Trevor Grundy
Giuseppe Garibaldi: Hero of two worlds Giuseppe Garibaldi is best known for his invasion and conquest of Sicily in 1860 and his life-long fight for Italian unity. Not so well- known is the way he spent over twelve years of his life fighting tyranny in South America
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iuseppe Garibaldi (born in Nice 1807, died on the island of Caprera, north of Sardinia in1882) was one of the greatest liberal, patriot, hero and soldiers of the 19th-century. He was a hero of two continents, an international celebrity, and a political pop star long before the face of Che Guevara appeared on millions of student t-shirts during the Paris uprisings of 1968. Remembered by most as the man who landed and led 1,000 red-shirted followers during the siege of Sicily and then Naples in 1860, Garibaldi, was offered a military command by Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War. Then the Confederates came up with a bright idea – to make Garibaldi a general if he would fight for slavery and the southern states. Fortunately for Italy and Europe, he did neither. Garibaldi is a hero of Western European liberals and revolutionaries. Born in Nice, son of a merchant shipman, he spent much of his youth sailing the Mediterranean. Soon he was caught up in the nationalist movement –the Risorg-
Garibaldi in South America: An Exploration Richard Bourne Hurst and Company www. www.hurstpublishers.com £25
imento – that put red shirts on the backs and guns into the hands of tens of thousands of young Italians who wanted rid of the Austrians and Roman Catholics who ruled various states. He was one of the first to realise the power of the press, which played so vital a role explaining the Crimean and American Civil War to the public and which, almost overnight, turned fighting men into living legends. In November 1833 he met
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Giuseppe Mazzini in Genoa and was spellbound. He joined the Carbonari, an informal collection of secret societies dedicated to ousting Italy’s self-imposed tyrants. In 1833 he participated in a failed Mazzini-inspired insurrection in Piedmont and a court sentenced him to death. He fled to Marseille then went to the Beylik of Tunis before finding his way by boat to the Empire of Brazil where he took up the cause of the Rio Grande do Sul Republic in its attempt to separate from Brazil in 1835. In Rio he joined a branch of Young Italy (and a local branch of the Freemasons) and was radicalised by young Italian revolutionaries who had made Latin America their exile base. After helping to attack and take Laguna in 1839, he met the woman who changed his life and after her death lived on as a memory and then a legend. Anna Maria Jesus de Ribeiro, commonly known as Anita, left her husband and eloped with the bearded, handsome Italian. She was his partner in war and a mother of four children, the first of Garibaldi’s three wives. It was
