On 4 September 1796 the French Army of Italy under Napoleon Bonaparte defeated an Austrian corps under Paul Davidovich at Rovereto, in the narrow valley of the Adige river north of Lake Garda. It was not one great clash but a running fight from one defended village to the next. Within two days Bonaparte was in Trento, and four days after Rovereto he caught the main Austrian army at Bassano.
The second relief of Mantua
In the summer of 1796 the fortress of Mantua was the key to northern Italy, and the French were besieging it. The Austrian commander Dagobert Wurmser had already broken through once and entered the city on 2 August, before he was driven back to the Mincio in the fighting around Castiglione, writes the military historian John Rickard. Ordered to try again, Wurmser chose to march his main army down the Brenta valley toward the plains near Vicenza, leaving Davidovich to hold the Adige valley and the approaches to Trento.1
Bonaparte, for his part, had orders to push north through the Tyrol and link up with the French Army of the Rhine, then fighting in southern Germany. The Fondation Napoléon dates his advance toward the Adige against Davidovich to 1 September. His rise is told in our biography of Napoleon.2
A fight from post to post
According to Rickard, Bonaparte moved in three columns: Vaubois up the shore of Lake Garda on the left, Masséna up the Adige valley in the center, and Augereau over the hills of the Monti Lessini on the right. Davidovich held outposts at Ala and Serravalle, larger posts at Marco and Mori, and defensive lines at Rovereto and Calliano. The Austrian outposts were pushed back on 3 September.3
On 4 September, in Rickard's account, Masséna got past Marco by sending light troops under General Jean-Joseph Pijon onto the heights above the village, so that the defenders had to fall back or be surrounded, while Vaubois took the fortified camp at Mori in a side valley to the west. At Rovereto itself General Rampon worked his men across broken ground between the town and the river and turned the Austrian flank, and after a short stand the Austrians fell back on Calliano. The Fondation Napoléon and the Napoleonic chronology at napoleon-empire.org both record 4 September as the day of the French victory at Roveredo, as the town was then usually spelled. In the French Republican calendar then in use the date was 18 Fructidor, Year IV.4
The timing of the fight at Calliano is less clear. Rickard's article on Calliano dates it to 5 September, when three of Masséna's demi-brigades with heavy artillery drove some 4,800 Austrians out of their entrenchments, while his overview of the campaign puts the breakthrough at Calliano on 4 September. Either way, Davidovich had to give up Trento. Reliable totals for the losses at Rovereto are not given in the sources we could check, so we leave them out.5
From Trento to Bassano
On 6 September Bonaparte wrote to the Directory from his headquarters at Trento that Wurmser had thrown his army onto the Brenta, that he could not tangle himself in the mountains of the Tyrol with the enemy on his flank and rear, and that he was marching that day down the Brenta to attack at Bassano. He left about 4,000 men to guard Trento.6
He beat Wurmser at Bassano on 8 September, as the Fondation Napoléon and napoleon-empire.org both record. Rickard adds that the victory split the Austrian army in two and that on 15 September Wurmser had to take refuge inside Mantua, the fortress he had come to relieve. The siege went on into the next year, through the battles of Arcole and Rivoli.7
