What was the purpose of the uprising in Italy in 1861 led by Garibaldi and his thousand men?

1000 (Viva V.E.R.D.I.) is a song based on the historical battle that took place in Italy in 1861 where a group of political figures in the north banded together to overthrow the Austrian, French, and Spanish regimes in Italy. The aim was to end foreign occupancy, unite Italy under one flag, language, and monarch, and aim for a future free from oppression.
1861, Giuseppe Garibaldi leaves the shores of Genova for Sicily with 1000 men dressed in denim jeans and red shirts. The locals know there will be an uprising and they are ready. Although they are poor and have little, they are armed with centuries of pent up fury. There is a promise made to southern Italy: that unification under the Savoia monarchy will drive out the foreign occupants including the Spanish Bourbons, and put the power back in the hands of the people. There is a growing hope for change – a growing belief that the futility of their century’s old fate can indeed come to an end. They will sacrifice everything to turn on their masters. They cannot go back. They will not lose.
3. 1000 (VIVA V.E.R.D.I.)
Romina (voice, guitar), Francesco Pellegrino (colascione, tammorra), Gianluca Campanino (tammorra), Ben Grossman (tammorra, percussion), Mike Herriott (trumpet, french horn, trombone), Drew Jurecka (violin), Rebekah Wolkstein (violin), Shannon Knights (viola), Rachel Pmedli (cello), Roberto Occhipinti (double bass).
Ascia, gancio, sega, pala, / Ax, hook, saw, shovel
falce, raspa, zappa, spada, / scythe, rasp, hoe, sword,
lama, pietra, unghia, denti, / blade, stone, fingernail, teeth,
urli, strilli, maledetti! / hollers, screams, cursed people!
O diman’ O diman’ / O tomorrow, O tomorrow
A Marsala, Garibald’ / Garibaldi at Marsala
Suona a tromba, suona a guerra / Sound the trumpet, Sound the war
Suona in cielo, suona in terra.

France sent 30,000 men to fight for the Pope and when these troops attacked Rome, Garibaldi organised the defence of the city while Mazzini controlled its government. Garibaldi's troops, wearing their famous red shirts, were defeated, but most of them managed to escape, and Garibaldi went to the United States. Returning to Europe in 1854, he settled on Caprera, a tiny island off Sardinia.
In 1859 Garibaldi was fighting the Austrians in north Italy once more, this time successfully. In May 1860, with 1,000 volunteers, he landed on the island of Sicily (off southern Italy) where the people were suffering under the brutal rule of King Francis of Naples. Within three months 25,000 of King Francis's troops were defeated, and Garibaldi led his men to the mainland of Italy, won the Battle of Reggio and marched on Naples. Francis fled and his kingdom of southern Italy was handed over to King Victor Emmanuel of Sardinia, who afterwards became King of the whole of Italy. Garibaldi, rejecting all offers of wealth and titles, returned to his simple farm on the island of Caprera.
From there in 1862 he returned once more to raise an army and march on Rome, which was still a separate state ruled by the Pope. However, Victor Emmanuel did not want further strife and forced Garibaldi to stop. In 1867 he tried again and was defeated by the Pope's army, which had French troops fighting with it.
Garibaldi retired to his farm and died at the age of 75, honoured and mourned throughout the nation he had fought to free.

By the end of the eighteenth-century, with revolutionary ferment changing the monarchical and political landscape across the European continent, and especially in France, Sicily also came close to ridding itself of its monarchy. By the late 1840s, corruption, mutiny, and violence effectively ended the rule of the Bourbons. This made Sicily into the ideal starting point for Garibaldi’s campaign to unify Italy, and he arrived on the island with his 1,000-strong army of Red Shirts in 1860.
Garibaldi, Unification, World War II, through to today (1860-to date)
Once Giuseppe Garibaldi had landed at Marsala in June 1860, his army was joined by increasingly large numbers of dissident Sicilian fighters, whose loyalty no longer rested with their Bourbon rulers. United, with a strong sense of patriotic purpose, a fair degree of strategic cunning and bare-faced bravura, and a good dose of luck, they eventually defeated the Bourbons. In 1870, Garibaldi officially handed Sicily over to the king of the rest of Italy, Victor Emmanuel II, of the royal house of Savoy, and Sicily became part of the newly unified Kingdom of Italy. However exuberance was quickly dispelled, when the nature of the new order became clear, with only 1% of Sicilians being entitled to vote in the new Italian Parliament. Sicily was once again the outpost of an empire, with absentee rulers who understood little and cared less about the Sicilians who struggled to make a subsistence living from agriculture and fishing.
Over the following century, the poverty of the island led to mass emigration. One and a half million Sicilians found their ways to the Americas, and it was in America that they were recruited to be willing participants in the final invasion of the island, by supplying US Intelligence with detailed information on the topography of the island, its towns, and the names of those in Sicily who would assist their cause. In July 1943, the US Army and allied forces, under the five-star leadership of Generals Patton and Montgomery, landed at Gela and Pozzallo, respectively. They numbered over 160,000, which was larger than any invading force, at any point in Sicily’s long history!

Italian unification and Liberal Italy
Main articles: Italian unification and Military history of Italy during World War I
The legendary "handshake of Teano" between Giuseppe Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel II: on 26 October 1860, General Garibaldi sacrificed republican hopes for the sake of Italian unity under a monarchy.
The creation of the Kingdom of Italy was the result of efforts by Italian nationalists and monarchists loyal to the House of Savoy to establish a united state encompassing the entire Italian Peninsula. In the context of the 1848 liberal revolutions that swept through Europe, an unsuccessful war was declared on Austria. The Kingdom of Sardinia again attacked the Austrian Empire in the Second Italian War of Independence of 1859, with the aid of France, resulting in liberating Lombardy.
In 1860–61, Giuseppe Garibaldi led the drive for unification in Naples and Sicily, allowing the Sardinian government led by the Count of Cavour to declare a united Italian kingdom on 17 March 1861. In 1866, Victor Emmanuel II allied with Prussia during the Austro-Prussian War, waging the Third Italian War of Independence which allowed Italy to annex Venetia. Finally, as France during the disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 1870 abandoned its garrisons in Rome, the Savoy rushed to fill the power gap by taking over the Papal States.
Italian infantry at the Battle of Isonzo. More than 650,000 Italian soldiers lost their lives on the battlefields of World War I.
The Sardinian Albertine Statute of 1848, extended to the whole Kingdom of Italy in 1861, provided for basic freedoms, but electoral laws excluded the non-propertied and uneducated classes from voting. The government of the new kingdom took place in a framework of parliamentary constitutional monarchy dominated by liberal forces. In 1913, male universal suffrage was adopted. As Northern Italy quickly industrialized, the South and rural areas of North remained underdeveloped and overpopulated, forcing millions of people to migrate abroad, while the Italian Socialist Party constantly increased in strength, challenging the traditional liberal and conservative establishment.
Starting from the last two decades of the 19th century, Italy developed into a colonial power by forcing Somalia, Eritrea and later Libya and the Dodecanese under its rule.

Muslims, Jews, Byzantine Greeks, Lombards, and Normans worked together fairly amicably. During this time many extraordinary buildings were constructed."Norman Sicily of the 12th Century"
Italian unificationThe led by captured Sicily in 1860, as part of the . The conquest started at Marsala, and native Sicilians joined him in the capture of the southern Italian peninsula. Garibaldi's march was completed with the Siege of Gaeta (1861), Siege of Gaeta, where the final Bourbons were expelled and Garibaldi announced his dictatorship in the name of Victor Emanuel II of Italy, Victor Emmanuel II of Kingdom of Sardinia. Sicily became part of the Kingdom of Sardinia after a referendum where more than 75% of Sicily voted in favour of the annexation on 21 October 1860 (but not everyone was allowed to vote). As a result of the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy, Sicily became part of the kingdom on 17 March 1861. The Sicilian economy (and the wider ''mezzogiorno'' economy) remained relatively underdeveloped after the , in spite of the strong investments made by the Kingdom of Italy in terms of modern infrastructure, and this caused an unprecedented Italian diaspora, wave of emigration. In 1894, organisations of workers and peasants known as the ''Fasci Siciliani'' protested against the bad social and economic conditions of the island, but they were suppressed in a few days. The 1908 Messina earthquake, Messina earthquake of 28 December 1908 killed more than 80,000 people. This period was also characterized by the first contact between the Sicilian mafia (the crime syndicate also known as Cosa Nostra) and the Italian government. The Mafia's origins are still uncertain, but it is generally accepted that it emerged in the 18th century initially in the role of private enforcers hired to protect the property of landowners and merchants from the groups of bandits (''Briganti'') who frequently pillaged the countryside and towns. The battle against the Mafia made by the Kingdom of Italy was controversial and ambiguous.

There is much discussion even today about exactly how a relatively small band of Garibaldini, augmented at most by a few thousand irregulars picked up along the way, managed to make their way up the peninsula against what, at least on paper, appeared to be an overwhelmingly superior force. It is probably best to view Garibaldi's victory as resulting from a combination of factors. First, Garibaldi, himself, was a master of the hit-and-run harassing tactics that would one day become known as "guerrilla warfare." He was also a firm believer in Napoleon's dictum that "morale is to material as ten is to one"—and his Redshirts had morale to burn. They were the righteous bringers of a new nation, and there is little doubt that large numbers of the long-suffering peasantry in Calabria and Puglia (perhaps less so as he moved further north towards Naples) genuinely viewed them as liberators.
situation in the Bourbon military also worked to
Garibaldi's advantage. There was massive desertion among
royalist troops, many of whom felt that they were now
bound up in defending a lost cause. Additionally, the
officer corps had been bitterly split for at least a
decade between old-guard royalists and those who felt
that the time for a united Italy had come at last.
All this, and more, combined to produce the unlikely sight, on September 7, 1860, of Giuseppe Garibaldi and a small group of companions entering Naples unopposed, by train (!) from Salerno and then in an open carriage from the station to the Royal Palace. They were miles ahead of the army. The king had fled to Gaeta the day before and the city and remaining troops welcomed the Risorgimento by giving Garibaldi a hero's welcome.
A Bourbon force of about 20,000 troops had remained loyal to the king and gone north with him. Initially, the king had intended his retreat as somewhat of a strategic withdrawal. He had no intention of surrendering his kingdom without a fight. His army, near Gaeta, was, however, also being pressed from the north by the advancing army of King Victor Emanuel of Piedmont, who had finally decided to get on the bandwagon of unification before Garibaldi got all the credit.

Thus hemmed in, the Bourbons made a desperate effort in early October to break out and retake their kingdom by storming south at the Volturno River. Garibaldi was called upon for one of the few times in his life to fight a pitched battle instead of one of his guerrilla actions, and to defend instead of attack. He commanded troops along a twenty-kilometer front against a superior attacking force and held.
On October 25th, near
Capua, Garibaldi greeted Victor Emanuel of Piedmont's
Royal House of Savoy with the words, "Greetings to the
first King of Italy" and surrendered his conquests
—Sicily, half the Italian peninsula and the vast
Neapolitan Royal Navy (considerably superior to northern
Italian fleets of the time) —without the slightest
hesitation or thought of reward for himself, simply
because it was the right thing to do.
For their efforts,
Garibaldi and his superb men were completely and utterly
snubbed by the new rulers of Italy. The egalitarian
initiatives such as free education and land reform that
Garibaldi had set up during his brief reign as "Dictator
of Naples" were revoked, provoking for another
decade in much of the south what almost amounted to a civil war as recently liberated
subjects of the Bourbons took to the hills to escape
their liberators from the north.
like the way things had turned out, but figured it was
just more injustice he would have to straighten out when
he got around to it. He spent the last twenty years of
his life actively trying to do just that in one way or
another, in one place or another. He would fight more battles,
be arrested and imprisoned (he escaped) and even be
elected to parliament. He didn't have a political bone
in his body, and he continued to be saddened and
confounded by the politics of those who refused to do
the right thing. The Kingdom of Naples, which Garibaldi
had handed to Victor Emanuel on a silver platter, was
officially dissolved on Oct. 22, 1860, when Neapolitans
voted by plebiscite to become part of Mazzini's "new
Italy…united for all Italians".

He spent fourteen years there, taking part in several wars, and returned to Italy in 1848.
After the Revolutions of 1848, the apparent leader of the Italian unification movement was Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi. He was popular amongst southern Italians. Garibaldi led the Italian republican drive for unification in southern Italy, but the northern Italian monarchy of the House of Savoy in the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia whose government was led by Camillo Benso, conte di Cavour, also had the ambition of establishing a united Italian state. Though the kingdom had no physical connection to Rome (deemed the natural capital of Italy), the kingdom had successfully challenged Austria in the Second Italian War of Independence, liberatingLombardy-Venetia from Austrian rule. The kingdom also had established important alliances which helped it improve the possibility of Italian unification, such as Britain and France in the Crimean War.
The transition was not smooth for the south (the “Mezzogiorno“). The entire region south of Naples was afflicted with numerous deep economic and social liabilities.Transportation was difficult, soil fertility was low with extensive erosion, deforestation was severe, many businesses could stay open only because of high protective tariffs, large estates were often poorly managed, most peasant had only very small plots, there was chronic unemployment and high crime rates.
Cavour decided the basic problem was poor government, and believed that could be remedied by strict application of the Piedmonese legal system. The main result was an upsurge in brigandage, and a heavy outflow of millions of peasants in the Italian diaspora, especially to the United States and South America. Others relocated to the northern industrial cities such as Genoa, Milan and Turin, and sent money home.
Liberal Italy (1861–1922)
Italy became a nation-state belatedly—on 17 March 1861, when most of the states of the peninsula were united under king Victor Emmanuel II of the Savoy dynasty, which ruled over Piedmont. The architects of Italian unification were Count Camillo Benso di Cavour, the Chief Minister of Victor Emmanuel, and Giuseppe Garibaldi, a general and national hero. In 1866 Prussian Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck offered Victor Emmanuel II an alliance with the Kingdom of Prussia in the Austro-Prussian War. In exchange Prussia would allow Italy to annex Austrian-controlled Venice.

In George Macaulay Trevelyan’s account of the key Battle of Calatafimi, the “Thousand” heroically defeated the Neapolitans who greatly outnumbered them. Before the battle, when the bugler blew the réveillée of Como, “[t]he unexpected music rang through the noonday stillness like a summons to the soul of Italy” (254); although, as Gilmour puts it, Garibaldi made “an unprovoked attack on a recognized state with which his country, Piedmont-Sardinia, was not at war” (192-3). “It was indeed a heroic enterprise but it was also, incontrovertibly, illegal” (Gilmour 192). Cavour, represented as the architect of unification, in fact opposed a united Italy until the late 1850s; in 1856, for example, he denigrated a Venetian pro-unification patriot for favouring “the idea of Italian unity and other such nonsense” (cited in Gilmour 179). His change of heart, revisionist historians insist, was part of his expansionist plans for Piedmont, which resulted in annexation of other Italian states to Piedmont—rather than Italian unification, these historians argue, the final wars of independence in 1859-60 resulted in the Piedmontization of Italy. Cavour’s annexing meant “the imposition of northern laws, customs and institutions on distant regions with no experience of their workings” (Gilmour 198). Massimo d’Azeglio (a prominent Sardinian politician) calculated that, despite the overwhelming show of support in the plebiscites (which arguably put the question of unity in a biased fashion, not mentioning annexation), only a fifth of Neopolitans wanted to be annexed (Gilmour 197). And then there was the King himself, promoted by d’Azeglio as “il re galantuomo” (the gentleman king), and celebrated as the heroic “father of Italy” in countless statues all over the Italian nation. [See, for example, Figure 4: Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II, Bergamo, Italy].

In order to keep it within bounds he hurried on a peace with Austria at Villa Franca. According to that peace the Austrians were still to retain very considerable Venetian territory in Italy; but the rest of Lombardy they handed over to Napoleon, who ceded it to the King of Sardinia. The Italians were furious in their disappointment. They considered Napoleon a greater enemy of theirs than were the Austrians. They claimed, and not without a fair show of justice, that one more battle, the success of which was scarcely doubtful, would have made secure the unity of Italy. They reproached Napoleon with a childish fear of the anger of the Pope, Pius IX., and with the intention of keeping Italy in her old anarchy. Garibaldi and other Italian patriots, especially Mazzini, published innumerable pamphlets, calling upon the Italian nation to rise in a body and to drive out her enemies. Cavour, who continually clung to his diplomacy, and who was, moreover, crushed by illness, overwork, and the considerable strain of continuous vigilance and diplomatic negotiations, still managed to hold the balance between the wavering of Napoleon, the hostility of the Austrians and the Pope, and the excessive claims of the ultras. He died in June, 1861, and by that time the unity of Italy was a foregone conclusion. The patriots under Garibaldi had, by their bold initiative in Sicily and Naples, so irretrievably engaged and compromised the people of southern Italy, that one part of Italy after another declared for Victor Emmanuel, hitherto only King of Lombardy, as King of Italy. The inevitable and necessary advent of the unity of Italy was finally quite clearly shown in 1866, when Victor Emmanuel, although beaten by Austria on sea and on land at Lissa and at Custozza, nevertheless made good his claim to the Venetian territory still in the hands of Austria, so that the whole of Italy, except the city of Rome, was in August, 1866, under the rule of Victor Emmanuel as King of Italy. The City of Rome was entered by the Italians a few weeks after the commencement of the Franco-German War, and ever since Italy has been a united monarchy.
The events of the fifties and sixties of the last century fully proved the correctness of Cavour’s policy.

(September) After a lightning campaign in Calabria, he captures Naples, the largest town in Italy, and makes himself "Dictator of the Two Sicilies." (October) After a big battle on the Volturno River, he holds plebiscites in Sicily and Naples, and then gives the whole of southern Italy to Cavour, proclaiming Victor Emanuel as King of a united nation. (November) He returns to Caprera, which now remains permanently his home.
1861 (April) He attacks Cavour in parliament over the latter's ungenerous treatment of the volunteers. (July) President Lincoln offers him a command in the American Civil War, but has to withdraw the offer after a storm of protest from the Vatican.
1862 (July) He begins agitating in Sicily for another march on Rome, evidently with some encouragement from the King and Rattazzi, the Prime Minister. (August) Seriously wounded in a clash with Italian troops at Aspromonte, in Calabria. (October) After being imprisoned, he is granted an amnesty by the King.
1863 Resigns from parliament because of martial law being applied in Sicily.
Triumphal reception in England.
Garibaldi welcomed in London.
A reception given by the Duchess of Sutherland at Stafford House.
The whole country shut down for 3 days when Garibaldi visited London in 1864. High and low received him except Queen Victoria and the royal family. Thousands of children lined the streets and they all chanted this little ditty:
We'll get a rope,
And hang the Pope:
So up with Garibaldi!
1866 Leads another volunteer army in a new war against Austria, after which Venice is joined to Italy.
1867 Again attempts a march on Rome, but is beaten by papal and French forces at Mentana, and once again is arrested by the Italian government.
1870 Joins republican France in the Franco-Prussian war, and is made commander of an army in the Vosges....This is one of the most important years in history. After 1260 years, Rome ceases to be governed by the Popes and becomes the Capital of the new united Italy. Pius IX declares himself infallible in the same year!!
Map of Italy after the fall of the Papal States
The Fourth Beast Papal Rome receives a deadly wound from the sword of Garibaldi.

