Giuseppe Garibaldi

Giuseppe Maria Garibaldi was born on July 4, 1807 in Nice, a Mediterranean port that then belonged to the French Empire and passed to the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia after the fall of Napoleon ^[1]. His father, Domenico Garibaldi, worked in coastal shipping, and his mother, Rosa Raimondo, hoped her son might enter the priesthood. The boy preferred the harbor to the classroom. By his mid teens he was sailing as a cabin boy, and he spent the next decade working merchant routes across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, eventually earning a captain's certificate ^[1].

The turning point of this Giuseppe Garibaldi biography came in 1833, when the young sailor encountered followers of Giuseppe Mazzini, the exiled prophet of Italian republicanism, and joined his movement, Young Italy ^[2]. In 1834 Garibaldi took part in a failed Mazzinian plot to raise a mutiny in the Piedmontese navy at Genoa. He escaped across the border to France, and a Genoese court condemned him to death in absentia ^[2]. At twenty six he was a fugitive with a price on his head, and Italy would not see him again for fourteen years.

Garibaldi reached Brazil in 1836 and soon put his seamanship at the service of the Riograndense Republic, a breakaway state in southern Brazil fighting the empire in the Ragamuffin War ^[3]. He commanded small warships, raided imperial shipping, and learned the improvised, fast moving style of combat that later defined his European campaigns. It was in this period that he met Ana Maria de Jesus Ribeiro, known as Anita, a Brazilian woman who fought beside him, shared his exile, and became his first wife ^[3].

When the Riograndense cause faded, the couple moved to Montevideo, where Garibaldi took command of the Uruguayan fleet and then organized an Italian Legion of exiles to defend the city against the forces of the Argentine ruler Juan Manuel de Rosas ^[3]. The legion adopted red shirts, reportedly cut from cloth intended for slaughterhouse workers, and the garment became his movement's uniform and emblem ^[4]. His defense of Montevideo and his victory at the battle of Sant'Antonio in 1846 were reported in European newspapers, so that when revolution broke out across Italy in 1848, Garibaldi already had a reputation waiting for him at home ^[3].

Garibaldi returned to Italy in 1848, offered his sword first to Pope Pius IX and then to King Charles Albert of Piedmont, and was rebuffed by both before leading volunteers against Austria in Lombardy ^[2]. The following year gave him his defining stage. When Rome expelled the pope and declared a republic in February 1849, Garibaldi was elected to its assembly and entrusted with the city's defense. Through the spring of 1849 his volunteers held off a much larger French expeditionary force sent to restore papal rule, winning early engagements at the Janiculum hill before weight of numbers told ^[5].

When the republic fell in July 1849, Garibaldi refused surrender and marched out of Rome with several thousand followers, pursued by French, Austrian, Spanish, and Neapolitan armies. The retreat across central Italy became one of the most retold episodes of the Risorgimento. Anita, pregnant and ill, died near Ravenna during the flight, a loss he mourned for the rest of his life ^[5]. Garibaldi escaped abroad once more, working for a time as a candle maker on Staten Island in New York and later as a merchant captain in the Pacific, before returning quietly to Italian soil in 1854 ^[1].

Any list of Giuseppe Garibaldi achievements begins in May 1860. After fighting for Piedmont against Austria in the war of 1859 at the head of his Cacciatori delle Alpi, Garibaldi answered an appeal from Sicilian rebels against the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. He sailed from Quarto near Genoa with roughly 1,000 volunteers, a force remembered as the Thousand (i Mille), landed at Marsala on May 11, 1860, and declared himself dictator of Sicily in the name of King Victor Emmanuel II ^[6].

What followed astonished Europe. The volunteers beat a Bourbon force at Calatafimi, took Palermo after street fighting in late May, and won again at Milazzo in July ^[6]. In August Garibaldi crossed the Strait of Messina, and on September 7, 1860 he entered Naples, the largest city in Italy, essentially unopposed, ahead of his own troops ^[6]. The decisive battle came on the Volturno river in October, where his army repelled the last major Bourbon counterattack.

