival saw one of the strangest scenes ever beheld in the Eternal City.  The men wore pointed hats with black, waving plumes; thin and gaunt, their faces dark as copper, with naked legs, long beards and wild dark hair hanging down their backs, they looked like a company of Salvator Rosa’s brigands.  Beautiful as a statue amidst his extraordinary host rode the Chief, mounted on a white horse, which he sat like a centaur.  ’He was quite a show, everyone stopping to look at him,’ adds the sculptor Gibson, to whom these details are owed.  ‘Probably,’ writes another Englishman, ’a human face so like a lion, and still retaining the humanity nearest the image of its Maker, was never seen.’  Garibaldi wore the historic red shirt, and a small cap ornamented with gold.