The Final UnificationCavour encourages Garibaldi to join Victor EmmanuelOct., 1860 Southern Italy holds votes to unite with the NorthItaly is BORN!!!Cavour dies three months later
Add Venice and RomeItaly allied with Prussia against Austria in 1866 and was given VeniceDuring Franco-Prussian War (1871), French protected Rome couldnt spare troops to defend the city so Italy took it

They occupied Ischia di Castro, Farnese, Acquapendente and Valentano, but, when attacked, took refuge in the convent of S. Francesco in Bagnoregio. The papal troops, however, organized themselves quickly and, after meeting in Montefiascone, drove the “brigands” or “bandits” across the border, regaining control of the entire area. However, after Garibaldi’s victory at Monterotondo, papal troops abandoned all their garrisons, afraid of an invasion from the regular troops of the Savoy and concentrated their efforts on Rome and Civitavecchia, where they expected the French reinforcements to land. The Garibaldini decided to take advantage of the situation, leaving their base in Torre Alfina to occupy Viterbo, taking control of the strategic strongholds of Bagnoregio, Valentano and Montefiascone, placing the latter under their military command. But just when the plebiscite had begun to welcome annexation to the Kingdom of Italy, news of Garibaldi’s defeat at the Battle of Mentana arrived. The Garibaldini therefore abandoned all their positions and left the Papal States. Only in 1871, with the fall of Rome, did the territory of Bolsena Lake finally became part of the Kingdom of Italy.

The Pope’s Irish Battalion – Battalion of St. Patrick
In 1860, 1,400 Irishmen travelled to Italy in response to Pope Pius IX’s call for help in thwarting Italian efforts to seize Papal Lands.
Up to the mid-nineteenth century Italy was a patchwork of small independent states, each influenced to a degree by neighbouring super powers such as France and Austria. A uniformitarian movement took hold in the 1850’s, however, with Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini included among its leaders. Key to their aims was the annexation of the Papal States, a vast territory interposed much like a wide band across the middle of the Italian peninsula. With no viable military force to protect his lands, an increasingly worried Pope Pius IX issued a call to Catholics throughout Europe for men and arms to raise an army in his defence.
By March 1860, Papal Emissaries had arrived in Dublin to recruit an Irish battalion to serve the Pope. At the forefront of this effort was an alliance between Count Charles McDonnell of Vienna, a ‘Chamberlain’ to the Pope, and Alexander Martin Sullivan, the Editor of the national newspaper. Within a matter of weeks, the resultant recruitment committee had organised rallies in support of the Pope throughout the country, and more than £80,000 was collected (equivalent to £5 million today), most of it channelled to the Vatican through the Irish Pontifical College in Rome. Sermons from the pulpits of parish churches also acted as conduits for the call to arms that emanated from St. Peter's Square.
Religion was not the sole motivation for the Irish volunteers. Their response was also against the anti-Catholic or anti-Papal elements within the British Establishment. In an effort to destabilise French and Austrian influence among the Italian states the government openly supported the reunification movement with support of the Royal Navy in southern Italy. The British government also introduced legislation – The Foreign Enlistment Act - which prohibited British citizens from joining foreign armies. The Irish Constabulary was charged with enforcing this act but, using their discretion, there was no will to enforce the Act. Indeed a large number of members of the Force resigned their positions and travelled to Italy to join the Papal army. These were trained men and were an invaluable asset to the new army.

As Marx noted, “The Roman revolution was an attack on property and bourgeois order as dreadful as the June revolution [in France].”
But the revolution in France had been defeated, so “the re-establishment of bourgeois rule in France required the restoration of papal rule in Rome”.
Radical ideas had already taken hold in Venice and Florence. This was another reason for 6,000 French troops to attack the radicals in control of Rome.
Having just returned from South America, Garibaldi led working class volunteers in a heroic defence of the city for three months until 20,000 professional soldiers finally crushed them.
Italian democrats had been defeated once again by powerful foreign forces. But they had been most successful in areas where working class people had been part of their struggle.
Workers saw that they were fighting for something far more important than a flag.
“The Hungarian, the Pole, the Italian shall not be free as long as the worker remains a slave,” as Marx put it.
Garibaldi and Mazzini moved in the opposite direction, however, trying to break the link between national independence and political egalitarianism.
They united with nationalists in Piedmont in the north, whose leaders wanted to make an alliance with France to get the Austrians out of northern Italy alone.
Count Cavour, the prime minister of Piedmont, admitted he knew far more about southern England than southern Italy – he even once claimed that Sicilians spoke Arabic!
But whatever his inclinations, Cavour still needed Garibaldi for his military skills and popularity. If Garibaldi appealed for volunteers, people came running.
After a series of incredible victories against the Austrians in the north, Garibaldi was allowed to sail to Sicily in April 1860, which was already in revolt. He left with just 1,000 men – and there has since always been a suspicion that Cavour sent him off as a diversion, expecting him to be killed.
Yet in Sicily Garibaldi won a stunning victory against one of Europe’s most powerful armies. The rebels were forced to use unorthodox tactics at times, such as charging the enemy with fixed bayonets because their rifles were so old and unreliable.
Just as in 1848, the rebel victory happened because peasants rose throughout Sicily against their landlords and joined Garibaldi. But in other respects this was a different revolution from 1848, which was an attempted “revolution from below”.

Across the Austrian Empire, nationalist sentiments among Austria's various ethnic groups led to the revolutions in Austria to take several different forms. Liberal sentiments prevailed extensively among the German Austrians, which were further complicated by the simultaneous events in the German states. The Hungarians within the Empire largely sought to establish their own independent kingdom or republic, which resulted in a revolution in Hungary. Italians within the Austrian Empire likewise sought to unify with the other Italian-speaking states of the Italian Peninsula to form a "Kingdom of Italy".
The revolution in Vienna sparked anti-Habsburg riots in Milan and Venice. Field Marshal Joseph Radetzky was unable to defeat the Venetian and Milanese insurgents in Lombardy-Venetia, and had to order his forces to evacuate western Italy, pulling his forces back to a chain of defensive fortresses between Milan and Venice known as the Quadrilatero. With Vienna itself in the middle of an uprising against the Habsburg Monarchy, the Austrian Empire appeared on the brink of collapse. On 23 March 1848, just one day after Radetzky was forced to retreat from Milan, The Kingdom of Sardinia declared war on the Austrian Empire, sparking the First Italian War of Independence.
First War of Italian Independence Edit
Venice was at the time one of Austria's largest and most important ports, and the revolution which began there nearly led to the disintegration of the Austrian Navy. The Austrian commander of the Venetian Naval Yard was beaten to death by his own men, while the head of the city's Marine Guard was unable to provide any aid to suppress the uprising as most of the men under his command deserted. Vice-Admiral Anton von Martini, Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, attempted to put an end to the rebellion but was betrayed by his officers, the majority of whom were Venetians, and subsequently captured and held prisoner.  By the end of March, the Austrian troops in Venice were forced from the city and the Austrian Navy appeared to be collapsing as many of the Austrian sailors and officers were of Italian descent. Fearing mutinies, Austrian officers ultimately relieved these Italian sailors of their duty and permitted them to return home. While this action left the Navy drastically undermanned, it prevented any wide-scale disintegration within the Navy which the Austrian Army had repeatedly suffered from in Italy.

The aim of the insurgents, who were mostly Italian workers, was to overthrow Austrian rule, but their conspiratorial tactics led them to failure. Marx analysed it in a number of articles (see present edition, Vol. 11, pp. 508-09, 513-16 and 535-37).
Source: Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 12
(pp.13-17), Progress Publishers, Moscow 1979

Napoleon could no longer doubt the very serious character of the threats constantly levelled at him by the Italian patriots. Under the pretence of taking the waters at Plombiéres in central eastern France, he had an interview with Cavour, and there a formal alliance was made and a promise given that at an early date war should be made against Austria both by France and Sardinia, and after the successful termination of the war Austria’s power in Italy would be put an end to.
Although Napoleon, as already remarked, was quite sincere in his ideas about the principle of nationality, and seriously believed that nothing but good could come from a still greater union amongst the distracted territories of Italy and other countries, yet personally he was not in favour of the union of the whole of the Italian Peninsula. At that time a number of French diplomatists and politicians warned him of the inevitable consequences that a unity of all Italy could not but entail upon the prestige and power of France. Italy, they said, if united, will only be the prelude to a similar union in Germany and in other portions of Europe, and France will inevitably suffer from the rise of new and powerful national states. Napoleon did not deny the force of these arguments. However, he hoped to keep the patriotic enthusiasm of the Italians within bounds, and to make of Italy, not one kingdom under the rule of the House of Savoy, but four kingdoms under the suzerainty of France. In this entirely false view he was confirmed by the subtlety and diplomacy of Cavour, who himself very well knew that once Austria’s power was broken in Italy, and the friendship and moral support of France and England secured, nothing could prevent the Italians from establishing themselves as one single united monarchy. Napoleon declared war against Austria, and the war was rapidly finished by the campaign of 1859, the two most important engagements being at Magenta, near Milan, and at Solferino, close to Mantua. The Austrian army, although in no wise inferior to that of the French, was badly generalled, and a few misunderstandings sufficed to produce the defeat of Austria in both engagements. The Italians, drunk with enthusiasm, wanted to force Napoleon to continue the campaign, hoping to oust the Austrians from Italy altogether. However, Napoleon now took fright at the vast waves of national enthusiasm roused in Italy.

During the dramatic events of the spring and early summer of 1849, when the French troops attacked the Roman Republic for a whole month, Porta San Pancrazio played a major role in the desperate defence of Rome led by Giuseppe Garibaldi.
In memory of that heroic resistance, for which men such as Emilio Dandolo, Luciano Manara, Goffredo Mameli gave their lives, for the 150th anniversary of the Unification of Italy, Porta San Pancrazio has become a museum dedicated to the 1849 Roman Republic and the memory of Garibaldi. A strongly evocative location and a privileged standpoint of the historical and monumental area of the Janiculum, where the memory of that battle is still presents in the monuments. The San Pancrazio gate, located on the height of the Janiculum in the perimeter of the Urbanian or Gianicolense walls, was built in 1854-57 by the architect Virginio Vespignani on the ruins of the gate created by Marcantonio De Rossi in 1648 and partially destroyed during the war of 1849. In turn, the seventeenth-century Aurelia gate had replaced the old gate in the Aurelian walls slightly behind than it does today. On April 19, 1951 the City Council designated the National Association of Veterans and the Garibaldi Veterans for the construction of the museum, which was opened in 1976 with two sections: the first on the History of the Risorgimento and Garibaldi and the second on the hustory of the Italian Garibaldi division.

How else can one explain, for example, the fact that a South American guerrilla leader of genius, Giuseppe Garibaldi, followed by 1,000 descamisados, conquered in a few weeks one of the oldest kingdoms in Europe, the Two Sicilies, most of whose inhabitants were loyal subjects of their king and (as they showed later, after the unification, when they carried on a bloody war in the mountains for years) tenacious opponents of the usurper and of the “godless” liberals? How could this kingdom, defended by a well-equipped, well-trained, and reasonably well-commanded army, and the best navy in Italy, collapse like a house of cards?
Denis Mack Smith’s conception of the Risorgimento satisfies the self-examining mood of Italian readers today, but not entirely. They welcome the pruning of the rhetorical foliage, the ruthless exposition of shortcomings and mistakes, the sharp delineation of character. They also welcome the analysis of the Risorgimento’s imperfections, from which many puzzling developments followed. Nevertheless Mack Smith is not Italian and his view of Italy is inevitably that of a twentieth-century, middle-class, northern Protestant scholar. Many of his censures seem inspired by an unconfessed desire to see Italy transform herself by magic into a law-abiding, tidy, fair-playing, decorous country, and by a perpetual disappointment in things as they are. His curiosity about the past is often moved by a desire to understand and remedy contemporary defects.
This, in other words, is the view from the Babington Tea Room. This famous and ancient pasticceria is on the left of the Spanish Steps, a pendant to the house where Keats died. For almost a century English residents or visitors found refuge in the only place, south of the Alps, where one could get a nice cup of tea, hot muffins, scones, and properly buttered toast. English lovers of Italy, nannies, spinsters, retired diplomats, dilettantes of all kinds met there and endlessly talked about the country and its inhabitants.

This is a link to a good 19th-century political cartoon plus accompanying article from Harper's Weekly about Garibaldi's conquering of the Kingdom of Naples at

And while your tremendous courage astonishes the world, we are sadly reminded how this old Europe, which also can boast a great cause of liberty to fight for, has not found the mind or heart to equal you.
Giuseppe Garibaldi, Scritti politici e militari, ed. Domenico Ciàmpoli, Rome 1907
If Abraham Lincoln had been able to obtain the services of the brilliant Giuseppe Garibaldi, the American Civil War may have ended in short order. As it was, for his military expeditions in South America and Europe (Italy, Austria and France), Garibaldi is known as the “Hero of Two Worlds”.

The obelisk is a 5-meter high stella representing the flying banner. The description on the backside reads: In 1833, Giuseppe Garibaldi took an oath of dedicating his life to liberation and unification of his Homeland Italy. Under leadership of the national hero Giuseppe Garibaldi, the country was liberated and unified. On the front side, it says:
In the person of Garibaldi Italy had a hero of antique kind, who was capable of producing miracles and who produced miracles (Friedrich Engels).
The obelisk in honor of Garibaldi’s visit to Taganrog was inaugurated on June 2, 1961 for the centenary of Italy’s liberation. The local artist Yakovenko realized the project of the monument. The bas-relief (Italian hero’s profile and a palm branch) was produced by the artist Baranov. In 1986, the bas-relief was replaced due to technical reasons and a new bas-relief by the artist Beglov was installed.
This is the only monument in honor of Giuseppe Garibaldi in the former Soviet Union.

The Bandiera brothers, Austrian naval officers, absconded in 1844 under the influence of Mazzinian revolutionary zeal to join a reported uprising in Calabria and declare a republic. Their venture was tragically misjudged; the Calabrian insurrection was minor and had been suppressed before their arrival. They were found and executed. Mazzini had discouraged the brothers, but he nevertheless turned their executions into a glorious martyrdom (see Gilmour 157-8).

After a series of smaller attempts throughout 1855 and 1856, in the later half of 1857 Napoleone's police force discovered an assassination plot involving former members of the government, and possibly a member of the exiled Tuscan royal family, Gian de'Medici, though the extent of the latter is a subject of debate.
Under Napoleone's direction, a company of his dragoons secretly crossed into the Aragonese Kingdom of Naples, where Gian was a local nobleman, and kidnapped him. After a short, secret, trial Gian was executed.
The event caused a serious diplomatic incident between the Italian Republic and Aragon, who until this had maintained a position of armed neutrality while it dealt with revolutionaries within its own territory. Aragon issued its first condemnation against the revolutionary government, and began considering further action. The incident also benefited Aragon's counter-revolutionary efforts in Naples; whereas many were expecting the fall of Aragonese authority over Naples to a revolutionary government, potentially a pro-Napoleone one, now Napoleone's raid have the pro-Aragon forces a rallying call, one that the majority of Neapolitans responded to.
Meanwhile, the assassination plot, and the alleged Medici involvement gave Napoleone an opportunity. Using the plot, he intended to re-create the hereditary, with himself as emperor. The move would have two effects: 1) by having a Buonapartist dynasty enshrined in the constitution, it would delegitimize a Medici restoration, and 2) by making himself an emperor, Napoleone would put himself on equal footing with the Holy Roman Emperor, and reject imperial authority over the lands under his control.
Napoleone was "elected" emperor in a lopsided, and probably fixed, referendum where 98.3% of those voting approved of the decision. Napoleones coronation was widely regarded as a sham, the Pope refused to coronate Napoleone, but Buonaparte never intended to ask. Instead, the High Judge of the Republic had Napoleone raise his hand, and answer a series of vows of what was expected to do as emperor (protect the Freedom of Speech, ensure Freedom of Religion, etc.). Afterwards, the High Judge extended Napoleone a cushion on which his imperial crown rested.

Mack Smith and David Gilmour point out how very far from the truth this image was (the former, for example, reports that the King told a British Ambassador “that there were only two ways of governing Italians, by bayonets or bribery” [“Documentary Falsification” 185]). And, as we have seen, Mazzini forged his image as a tragic outsider, a romantic nationalist, a patriot tragically exiled from his beloved land. Italian patriotic heroism sustained the “beautiful legend” of the teleological, inevitable movement to unification and liberty, as it depended on depicting the four prominent political players—the passionate zeal of Mazzini, the politican acumen of Cavour, the gentlemanly kingship of Victor Emanuel and the revolutionary heroism of Garibaldi—as complimentary and working in the end for a common goal, despite their clear difference of agenda and philosophy.
While Risorgmento print culture helped create such celebrities for the Italian literate classes, the concept of Italian independence was circulated in Britain by many authors in the nineteenth century. The complexity of the term “Risorgimento,” and the very problem it underscores about the concept “Italy,” was fed by British writers who inscribed and questioned the concept of “Bella Italia,” or beautiful Italy, which had a long tradition of mythologization in British literature. The feminization and aestheticization of Italy troped her as a beautiful, neglected, tragic woman, perhaps most famously in Lord Byron’s description of Venice in Canto Four of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818), where the city is figured as a tragic, abandoned “Ocean queen” (Canto 4, stanza 17, l. 7).

If he was grand in his wrath, he was grand also in his ideal aspirations; whether he thundered with the withering eloquence of a Cicero, or pleaded for the Brotherhood of Man with the accents of love; whether he bowed his head humbly before the power of one great G.o.d, or rose fanatically to preach the new Gospel: "Dio e il popolo," G.o.d the first cause, the People sole legitimate interpreter of His law of eternal progress.
The conviction that spoke from that man's lips was so intense, that it kindled conviction; his soul so stirred that one's soul could not but vibrate responsively. To be sure, at the time I am speaking of, every conversation seemed to lead up to the one all-absorbing topic, the unification of Italy. She must be freed from the yoke of the Austrian or the Frenchman; the dungeons of King Bomba must be opened and the fetters forged at the Vatican shaken off. His eyes sparkled as he spoke, and reflected the ever-glowing and illuminating fire within; he held you magnetically. He would penetrate into some innermost recess of your conscience and kindle a spark where all had been darkness. Whilst under the influence of that eye, that voice, you felt as if you could leave father and mother and follow him, the elect of Providence, who had come to overthrow the whole wretched fabric of falsehoods holding mankind in bondage. He gave you eyes to see, and ears to hear, and you too were stirred to rise and go forth to propagate the new Gospel, "The Duties of Man."
What he wrote, what he spoke, was something beyond revealed religion, the outcome of a faith that looked upwards to gather a new revelation of the eternal law that governs the universe. Gospel, Koran, Talmud, merged in his mind in the new faith, rising over the horizon to illuminate humanity.
There was another side of his nature that many a time deeply impressed me. The enthusiast, the conspirator, would give way to the poet, the dreamer, as he would speak of G.o.d's nature, and of its loveliest creation, Woman; of innocent childhood, of suns.h.i.+ne and flowers.
I have heard much said about Woman and Woman's Rights since the days of Mazzini, from pulpit and platform, from easy-chair and office-stool.

