by Lucy Riall
The celebrations for Garibaldi's birthday took place in Palermo on the evening of 19 July (unfortunately without him, as he had been forced to leave Palermo at the last moment for the battle of Milazzo). They were extremely elaborate. According to one report, the church bells started to peal early in the morning;34 and this was followed by a popular demonstration. L'Unità Italiana reported that a children's choir moved around the city singing hymns, and that a group of lively young men carried around an effigy in black (representing perhaps a Jesuit) which they periodically hit with a stick.35 Thereafter, the official celebrations took over. All the shops were closed and public and private buildings – including the archbishop's palace, the university and the municipal government – were covered entirely in decorations: ‘All the balconies crammed full of Chinese lanterns and party decorations, with busts, portraits and flags’, commented one newspaper. The decorations on Palazzo Riso attracted particular praise (it was one of the main noble residences in the city, facing Piazza Bologni): ‘decorated with magnificent tapestries, of gold and silver braid, along with prestigious military trophies of ancient date … brocade cloth with gold and sliver braid and numerous candelabra on the balconies. In the middle, an ancient military trophy with a painting of Garibaldi.’ Another imposing residence, the Palazzo Sant-Elia, was decorated in lights, flowers and flags, with an image of Garibaldi in the centre and an inscription reading: ‘To Giuseppe Garibaldi – Angel of divine justice – Powerful expression – Of eternal Italy.’ The various gentlemen's clubs were ‘transformed into rooms of A thousand and one nights’, according to a newspaper.36 The ‘caffè di Sicilia’ on the corner of Piazza Bologni and via Toledo displayed the following inscription: ‘For Giuseppe Garibaldi – Example of rare modesty – The Italians of Sicily – Celebrate his 53rd year’.37
A striking feature of the celebrations was the hanging of large illuminated ‘transparent canvases’ featuring episodes from Garibaldi's expedition to Sicily and other nationalist allegories. Four of these were hung at the four sides of the Quattro Canti at the centre of the city: representing the arrival at Marsala (with ‘800 Italians’; see figure 13 overleaf), the battle of Calatafimi, and two moments in the battle for Palermo. There were two other canvases, one on the via Toledo and another on the via Maqueda.38 The via Maqueda canvas showed Sicily ‘in the form of Ceres [the goddess of grain and harvests, and a symbol of the cycle of death and rebirth] with a white dress, green scarf and red shawl’, standing hand in hand with Garibaldi who, as in all the canvases and the portraits, was ‘painted with the classic red shirt and scarf around his shoulders’ (see figure 14). Underneath was written a short verse: ‘Come child of the sun, you know you must come – Since you are engaged to the King Vittorio.’39
13 ‘Landing in Marsala of General Garibaldi with 800 Italians’: this version of one of the most emblematic episodes of the Thousand is a copy of a large transparent canvas hung in the centre of Palermo.
There were parades and processions all over Palermo. Troops paraded in Piazza dell'Olivella, and in other squares too, complete with transparent canvases and statues of Garibaldi. The climax of all the celebrations was a general procession, led by a choir and orchestra, and followed by huge crowds, down the via Toledo towards the sea. The procession stopped at various strategic points to sing hymns to Garibaldi. The message of all the hymns was the same and was simple: they presented Garibaldi as the saviour of Sicily, and encouraged Sicilians to fight with him:
Oh child of the Alps, terrible warrior … you unite in joy an entire people/ How sacred is the day you were born … Brave boys the cry of war/ Encourages us to renewed virtue/ It reminds us that this is the land/ Of Guinarde and Procida [a reference to the Vespers] … You are the father, the friend, the husband,/ The Redeemer of your Sicilian children,/ You are that great man, who … stole us from cruel servitude.40
On the same day, there was a huge festival in Marsala (which lasted five days, according to one paper),41 with a gun salute, military parade, and Te Deum in the cathedral. In the evening there were illuminations, and a transparent canvas of Garibaldi's landing was hung over the gate by which he had entered the town (although an English observer commented that the painter ‘had given rather a stretch to the imagination when he portrayed the people of Marsala receiving them with open arms amid a perfect shower of shot and shell from the Neapolitan ships’).42 The following day, 20 July, there was another – seemingly impromptu – demonstration in Palermo to celebrate Garibaldi's victory at Milazzo, with more illuminations, singing and flag-waving: ‘The bells rang out in celebration from every street and district, the crowd vomited into via Toledo with frenzied evvivas to Garibaldi, to Italy, to Vittorio Emanuele’.43
14 ‘Garibaldi hands Sicily over to the gentleman King’: another copy of a transparent canvas hung in Palermo shows Sicily as the goddess Ceres; both figures were dressed in the colours of the Italian tricolour.
