Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807 - 1882) was an Italian general, patriot and republican, one of the principal figures of the Risorgimento that unified Italy. [1] After years of guerrilla warfare in South America he led the 1860 Expedition of the Thousand, which overthrew Bourbon rule in Sicily and Naples and handed the territory to Victor Emmanuel II. [2] His campaigns on two continents earned him the popular title of the Hero of the Two Worlds.
Early life and exile
Garibaldi was born on 4 July 1807 in Nice, then part of the French Empire and later of the Kingdom of Sardinia, into a family of coastal traders. He went to sea young and qualified as a merchant captain. [1] In the 1830s he joined Giuseppe Mazzini's Young Italy movement and took part in a failed insurrection in Piedmont, for which he was sentenced to death in absentia and forced to flee.
He spent twelve years in South America. He fought for the breakaway Riograndense Republic in southern Brazil and then for Uruguay against the forces of the Argentine leader Juan Manuel de Rosas, commanding an Italian Legion whose red shirts became his movement's emblem. [2] In Brazil he met Ana Maria de Jesus Ribeiro, known as Anita, who fought alongside him and became his wife.
The revolutions of 1848 and 1849
News of revolution brought Garibaldi back to Italy in 1848. When the pope fled Rome and a Roman Republic was proclaimed the following year, he took charge of its defence against a French expeditionary force sent to restore papal rule. [3] After the city fell he led a long retreat across central Italy pursued by four armies; most of his column dispersed, and Anita died near Ravenna.
Exile followed once more, including a period in the United States working in a candle factory on Staten Island and further years at sea. [1] He returned to Italy in the mid-1850s and bought land on the island of Caprera.
The Expedition of the Thousand
In the war of 1859 Garibaldi commanded the Hunters of the Alps for Piedmont-Sardinia. The following year, with the covert acquiescence of Piedmontese ministers, he sailed from Quarto near Genoa with about a thousand volunteers and landed at Marsala in Sicily on 11 May 1860. [2]
Victory at Calatafimi was followed by the capture of Palermo and then of the whole island. Garibaldi crossed the Strait of Messina, advanced up the peninsula and entered Naples in September, with the Bourbon army finally checked at the Volturno. [1] Rather than proclaim a republic, he met Victor Emmanuel II and surrendered his conquests to the king, then withdrew to Caprera refusing rewards.
Later campaigns and death
Rome remained outside the new kingdom, and Garibaldi twice marched on it without government sanction: he was wounded and arrested at Aspromonte in 1862 and defeated by French and papal troops at Mentana in 1867. [3] He fought again for Italy in the war of 1866 and, in 1870, took command of the Army of the Vosges on behalf of the new French Republic against Prussia.
He served intermittently as a deputy in the Italian parliament and retired to Caprera, where he farmed and wrote memoirs and novels. He died there on 2 June 1882. [1] Monuments and streets bearing his name are found in almost every Italian town, and he remains a symbol of national unification and of nineteenth-century republican volunteerism. [2]