The Papal States divided Italy for about 1260 years (606-1866)
Giuseppe Garibaldi -
Father of Modern Italy
1807 (July 4) Born at Nice or Nizza (at that time part of France), the son of Domenico Garibaldi, a fisherman and coastal trader. The Great Liberator of the old world was born on the 31 birthday of the United States and just 2 years before the Great Liberator of the New World, Abraham Lincoln in 1809. His birthplace Nice or Nizza was always part of Italy until it was ceded to the French in 1796.
1814 Nice is once again joined to the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia.
1824-33 Garibaldi lives as a sailor in the Mediterranean and Black Sea.
1832 He acquires his master's certificate as a merchant captain.
1833 In touch with Mazzini's patriotic organization, Young Italy, and visits its headquarters at Marseilles.
1834 As a naval rating in the Piedmontese navy, he takes part in a mutiny for the republican cause. Sentenced to death by default, after escaping to France.
1835 Takes casual jobs in France and with the Bey of Tunis.
1836 Sails for Rio de Janeiro from Marseilles in a 200 ton brigantine.
He meets his Brazilian born wife Anita who becomes his companion-in-arms and heroine of the Risorgimento. She was just as brave as Garibaldi often fighting side by side with her hero husband. She died during the retreat from Rome in '49.
1836-40 As soldier, corsair, and naval captain, he fights for the break-away province of Rio Grande, in its attempt to free itself from the Brazilian Empire.
1841 He tries his hand at various jobs-including cattle herdsman, trader, and schoolmaster at Montevideo.
1842 Put in command of the small Orientale (Uruguayan) fleet against Manuel de Rosas, the dictator of Argentina.
1843 Also becomes commander of the newly formed Italian Legion at Montevideo.
1846 Wins the "battle" of St. Antonio, after which a sword of honor is subscribed for him in Italy. Lord John Russell is appointed Prime Minister in Great Britain.
1847 Briefly in command of the defense of Montevideo. Offers his services to Pope Pius IX but is refused.

1848 (April) Leads eighty of his legionaries back to Italy. (July) Vainly offers to fight for the king of Piedmont. (August) In command of a volunteer unit at Milan against the Austrians, and survives two brisk engagements at Luino and Morrazzone.
1849 (February) As an elected deputy in the Roman Assembly (after the flight of Pius IX), he proposes the creation of a Roman Republic. (April) As a general of brigade, he beats off an attack by the French at the St. Pancrazio gate of Rome. (May) Defeats a Neapolitan army at Velletri. (June) Takes a principal part in defending Rome against further French attacks. (July) Leads a few thousand men from Rome through central Italy to escape from French and Austrian armies. (August) After disbanding his men in San Marino, he is chased at sea and on land by the Austrians; his first wife, Anita, dies. (September) As soon as he arrives back in Piedmontese territory, he is arrested and deported as an undesirable.
Garibaldi is pursued by 100,000 of the Pope's soldiers. His beloved wife Anita, who is sick and pregnant, refuses to leave his side and she dies on the beach. The Pope had placed an enormous bounty on his head but not one Italian betrays him to the Papal Army.
Pope Pius IX (1846-1878).
Pope blesses the victorious French Army at the Vatican.
Pope Pius IX was the longest reigning Pope in history and the great antagonist of Italian unity. During his reign the firing squads and the scaffolds were kept busy day and night. He urged the Austrians to set up the guillotine and he would not allow railroads to be built in the Papal States.
1849-50 Lives for seven months in Tangiers, where he writes the first edition of his memoirs.
Ticker tape parade on Broadway.
Garibaldi was offered a ticker tape parade up the "canyon of heroes" in New York City. The Jesuits stirred up the Irish Catholics against him and in order to keep the peace he refused the offer. Of all the many world famous personalities to have been offered this singular honor, Garibaldi remains the only person to date to have refused it!!

In 1861 after the annexation of almost all the peninsula the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed at Florence and that of Sardinia came to an end.
The following is a list of the kings: Victor Amadeus II (1718-30), who abdicated in favour of his son Charles Emmanuel 111 (1730-73), regretting which he was imprisoned at Moncalieri where he died (1732). Charles Emmanuel to conquer the Milanese allied himself with France and Spain, in the War of the Polish Succession; he was frequently victorious but only obtained the region on the right of the Ticino (1738). He took part in the War of the Austrian Succession; gained splendid victories (the siege of Toulon, 1746; the battle of Col dell' Assietta, 1747), but with very little profit, gaining only the county of Angers, and Arona, the valley of Ossola, Vigevano, and Bobbio. Victor Amadeus 111 (1773-96), for having crushed the nationalist movement in Savoy (1791) with excessive severity, was overthrown by the revolutionary army which captured Savoy and Nizza. He allied himself with Austria and the campaign was conducted with varying fortunes, but when Bonaparte took command of the French troops Victor Amadeus had to agree to a humiliating peace. Charles Emmanuel IV (1796-1802) made an offensive treaty with France, whereupon his subjects revolted. The rebellion was crushed with severity and thousands of democrats emigrated either into France or to the Cisalpine Republic, whence they returned in arms. The royalists having obtained the upper hand, France intervened and obliged the king to abandon his possessions on the mainland (19 December, 1798). Charles Emmanuel withdrew to Sardinia; and in 1802 abdicated in favour of his brother Victor Emmanuel I (1802-21), who in 1814 was returned to Turin and saw his dominions increased by the inclusion of Genoa.
As happened elsewhere the restoration did not do justice to the legitimate aspirations of the democrats. There followed the revolution of 1821 caused by a demand for a Constitution and for war with Austria to obtain possession of Lombardy, which Piedmont had coveted for centuries.

Here was the fulfillment of the army career Charette had long worked for, yet, it was to be a very short assignment due to the outbreak of war between Austria and France in northern Italy. Opposed as Charette might have been to the French government, he could not bring himself to take up arms against his own people and his own country and so was forced to resign his commission in 1859 and look for an opportunity to serve in a worthy cause against a wicked enemy. Unfortunately there were plenty of enemies to be found for a young, conservative, traditional Catholic royalist like Charette; especially in Italy.
For some time the Italian states had been harassed by radical, liberal revolutionaries and nationalists who sought to create a united Italian nation state by overthrowing the local Italian princes, destroying their countries and, for good measure, tearing down the Catholic Church as the source of all evil in their warped, ultra-liberal viewpoint. One of the places where this conflict was most intense was in the very conservative Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Charrette had two brothers who opted to defend the Sicilian King Francis II and his lovely and heroic wife Queen Maria Sophia. This was a noble endeavor, but Charette himself opted instead to join in the defense of the Papal States and Blessed Pope Pius IX in May of 1860. As the Papal States had come under attack from the liberal Italian nationalists Pius IX was forced to organize a military defense. He appointed Monsignor Xavier de Merode Minister of War and General Christophe de Lamoriciere as commander of the papal armed forces. The army was an international one with volunteers from Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Spain, Portugal, France, Ireland and Canada. Charette was commissioned captain in the first company of French and Belgian troops known a year later as the Pontifical Zouaves.
Charette was certainly in good company as a great many of his comrades in the papal army were legitimist French royalists to the extent that one of their Italian enemies remarked that the officers of the papal army could easily have been a list of guests at the court of King Louis XIV. It was a truly heroic army with men like Charrette and his comrades, with very little pay, few supplies and hopelessly outnumbered fighting for the Church and the sovereignty of the Pope against a vastly superior enemy.

On 10th October 1943 the King of Italy, who with his Government had fled from Rome to Brindisi, declared war on Germany. Sporadic resistance to the Nazis began in German-occupied Italy almost immediately. In the mountain valleys and towns, armed groups were formed from Italian soldiers on the run - who feared deportation as forced labor to Germany - and escaped Allied POW's. Some of the more active partisans were Communist bands. The Communist Garibaldi band was active in the frontier area in north-East Italy, namely Friuli Venezia Giulia, and cooperated with Tito's partisans on the Yugoslav frontier. The Garibaldi made no secret of the fact that they supported Tito's claim to absorb the Venezia Giulia Region into Yugoslavia after the war.
On the other hand the Osoppo Partisan Brigade operated under the orders of the 'Committee of Liberation' which was formed to coordinate the resistance to German occupation by disparate partisan groups of diverse political persuasions. The 'Committee of Liberation' was comprised of the political parties that had been in hiding since their suppression by Mussolini in 1922. Their first acts were to aid escaping Allied POWs and deserters from the Italian army. By the end of November 1944, after further Cossack and German attacks, the Garibaldi partisans had dispersed to the East of the Isonzo River and passed completely under Yugoslav control. A few Osoppo partisans lay low in the high mountain villages where Cossack and German patrols did not penetrate.
A number of the Garibaldi objected to being under the Yugoslavs and deserted to the Osoppo. Both the Garibaldi leaders and the IX Yugoslav Corps were furious and their relations with both the Osoppo partisans and the British S.O.E. units supporting them became openly hostile. By February 1945 the Garibaldi Commanders had launched a violent anti-British and anti-American campaign which threatened the lives of British and American Commanders and resulted in the stealing of arms and money from British troops. However, the avowed intention of the Garibaldi partisans and the Yugoslavs was to destroy the Osoppo partisan units.

This is the second part of the section on the unity of Italy beginning from, “…in order to place them under obligations to Italy, had sent out a considerable corps of Italian soldiers to the Crimea as an auxiliary army for the allies.”
The decisive event, however, was the attempted crime of Orsini. It appears that Napoleon III., long before he succeeded in ascending the throne of France, and when he was still a roaming adventurer, had promised to the Italian patriots that whenever he should succeed in his aspirations he would extend to them a helping hand and put an end to the political and social anarchy of Italy. There is little doubt that Napoleon took these promises pretty seriously. Like all the members of the Napoleon family, ha had deep Italian sympathies; and, moreover, his general policy made him take his early promises to the Italian patriots as part of a policy both practical and sublime. However, the exigencies of his home as well as his foreign policy, the great war with Russia from 1854 to 1856, had prevented him from realizing his promises; and to numerous secret reminders of the part of the Italian patriots he answered evasively. These patriots had always threatened him with death unless he redeemed the promises made to them in the autumn of 1857. The most resolute of these patriots, Orsini, left London fro Paris, determined to put an end to the life of Napoleon. With several accomplices he ambushed Napoleon in a street near the Opéra in Paris, whither Napoleon, his wife Eugénie, and other members of his court were repairing in the evening of the 14th January, 1858. Orsini and his accomplices threw several bombs at the carriage of the Emperor; the bombs exploded, and killed and wounded over one hundred and forty persons; however, the Emperor and his wife escaped unscathed. Orsini in prison behaved with the most heroic steadfastness. Napoleon really wanted to pardon him, but it appeared that it would have been unwise to pardon the assassin of so many persons; the indignation of the French public was too intense. Orsini, however, made the Emperor promise that a French army would enter Italy and wage war with Austria, and having obtained this formal promise from Napoleon, Orsini mounted the scaffold with serenity.

Although some land was redistributed to peasants, when peasants pushed further by attacking landlords and taking over their land, Garibaldi’s forces repressed those actions ruthlessly.
Garibaldi’s successful campaign on the mainland continued to guarantee him popularity, and forced Piedmont to accept that the whole of the peninsula would be united.
But this Italian unification was a “revolution from above” and it stopped halfway – Gramsci called it a “passive revolution”.
As Marx’s collaborator Frederick Engels would write many years later, “The bourgeoisie, which gained power during and after national emancipation, was neither able nor willing to complete its victory.
“It has not destroyed the relics of feudalism, nor reorganised national production along the lines of a modern bourgeois model.”
Garibaldi wanted nothing for his massive achievements – he refused all honours and financial awards.
Although he would later fight to allow Rome and Venice to join the new nation of Italy, he essentially retired to a tiny island off Sardinia.
Not even Abraham Lincoln could tempt him to take a major command in the Union forces during the American Civil War.
As Garibaldi grew older, the limitations of his “revolution from above” became clear. In the south, people resented new taxes placed on consumer goods such as salt and tobacco to pay for the Crimean war, as well as military conscription.
In many areas there were virtual revolts, with armed gangs attacking troops and robbing wherever and whatever they could.
Over 100,000 Piedmontese troops were sent down to quell the south by destroying villages. They were greeted as an occupying foreign army.
Italy came into being as a “bastard state”, according to Gramsci.
Garibaldi’s life carries both hope and a warning to us today. In Latin America a number of charismatic leaders have appeared on the world stage.
So far they have not created a situation of “revolution from below” – and the conservative forces that oppose them could still be victorious if the revolutionary process is not deepened.
But some heroes and leaders are a source of inspiration. What Che Guevara was to the 20th century, Garibaldi was to the 19th. He died, penniless but still a hero, in 1882.
The Resistable Rise of Benito Mussolini by Tom Behan is available from Bookmarks, the socialist bookshop. Phone 020 7637 1848 or go to » www.bookmarks.uk.com

italian unification the supremo pizza of nationalism
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Italian UnificationThe Supremo Pizza of Nationalism
1800s - The Age of Nationalism Peoples inspired by example of George Washington and motivated against Napoleon
The Italian SituationItaly did not existMultiple Independent kingdomsSome foreign ownedFrance= Kingdom of the two SiciliesAustria= Lombardy and VenetiaTransportation and communication hard
Early NationalismRisorgimentoGiuseppe Mazzini led Young Italy
Revolution of 1848Republican Revolution in SicilySpread north to Austrian Italy (Lombardy/Venetia)King Charles Albert of Sardinia rallies Italian countries against Austrians and he was winning!!!
A Young Charles Albert
The Revolution Fails to Make ItalyApril, 1848 Pope Pius IX removes Papal States from the warDidnt like Catholic peoples making war and killing other CatholicsCoalition falls apart
Pope Pius IX
End of the First AttemptMazzini and Young Italy overthrow the Pope and take RomeAngered over his influence in war with AustriaFrance, Spain, and Naples invade Rome and put Pius IX back into power.
Young Italy dead, but Charles Albert smells like a rose for his nationalism
Charles Albert, King of SardiniaA Phoenix in the Ashes?
Sardinia leads the WayVictor Emmanuel becomes King of Sardinia after death of father.Helped in unifying the North of Italy by his chief minister, Count Camillo di Cavour
Count Camillo di CavourSaw that Italian unification lay in defeating AustriaA Secret PlanSupported France and UK in the Crimean War to gain favors from them
A Franco-Austrian War, 1859Secret Treaty of Plombiers-Les-BainsFrance fights Austria and Italy gets Lombardy- Venetia if Italy gives France Nice and Savoy
A Partial VictoryViva VERDI (Victor Emmanuel, Re DItalia) united ItalyNapoleon III pulls out as war too costly.Tuscany, Parma, Modena & Romagna join Sardinia to fight for V.E. IIIs ItalyItaly gets LombardyNapoleon III of France
The SouthThe Rise of GaribaldiRevolutionary RootsRed Shirts -Led Revolution in 1860 after death of Sicilian King Ferdinand II Took Naples with 1000 men then marched NorthCavour is nervous!!!

Napoleon’s moment of coronation gives a flavour of how the campaign for Italian national independence known as the Risorgimento was so very contingent on myth; perhaps, indeed, the Risorgimento could be termed the most mythologized political and cultural movement in nineteenth-century Europe. Even the name Risorgimento (meaning political and cultural “resurgence,” “rebirth” and “resurrection”) was chosen for its symbolic weight by one of unification’s chief architects, Cavour (Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour), as the title of his liberal newspaper (founded in Turin on 15 December 1847), and the term for political unity stuck. Il Risorgimento took advantage of the new press freedoms granted by King Charles Albert of Piedmont (father of Victor Emanuel) in 1847, underlining the important relationship between print culture and Italian nationalism. In Tuscany, the abolition of press censorship by the Austrian Grand Duke Leopold led to another new pro-unification newspaper, The Tuscan Athenaeum (30 October 1847-22 January 1848), founded by Thomas Trollope (son of Fanny, brother of Anthony), modeled on the British Athenaeum. Trollope’s newspaper had a much smaller circulation and profile than Cavour’s, but nevertheless it was significant for its ambition and Anglo-Italian emphasis. The Tuscan Athenaeum, like Il Risorgimento, took advantage of the changing political climate to circulate a pro-Risorgimento message among the middle classes of Tuscany, and especially Florence where the newspaper was published. The Tuscan Athenaeum, however short-lived, was especially distinctive for two things. Firstly, it made a clear editorial call for moderation, spelled out in the very first issue, which associated its message with British liberalism. Secondly, it explicitly articulated the necessity of British interest in Italian politics. The newspaper was directed at mostly a British expatriate readership, and offered translations of Italian patriotic journalism from such other Tuscan newspapers as L’Alba to educate and motivate its audience in the Italian national cause.
The Risorgimento political philosophy was also circulated through another important channel: the journalism of the revolutionary and charismatic Giuseppe Mazzini.

Manuel Rosas, the dictator of Argentina, set his eyes on Uruguay. Leading a regiment of Italian soldiers, Giuseppe Garibaldi left to defend his new country. Even though Anita stayed behind to take care of their children she found herself defending the city of Montevideo from the Argentinians. She led a group of women in an organized effort to build walls to fortify the city against the invaders. It was because of her and the efforts of the women that she worked with that Montevideo was saved.
At the close of another war, Giuseppe Garibaldi received the letter that he had been waiting a long time for. The King of Sardinia wanted him to come home. Italy needed him. So the Garibaldi packed their bags and moved to Italy.
While Giuseppe began his campaign for a united Italy, independent of other countries, Anita took on the role of publicist and recruiter in addition to tending to their children. However, when Giuseppe needed her, she rushed to his side and there she stayed. She followed him on his campaign to liberate Rome. Their attempt at a liberation failed and the army was forced to retreat.
It was during this retreat that Anita fell ill and died. She was 28 years old and eight months pregnant.
Anita Garibaldi leaves a legacy unlike any other woman: A freedom fighter, martyr and mother, she is an inspiration the world over.

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Venice, they had performed deeds of valor and patriotism, not unworthy the brightest days of ancient Rome. The Roman and the Tuscan, the Venetian, the Piedmontese, and the Lombard, had fought side by side against the common enemy, and mingled their blood in the common cause. Thenceforth that cause was no longer the creed of a cliqne or a club—no longer the idol of a few patriotic enthusiasts. It had found for itself a sanctuary in every Italian heart. It had become the center, towards which the Italian mind, with all its convictions and aspirations, still continues to gravitate, with unerring certainty.
And now—to resume the thread of our narration—when the shock of Novara was past, the mourning for Charles Albert over, and the treaty with Austria, after long debate, had been ratified by Parliament, the government of Victor Emanuel set earnestly about the work of reform commenced by his father. Though little was known about the young king, except that his mother and wife were Austrian princesses, that he had been the pupil of Jesuits, and that as a soldier he was brave and intrepid in battle, yet he gave to his subjects a very acceptable pledge of his devotion to the constitution, in the choice that he made of his counselors. First in his confidence was Massimo D'Azeglio, the head of the ministry. Next to him in prominence, was Count Cavour, a man of great talents, wealth and ambition, the rival of D'Azeglio, and now his successor. These two men, by thus uniting their influence, were enabled to secure the support of what, in French phraseology, is called the right center and the left center of the houses of legislation, and thus command a majority over the opposite extremes of radicalism and conservatism. Though they were destined to meet with determined opposition, still they found most able supporters both in the cabinet and in the Parliament. There was La Marmora, who commanded the Sardinians in the Crimea. There was Cibrario, the able historian of Piedinont. There was Brofferio, whose eloquence in the Chamber of Deputies often swept all before it.

