Giuseppe Garibaldi

Giuseppe Maria Garibaldi was an Italian general, patriot, revolutionary, and republican. He contributed to the Italian unification and the creation of the Kingdom of Italy. He is considered one of the greatest generals of modern times[1] and one of Italy’s “fathers of the fatherland”, along with Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, Victor Emmanuel II of Italy and Giuseppe Mazzini.[2] Garibaldi is also known as the “Hero of the Two Worlds” because of his military enterprises in South America and Europe.[3]

Garibaldi was a follower of the Italian nationalist Mazzini and embraced the republican nationalism of the Young Italy movement.[4] He became a supporter of Italian unification under a democratic republican government. However, breaking with Mazzini, he pragmatically allied himself with the monarchist Cavour and Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia in the struggle for independence, subordinating his republican ideals to his nationalist ones until Italy was unified. After participating in an uprising in Piedmont, he was sentenced to death, but escaped and sailed to South America, where he spent 14 years in exile, during which he took part in several wars and learnt the art of guerrilla warfare.[5] In 1835 he joined the rebels known as the Ragamuffins (farrapos), in the Ragamuffin War in Brazil, and took up their cause of establishing the Riograndense Republic and later the Catarinense Republic. Garibaldi also became involved in the Uruguayan Civil War, raising an Italian force known as Redshirts and is still celebrated as an important contributor to Uruguay’s reconstitution.