There seems little doubt about the political intention of these celebrations. Indeed, they appear to be an archetypal example of nation-building from above, of an official attempt to elaborate and utilise a political aesthetic through festivals and visual representations to encourage a sense of national belonging, to foster an emotional attachment to the regime, and to Italianise the public spaces of Palermo.44 Specifically in this case, we can observe an effort to establish Sicily as part of Italy, identified with the Piedmontese monarchy, through the celebration of the figure of Garibaldi. Yet there was nothing very new about the production itself: the Bourbons had pioneered the use of transparent canvases and elaborate temporary stages and displays for popular festivals (although their origins lie in revolutionary and post-revolutionary France);45 and although the technology was modern, the spectacle itself was heavy with traditional, and especially religious, symbolism. Garibaldi himself was represented as a saint, responsible for the miraculous liberation of Sicily. In fact, the celebration itself – its timing in the middle of July, the organisation and placing of the procession in the via Toledo and around the Quattro Canti, the iconography of Garibaldi as saint – bears an overwhelming resemblance to the popular procession traditionally held in mid-July to commemorate the festival of Santa Rosalia in Palermo. This festival was not celebrated in 1860, allegedly because the Bourbons had stolen the saint's effects and part of her statue from the cathedral.46
There were still other official attempts at ‘making Italians’. Throughout the summer of 1860, public commemorations sought to establish an official narrative of the events of 1860, or to create and control a nationalist memory of what had occurred. The departure of the Bourbon garrison from Palermo was turned (unsurprisingly) into a general festival of italianità, as was the defection of a Bourbon warship, Veloce, to the nationalist side: ‘you now belong to our family’, Garibaldi told the crew.47 One of the boats which had brought the Thousand to Marsala was refloated and taken to lie in the harbour at Palermo for all to see: ‘[it's] a wreck,’ commented one volunteer, ‘but the intention is to remind people of the great event’.48 Towards the end of June, the final symbol of Bourbon power in Palermo, the fort of Castellamare, was taken by Garibaldi's army. The fort was then demolished (or – more accurately – an attempt was made to demolish it) as part of a great public celebration, involving all the non-combatant groups of Palermo society: priests, women, children, young and old, rich and poor. They reportedly marched together down to the fort shouting ‘Evviva all'Italia, evviva al nostro Re e al Dittatore’, carrying flowers, refreshments and the tools of the job to destroy it; and the fort became an open-air site for the staging of italianità, visited by prominent political figures, including Garibaldi himself and the archbishop of Monreale, Benedetto d'Acquisto.49
The public demolition of the fort at Castellamare was indicative of a more general policy to stage and to encourage public performances of nationalist zeal. Public funerals and other commemorative events were organised to celebrate those ‘martyrs’ who had died in the Sicilian campaign. Foreigne
rs who had come to fight in Sicily were commemorated, and the biggest funeral of all was ordered personally by Crispi, for his friend, Rosolino Pilo (who had arrived before Garibaldi and was killed in the mountains above Palermo), along with the erection of a monument to him. Pilo's funeral service lasted three hours and took place in the Church of San Domenico, the ‘pantheon’ of Palermo, on 24 August.50 Crispi also used the press to make Italians. The two government papers in Palermo, Il Giornale di Sicilia and Il Precursore, were masterminded by Crispi, and both emphasised the exceptional stature of Garibaldi and sought to glorify specific moments in the revolution. The Giornale di Sicilia's main purpose was to publish the decrees of the dictatorship, but much of its first number was taken up with establishing a detailed, if largely tendentious, narrative of the revolution from the departure at Quarto to the arrival in the mountains above Palermo. Garibaldi, according to the paper, the ‘noble Leader [Duce]’, was a ‘genius’ with a ‘radiant look’, whose light shone ‘like the brilliant halo of the Italian flag’ among the devastation of the Bourbon bombardment and the horrors of a civil war.51