Particularly notable are the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, after which Italy gained Venetia, and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, which finally unified Italy with the gain of the Papal States and Rome. This final war also brought about the downfall of Napoleon’s nephew, Louis Napoleon or Napoleon III, as well as the unification of Germany. Unlike Italy, the German struggle for unity did not attract the same intense identifications and passionate romanticised zeal as the Risorgimento, perhaps because Germany was taken more seriously as an economic, modernized nation with stronger military and diplomatic power. As Maura O’Connor points out, the different fates of Germany and Italy in the nineteenth century illustrates the unevenness of economic and political change.
Unification of Italy, and its freedom from foreign occupiers, was achieved in 1861 through the military intervention of Napoleon’s nephew, Napoleon III, together with King Victor Emanuel of Sardinia (Piedmont), who became King of a united Italy through a series of plebiscites (Venice and Rome were not incorporated into the Kingdom until 1866 and 1870 respectively). But unification was both a cultural movement as well as a political phenomenon, and the example of Napoleon’s coronation demonstrates the fraught relationship between culture and politics. In addition, Napoleon’s adoption of the kingship of France underlines another key problematic at the heart of the concept of “Italy”: a belief in Italy as a national entity did not necessarily directly correspond with a movement to free the land from foreign rule. Furthermore, those advocating for political independence did not necessarily want unity; as Martin Clark points out, for many Italian writers and intellectuals, Italy’s diversity meant that “a single Italian state seemed [. . .] . . . not only impossible but also undesirable” (4). Those more inclined towards any kind of national unity favoured federalism (4). But, although unification, liberty and independence—the attested trio of Risorgimento goals—were largely achieved in 1861, this still did not equate to creating Italy as a nation. As Clark observes, “If Italian identity is multiple now, it was even more multiple then” (8).

Mazzini, writing under the pseudonym "Piccolo Tigre," was the author the Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita, which detailed the overthrow of Catholicism by infiltrating it. On October 31 of that year he was arrested at Genoa and interned at Savona. Although freed in early 1831, he chose exile instead of life confined into the small hamlet which was requested of him by the police, moving to Geneva in Switzerland.
In 1831 he went to La giovine Italia (Young Italy). Young Italy was a secret society formed to promote Italian unification. Mazzini believed that a popular uprising would create a unified Italy, and would touch off a European-wide revolutionary movement. The group's motto was God and the People, and its basic principle was the unification of the several states and kingdoms of the peninsula into a single republic as the only true foundation of Italian liberty. The new nation had to be: "One, Independent, Free Republic".
The Mazzinian political activism met some success in Tuscany, Abruzzi, Sicily, Piedmont and his native Liguria, especially among several military officers. Young Italy counted ca 60,000 adherents in 1833, with branches in Genoa and other cities. In that year Mazzini launched a first attempt of insurrection, which would spread from Chambéry (then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia), Alessandria, Turin and Genoa. However, the Savoy government discovered the plot before it could begin and many revolutionaries (including Vincenzo Gioberti) were arrested. The repression was ruthless: 12 participants were executed, while Mazzini's best friend and director of the Genoese section of the Giovine Italia, Jacopo Ruffini, killed himself. Mazzini was tried in absence and sentenced to death.
Despite this setback (whose victims later created numerous doubts and psychological strife in Mazzini), he organized another uprising for the following year. A group of Italian exiles were to enter Piedmont from Switzerland and spread the revolution there, while Giuseppe Garibaldi, who had recently joined the Giovine Italia, was to do the same from Genoa. However, the Piedmontese troops easily crushed the new attempt.

“Il Risorgimento”, the popular term for Italian Unification, is a complex and contentious term that connects two highly symbolic moments in the peninsula’s history: the crowning of Napoleon as King of Italy in 1805 to the 1861 unification of most of Italy with the military and diplomatic assistance of his nephew Napoleon III and King Victor Emanuel of Piedmont. The complex and contradictory set of myths that insist on the “beautiful legend” of the Risorgimento cover over the very difficulty and controversy of the notion of Italy itself.
The Napoleonic proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy only encompassed the northern part of what we now know as Italy, and it only lasted until his abdication of the thrones of both France and Italy on 11 April 1814. His Italian kingdom was what Christopher Duggan terms “an arena for constitutional experiments, with boundaries being rubbed out and redrawn with such frequency that many people must have been unsure at any given moment exactly whose subjects they were” (92). While “[t]hese changes were made without any reference to the Italian people” (Duggan 93), and Napoleonic rule led to discontent and unrest (being the monarch might mean saving Italy as an entity, but it also meant high taxes and unpopular centralization), foreign conquerors in Italy had a history of being welcomed and supported by Italians. As Denis Mack Smith notes, “the main obstruction in the way of the patriotic movement was not foreign governments,” but rather “the slowness of the great bulk of Italians to accept or even to comprehend the idea of Italy” (The Making of Italy 2). Napoleon’s stint as King of Italy, with its dependence on a revitalized concept of Italy, was an important precursor to the Risorgimento. Even the more negative aspects of French rule ultimately benefited a unified Italy, as Duggan argues, for the anger generated by his treatment of the Kingdom of Italy—divided up and gifted to his family, treated as secondary to the French empire—fed the movement for cultural nationalism, especially when Napoleon tried to impose French as the official language (96). It is important to underline the involvement other European nations had in Italian unification, both diplomatic and military. While some investments were more symbolic and diplomatic (especially that of Britain), Germany, Austria and France engaged in military conflict over Italian territorial claims.

more than an ordinary victory, and for the Austrians more than an ordinary defeat” (8), made all the more dramatic by the description of Magenta itself as “a little town in Lombardy” (8). The newspaper quotes an official French communication thought to be written by Napoleon himself, triumphant at the battle’s display of “prodigies of valour” (8) that involved taking more than a thousand prisoners. By 1860, the Illustrated London News uses the term “magenta” to describe a heroic victory, when it begins a description of a debate in the House of Commons thus: “Mr. Gladstone won his Magenta gallantly, and with extraordinary damage to the enemy.” The Battle of Magenta entered the “beautiful legend” of the Risorgimento as a resounding Italian patriotic triumph; as Gilmour wryly comments, the pictures of the battle that adorn the Risorgimento museums across Italy, like Fattori’s, like the Italian educational textbooks, turned it into a Piedmontese victory, although Victor Emanuel’s army in fact arrived at night when the battle was over (185, 259). Napoleon III—dismayed with the heavy casualties at Magenta and then Solferino, with the Lombards’ reluctance to be liberated, and with the military incompetence of the Piedmontese (who did not possess accurate maps of Lombardy, and who could garner only a tenth of the promised 200,000 patriotic volunteers [Gilmour 187])—suddenly (and unexpectedly to his allies) made a Peace at Villafranca in July. But Magenta entered into the Risorgimento historiography as a brave patriotic Italian victory, as a decisive blow for independence, liberty and unity.
Particularly notable, along with patriotic re-telling of battles, were the mythologizing of the major political figures to craft a narrative of heroic patriotism. One major player in unification, the revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi, was especially and famously adept at massaging his personality cult, as Lucy Riall’s recent biography admirably demonstrates in detail. Perhaps most notable was Garibaldi’s famous campaign in the south with the expedition of the “Thousand,” an army that in fact (and despite patriotic legend) had grown to over 21,000 by the time it defeated the 25,000 badly organized Neapolitan troops in Sicily (Gilmour 194).

The first of a long series of arrests came at age fourteen, when he was apprehended for writing an “insolent and threatening” letter to King Victor Emmanuel II.
Malatesta became politically active in his early youth, first as a Republican, then an Anarchist. He was introduced to Mazzinian Republicanism while studying medicine at the University of Naples; however, he was expelled from the university in 1871 for joining a demonstration. Partly via his enthusiasm for the Paris Commune and partly via his friendship with Carmelo Palladino, he joined the Naples section of the International Workingmen’s Association that same year, as well as teaching himself to be a mechanic and electrician. In 1872 he met Mikhail Bakunin, with whom he participated in the St Imier congress of the International.
While respecting “complete autonomy of local groups” the congress defined propaganda actions that all could follow and agreed that “propaganda by the deed” was the path to social revolution. For the next four years, Malatesta helped spread Internationalist propaganda in Italy; he was imprisoned twice for these activities.
In April 1877, Malatesta, Carlo Cafiero, the Russian Stepniak and about thirty others started an insurrection in the province of Benevento, taking the villages of Letino and Gallo without a struggle. The revolutionaries burned tax registers and declared the end of the King’s reign and were met by enthusiasm. After leaving Gallo, however, they were arrested by government troops and held for sixteen months before being acquitted. After A murder attempt by one Giovanni Passannante on king Umberto I, the radicals were kept under constant surveillance by the police. Even though the Anarchists claimed to have no connection to Passannante, Malatesta, being an advocate of social revolution, was included in this surveillance. After returning to Naples, he was forced to leave Italy altogether in the fall of 1878 because of these conditions, beginning his life in exile.
His constant work as an organizer and speaker embodied his ideals of free association: for Malatesta, it was useful to join an organization only for the purpose of doing something with that group of people. There was no sense in belonging to a group simply to belong.
He argued against pure syndicalism. Malatesta thought that trade-unions were reformist, and could even be, at times, conservative.

As the king had agreed with Austria and Naples not to grant the Constitution, he abdicated in favour of Charles Felix, his brother, who was absent at the time; Charles Albert, Prince of Carignano, assumed the regency and on 13 March, 1821, promulgated the Constitution of Spain, which was not accepted by Charles Felix (1821-31). Meanwhile, the revolutionary party had joined in the movement for Italian unity, but there was difference of opinion as to the form of that unity, whether there should be a great republic, or a federation of republics, or again a single monarchy or a federation of principalities. Many however were indifferent to the form. In 1831, therefore, disturbances began in Central Italy but were easily suppressed. The same year Charles Felix died without offspring and was succeeded by Charles Albert (1831-48). The Piedmontese then decided in favour of a United Kingdom of Italy under the House of Savoy, and to that end all the efforts of the Sardinian Government were henceforward directed. In 1847 Charles Albert granted freedom of the press and other liberal institutions. On 8 February he promulgated the statute which still remains the fundamental law of the Kingdom of Italy. One month later he declared war on Austria in order to come to the rescue of the Lombards who were eager to throw off the Austrian yoke at once. Though victorious in the first engagements, he suffered a severe defeat at Custoza and, after the armistice of Salasco, was again defeated at Novara (1849).
The King of Sardinia had for the time being to abandon his idea of conquest. Charles Albert abdicated in favour of his son Victor Emmanuel II (1849-78) and withdrew to Oporto where he died the same year. There followed ten years of military preparations, which were tested in the Crimean War, and vigorous diplomatic and sectarian operations to the detriment of the other Italian rulers, carried out under the direction and inspiration of Count di Cavour, who did not hesitate to enter into league with Mazzini, the head of the Republicans, knowing well that the latter's principles while bringing about the destruction of the other Italian states on the one hand, could not on the other, serve as a basis for a permanent political organization.

King Emmanuel agreed to the alliance and the Third Italian War of Independencebegan. The victory against Austria allowed Italy to annex Venice. The one major obstacle to Italian unity remained Rome.
In 1870, Prussia went to war with France starting the Franco-Prussian War. To keep the large Prussian army at bay, France abandoned its positions in Rome in order to fight the Prussians. Italy benefited from Prussia’s victory against France by being able to take over the Papal State from French authority. Italian unification was completed, and shortly afterward Italy’s capital was moved to Rome. Rome itself remained for a decade under the Papacy, and became part of the Kingdom of Italy only on 20 September 1870, the final date of Italian unification. The Vatican City is now, since the Lateran Treaty of 1929, an independent enclave surrounded by Italy, as is San Marino.
In Northern Italy, industrialisation and modernisation began in the last part of the 19th century. The south, at the same time, was overpopulated, forcing millions of people to search for a better life abroad. It is estimated that around one million Italian people moved to other European countries such as France, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg.
Parliamentary democracy developed considerably in the 20th century. The Sardinian Statuto Albertino of 1848, extended to the wholeKingdom of Italy in 1861, provided for basic freedoms, but the electoral laws excluded the non-propertied and uneducated classes from voting.
After unification, Italy’s politics favored radical socialism due to a regionally fragmented right, as conservative Prime Minister Marco Minghetti only held on to power by enacting revolutionary and socialist-leaning policies to appease the opposition such as the nationalization of railways. In 1876, Minghetti was ousted and replaced by socialist Agostino Depretis, who began the long Socialist Period. The Socialist Period was marked by corruption, government instability, poverty, and use of authoritarian measures by the Italian government.
Depretis began his term as Prime Minister by initiating an experimental political idea called Trasformismo (transformism). The theory ofTrasformismo was that a cabinet should select a variety of moderates and capable politicians from a non-partisan perspective.

Denis Mack Smith, Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, has dedicated a large part of his professional life to Italy, to Italian history, and, more particularly, to the fateful years between 1848 and 1870, when the country finally managed to be unified under one king and one law. He is now moving up a half century and preparing a book on the fascist era, which he considers the unfortunate and almost inevitable consequence of the shortcomings of the Risorgimento, its “poisoned fruits.”
Of course, the history of Italy during the last 100 years is extremely important for Italians; it is colorful, filled with picturesque characters and noble heroes. Still it is only marginal when seen as part of European history. What happened south of the Alps was the belated and peripheral effect of the political, ideological, and industrial revolutions which had taken place in America and in the rest of Europe generations before. Nevertheless, the Italian “resurgence” attracted and still attracts a large, possibly disproportionate, number of foreign, mostly English, historians.
For some reason, Englishmen more than any other literati have studied and described all kinds of foreign nations, near and far, illustrious and obscure, past and present, their art, religion, language, politics, manners, and morals. As a result the rest of the world is often forced, faute de mieux, to see lesser known countries exclusively through British prejudices and predilections. In the last century and a half a large number of these xenophiles have been smitten with a burning passion for Italy. They were historians, antiquarians, novelists, poets, authors of travel reminiscences and guidebooks.
The reasons for this infatuation seem unaccountable and vaguely abnormal to many Italians. Why Italy? Why should these northerners worry so much about a people whom most of them obviously love but rarely esteem, whose real virtues and vices they seldom understand, whose language they frequently misspell (Garibaldi’s and Mazzini’s first name, Giuseppe, is almost invariably Guiseppe in English), and whose history never seems quite to satisfy them?
Perhaps John Ruskin and Robert Browning could be considered among the forerunners of this trend, particularly Robert Browning.

Giuseppe Mazzini was born in Genoa when it was part of the French Empire and his father was an advocate of the ideas of the French Revolution. Genoa’s intellectual elite resented being handed over to the authoritarian monarchical Piedmont in 1815 and Mazzini, soon after graduating as a lawyer, started writing for newspapers that challenged the House of Savoy and were quickly closed down by the Piedmontese authorities.
In 1831, Mazzini joined the patriotic movement, the Carbonari, and he was arrested and imprisoned in Savona. On his release, he went into exile in Marseille, where he founded La Giovine Italia, Young Italy, a secret society who wanted to unify Italy into a liberal republic. Mazzini was convinced that this would be brought about by a popular uprising that would in turn spark a revolution across Europe.
By 1833, La Giovine Italia had 60,000 members and Mazzini launched the first of a series of failed revolts in Genoa. The uprising was brutally suppressed, its leaders executed and the director of the Genoa branch, Jacopo Ruffini, killed himself in prison. Mazzini was tried in absentia and sentenced to death. Another revolt failed in 1834 but undaunted, Mazzini now founded Young Europe, a movement ahead of its time, that envisaged a Europe of liberal republics linked in a federal state. It was a move that saw him arrested in both Switzerland and Paris.
In exile in England he continued to plot revolts. Above all he was impressed by the power of the press and was quick to see it as a potential weapon for garnering support, both in Britain and Italy. It was Mazzini who was to create the great myth of Garibaldi, the military leader of the Risorgimento. After another failed uprising in Genoa, Mazzini was sidelined in the story of the Risorgimento by Camillo Benso, the Piedmontese prime minister, who in 1856 now took a leading role, although he still remained active in Italian politics until his death in 1872. He’s buried in Genoa’s Staglieno cemetery.

Italian and British revisionist historians of the twentieth century, such as Denis Mack Smith, Christopher Duggan and Martin Clark, focus on the relationship between Mazzini and Cavour to demonstrate that the Risorgimento was, in fact, not an inevitable nationalist movement for unity, but rather a series of non-teleological, complex events (see, in particular, Clark 4), whose wars were largely fought between foreign powers (such as the crucial battles of Magenta and Solferino in June 1859). Indeed, many prefer not to use the term Risorgimento at all, seeing it as a problematic phrase that supports and simplifies a complex nationalist mythology concealing the real power behind unification: the dynastic expansionist interests of Napoleon III and Victor Emanuel. The main driving force behind unification in the 1850s, Cavour, pursued arguably underhand and devious politics that were driven by the urge to expand Piedmont’s territories in the south and expulse Austria, something that revisionist historians have termed derogatorily the “piemontesizzazione” of Italy. In addition, the revisionist accounts of unification emphasise it as a minority movement of the elite middle classes (what Piero Gobetti in Risorgimento senza eroi describes as a “failed revolution,” and what Antonio Gramsci calls a “passive revolution” that bypasses the economically disenfranchised) conducted by northern Italy at the expense of the interests of the south (seen as a backward “Mezzogiorno”). For example, while pro-unification print culture is widely accepted by historians as crucial to nationalist unity, Martin Clark notes that only 2.5% of the population could speak Italian and, indeed, few Italians actually wanted unification (4). Maxime Du Camp writes of overhearing crowds in Naples, following the plebiscites, shouting “Long live Italy,”, but then members of the crowd asked him what “Italy” was (Gilmour 199). Gilmour’s recent study underlines the problem of the very concept of Italy, noting that Metternich’s description of Italy in 1847 as merely “une expression géographique” has some truth, for at that time it was made up of eight independent states that had last been united by the Romans (158).

What was happening in Italy in the 1890s?
It unified penal legislation in Italy, abolished capital punishment and recognised the right to strike. January 1 – The Kingdom of Italy establishes Italian Eritrea as its colony in the Horn of Africa. May 17 – The Cavalleria rusticana opera by Pietro Mascagni premiers at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome.
What was happening in Italy in the early 1900’s?
The Italy of 1900 was a new country but it was also a weak one. The majority of the country was poor and there was little respect for the government. Even the royal family was not safe. In 1900, King Hubert was assassinated.
What was happening in Italy in the 1800s?
In the 1800s much of Italy wanted to unify into a single country. In 1871 Italy became a constitutional monarchy and an independent unified country. … He turned Italy into a fascist state where he was dictator. He sided with the Axis Powers of Germany and Japan in World War II.
What are some major events that happened in Italy?
Italy historical timeline
- 2000–1200 BC. Tribes from central Europe and Asia, the Villanovans, settle in northern Italy.
- c. 800 BC. …
- 753 BC. Legendary date of Rome’s founding.
- 750 BC. Greeks start to colonise southern Italy.
- 509 BC. Rome becomes a republic.
- 390 BC. Gauls sack Rome, but are expelled.
- 343–264 BC. …
- 264–146 BC.
What was Italy called before Italy?
The Greeks gradually came to apply the name Italia to a larger region, but it was during the reign of Augustus, at the end of the 1st century BC, that the term was expanded to cover the entire peninsula until the Alps, now entirely under Roman rule.
What started the Italian unification?
The Franco-Austrian War of 1859 was the agent that began the physical process of Italian unification. The Austrians were defeated by the French and Piedmontese at Magenta and Solferino, and thus relinquished Lombardy. By the end of the year Lombardy was added to the holdings of Piedmont-Sardinia.
Who ruled Italy in 1500s?

