I also come in praise of museums that give me private tours. Being told that an awkward American was in the building, my guide-to-be, an economics graduate of Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh and a former insurance executive in Kansas City, pulled me aside and said, “Give me 30 minutes and I’ll take you into the tunnels myself.” Cool! The lower gallery.
I have to bend my knees to keep from lacerating my scalp. Watch your head!
This kind of underground warfare is strange to me. The Piedmontese had created a spider web of tunnels extending beyond the citadel, and their modus operandi would be to pack dirt around casks of gunpowder and blow up French artillery positions from below. That’s right. French soldiers lived in constant fear of getting an assful of shrapnel from explosions right beneath them. Now, I‘ve heard of mine warfare, but in this case you don’t have to step on anything to get killed; you just have to be standing in the wrong place.
In return, the French and their Spanish cohorts would shoot these 200-pound cannonballs across a 70-yard-wide moat (no water; just a big ditch) into the side of the fortress. The idea was to turn the sheer walls into 45-degree piles of rubble that they could climb over. But the Piedmontese built their fortifications at oblique angles so the cannonballs would bounce off. The French would try to flood the tunnels; the Piedmontese would dig drains that empty into the aquifer below. Very Itchy and Scratchy stuff.
On two consecutive nights in August 1706, French special forces were able to enter the top tunnel, and, having reached a fortified door at the top of the stairs leading to the lower galleries, started to knock it down. Time was running short. One of Micca’s fellow fighters tried to light a fuse leading to 44 pounds of gunpowder, but he was taking too long. “Go on, get out of here; you’re longer than a day without bread,” Micca told him. I puzzled over this admonition and asked my guide about it. He said that a day without bread seems like a very long time. His partner was simply taking too much time. Makes sense.
So Micca wound up lighting the fuse. Was he a martyr? My guide’s answer surprised me. “I don’t think so. He wanted to live. That’s why he ran away.” He was able to make it about 40 yards down this tunnel, where he died. Not from the explosion, my guide explained, but probably from a lack of oxygen and fumes from the blast. A wreath marks the spot where he collapsed.
“This was not some great tactical victory,” he said. “Micca is remembered more for the symbolism of what he represented -- resistance to French aggression. The citadel was still intact. Even if the French had breached this part of it, they would have been killed by gunfire in six or seven seconds.”
So the legend of Pietro Micca isn’t what it seems. He wasn’t a suicidal nutjob after all, just a scared soldier doing his job and trying to get the hell out before it was too late. He left behind a child and a wife, who received a war widow’s pension of two loaves of bread a week for the rest of her life.
The siege of Turin ended 304 years ago today. I remind my guide of this and he seems momentarily stunned. He had forgotten what day it is. Clasping me on the shoulder, he says, “Congratulations, you are a greater historian than I. Tell your newspaper readers about this place. They might be surprised.”
Pietro Micca and 1706 Siege of Turin Civic Museum
Via Guicciardini 7A
Tues.-Sun. 9-7
Admission 3 euros
No photographs permitted; mute your flash and cough a lot
Guided tours available on Sundays, or if you’re an English-only speaker who shows sincere interest, apparently anytime
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