This lead was taken up by Il Precursore (whose name referred to Pilo). The celebrations for Garibaldi's birthday, the battle of Milazzo, his arrival in Calabria, and other nationalist events: all these gave Il Precursore the opportunity to rewrite the idea of the nation in a popular religious vernacular and to hold up Garibaldi as its main interpreter. Reporting on the victory at Milazzo, the paper asked: ‘Who can resist the sword of the Hero of Varese and Calatafimi, if his sword is that of the avenging Angel?’52 ‘Where did he go?’ it asked after Garibaldi left for Calabria, ‘nobody knew, and our answer to those who ask is his: when you come with me you don't ask where we are going’.53 After Garibaldi returned briefly to Sicily in September, Il Precursore indulged in an extended hagiography which ran over two issues (‘Oh how beautiful it was to see the liberator of Italy, the greatest hero of our day …!’). As Garibaldi departed from Porta Felice, the paper reported that ‘a thousand kisses’ were exchanged, while those who could not kiss him ‘began to kiss his red shirt, his arms, his legs, his feet, with the same ardour as they would have kissed a saint’. He was carried to the boat by the people, crying: ‘long live the great liberator of Italy, long live our father, long live the Saviour – why are you leaving, why are you abandoning us?’54
At a time of political uncertainty and war (for instance, during the battle of Milazzo for Garibaldi's birthday; during Garibaldi's march on Naples for the funeral for Pilo), the amount of attention and resources given to displays of national belonging by Garibaldi's dictatorship is surprising. Indeed, it has never been taken seriously by historians. Yet these kinds of patriotic display in Palermo in 1860 – the role of funerals and the exaltation of death in battle; the promotion of heroes (Garibaldi, the king, Pilo); and the establishment of patriotic rituals and symbols associated with religious practices and vocabularies – represent a significant attempt to sacralise the nation, and to make political action the subject of a religious cult.55 The patriotic displays of 1860 also tell us that Mazzini's concept of a political religion found official and practical expression before national unification, and well before Francesco Crispi, as Italian prime minister, introduced a programme of ‘making’ and educating Italians two decades later.56
Many of these celebrations were also politically astute. Not only was a great effort made to be as inclusive as possible (only unrepentant Bourbons and Jesuits were excluded from Garibaldi's revolution), but enormous care was taken not to offend the Church. Moreover, since most of these festivities required a significant amount of expenditure and practical organisation, they presumably served to provide employment for artisans, and so to revitalise the city's economy after the fighting and bombardment and appease this crucial section of Palermo society.57 The creation of employment opportunities could serve other purposes too. The painters responsible for the large-scale canvases at Garibaldi's birthday celebrations and Pilo's funeral were highly experienced in producing religious and theatrical art, and could therefore be relied upon to produce something spectacular. But they – Giuseppe Bagnasco, Luigi Lo Jacono, Giovan Battista Basile – were also prominent figures known for their liberal sympathies, and it seems very likely that the government sought to reward them for their loyalty and to show other artists and artisans the material advantages which official patronage could bring.58
The myth of the ‘Mille’
From the outset, Garibaldi's dictatorship had a very keen eye for self-publicity. These publicity efforts were not, however, confined to Sicily; the expedition, and later the government, were extremely attentive to public opinion both in northern and central Italy and internationally. Positive publicity was vital to the success of the expedition, in part because it could translate into the supply of money and men. Widespread and positive publicity was also crucial because, at the outset at least, the expedition to Sicily was part of a broader military strategy which included an attack on the Papal States.