Luigi Galleani was a major figure in the anarchist movement, specifically among Italian anarchists, known as an unflinching advocate of propaganda by the deed. Galleani savored insurrectionary anarchism, seeing the Idea (as they termed anarchism) as a crusade and anarchists as martyrs pursuing holy vengeance and retribution against State, Capital, and Church.
Galleani was most influential Italian anarchist of the early 20th century. He was an accomplished radical orator, strongly charismatic, and inspired countless followers among his Italian comrades. He edited the principal Italian anarchist paper, Cronaca Sovversiva, which ran for fifteen years until its eventual suppression by the US government.
Born to middle class parents, Galleani became an anarchist in his late teen years while studying law at the University of Turin. He refused to practice law, which he now held in contempt, and turned his attentions to anarchist propaganda. He was forced to flee to France to evade threatened prosecution in Italy, but was expelled from France for taking part in a May Day demonstration.
Galleani later lived briefly in Switzerland, where he spent some time with students of the University of Geneva before again being expelled as a dangerous agitator, this time for arranging a celebration in honor of the Haymarket martyrs. He went back to Italy only to run afoul of the police again as a result of his insurgent activities. His return to Italy ended with his arrest for charges of conspiracy, where he spent five years in jail, exiled on the island of Pantelleria, off the coast of Sicily.
Escaping Pantelleria in 1900, Galleani fled to Egypt, staying among Italian comrades for a year until threatened with extradition, whereupon he fled to London. He was 40 years old at this time, and arrived at the United States in 1901, barely a month after the assassination of President McKinley at the hand of a self-proclaimed anarchist.
Settling in Paterson, New Jersey, Galleani assumed editorship of La Questione Sociale, the leading Italian anarchist periodical in America. In 1902, the Paterson silk workers engaged in a strike, and Galleani threw his oratorical talents in with the strikers, urging workers to declare a general strike and overcome capitalism, spellbinding his audiences with his rhetorical flourish and clarity of thought.

This treaty gave Austrian recognition to the existence of the Cisalpine Republic (made up of Lombardy, Emilia Romagna and small parts of Tuscany and Veneto), and annexed Piedmont to France. Even if, like the other states created by the invasion, the Cisalpine Republic was just a satellite of France, these satellites sparked a nationalist movement. The Cisalpine Republic was converted into the Italian Republic in 1802, under the presidency of Napoleon.
In 1805, after the French victory over the Third Coalition and the Peace of Pressburg, Napoleon recovered Veneto and Dalmatia, annexing them to the Italian Republic and renaming it the Kingdom of Italy. Also that year a second satellite state, the Ligurian Republic (successor to the old Republic of Genoa), was pressured into merging with France. In 1806, he conquered the Kingdom of Naples and granted it to his brother and then (from 1808) to Joachim Murat, along with marrying his sisters Elisa and Paolina off to the princes of Massa-Carrara and Guastalla. In 1808, he also annexed Marche and Tuscany to the Kingdom of Italy.
In 1809, Bonaparte occupied Rome, for contrasts with the pope, who had excommunicated him, and to maintain his own state efficiently,exiling the Pope first to Savona and then to France.
After Russia, the other states of Europe re-allied themselves and defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig, after which his Italian allied states, with Murat first among them, abandoned him to ally with Austria. Defeated at Paris on 6 April 1814, Napoleon was compelled to renounce his throne and sent into exile on Elba. The resulting Congress of Vienna (1814) restored a situation close to that of 1795, dividing Italy between Austria (in the north-east and Lombardy), the Kingdom of Sardinia, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies(in the south and in Sicily), and Tuscany, the Papal States and other minor states in the centre. However, old republics such as Veniceand Genoa were not recreated, Venice went to Austria, and Genoa went to the Kingdom of Sardinia.

The Coming of Garibaldi
The fall of the House of Bourbon and the Kingdom of Naples in 1860 is part of the success of the risorgimento, the movement to unite Italy into a single nation. This success is due primarily to three persons: a theoretician, a politician, and a soldier.
The theoretician, the ideologue, the one who preached national unity, was Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-72). He was not a particularly practical man, and he spent much of his life in exile, proclaiming from abroad the idea of Italian unity as a fulfillment of destiny, one which he apparently saw as a nebulous combination of ancient Italian glory and reasonable aspirations to modern nation-statehood.
The politician of the risorgimento,
as shrewd as Metternich and Bismark, was Camillo
Benzo Conte di Cavour (1810-61) prime minister of
the Kingdom of Piedmont. Northern Italy in the mid-1800s
was a patchwork. There was Piedmont, Lombardy, Modena,
Venezia, the Papal States, etc. etc., each a sovereign
state. It was Cavour who had the political acumen to
handle the problem of northern unity before turning to
the greater one of unifying north and south. He was,
however, a conservative and calculating man, one who
favored a gradual process of unification over
politician Cavour might have had his way if the soldier,
Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-82), as a young man in
the 1830s, had not wandered into a tavern where the
theoretician, Mazzini, was holding forth to fellow
members of the revolutionary group, Young Italy.
you mean by Italy?" asked one. "The Kingdom of
Naples? The Kingdom of Piedmont? The Duchy of
"I mean the new Italy… the united Italy of all the Italians," said Mazzini.
"At that point,"
recalled Garibaldi in later years, "I felt as Columbus
must have felt when he first sighted land."
As a pirate, patriot, soldier of fortune, lover and guerrilla fighter from Italy to South America, Garibaldi had a patent on the swashbuckle. He survived imprisonment, torture, severe wounds and exile.

Skirmishes which left a dozen dead on the battlefield are usually called battles and earnestly analyzed as if they were Austerlitz or Waterloo.
The facts that Denis Mack Smith dug up and published often contradict the official mythology. Official mythologies are common to all countries. All countries cherish one or two particular periods of their histories, which they ennoble and embellish, to justify and give meaning to their present and to give a purpose to their future. This habit may be merely useful or ornamental to great, old, and solid nations. It is extremely important to recent and ramshackle ones. For Italy the myth of the Risorgimento has been almost literally a matter of life and death.
The Risorgimento had been a movement led by a motley elite, an exiguous middle-class liberal minority that was deprecated and opposed by the upper- and lower-class conservative majority. Each liberal or revolutionary group in the movement plotted and fought to create an imaginary future country of its own, entirely different from all others. The leaders were largely unremarkable men, some of them high minded, most of them fanatics or crackpots, only a few really conscious of their role in history. Perhaps Camillo Cavour was the only genuinely great man among them, the only one who might have had a success in another country.
The final outcome was a flimsy compromise, mainly the result of the royal conquest of Italy and not of the popular vague de fond so many had wished or imagined had taken place. “This is only the ghost of Italy,” Mazzini wrote just before he died. “It is an illusion, a lie…a corpse without a truly living soul inside it. Italy has been put together just like a mosaic, piece by piece, and the battles for this cause have been won on our behalf by foreigners….” In the end, inevitably, the Catholics hated the liberal democratic unified secular kingdom, men from all other regions hated the domination of the Piedmontese, Milan hated Rome, the Tuscans hated everybody else, the south hated the north, the republicans hated the monarchists, the middle class feared the revolution, and everybody resented the new heavy taxes necessary to pay for the wars of independence, the indispensable public works, and the armaments needed to keep up the pretense that Italy had become a first-class power.
The myths, therefore, were confirmed, embellished, enriched, and defended.

Both radical and conservative forces in the Italian parliament demanded that the government investigate how to improve agriculture in Italy.The investigation which started in 1877 and was released eight years later, showed that agriculture was not improving, that landowners were swallowing up revenue from their lands and contributing almost nothing to the development of the land. There was aggravation by lower class Italians to the break-up of communal lands which benefited only landlords.Most of the workers on the agricultural lands were not peasants but short-term labourers who at best were employed for one year.Peasants without stable income were forced to live off meager food supplies, disease was spreading rapidly, plagues were reported, including a major cholera epidemic which killed at least 55,000 people.
A 1905 Fiat advertisement.
The Italian government could not deal with the situation effectively due to the mass overspending of the Depretis government that left Italy in huge debt. Italy also suffered economically because of overproduction of grapes for their vineyards in the 1870s and 1880s when France’s vineyard industry was suffering from vine disease caused by insects. Italy during that time prospered as the largest exporter of wine in Europe but following the recovery of France in 1888, southern Italy was overproducing and had to split into which caused greater unemployment and bankruptcies.In 1913 male universal suffrage was allowed. The Socialist Party became the main political party, outclassing the traditional liberal and conservative organisations.
Starting from the last two decades of the 19th century, Italy developed its own colonial Empire. Italian colonies were Somalia and Eritrea; an attempt to occupy Ethiopia failed in the First Italo–Ethiopian War of 1895–1896. In 1911, Giovanni Giolitti‘s government sent forces to occupy Libya and declared war on the Ottoman Empire which held Libya. Italy soon conquered and annexed Tripoli and the Dodecanese Islands. Nationalists advocated Italy’s domination of the Mediterranean Sea by occupying Greece as well as the Adriatic coastal region of Dalmatia.
Italy in the Great War
The First World War (1914–1918) was an unexpected development that forced the decision whether or not to honor the alliance with Germany. At first Italy remained neutral, saying that the Triple Alliance was only for defensive purposes. Public opinion in Italy was sharply divided, with Catholics and socialists recommending peace.

He spoke to striking workers and others at events organized by Italian-speaking subscribers to his very popular anarchist newspaper, for many years based out of the hotbed of Italian anarchism, the quarry town of Barre, Vermont.
However, Galleani had to leave Vermont for his own safety, and relocate to the even bigger hotbed of Italian anarchists at the time, the suburbs of Boston.
The idea of an insurrection for revolutionary change advocated by Galleani in the U.S. had its germination in the turmoil of late 19th century Italy where he lived for the first 40 years of his life. At the time, Italian socialists, like many others, were divided over the question of whether a parliamentary path could bring real, substantive change to society.
Galleani’s popular and often very persuasive side of the argument was that participating in parliamentary politics in post-1848 bourgeois democracies in Europe was pointless. He called for armed uprisings to bring down capitalism and the state.
As poverty and hunger continued to be widespread in Italy and throughout Europe at the time, Galleani’s orientation of encouraging as many general strikes and insurrections as possible in the hope they would spread had a large following. His ideas continued to be popular among workers in the U.S. as well.
His advocacy of “propaganda by the deed” often published in Cronaca Sovversiva held that it was appropriate and even necessary to retaliate against, for example, police chiefs or others for killing striking workers, by killing them in turn. Galleani’s newspaper famously included a bomb-making recipe-book insert on one occasion, with an unrelated title hoping that would help evade the censors.
A series of bombings ascribed to Galleanists were carried out between 1914 and 1920 targeting politicians, owners, and police, the last and most famous being the 1920 Wall Street bombing which killed 38 people and severely wounded 143. It was these attacks which earned Galleani the title of this book.
Whether the tactics and strategies employed by Galleani’s wing of the large, international anarchist movement of the day would be considered adventurist, ultra-left, foolhardy, completely nuts or perfectly reasonable today obviously depends on who you talk to.

At the time, the struggle for Italian unification was perceived to be waged primarily against the Austrian Empire and the Habsburgs, since they directly controlled the predominantly Italian-speaking northeastern part of present-day Italy and were the single most powerful force against unification. The Austrian Empire vigorously repressed nationalist sentiment growing on the Italian peninsula, as well as in the other parts of Habsburg domains. Austrian Chancellor Franz Metternich, an influential diplomat at the Congress of Vienna, stated that the word Italy was nothing more than “a geographic expression.
Artistic and literary sentiment also turned towards nationalism; and perhaps the most famous of proto-nationalist works wasAlessandro Manzoni‘s I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed). Some read this novel as a thinly veiled allegorical critique of Austrian rule. The novel was published in 1827 and extensively revised in the following years. The 1840 version of I Promessi Sposi used a standardized version of the Tuscan dialect, a conscious effort by the author to provide a language and force people to learn it.
Those in favour of unification also faced opposition from the Holy See, particularly after failed attempts to broker a confederation with the Papal States, which would have left the Papacy with some measure of autonomy over the region. The pope at the time, Pius IX, feared that giving up power in the region could mean the persecution of Italian Catholics.
Even among those who wanted to see the peninsula unified into one country, different groups could not agree on what form a unified state would take. Vincenzo Gioberti, a Piedmontese priest, had suggested a confederation of Italian states under rulership of the Pope. His book,Of the Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italians, was published in 1843 and created a link between the Papacy and the Risorgimento. Many leading revolutionaries wanted a republic, but eventually it was a king and his chief minister who had the power to unite the Italian states as a monarchy.
One of the most influential revolutionary groups was the Carbonari (coal-burners), a secret organization formed in southern Italy early in the 19th century. Inspired by the principles of the French Revolution, its members were mainly drawn from the middle class and intellectuals.

After the Congress of Vienna divided the Italian peninsula among the European powers, the Carbonari movement spread into the Papal States, the Kingdom of Sardinia, theGrand Duchy of Tuscany, the Duchy of Modena and the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia.
The revolutionaries were so feared that the reigning authorities passed an ordinance condemning to death anyone who attended a Carbonari meeting. The society, however, continued to exist and was at the root of many of the political disturbances in Italy from 1820 until after unification. The Carbonari condemned Napoleon III to death for failing to unite Italy, and the group almost succeeded in assassinating him in 1858. Many leaders of the unification movement were at one time members of this organization. (Note: Napoleon III, as a young man, fought on the side of the ‘Carbonari’.)
Two prominent radical figures in the unification movement were Giuseppe Mazzini andGiuseppe Garibaldi. The more conservative constitutional monarchic figures included Count Cavour and Victor Emmanuel II, who would later become the first king of a united Italy.
Mazzini’s activity in revolutionary movements caused him to be imprisoned soon after he joined. While in prison, he concluded that Italy could – and therefore should – be unified and formulated his program for establishing a free, independent, and republican nation with Rome as its capital. After Mazzini’s release in 1831, he went to Marseille, where he organized a new political society called La Giovine Italia (Young Italy). The new society, whose motto was “God and the People,” sought the unification of Italy.
The creation of the Kingdom of Italy was the result of concerted efforts by Italian nationalists and monarchists loyal to the House of Savoy to establish a united kingdom encompassing the entire Italian Peninsula.
The Kingdom of Sardinia industrialized from 1830 onward. A constitution, the Statuto Albertino was enacted in the year of revolutions, 1848, under liberal pressure. Under the same pressure, the First Italian War of Independence was declared on Austria. After initial success the war took a turn for the worse and the Kingdom of Sardinia lost.
Garibaldi, a native of Nice (then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia), participated in an uprising in Piedmont in 1834, was sentenced to death, and escaped to South America.

The Risorgimento is definitely not “one damned thing after another,” the sum of a series of events; a chain of right and wrong guesses, skirmishes, campaigns, and battles lost or won by many bad and a few good generals; the exchanges of letters, the secret pacts, the shabby or brilliant schemes, the speeches, the famous sayings, the protagonists’ ideas, the sacrifices made by a few heroes, and the cowardice of others. It cannot be entirely explained as the product of Fortune, or as the belated adaptation of Italy to the age of steam, parliamentary democracy, nationalism, centralized bureaucracy, railways, and textile mills.
The Risorgimento was all this, to be sure, but it was also a popular, pâpier-maché epic, or somewhat like the Romance of the Knights of Charlemagne which is shown in Sicilian puppet theaters. The Romance is enriched by erroneous versions of events, distorted by wishful thinking, or entirely imagined. There was the “spirit of the age,” of which the greatest expression was Verdi’s music, but also innumerable stirring poems by forgotten poets, which the enlightened middle class as well as many artisans were carried away by. It was a case of Dieu le veult, and one had to put up with the men available, exploit whatever political opportunities were offered, and cheerfully accept whatever sacrifices were necessary. Men went into exile or dungeons, were hanged or died in battle for this imaginary Risorgimento which contemporary historians are right to demolish.
The faith in liberty, independence, and unity, this amore per l’Italia, enflamed, as I said, a very small minority, perhaps less than 5 percent of the population. (In the 1859 war there were more Italians on the Austrian than on the Piedmontese side and they fought better; in the naval engagement at Lissa, in 1866, in which the Austrian navy defeated the Italians, the Austrian sailors were all Venetians, and all orders were given in their patois.) Nevertheless the other 95 percent of the population, neither liberals nor patriots, were aware somehow that there was no way to stem the tide and were resigned to the fact that history was against them. Few of them put up any resistance.

At first Sicily was able to remain as an independent kingdom under personal union, while the Bourbons ruled over both from Naples. However, the advent of Napoleon's First French Empire saw Naples taken at the Battle of Campo Tenese and Bonapartist Kings of Naples were instated. Ferdinand III the Bourbon was forced to retreat to Sicily which he was still in complete control of with the help of British naval protection.
Following this Sicily joined the Napoleonic Wars, after the wars were won Sicily and Naples formally merged as the Two Sicilies under the Bourbons. Major revolutionary movements occurred in 1820 and 1848 against the Bourbon government with Sicily seeking independence; the second of which, the 1848 revolution resulted in a short period of independence for Sicily. However, in 1849 the Bourbons retook the control of the island and dominated it until 1860.
In 1860, as part of the Risorgimento, the Expedition of the Thousand led by Giuseppe Garibaldi captured Sicily. The conquest started at Marsala, and native Sicilians joined him in the capture of the southern Italian peninsula. Garibaldi's march was finally completed with the Siege of Gaeta, where the final Bourbons were expelled and Garibaldi announced his dictatorship in the name of Victor Emmanuel II of Kingdom of Sardinia. Sicily became part of the Kingdom of Sardinia after a referendum where more than 75% of Sicily voted in favor of the annexation on 21 October 1860 (but not everyone was allowed to vote). As a result of the Kingdom of Italy proclamation, Sicily became part of the kingdom on 17 March 1861.
After the Italian Unification, in spite of the strong investments made by the Kingdom of Italy in terms of modern infrastructure, the Sicilian (and the wider mezzogiorno) economy remained relatively underdeveloped and this caused an unprecedented wave of emigration. In 1894, organizations of workers and peasants known as the Fasci Siciliani, protested against the bad social and economic conditions of the island but they were suppressed in a few days. The Messina earthquake of 28 December 1908 killed over 80,000 people. This period was also characterised by the first contact between the Mafia, the Sicilian crime syndicate (also known as Cosa Nostra), and the Italian government.

Following a prolonged campaign of strikes and demonstrations across Italy to protest the rising cost of living, a mass demonstration of workers had taken place through the streets of Milan in 1898. The march took an increasingly violent turn and, fearing an attack upon the Royal Palace, troops were ordered to fire on the crowd, who were unarmed. The protestors marched toward the palace, which was surrounded by a strong military force under the command of General Fiorenzo Bava-Beccaris. The crowd ignored the order to disperse, whereupon Bava-Beccaris gave the signal to fire with muskets and cannons, resulting in a massacre of the demonstrators, in which more than ninety people died. The shootings, known as the Bava-Beccaris massacre named after the general who had ordered the attack.
King Umberto later decorated Bava-Beccaris,complimenting him upon his “brave defense of the royal house” — as a result of which Bresci became determined to kill the king.
Unexpectedly, to his comrades, Bresci approached them at La Questione Social and demanded the return of a loan which had been used to set up the paper. Offering no explanation for his actions and leaving his comrades deeply bitter towards him, Bresci left the United States with the intention of assassinating King Umberto I of Italy (fulfilling the propaganda by the deed ethos).
Two months later Bresci had made his way to the small town of Monza, some 10 miles north of Milan. The town was the location of one of the king’s royal villas which he would be staying at for several weeks. It was here that Bresci committed his attentat. On the evening of July 29, while the king was handing out prizes to athletes after a sporting event, Bresci burst from the crowd and shot the king three times using a 32 revolver, killing him almost immediately.
Bresci was captured and put on trial, represented by the famous Anarchist lawyer Francesco Saverio Merlino, Bresci stood trial in Milan and was sentenced to a life of hard labour on Santo Stefano, the island prison infamous for its many Anarchists and socialist prisoners. He was not to stay long. Less than a year later he was found hanged in his cell, his body being thrown into the sea by prison guards soon after.