Garibaldi then did something rarer than winning: he gave his conquests away. At Teano on October 26, 1860 he met Victor Emmanuel II, handed over southern Italy to the Piedmontese monarchy, and refused honors, titles, and rewards, retiring instead to his farm on the island of Caprera off Sardinia ^[2]. The gesture sealed his legend. A republican by conviction, he had judged that unity under the House of Savoy was the only realistic path to a single Italian state, and he acted on that judgment at the cost of his own program ^[2].

Unification remained incomplete, since Rome stayed under papal rule protected by French troops, and Venice under Austria. Garibaldi twice tried to force the Roman question himself. In 1862 he marched from Sicily under the slogan Rome or Death, only to be stopped by Italian royal troops at Aspromonte in Calabria, where he was wounded in the foot and briefly imprisoned by the state he had helped create ^[2]. He tried again in 1867 and was defeated by French and papal forces at Mentana ^[2].

Between these failures he served the kingdom loyally when asked, commanding volunteers against Austria in the war of 1866 that brought Venice into Italy, and winning at Bezzecca, his side's one clear success in that campaign ^[1]. His fame by now crossed every border. During a visit to England in 1864 enormous London crowds turned out to greet him, a reception few foreign figures have ever matched ^[4]. In 1870, past sixty and crippled by arthritis and old wounds, he offered his sword to the new French Republic against Prussia and led the Army of the Vosges, then sat briefly in the French National Assembly at Bordeaux ^[1]. Italian troops had meanwhile taken Rome in September 1870, completing the unification he had done so much to drive.

Garibaldi's private life was as unsettled as his campaigns. With Anita, whom he married in Montevideo in 1842, he had four children, including Menotti and Ricciotti, both of whom later fought in his campaigns ^[3]. A brief second marriage in 1860 to the young marchesina Giuseppina Raimondi collapsed on the wedding day and was eventually annulled. Late in life he married Francesca Armosino, the caretaker on Caprera and mother of three more of his children ^[1].

He was a lifelong seaman in habits and tastes, plain in dress, indifferent to money, and famously charismatic in person. He was also a writer: he published an autobiography, several polemical novels, and a stream of letters and manifestos supporting causes that ranged from the abolition of slavery to workers' rights and early internationalism ^[4]. Deeply anticlerical, he regarded the papacy's temporal power as the chief obstacle to Italian freedom, a conviction that ran through his politics from 1849 onward ^[2].

The final decade of Garibaldi's life passed mainly on Caprera, where he farmed, wrote, and received a constant flow of visitors and correspondence. Elected repeatedly to the Italian parliament, he appeared there rarely, and he grew openly disappointed with the conservative, heavily taxed kingdom that unification had produced ^[2]. He died at his island home on June 2, 1882, at the age of seventy four. He had asked for a simple cremation; instead the state buried him on Caprera with national honors, and Italy went into public mourning ^[1].

Among essential Giuseppe Garibaldi facts is the scale of his posthumous presence: nearly every Italian town has a street, square, or statue bearing his name, and monuments to him stand in cities from New York to Buenos Aires and Montevideo ^[4]. Historians continue to debate how far his cult was spontaneous and how far it was built by Mazzinian publicity and a fascinated foreign press, but none dispute that without his 1860 expedition the unification of Italy would have taken a very different course ^[4].

His example traveled. Volunteers calling themselves Garibaldini fought in Greece, France, and the Balkans into the twentieth century, and Italian partisan brigades in the Second World War took his name ^[4]. Abraham Lincoln's administration even sounded him out about a Union command in 1861, an offer that came to nothing partly because Garibaldi wanted a clear commitment to emancipation ^[7]. Few nineteenth century figures were admired so widely, by liberals, nationalists, and socialists alike, and his red shirt remains one of the most recognizable political symbols ever created.