The day before leaving for Sicily, Garibaldi wrote a series of letters, destined for publication in the main democratic newspapers such as Valerio's Il Diritto, L'Unità Italiana and Il Movimento.59 These letters represent a manifesto for the expedition, in which he justified his action and announced his aims. One of the most important and widely circulated was his 5 May letter to Bertani (who had stayed at Genoa), which asked for practical support in the name of Italian independence:
Try to make Italians understand that if we are duly helped, Italy will be made quickly and at a small cost … That for an Italy freed today, five hundred thousand soldiers must take up arms, and not a hundred thousand … With such an army, Italy will no longer need foreign masters who will eat her up bit by bit on the pretext of freeing her. That wherever there are Italians who are fighting the oppressor, there we must incite all the brave men to go and provide them with the necessary for the journey.60
That this letter was intended not so much for Bertani as for the rest of the world is suggested by its publication in Il Diritto on 9 May, and its translation and circulation to many foreign newspapers, including the London Times and the New York Times (the latter commented that it was ‘in better taste than many of the guerillero's late effusions’).61 A proclamation addressed to Italiani!, and which began: ‘Sicilians are fighting against the enemies of Italy, and for Italy! It is the duty of every Italian to help them, with word, with money, with firearms and above all with their hands’, was also printed and distributed as a flyer.62
Arguably the most important sign of Garibaldi's concern with public opinion was the public letter he wrote to the king just before sailing to Sicily. In it, Garibaldi both reiterated the link between nation, monarchy and democracy that he had tried so hard to promote during the previous year, and recast his initially reluctant decision to go to Sicily in a much more conclusive light:
The cry of torment which arrived at my ears from Sicily has moved my heart, and the heart of a few hundred of my old fellow-soldiers. I did not encourage the insurrection by my brothers in Sicily; but from the moment that they rose up in the name of Italian Union, of which Your Majesty is the personification, against the most vile tyranny of our times, I did not hesitate in placing myself at the head of the expedition. I am well aware that I am embarking on a hazardous enterprise, but I have faith in God, and in the courage and devotion of my companions. Our war cry will always be: Viva l'unità d'Italia! Viva Vittorio Emanuele, her first and bravest soldier!63
In other words, Garibaldi was not responsible for the insurrection, but it was justifiable against such an evil regime; and the expedition itself was a heroic and generous endeavour carried out for Italy and in the name of the king. In this way, Garibaldi sought to establish and control the symbolic representation of the expedition, and to legitimise it by appealing both to revolutionary nationalism and to monarchical devotion.
Garibaldi was also careful to write a letter to the director of the Rubattino Steamship Compan
y in which he justified the theft of his two ships by reference to the ‘service to a holy cause’, and this letter was published not only in Il Diritto and L'Unità Italiana, but also in foreign papers like the London Times, the New York Times and Le Siècle.64 Further evidence of Garibaldi's commitment to getting material and moral support for the expedition is provided by a private letter to Giacomo Medici, asking him to stay behind and organise men and arms: ‘Tell the Italians that they should follow you in complete faith, that the hour has finally come to make this Italy that we all yearn for and that by God! they should understand that if we are many we will finish them off quickly and that our enemies draw strength from our fears and our indifference’.65 This effort did not let up after departure. On 13 May, the Movimento published Garibaldi's orders to his troops:
the mission of this corps will be, as it was heretofore, based upon the most complete abnegation with the object of regenerating our country. The brave Chasseurs have served and will serve their country with the devotion and discipline of the best troops in the world without hoping for any other reward than that of an unspotted conscience. They are attracted to the service by no offer of rank, honors or rewards. When the danger is over they will retire to their simple private life; but now that the hour of combat has come, Italy beholds them in the front rank, joyous and determined, ready to shed their blood.