The sound defeat Italy had received in the Abyssinian War, the muddled mismanagement of the army in the Turkish War, and finally, to cap it all, the disgraceful actions of the General Staff in the World War, heaping a staggering total of dead and wounded on the battle fields, led the masses to have only the greatest contempt for the martial ability of its so-called rulers.
The peaceful pursuits of the Italian population for many centuries had favored a practical anti-militarism. The Socialist Party in Italy grew rapidly over the issue of imperialism and war, and in 1896 was able successfully to oppose the further continuance of the war in Abyssinia. After the defeat at Adowa and following the termination of the war, huge disorders spread throughout the country, especially in Milan, leading to the killing of over four hundred by the soldiery of the government. (*1) So frightened were the rulers that all Italy was declared in a state of siege. Again, in the war with Turkey over Africa in 1911 and 1912, the socialists took a threatening attitude. While they could not stop the slaughter, they were able to purge their ranks at the time of a good many of the national and chauvinist reformists within the Party. Thus, by 1914, the Italian Socialist Party was in a strong position to fight the entrance of Italy into the World War, and helped to delay Italy's participation. When the War broke out, its official stand was "neither to help nor to hinder."
Immediately before the World War, the workers' movements had developed into menacing proportions; in 1914, from June seventh to June fourteenth, a general insurrection raged throughout the city of Bologna and the province of Romagna. The World War came just in time to prevent the overthrow of the royalist regime.
The weak position of the ruling class in Italy was due also to the fact that Italy was an exceedingly poor country, unable to stand the expenses of imperialist adventures. Italy had no iron and no coal. Her chief economy was agriculture. Only in the twentieth century was she able to begin to develop her water power into electricity. Thus Italy was a second rate power, unable to meet her industrial rivals in Europe and unable, therefore, to carve out for herself any large colonial domain.

he revived the constitution of 1848 and relinquished his absolute powers. There was even talk of an alliance between a liberalized Naples and the Piedmont kingdom of northern Italy, an Italian federation, of sorts. This, indeed, would have been a watered-down risorgimento, but it would have thwarted Garibaldi.
Even northern politicians, primarily Cavour, while theoretically in favor of Italian unification, were aghast at the thought of a popular revolutionary army led by a thousand redshirted lunatics storming up the peninsula, spreading a message of instant universal brotherhood. Garibaldi, after all, in his youth had had to do with a mystic band of Christian communards, the St. Simonians, who, years before Karl Marx, had preached: From each according to his capacity; To each according to his works; The end of the exploitation of man by man; and The abolition of all privileges of birth.
Garibaldi landed at
Marsala and a few days later engaged a superior force
near Calatafimi. He threw caution to the winds (he
didn't have very much of it to begin with), said, "Here
we either make Italy or die", and led a ferocious
bayonet charge uphill, literally overrunning the enemy.
And that was more or less
that. Sicilian irregulars in rebellion against the royal
forces had been watching the engagement from nearby
hillsides. They liked what they saw. Soon Garibaldi's
forces were swelled by a ragtag collection of rebels
armed with guns, axes, clubs and whatever else could
kill a Bourbon. Together they marched on Palermo and by
ceaseless guerrilla street fighting drove the Bourbon
commander into asking for an armistice, the only
condition being that royalist forces be allowed to leave
the island for the mainland.
With 3,500 men
under him, Garibaldi then crossed to the mainland on
August 19 and started the 300-mile slog in the heat of
summer up towards Naples, his reputation preceding him
by leaps and bounds. Peasants were already calling him
the "Father of Italy," mothers brought their
babies out to be blessed by him, and there was an air of
natural invincibility about him as he moved north.

He enjoyed only a brief period of direct political power, as a member—along with Carlo Armellini and Aurelio Saffi—of a triumvirate of the Roman Republic after the ancient Roman model (9 February 1849– 3 July 1849). This opportunity to form a republic was seized following the assassination of the Papal Minister of Justice, Pellegrino Rossi, after which Pope Pius IX fled to Gaeta (on 24 November 1848) for the protection of Ferdinand II of Naples. The Roman Republic instituted a number of important reforms, such as freedom of religion (the Pope had only permitted Catholicism and Judaism) and the abolition of the Pope’s temporal power. The Republic was seen by patriots as a model for an independent Italy, but the experiment in a radical new constitution ended when French troops entered the city in support of the Pope and defeated the Republican army (led by Giuseppe Garibaldi). This episode is considered one of the most significant experiments in republicanism, popular democracy and constitutional reform in Italy’s history. But it also gave Mazzini his only political office. After the fall of the Republic he went again into exile and largely watched events in his native country from the sidelines (mostly in England). Nevertheless, Mazzini was an important player in the articulation of a national Italian identity, especially in his support of insurrections, coups and assassinations. He founded what was in effect the first modern Italian political organization, Giovine Italia (Young Italy), a revolutionary, popular pro-democracy group that espoused unification and republicanism. Along with La Giovine Italia, the party’s newspaper, Mazzini also encouraged a wave of patriotic journalism across Europe for, as Lucy Riall notes (32), he believed “in the unity of thought and action” (the title of one of his journals, founded in 1858 in London, was Pensiero e Azione [Thought and Action]), and tirelessly romanticized his self-image, his revolutionary violence, and even his defeats (which were represented as heroic failures). His political ideology created a new language for Risorgimento politics, as Riall comments, which was contingent on the symbolism of “nation” and “republicanism” and “il popolo” (the people), and on the circulation of a romantic ideal of the Italian struggle (32).

In the 14th and 15th centuries Italy was divided among five powers — the kingdom of Naples, the duchy of Milan, the republics of Florence and Venice and the papacy; the Medici family flourished; the papacy was restored to Rome; and Florence as a republic acknowledged the influence of Savonarola. The 16th century was the most disastrous in Italian history. The rivalry of Charles V and Francis I filled the land with foreign armies, the papacy being the gainer from the struggles. Francis I was driven out of Italy; Rome was sacked in 1527, the sack lasting seven months; the Medici were driven out, and restored and made grand-dukes of Tuscany. In 1529 the peace of Cambrai left Charles V master of Italy, and the peace of Château Cambray (1559) made his son Philip its undisputed lord. The papacy was strengthened by the founding of the order of Jesuits, the inquisition and additions to its territory; and Venice made her last great achievement in a war that had lasted five centuries by the conquest of the Peloponnesus in 1684. After each of three European wars of the 18th century Italy was divided afresh. Napoleon entered Italy in 1796, reconquered it at Marengo in 1800, and was crowned king of Italy in 1805. The congress of Vienna in 1815 restored Italy to its former state. The year of revolution, 1848, opened with the party of Mazzini supreme. Pope Pius IX became a fugitive, and Garibaldi was in the field. Rome and Venice yielded to French armies, the pope and other petty sovereigns of Italy returned, and the revolution proved a failure. But Victor Emmanuel, Cavour and Garibaldi were ready for the coming struggle. Cavour made terms with Louis Napoleon, and the French and Italian troops won the battles of Magenta and Solferino, driving Austria to the east. In February, 1861, the first Italian parliament met at Turin, and Victor Emmanuel was proclaimed king of Italy. Venice was restored in 1866, and on Sept. 20, 1870, the king entered Rome and the emancipation of Italy was complete.

Fascist and anti-Fascist violence in Italy (1919–1926)
|Civil unrest in Italy (1919–26)|
Benito Mussolini and Fascists during the March on Rome in 1922.
|Far-left and anti-Fascists||Government||Fascist|
|Commanders and leaders|
Italy witnessed significant widespread civil unrest and political strife in the aftermath of World War I and the rise of the Fascist movement led by Benito Mussolini which opposed the rise of the international left, especially the far-left along with others who opposed Fascism.
Fascists and communists fought on the streets during this period as the two factions competed to gain power in Italy. The already tense political environment in Italy escalated into major civil unrest when Fascists began attacking their rivals, beginning on April 15, 1919 with Fascists attacking the offices of the Italian Socialist Party's newspaper Avanti!.
Violence grew in 1921 with Italian army officers beginning to assist the Fascists with their violence against communists and socialists. With the Fascist movement growing, anti-fascists of various political allegiances (but generally of the international left) combined into the Arditi del Popolo (People's Militia) in 1921. With the threat of a general strike being initiated by anarchists, communists, and socialists, the Fascists launched a coup against the Italian government with the March on Rome in 1922 which pressured Prime Minister Luigi Facta to resign and allowed Mussolini to be appointed Prime Minister by the King Victor Emmanuel III. Two months after Mussolini took over as Prime Minister, Fascists attacked and killed members of the local labour movement in Turin in what became known as the 1922 Turin Massacre. The next act of violence was the assassination of Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti by Fascist militant Amerigo Dumini in 1924. A right-wing fascist deputy, Armando Casalini, was killed on a tramway in retaliation for Matteotti's murder by the anti-fascist Giovanni Corvi. This was followed by a Fascist takeover of the Italian government and multiple assassination attempts were made against Mussolini in 1926, with the last attempt on October 31, 1926. On November 9, 1926, the Fascist government initiated emergency powers which resulted in the arrest of multiple anti-Fascists including communist Antonio Gramsci.

In practice, trasformismo was authoritarian and corrupt, Depretis pressured districts to vote for his candidates if they wished to gain favourable concessions from Depretis when in power. The results of the 1876 election resulted in only four representatives from the right being elected, allowing the government to be dominated by Depretis. Despotic and corrupt actions are believed to be the key means in which Depretis managed to keep support in southern Italy. Depretis put through authoritarian measures, such as the banning public meetings, placing “dangerous” individuals in internal exile on remote penal islands across Italy and adopting militarist policies. Depretis enacted controversial legislation for the time, such was abolishing arrest for debt, making elementary education free and compulsory while ending compulsory religious teaching in elementary schools.
The first government of Depretis collapsed after his dismisal of his Interior Minister, and ended with his resignation in 1877. The second government of Depretis started in 1881. Depretis’ goals included widening suffrage in 1882 and increasing the tax intake from Italians by expanding the minimum requirements of who could pay taxes and the creation of a new electoral system called which resulted in large numbers of inexperienced deputies in the Italian parliament.In 1887, Depretis was finally pushed out of office after years of political decline.
In 1887, Depretis cabinet minister and former Garibaldi republican Francesco Crispi became Prime Minister. Crispi’s major concerns before during his reign was protecting Italy from their dangerous neighbour Austria-Hungary. To challenge the threat, Crispi worked to build Italy as a great world power through increased military expenditures, advocation of expansionism, and trying to win Germany’s favor even by joining the Triple Alliance which included both Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1882 which remained officially intact until 1915. While helping Italy develop strategically, he continued trasformismo and was authoritarian, once suggesting the use of martial law to ban opposition parties. Despite being authoritarian, Crispi put through liberal policies such as the Public Health Act of 1888 and establishing tribunals for redress against abuses by the government.
The overwhelming attention paid to foreign policy alienated the agricultural community in Italy which had been in decline since 1873.”.

They were typically aristocrats and business leaders, totally uninterested in democracy or in improving the lives of working people.
As a young man Garibaldi gravitated towards a secret movement known as La Giovine Italia, “Young Italy”. It was led by Giuseppe Mazzini. He believed in revolutionary action to unite Italy as a republic, rather than as a monarchy.
However it is always difficult to build a mass movement under a dictatorship, and Garibaldi’s first experience of armed insurrection, in Genoa in 1834, was a dismal failure.
The following year Garibaldi moved to South America where he spent the next 13 years taking part in a variety of national liberation movements.
Word of his exploits started to feed back to Italy and he acquired a reputation as the “hero of two worlds”.
The year 1848 was a turning point for popular struggle throughout Europe, as revolt after revolt broke out against hated rulers. This continent-wide uprising began in Sicily.
Karl Marx noted at the time, “The bloody revolt of the people in Palermo affected the paralysed mass of the people like an electric shock and reawakened their great revolutionary memories and passions.”
In northern Italy the catalyst was revolution in Austria and the fall of its ruler, Prince Metternich. The Austrian army was occupying northern Italy and many began to desert. An uprising broke out in Milan four days after Metternich’s fall.
Poor people and peasants supported this movement, since they suffered from conscription into the Austrian army – which landowners could pay to avoid – and had to pay heavy taxes to the Austrian empire.
The whole continent was soon in revolt. As Marx wrote, “Every postal delivery brought a fresh report of revolution, now from Italy, now from Germany, now from the remotest south east of Europe, and sustained the general intoxication of the people.”
One of the highest points in this revolutionary wave was the Roman Republic, proclaimed in Rome in January 1849.
Not only did it oppose monarchy, it was also in favour of fair systems of taxation. It all looked similar to the French Revolution of 1789, right down to the planting of “trees of liberty”.
Indeed there had been another revolution in France the previous June.

The "Young Europe" movement also inspired a group of young Turkish army cadets and students who, later in history, named themselves the "Young Turks".
In 1843 he organized another riot in Bologna, which attracted the attention of two young officers of the Austrian Navy, Attilio and Emilio Bandiera. With Mazzini's support, they landed near Cosenza (Kingdom of Naples), but were arrested and executed. Mazzini accused the British government of having passed information about the expeditions to the Neapolitans, and question was raised in the British Parliament. When it was admitted that his private letters had indeed been opened, and its contents revealed by the Foreign Office to the Austrian and Neapolitan governments, Mazzini gained popularity and support among the British liberals, who were outraged by such a blatant intrusion of the government into his private correspondence.
In 1847 he moved again to London, where he wrote a long "open letter" to Pope Pius IX, whose apparently liberal reforms had gained him a momentary status as possible paladin of the unification of Italy. The Pope, however, did not reply. He also founded the People's International League. By March 8, 1848 Mazzini was in Paris, where he launched a new political association, the Associazione Nazionale Italiana.
The 1848–49 revolts
On April 7, 1848 Mazzini reached Milan, whose population had rebelled against the Austrian garrison and established a provisional government. The First Italian War of Independence, started by the Piedmontese king Charles Albert to exploit the favourable circumstances in Milan, turned into a total failure. Mazzini, who had never been popular in the city because he wanted Lombardy to become a republic instead of joining Piedmont, abandoned Milan. He joined Garibaldi's irregular force at Bergamo, moving to Switzerland with him.
On February 9, 1849 a republic was declared in Rome, with Pius IX already having been forced to flee to Gaeta the preceding November. On the same day the Republic was declared, Mazzini reached the city. He was appointed, together with Carlo Armellini and Aurelio Saffi, as a member of the "triumvirate" of the new republic on March 29, becoming soon the true leader of the government and showing good administrative capabilities in social reforms.

Meanwhile the new Pope had been elected, and from Piedmont to Calabria we hailed in him the Banner that was to lead our hosts to war.
So time passed and we reached the last months of '47. The villa on Iseo had been closed since the end of August. Roberto had no great liking for his gloomy palace in Milan, and it had been his habit to spend nine months of the year at Siviano; but he was now too much engrossed in his work to remain away from Milan, and his wife and sister had joined him there as soon as the midsummer heat was over. During the autumn he had called me once or twice to the city to consult me on business connected with his fruit-farms; and in the course of our talks he had sometimes let fall a hint of graver matters. It was in July of that year that a troop of Croats had marched into Ferrara, with muskets and cannon loaded. The lighted matches of their cannon had fired the sleeping hate of Austria, and the whole country now echoed the Lombard cry: "Out with the barbarian!" All talk of adjustment, compromise, reorganization, shrivelled on lips that the live coal of patriotism had touched. Italy for the Italians, and then--monarchy, federation, republic, it mattered not what!
The oppressor's grip had tightened on our throats and the clear-sighted saw well enough that Metternich's policy was to provoke a rebellion and then crush it under the Croat heel. But it was too late to cry prudence in Lombardy. With the first days of the new year the tobacco riots had drawn blood in Milan. Soon afterward the Lions' Club was closed, and edicts were issued forbidding the singing of Pio Nono's hymn, the wearing of white and blue, the collecting of subscriptions for the victims of the riots. To each prohibition Milan returned a fresh defiance. The ladies of the nobility put on mourning for the rioters who had been shot down by the soldiery. Half the members of the Guardia Nobile resigned and Count Borromeo sent back his Golden Fleece to the Emperor. Fresh regiments were continually pouring into Milan and it was no secret that Radetsky was strengthening the fortifications. Late in January several leading liberals were arrested and sent into exile, and two weeks later martial law was proclaimed in Milan.

For two centuries, between the French Revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the model for military mobilization in Europe was associated with the nation-state and conscription. Citizens played a key role in the defence of their state: the nation-state was considered the primary political unit of the international system and citizens were usually expected to fight for their own state. But non-state mobilization did not disappear. As Nir Arielli and Bruce Collins showed, the history of military mobilization does not fit neatly into national boxes. Transnational war volunteers have existed for decades between the 19th and the 20th century and have played a central role in many European wars.
In August 1936 the Italian anarchist Lanciotto Corsi was 43 years old and had been living in France for five years. He had a wife, five children and a precarious job in Marseille. He decided to go to Spain, where a civil war had started a few weeks earlier. In Barcelona, Corsi joined an international group fighting on the Aragonese front. He wrote to his wife that he went to Spain to fight fascism, as, for the moment, it was impossible to do it in Italy.Why did a mature man decide to leave his family and his job to go to fight in a foreign country?
Between WWI and WWII, within the anti-fascist movement, thousands of Europeans were spurred into action by the political struggles in their home societies. The Spanish Civil War represented one of the latest causes because of which many people decided, voluntarily, to fight for. Around 40,000 international volunteers fought against Franco’s troops.
This project’s overall objective is to carry out a transnational study of the legacies and the survival of the myth of the so-called Garibaldinism between the experience of the the Italian unification (1861) and the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Following both a social and cultural history perspective, it will analyse how the legacy of Giuseppe Garibaldi in Southern Europe was very strong and was linked with social and political claims. In our approach Garibaldinism will refer to a political and cultural phenomenon aimed at encouraging a board and consciously “popular” type of aggregation strictly linked to the tradition of armed voluntarism and the attempt to form an ideal homogeneous block that goes beyond the single ideological matrices and political formations of which it is composed.

Giuseppe Garibaldi and The Creation of Italy. Rome today
Giuseppe Garibaldi and his Achievements for Italy
The son of a seaman, he was born on July 4, 1807, in Nice, which is now in France but was then an Italian town. From his earliest years he loved adventure, and at the age of 15 tried to run away to sea. With his father's agreement he later went to sea and by the time he was 25 had worked his way from cabin boy to captain.
In 1832 came the turning point of Garibaldi's life, for he met another Italian, Giuseppe Mazzini, who was the organiser of the “Young Italy” movement. At this time Italy was made up of several separate states, many of which were ruled by kings who paid no attention to the wishes of their people. Great parts of what is now northern Italy belonged to Austria. The members of the “Young Italy” movement sought to drive out the Austrians, to unite all the states into one country and to set up one government for the whole country. They were determined to make that government democratic; that is, to have a government that would rule in accordance with the wishes of the people.
In 1834 Garibaldi helped Mazzini to organise a rebellion in Savoy (northem Italy). The attempt failed, Garibaldi fled to France, was sentenced to death in his absence and went to live in exile in South America. For 12 years he led a band of men who were fighting for the Republic of the Rio Grande, which was rebelling against Brazil. He suffered shipwreck, imprisonment and torture so bravely that his followers worshipped him. He organised other Italian exiles into an army known as the Italian Legion, which in 1843 and 1846 saved Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, from attack by Argentina.
In 1848 Garibaldi returned to Italy and found the north Italians in revolt against the Austrians. He formed and fought with a volunteer army of 3,000 men, but after the Italians were defeated had to escape to Switzerland. In 1849 he was back in Italy, defending Rome against the French. The people of Rome had rebelled against the government of the Pope (who at that time ruled over great areas in the same way as an ordinary king), and set up their own government.

However, when the French troops called by the Pope made clear that the resistance of the Republican troops, led by Garibaldi, was in vain, on July 12, 1849, Mazzini set out for Marseille, from where he moved again to Switzerland.
Mazzini spent all of 1850 hiding from the Swiss police. In July he founded the association Amici di Italia (Friends of Italy) in London, to attract consensus towards the Italian liberation cause. Two failed riots in Crimean War. Also in vain was the expedition of Felice Orsini in Carrara of 1853–54.
In 1856 he returned to Genoa to organize a series of uprisings: the only serious attempt was that of Victor Emmanuel II and his skilled prime minister, Camillo Benso, Conte di Cavour. The latter defined him as "Chief of the assassins".
In 1858 he founded another journal in London, Pensiero e azione ("Thought and Action"). Also there, on February 21, 1859, together with 151 republicans he signed a manifesto against the alliance between Piedmont and the Emperor of France which resulted in the Giorgio Pallavicino to move away.
In 1862 he again joined Garibaldi during his failed attempt to free Rome. In 1866 Venetia was ceded by France, who had obtained it from Austria at the end of the Austro-Prussian War, to the new Kingdom of Italy, which had been created in 1861 under the Savoy monarchy. At this time Mazzini was frequently in polemics with the course followed by the unification of his country, and in 1867 he refused a seat in the Italian Chamber of Deputies. In 1870, during an attempt to free Sicily, he was arrested and imprisoned in Gaeta. He was freed in October due to the amnesty conceded after the successful capture of Rome, and returned to London in mid-December.
Karl Marx, in an interview by R. Landor from 1871, said that Mazzini's ideas represented "nothing better than the old idea of a middle-class republic." Marx believed, especially after the Revolutions of 1848, that Mazzini's point of view had become reactionary, and the proletariat had nothing to do with it. In another interview, Marx described Mazzini as "that everlasting old ass".

Garibaldi stayed at this house on Staten Island, New York. It was the home of inventor Antonio Meucci who is said to have invented the telephone before Alexander Graham Bell!!
Garibaldi Monument in New York City
Garibaldi statue in Washington Sq. Park, downtown New York City. Make it destination #1 when you visit the Big Apple.
1851-52 Travels to Peru.
1852-53 As a "citizen of Peru," he captains a clipper to the far east, returning to Lima via Australia and New Zealand.
1854 Returns by way of New York, carrying a cargo of coal from Newcastle (England) to Genoa.
1855 Engaged to an English lady, Mrs. Emma Roberts. Buys part of the Island of Caprera, north of Sardinia.
1856 Comes to England on a scheme (largely financed by individual British politicians and British secret service funds) to buy a ship and lead an expedition to release political prisoners in Naples; but the ship is wrecked.
1858 Goes to Turin to meet Count Cavour, the Piedmontese Prime Minister, who wants him to organize a corps of volunteers, in anticipation of another war against Austria.
1859 (April) As a general in the Piedmontese army, he forms this corps, the Cacciatori delle Alpi, and war begins. (May) Takes Varese and Como, while the main Franco-Piedmontese forces are fighting in the plain of Lombardy. (September) After the armistice of Villafranco, Baron Ricosok gives him command of the army of Tuscany. (November) When his project to march into the Papal States is overruled, he returns to civil life.
1860 (April) As deputy for Nice in the Piedmontese parliament at Turin, he attacks Cavour for ceding Nice to Louis Napoleon, Emperor of the French. (May) He sets out with a thousand volunteers on a piratical raid against the forces of the Neapolitan Bourbons. After an engagement at Calatafimi, he captures Palermo, the capital of Sicily. (July) He wins the battle of Milazzo, near Messina. (August) Crosses the Straits of Messina, eluding the sizable Neapolitan navy.

Between 19th and 20th Century several European generations, the last was the antifascist one, claimed for themselves the cultural, political, and ideal heritage of Garibaldinism. There were radical volunteers wearing the traditional red shirt in Poland (1863), at Crete (1866-67), in France (1870-71), in the Balkans (1876), in Greece (1897), in Serbia (1912 and 1914), in France again (1914) and in Spain (1936-39). A significant part of those volunteers were republicans, anarchists or socialists.
There are three main questions addressed by this research project:
- Is it possible to identify a long-term tradition of international armed volunteering linked with political radicalism between the 19th and the 20th Century?
- Is it right to speak about a transnational Garibaldinism?
- Is it possible to identify Garibaldinism as a bridge between different radical political creeds (e.g. Anarchism, Socialism and, later on, Communism)?

David Lazzaretti was born in Arcidosso in 1834 and was a carriage driver by profession. In 1860, he volunteered to join the Piedmont army, which fought the papal troops in Umbria and Marche. Moved by some visions, between April and September 1868, he went several times to Rome where he obtained an audience with Pius IX. Then, between October and December of that year, he had his most significant visionary experience in a cave in Sabina, from which the story about him began. When he returned to Monte Amiata, he had adopted the guise of a 'holy' man, and many believers gathered to listen to his preaching. He retired to Monte Labbro where, between 1870 and 1872, he laid the foundations of a community founded on Christian brotherhood which shared goods and work, and opened schools for children and adults. Monte Labbro was the spiritual centre and gathering place for the faithful. Lazzaretti's work not only aroused the interest of proselytes and his supporters, but also persecutors who were fearful of his ambition for social and religious reform.
Between March and April 1878, Lazzaretti underwent a trial in front of the Holy Office. At the beginning of July, he returned to Amiata where he and his followers were accused of hiding a subversive public order plot in the form of religion. On the morning of 17th August, a red wooden flag with the inscription "The Republic is the Kingdom of God" was hoisted on the tower. At dawn on 18th August, Lazzaretti and his people descended in a procession from Monte Labbro to announce the advent of the new age of law and justice to the world – the reign of the Holy Spirit. They weren’t carrying any weapons. In Arcidosso, a huge crowd had arrived from nearby villages to welcome them. However, the Carabinieri, a branch of the Italian police force, were also waiting for them and they fired on the defenceless crowd. David was shot in the head and died later that evening. He was 44 years old.

Giuseppe Garibaldi resigned his commission of leader of the army of Unification (I Mille) on September 18, 1860 and retired to his home on the island of Caprera off the coast of Sardinia. He was 53 years old and recovering from a battle wound.
In 1861, at the outbreak of the American Civil War, Garibaldi was approached by a representative of the United States Government, reportedly on behalf of President Abraham Lincoln. The Union Army was in disarray and Lincoln was unhappy with those in command. He needed a proven military leader.
“The offer came at a moment in Garibaldi’s life when he lived in semi-exile—too little of a politician to scheme for personal advancement, too much of a national idol to be put behind bars on the Italian mainland. The hero of the movement for a unified Italy, he had led a spectacularly successful revolt against a reactionary regime in Sicily and in Naples—the so-called Two Sicilies—in 1860, but now he was in temporary retirement.
On lonely Caprera, a wild, rocky island covered with juniper and myrtle and stunted olive trees, below La Maddalena off the northeastern corner of Sardinia, Garibaldi tended his vines and figs, built stone walls to fence in his goats, and looked out to the sea, dreaming. The conqueror of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, in gray trousers and slouch hat, his red shirt and poncho flapping in the wind, refused all titles and honors for himself and sought only lenience for his followers. “How men are treated like oranges—squeezed dry and then cast aside!” he said.
He had wanted to march on Rome, against the “myrmidons of Napoleon in,” supposedly there to protect the pope, and defeat the Bourbon troops. But Victor Emmanuel II, king of Sardinia and now of Sicily and Naples as well, decided that French help was needed to complete unification of Italy and called off Garibaldi’s advance. Going back to Caprera, Garibaldi leaned against the steamer rail and said to his legion of Red Shirts: “Addio—a Roma!”
Abraham Lincoln’s Offer
Through the letter, dated July 17, 1861, from Secretary of State William H. Seward to H.S. Sanford, the U.S.

On Napoleon’s escape and return to France (the Hundred Days), he regained Murat’s support, but Murat proved unable to convince the Italians to fight for Napoleon with his Proclamation of Rimini and was beaten and killed. The Italian kingdoms thus fell, and Italy’s Restoration period began, with many pre-Napoleonic sovereigns returned to their thrones. Piedmont, Genoa and Nice came to be united, as did Sardinia (which went on to create the State of Savoy), while Lombardy, Veneto, Istria and Dalmatia were re-annexed to Austria.
The dukedoms of Parma and Modena re-formed, and the Papal States and the Kingdom of Naples returned to the Bourbons. The political and social events in the restoration period of Italy (1815–1835) led to popular uprisings throughout the peninsula and greatly shaped what would become the Italian Wars of Independence. All this led to a new Kingdom of Italy and Italian unification.
Unification (1814 to 1861)
It is difficult to pin down exact dates for the beginning and end of Italian reunification, but most scholars agree that it began with the end of Napoleonic rule and the Congress of Vienna in 1815, and approximately ended with the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, though the last “città irredente” did not join the Kingdom of Italy until the Italian victory in World War I.
As Napoleon’s reign began to fail, other national monarchs he had installed tried to keep their thrones by feeding those nationalistic sentiments, setting the stage for the revolutions to come. Among these monarchs were the viceroy of Italy, Eugène de Beauharnais, who tried to get Austrian approval for his succession to the Kingdom of Italy, and Joachim Murat, who called for Italian patriots’ help for the unification of Italy under his rule. Following the defeat of Napoleonic France, the Congress of Vienna (1815) was convened to redraw the European continent. In Italy, the Congress restored the pre-Napoleonic patchwork of independent governments, either directly ruled or strongly influenced by the prevailing European powers, particularly Austria.

The painting comes from the collection of Enrico Piceni, the discerning art lover and journalist who was also the driving force behind the important series of monographic studies on 19th-century masters published by Arnoldo Mondadori in the 1930s. It is a replica of the work commissioned by Cesare Sala and shown at the Esposizione di Belle Arti dell’Accademia di Brera in 1861 with the title Garibaldi on the Hill over Sant’Angelo (1861, Milan, Civiche Raccolte Storiche). It portrays Garibaldi on the high ground overlooking the plain of the River Volturno, where the outline of the town of Capua can be discerned. Two mounted soldiers on the right seem to be waiting for the general as he pauses pensively on the spot where his army of volunteers has just won a heroic victory. Garibaldi was soon after to meet Vittorio Emanuele II at Teano and hand over the conquered territories, thus marking the end of the expedition of his one thousand volunteers and the beginning of the Kingdom of Italy. Unquestionably the greatest leader of the Risorgimento, Garibaldi appears in the history painting of Gerolamo Induno as an epic symbol and a very human figure at the same time. In this work he stands out in isolation against the sun-drenched landscape of southern Italy but displays the informality of the ordinary mortal in the way he holds the cigar between his fingers and the natural pose of the arm resting on the hilt of his sword. The realism of this portrait is inseparably interwoven with the heroic character of its subject, thus endowing the work with the unmistakable power to bring the events and personages of contemporary history closer to the life of the common people, as shown also in the canvases of the painter’s brother Domenico Induno.

The legend of the Risorgimento became sacred and untouchable. All the leaders were shown to have been great, disinterested men, Plutarchian characters, united by a common purpose and mutual respect, divided only occasionally by superficial discordances. Memorable sayings were religiously preserved, but when none was available they were fabricated either by improving on reality or by outright invention. One example: When Victor Emanuel arrived in Rome for the first time, in the autumn of 1870 (the carriage trip from Florence under pouring rains on muddy roads had been especially trying), he said a few words in Piedmontese patois to his aide-de-camp: “Finalment, i suma” or “We’ve finally arrived.” The line was translated in all schoolbooks for generations as: “A Roma ci siamo e ci resteremo” or “We are in Rome. We will stay.” It had been transformed into a political pronouncement squarely aimed at the Pope’s temporal power and papal legitimists’ hopes.
Mack Smith is not only an antlike researcher but, as is true of many other contemporary English historians, a remarkably good writer. Good writing is seldom the product of divine inspiration. Almost always it is the art of thinking clearly, of knowing exactly what one wants to say, in what order and proportions, and saying it with the precise words. His work is so rich in the new material he has gathered (or the material many of his Italian predecessors did not dare use) that he can often afford to leave out anecdotes and lines too well known to be recounted one more time. His books can be read with as much pleasure as good novels, at least by Italians who know the background. Dramatic events quickly follow one another relentlessly and logically; historic speeches and pamphlets are reduced to a few significant lines; characters are sharply drawn.
He is, furthermore, a prolific writer. His stock of source material is so vast that he could put together a new book on the Risorgimento in a relatively short time without repeating himself. His Italy: a Modern History, Garibaldi, and Medieval and Modern Sicily were immediately translated into Italian, published by the revered house of Láterza at Bari, which was Benedetto Croce’s publisher, and almost all made the Italian best-seller list.

In the end as per the Paris Agreement, Britain accepted that the 13 colonies were independent. Since the declaration of independence was made on 4th July, it became a day of great significance to the Americans.
The American War of Independence acted as an inspiration for the French Revolution. Many of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies of America got inspired to become free and hence revolted against their motherland. The new nation called the United States of America was born. This is the most important significance of the American War of Independence.
How were economic factors responsible for the French revolution?
Even at the end of the 18th century. France was economically backward. Though its neighboring country England became an Industrial Country. France remained as the .agricultural country. Feudalism still existed.
The clergy, the nobles led to luxurious life at the cost of ordinary people. The farmers and other skilled laborers could not pay taxes levied on them by the kings. The farmers revolted against the system.
Industries were under the control of trade unions. Even the industries were strong enough to compete with other countries like England. Totally there was economic instability in the country because of maladministration.
What was the role of Garibaldi in Italy’s unification?
Garibaldi was a soldier and fighter. He played an important role in the unification of Italy.
He joined the ‘Young Italy’ established by Mazzini. After that, he constituted an army called ‘Red Brigade’ or “Red Shirts”.
With the help of Sardinia, fought with Austria. In 1860, he fought against the twin states of Sicily using his Red Garibaldi Brigade. He conquered them. Thus he played his role in the unification of Italy.
Who was the architect of the unification of Germany? Write a note on him.
The architect of the unification of Germany was Ottowan Bismark.
He was the chief minister of the King of Prussia, William I. He had begun his career as a Government servant, a member of the assembly called “Diet” and as an ambassador in various nations and had gained a lot of popularity. He was aware of the German States Association under the leadership of Austria and knew about the activities and weaknesses of this organization. Having worked in Austria, France, and Russia as an ambassador, he had the knowledge of their strength and weakness.

If you visit Italy, you will notice that, wherever you’re staying, the main street or square will almost invariably be named after Giuseppe Garibaldi. Garibaldi is the national hero who led the movement to unite Italy in the mid-19th century.
Italy only became a unified state between 1859 and 1871. Before that it was a patchwork of different states.
“We Italians adore Garibaldi – from the cradle we are taught to admire him,” Antonio Gramsci, the great Italian Marxist, wrote.
“If one were to ask Italian youngsters who they would most like to be, the overwhelming majority would certainly opt for the blond hero.”
But it is not just the left that would like to claim Garibaldi as one of their own. The Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and other leaders of the Italian right have been fascinated by Garibaldi’s military exploits and admired him for his patriotism.
Garibaldi’s exploits made him an international hero during his lifetime. An account from April 1864 describes one of his visits to London:
“The working men of London had organised a procession for the purpose of meeting and welcoming the liberator of Italy.
“But this procession, though numbering 50,000 intelligent artisans, was completely swallowed up in the mighty ovation by the whole metropolitan people, and served merely as a foretaste to Garibaldi of the extraordinary testimony which was about to be given of the estimation in which his principles and services in the cause of liberty were held by the English people.”
Garibaldi was in London primarily to raise funds to finance an expedition to free Venice, which was still under Austrian rule. He mixed in government circles, and spent many evenings chattering with the middle classes.
But in a contradiction that sums up his life, Garibaldi had also been invited to London by the city’s trades council.
The reaction he provoked among workers and trade unions began to worry the government. It eventually ordered him out of the country – and Queen Victoria made clear she regarded this as good riddance.
But why did people make such a fuss about Garibaldi, and why is his memory so contested? He was born 200 years ago in the city of Nice, then an Italian-French area, the son of a fisherman.
Like many people in continental Europe at the time, Garibaldi experienced brutal domination by a foreign power. However the local opponents of this rule were often not much better.

In 1796, he forced Austria to retreat, and he then spent the next three years conquering the Italian peninsula in the name of the French revolution. This included declaring himself King of Italy in 1805 in a region around Venice. He ruled the rest of the peninsula but mainly through his rule of France. In 1809, Napoleon made it to Rome. He had been excommunicated earlier by the Pope, but now the Pope fled. There was a lot more fighting and eventually Napoleon was exiled to Elba, escaped, and still did not succeed.
The seed of unification was planted. Revolution and independence were popular at that time in Europe and abroad. The British colonies had declared themselves free a few decades back, and the French people had had a revolution as well. On the Italian peninsula, where the seed of unification was sprouting, the flame blew into the Italian Wars of Independence from 1848-1866. These wars were mainly against Austria, that big brute, and the Kingdom of Sardinia did most of the heavy lifting.
Part of the unification of Italy involved choosing a king. King Victor Emmanuel II of the Kingdom of Sardinia was chosen as King of Italy in 1861. Italy was a kingdom until 1946 when a referendum created the modern Italian Republic. Giuseppe Garibaldi was an Italian general who is considered one of the fathers of modern Italy. Garibaldi’s life took him all around the world and he became a much admired figure in history. For the sake of a book on food, I mention him as part of history. He helped create Italy as a unified country, but there are still Italians who wish he had stayed home.
The flag of Italy, “il Tricolore” contains three panels with equal vertical panels of green, white, and red. Green is for the evergreen scrubland of the Mediterranean, white for the snowcapped Alps, and red for the blood shed during the revolution. Garibaldi’s men were also called redshirts after their uniform. According to Catholic interpretation, the flag colors represent hope, faith, and love. The “love” part of this represents the virtue of charity and love for God and for thy neighbor. Quite appropriate for a land of neighbors.

It was in this atmosphere that the writer and soldier Gabriele D'Annunzio, who'd done much to convince Italy to enter the war in the first place, led a band of black-shirted militant nationals against Fiume in the north, setting up his own quixotic government that lasted for several months.
Of all the fire-breathing Italian demagogues to emerge after the war, only Mussolini articulated, maintained, and sold a vision of Italian nationalism and greatness that the masses could believe. His widest appeal, he realized, would be to the million war veterans; he figured that if he could get their support he could lead all of Italy. Which is why he formed his own political movement known as the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento--Italian Combat Leagues--which soon became known as the Fascist party, its followers called Fascisti. Their uniform was the black shirt--an homage to D'Annunzio--and their primary tactic was the violent disruption of rallies held by other political parties, especially the socialists.
The years 1920 and 1921 were misery in Italy--leftist-led labor strikes, food riots, and full-fledged tax revolts. Life for average Italians became a kind of earthly hell, with the police and army powerless to protect them.
If he had planned it this way, Mussolini couldn't have given himself a more glorious opportunity. He sent out his bands of armed Black Shirts, like hired guns in the Old West, to restore order in the streets and factories. Naturally, his most generous employers were industrialists and big landlords, anxious to again make profits. But on his own, with a wink and a nod from Rome, he also took it upon himself to destroy communist and socialist groups, and left-wing trade unions, most of which were Catholic. That's how his National Fascist Party consolidated its own power, by reducing the power of the Church, the left, and the government. For the elections of 1921, the liberal government even brought the Fascists into an electoral coalition as a way to keep the beast fed, and the Fascists won 35 seats, including one by Mussolini himself. Government ministers, and King Victor Emmanuel, hoped Mussolini would be happy with what he'd achieved, and they planned to continue using his Black Shirts to put down threats from the left.

The handwriting appears nervy and frenetic, with numerous spelling errors, among which are "Ilia" for "Italia" and "Ballilla" for "Balilla". The second manuscript is the copy that Goffredo Mameli sent to Michele Novaro for setting to music. It shows a much steadier handwriting, fixes misspellings, and has a significant modification: the incipit is "Fratelli d'Italia". This copy is in the Museo del Risorgimento in Turin. The hymn was also printed on leaflets in Genoa, by the printing office Casamara. The Istituto Mazziniano has a copy of these, with hand annotations by Mameli himself. This sheet, subsequent to the two manuscripts, lacks the last strophe ("Son giunchi che piegano...") for fear of censorship. These leaflets were to be distributed on the December 10 demonstration, in Genoa.3
December 10, 1847 was an historical day for Italy: the demonstration was officially dedicated to the 101st anniversary of the popular rebellion which led to the expulsion of the Austrian powers from the city; in fact it was an excuse to protest against foreign occupations in Italy and induce Carlo Alberto to embrace the Italian cause of liberty. In this occasion the tricolor flag was shown and Mameli's hymn was publicly sung for the first time. After December 10 the hymn spread all over the Italian peninsula, brought by the same patriots that participated to the Genoa demonstration. In the 1848, Mameli's hymn was very popular among the Italian people and it was commonly sung during demonstrations, protests and revolts as a symbol of the Italian Unification in most part of Italy. In the Five Days of Milan, the rebels sang the Song of the Italians during clashes against the Austrian Empire.4 In the 1860, the corps of volunteers led by Giuseppe Garibaldi used to sing the hymn in the battles against the Bourbons in Sicily and Southern Italy.5 Giuseppe Verdi, in his Inno delle nazioni (Hymn of the Nations), composed for the London International Exhibition of 1862, chose Il Canto degli Italiani to represent Italy, putting it beside God Save the Queen and La Marseillaise.

He also convinced his king to exchange the province of Savoy and the city of Nice, the birthplace of Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi, for the strategic friendship of France against Austria.
He might be called “a man for all seasons” and we Kurds might see some of our own leaders in him. But this indefatigable Kissinger of Italy also earned the well-deserved title of liar for all times.
The man who actually freed Italy and captured the imagination of Italians and Europeans alike was the native of Nice, Guiseppe Garibaldi (1807-1882). His contemporaries likened him to Spartan Leonidas, Roman Cincinnatus and American George Washington.
Britain’s poet laureate Lord Tennyson, after planting a tree in his honor, movingly wrote:
Or watch the waving pine which here
The warrior of Caprera set,
A name that earth will not forget
Till earth has roll’d her latest year—.
Liberation movements used to command the attention of 19th century poets. At the dawn of 21st century, the bards have gone quiet, but the prose writers are busy conflating our desire to be free, alas, with selfishness.
In Italy, the decisive countdown for liberation started on May 5, 1860. With the help of Cavour, Garibaldi and his Mille (thousand) Redshirts sailed to Marsala in western Sicily with a hoodwinking from Great Britain.
Four months later, all of Sicily and southern Italy were in the hands of 21 thousand Redshirts and Garibaldi. Italians were winning and those dying could finally say, as Leopardi wanted them to:
“Beloved native land,
the life you gave me I give back to you.”
Ten years later—with a little bit of help from Germany, modern Italy was born.
But instead of focusing its energies on making Italians better patriots, it foolishly aspired to become an imperial power with fleeting forays into Eritrea, Somalia, Libya, Dodecanese Islands, and Ethiopia.
Unheeded observation of Chancellor Bismarck was spot-on: “Italy has a large appetite but false teeth.”
Leopardi, the Italian poet, can finally rest in peace. These days, Italians are not dying at the outskirts of Moscow from cold.

The second most populous state in Europe was the multinational Empire.
Revolution had different implications depending on whether it broke out in the empire's western or eastern areas.
In the west, revolutionaries looked to refining an already developed liberalism to benefit an educated, relatively affluent urban population.
In the east, liberalism was more about freeing serfs in areas where most of the population was poor.
The invasion of the royal palace in the second week of March was so shocking that Metternich resigned and fled the country.
The March Laws were passed by the long restive Magyars in their Diet.
There were challenges to Habsburg rule in other parts of the empire.
The Austrian military garrison was driven out of Milan, the largest city of northern Italy and capital of Lombardy.
A republic was proclaimed in Venice.
Rioting in Berlin prompted the king of Prussia to promise a constitution.
By the end of the month, the leaders of the smaller German states, facing similar unrest, had agreed to call an assembly that would represent all German states, with the understanding that a more centralized and unified state form would emerge.
The assembly was formed on the basis of a democratic vote and met in May of 1848.
The hopes of German nationalists for about a year came to symbolize the failures of German liberalism.
The king of Piedmont-Sardinia, the major independent state in the north of Italy, ordered an invasion of Lombardy, hoping to increase his holdings and create a powerful northern Italian state.
He was alarmed by the fact that troops from Tuscany, as far south as Naples, began to march to the north to help drive out the Austrians.
The men were united by vague visions of a unified Italy, but there was little consensus about the form a unified Italian state would assume.
Despite Italy's clear natural frontiers, most Italians north of Rome had little enthusiasm for an immediate union with the backward areas south of Rome.
Local and regional fidelities in Italy remained strong into the twentieth century.
The March uprisings are considered to be the most widespread wave of revolution in European history.
Socialists, radicals, and moderate republicans differed on too many fundamental points to work effectively together in France.
Most of them did not have political experience.
They couldn't assemble a reliable military power.
In France and the rest of Europe, the left did not enjoy broad or reliable popular support.
There was no match for trained and disciplined troops in the initial surge of support.

But the left never stopped trying to incite revolution, so with the government unable defeat them, that job fell to the Fascists.
WHAT DID the average Italian man want? Not revolution. No, he wanted only to earn a decent living and to drink wine and make love to his wife under a warm roof that didn't leak. He wanted life to be bearable again and orderly--for the trains to run on time--and by promising that, Mussolini was like Spartacus two thousand years before, his army of admirers and followers growing with every battle won. When he stood before the cheering throngs at Fascist rallies, they called out "Il Duce"--The Leader--because that's what he was to them, the man who would lead them out of turmoil and despair.
Throughout 1922, several parliamentary governments were formed and quickly collapsed under the weight of unrest and uncertainty. Then came October. In the lengthening shadows and falling leaves, tens of thousands of black-shirted Fascists gathered from all over Italy and descended on Rome, an occupying force awaiting word from its commanding general. Mussolini threatened Victor Emmanuel with all-out civil war if the king didn't name him, Il Duce, to lead the next government. In response, Emmanuel began mobilizing his army against the Fascists--martial rule. But his ministers and generals said that that would be madness, and convinced him to appease Mussolini by making him prime minister of a coalition government; that, they said, would defuse the situation.
Over the next five years, under the guise of law and order, Mussolini whittled away at the constitution. In 1924, a leading socialist deputy was found murdered, with no one claiming responsibility but no one denying it, either; the man was, after all, a leftist. In the same way, all opposition parties and leaders were harassed and threatened by Mussolini's secret police, and soon the press was ordered to endorse the governmental position or face the consequences. Whatever outrage there was dribbled out in whispers, because the factory workers and the landlords and the moneyed interests were more content; the average man could again work at a job that paid him a little, not too much, but enough for a bottle of wine and a bowl of pasta and a warm place to make love to his wife, and Italy was once again a unified country.

The Black Death repeatedly returned to haunt Italy throughout the 14th to 17th centuries. The plague of 1575–77 claimed some 50,000 victims in Venice. In the first half of the 17th century a plague claimed some 1,730,000 victims, or about 14% of Italy’s population. The Great Plague of Milan occurred from 1629 through 1631 in northern Italy, with the cities of Lombardy and Veniceexperiencing particularly high death rates. In 1656 the plague killed about half of Naples‘ 300,000 inhabitants.
The Musicians by Caravaggio
Napoleonic invasion (1796)
Italy before the Napoleonic invasion (1796).
At the end of the 18th century, Italy was almost in the same political conditions as in the 16th century; the main differences were that Austria had replaced Spain as the dominant foreign power after the War of Spanish Succession (and that too was not true with regards to Naples and Sicily), and that the dukes of Savoy (a mountainous region between Italy and France) had become kings of Sardinia by increasing their Italian possessions, which now included Sardinia and the north-western region of Piedmont.
This situation was shaken in 1796, when the French Army of Italy under Napoleoninvaded Italy, with the aims of forcing the First Coalition to abandon Sardinia (where they had created an anti-revolutionary puppet-ruler) and forcing Austria to withdraw from Italy. The first battles came on 9 April, between the French and the Piedmontese, and within only two weeks Victor Amadeus III of Sardinia was forced to sign an armistice. On 15 May the French general then entered Milan, where he was welcomed as a liberator. Subsequently beating off Austrian counterattacks and continuing to advance, he arrived in the Veneto in 1797. Here occurred theVeronese Easters, an act of rebellion against French oppression, that tied down Napoleon for about a week.
On October 1797 Napoleon signed the Treaty of Campo Formio, by which the Republic of Venice was annexed to the Austrian state, dashing Italian nationalists’ hopes that it might become an independent state.

A public announcement from the PCI in September 1943 stated:
To the tyranny of Nazism, that claims to reduce to slavery through violence and terror, we must respond with violence and terror.— Appeal of PCI to the Italian People, September 1943
The GAP's mission was claimed to be delivering "justice" to Nazi tyranny and terror, with emphasis on the selection of targets: "the official, hierarchical collaborators, agents hired to denounce men of the Resistance and Jews, the Nazi police informants and law enforcement organizations of CSR", thus differentiating it from the Nazi terror. However, partisan memoirs discussed the "elimination of enemies especially heinous", such as torturers, spies and provocateurs. Some orders from branch command partisans insisted on protecting the innocent, instead of providing lists of categories to be hit as individuals deserving of punishment. Part of the Italian press during the war agreed that murders were carried out of most moderate Republican fascists, willing to compromise and negotiate, such as Aldo Resega, Igino Ghisellini, Eugenio Facchini and the philosopher Giovanni Gentile.
Women also participated in the resistance, mainly procuring supplies, clothing and medicines, anti-fascist propaganda, fundraising, maintenance of communications, partisan relays, participated in strikes and demonstrations against fascism. Some women actively participated in the conflict as combatants.
The first detachment of guerilla fighters rose up in Piedmont in mid-1944 as the Garibaldi Brigade Eusebio Giambone. Partisan forces varied by seasons, German and fascist repression and also by Italian topography, never exceeding 200,000 men actively involved, with an important support by residents of occupied territories. Nonetheless it was an important factor that immobilized a conspicuous part of German forces in Italy, and to keep German communication lines insecure.
When the Italian Resistance movement began following the armistice, with various Italian soldiers of disbanded units and many young people not willing to be conscripted into the fascist forces, Mussolini's Italian Social Republic (RSI) also began putting together an army. This was formed with what was left of the previous Regio Esercito and Regia Marina corps, fascist volunteers and drafted personnel.

As a general, he was fearless, commanding respect and loyalty from his men by fighting right alongside them in hand-to-hand combat. He was a man of action with an acute sense of justice and a childlike belief that good would triumph over immorality and corruption. He didn't want to win battles for politicians —he distrusted them. He was simply and truly out to smite evil. He was what most twelve-year-old boys want to be when they grow up, and if you ever have a strange dream in which you are beset by enemies and plagued by wrongdoers, and your dreammeister lets you choose whomever you want for help, take Garibaldi. Ask Cavour and Mazzini. They took him, and they didn't even like him. He was that good.
Thus, in May of 1860,
Francis II, King of the Two Sicilies had excellent
reason to worry. Garibaldi, over the objections of the
ultra-cautious Cavour, had just smuggled a small and
almost unarmed (!) group of men out of the port of Genoa
aboard two leaky tubs and set off to liberate the
Italian south. He would start in Sicily, in support of a
local uprising, and work his way over to the mainland
and on up to the capital, the city of Naples. He cajoled
and threatened weapons and ammunition out of the
commanders of a few armories along the way as he plodded
south toward Sicily, where his famous "Thousand
redshirts" (1,089, to be exact) would take on a regular
army twenty times that number. (Garibaldi set sail from
Genoa on May 5 and landed in Sicily on May 11.)
The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had a sizable army and the largest navy in the Mediterranean. Socially and politically, however, it had been standing still since the post-Napoleonic Restoration in 1815, surviving the Carbonari revolution of 1820 and successfully resisting calls for reform only by being propped up by the Austrian army and Swiss mercenaries. Many of the kingdom's liberals and intellectuals had left, and by 1860 even King Francis could sense what was coming. In June of that year (after Garibaldi had already taken Sicily!)

|Triumvir of the Roman Republic|
March 29 – July 1, 1849
|Preceded by||Republic established|
|Succeeded by||Aurelio Saliceti|
22 June 1805
Genoa, Ligurian Republic, now Italy (or First French Empire)
10 March 1872
Pisa, Kingdom of Italy
|Alma mater||University of Genoa|
|Profession||Politician, journalist, and activist for Italian independence/unification.|
Giuseppe Mazzini (Italian pronunciation: ; 22 June 1805 – 10 March 1872), was an Italian politician, journalist and activist for the unification of Italy. His efforts helped bring about the independent and unified Italy in place of the several separate states, many dominated by foreign powers that existed until the 19th century. He also helped define the modern European movement for popular democracy in a republican state.
Mazzini was born in Genoa, then part of the Ligurian Republic, under the rule of the French Empire. His father, Giacomo Mazzini, originally from Chiavari, was a university professor who had adhered to Jacobin ideology; his mother, Maria Drago, was renowned for her beauty and religious (Jansenist) fervour. Since a very early age, Mazzini showed good learning qualities (as well as a precocious interest towards politics and literature), and was admitted to the University at only 14, graduating in law in 1826, initially practicing as a "poor man's lawyer". He also hoped to become a historical novelist or a dramatist, and in the same year he wrote his first essay, Dell'amor patrio di Dante ("On Dante's Patriotic Love"), which was published in 1837. In 1828–29 he collaborated with a Genoese newspaper, L'indicatore genovese, which was however soon closed by the Piedmontese authorities. He then became one of the leading authors of L'Indicatore Livornese, published at Livorno by F.D. Guerrazzi, until this paper was closed down by the authorities, too.
In 1827 Mazzini travelled to Tuscany, where he became a member of the Carbonari, a secret association with political purposes.

Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) didn’t live long enough to see a free Italy, but wrote some of the most moving verses to lament his homeland’s subjugation by France under Napoleon Bonaparte.
In a poem titled, To Italy, he mourns the loss of Italian soldiers in Bonaparte’s ill-fated Russian campaign with these haunting words that can easily pass for Kurdish fighters who died in Korea for Turkish Adnan Menderes or Kuwait for Arab Saddam Hussein.
Oh miserable is he—who dies in battle,
not for his country’s soil, his faithful wife
and precious children,
but he dies serving someone else,
dies at the hand’s of that man’s enemies,
and can’t say at the end: Beloved native land,
the life you gave me I give back to you.
Italians devoured his poems like hungry wolves and set out to liberate Italy from the yoke of France and Austria.
Three of them deserve special Kurdish notice—for what may be called the soul, brain and sword of Italian freedom.
Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872) spoke to the soul of Italians with his passion for liberty. As if addressing the stateless peoples all over the world, he said:
“Do not beguile yourselves with the hope of emancipation from unjust social conditions if you do not first conquer a country for yourselves.”
“Without country,” he harangued his fellow Italians: “you are the bastards of humanity.”
Truer words have never been uttered so succinctly on behalf of freedom anywhere in the world.
Mazzini may have voiced the deepest yearnings of Italian patriots, but the brain behind unification was Count Cavour (1810-1861), the prime minister of King Victor Emmanuel in the Kingdom of Piedmont, a small Italian state bordering France.
Unlike Mazzini, who advocated mingling blood and iron for liberation, Cavour opted for diplomacy, especially with Great Britain, the superpower of 19th century, to achieve the same goal.
So when Great Britain, together with France and Ottoman Empire, declared war on Russia to preserve the territorial integrity of the crumbling Turkish state for geopolitical reasons, Count Cavour rushed in 15,000 Italian soldiers to Crimea to help Great Britain win the war in 1853.
Four years later, the same Cavour allowed Russia to establish a naval base in Piedmont.

After preparing the international terrain at the Leghorn meeting, Mussolini waited for an opportunity to carry out his plan to take over Albania. This opportunity was given to him by the Dukagjin Uprising. In early 1926, the Bashkimi Kombëtar Committee, with its headquarters in Bari, was informed that demoralisation within the Albanian regime had reached a zenith because of corruption and the oppression of the population, and because of the concessions given to foreign circles in contradiction with vital national interests. Convinced that a well-organised movement could overthrow the regime without great sacrifice and would be welcomed by the majority of the population, the Committee made a corresponding proposal to Albanian patriots in the north and south of the country. The patriots in the south replied that they were ready to act unconditionally at the moment the Committee deemed suitable. The patriots in the north, for their part, asked for 5,000 gold Napoleons, a sum ten times greater than what the Committee had. A little later, however, the situation in the north changed radically and in the autumn of 1926, there was great support for an uprising in Albania, in particular after the proposal made by Baron Aloisi. At this time, the Catholic clergy and the leaders of the Muslim community in Shkodra informed the Committee that they were ready to organise an uprising without any financial backing. They added that the situation was so tense that, if the Bashkimi Kombëtar Committee did not act, other irresponsible and ill-prepared individuals would take over leadership of a national uprising which, under such conditions, would have catastrophic repercussions for the country. Unfortunately this is exactly what happened. The Bashkimi Kombëtar Committee told patriots in Albania to make the necessary preparations, but to wait for orders before rising in revolt. The reason why the uprising did not begin immediately was a disagreement among the leaders of our organisation (Bashkimi Kombëtar) with regard to collaboration with Konare. Sotir Peci and the leaders of the north were strictly against any uprising conducted with Konare leaders because participation of the latter would compromise the movement internationally such that it would be decried as a communist revolt.