Garibaldi

by Lucy Riall

  The soldier of Garibaldi is dressed in a red shirt and wide trousers – he has an easy gait … he is used to hardship, he can withstand the sun, ice, and fatigue – he sleeps little, and mostly on straw or the bare earth … in battle his law is to go ever onward; a garibaldino dies, he does not flee – he never hides from fire, but faces the bullets with his chest exposed, he fires one or two shots and then uses the bayonet – he adores his general, and is enchanted by him, he would lay down for him not one but twenty lives.31

  The press also promoted the virtues of martyrdom, and was particularly keen to encourage the cult of local martyrs like Francesco Riso and Rosolino Pilo, as well as those – Tuckory, the Bandiera brothers (‘the first heroes of Italian freedom’)32 – who had come from afar to die for freedom in southern Italy.33

  Such fidelity to the government line is not altogether surprising, since we already know that the regime cultivated the press, but it is worth noting as a cultural contrast to the relative lack of material support. Praise of Garibaldi and of his government was almost unanimous. Moreover, the language in which it was expressed, and the symbols referred to, are proof of the full acceptance of the national–patriotic discourse in Palermo, a city which was traditionally the centre of Sicilian autonomy rather than of Italian nationalism. The Palermo press made ample use of existing Risorgimento tropes like degeneration, regeneration, heroism and martyrdom, and emphasised almost daily both the virtues of a military life and volunteering and the idea of Garibaldi as the saviour of Sicily. So, if nothing else, the government succeeded in getting its patriotic message across to the press. Indeed, there is little difference in attitude between the Palermo press and the liberal press elsewhere in Italy during the events of 1860: both unquestioningly accepted Garibaldi and his dictatorship as representative of the Italian nation, and opposition was almost entirely silent. Only in October was some cynicism expressed in Palermo, and then by two nationalist papers, about the elaborate absurdity of the commemorations of the ‘martyrs for liberty’ in the Church of San Domenico.34 However, this was an isolated moment of dissent; otherwise the papers concurred in praising government-sponsored celebrations such as the demolition of Castellamare fort and Garibaldi's birthday.35

  Furthermore, journalists and intellectuals were not content merely to echo government propaganda, but also came up with their own associative activities and their own ways of celebrating the revolution. Many of the plays and other performances put on in Palermo at this time had a nationalist theme and/or enacted a nationalist narrative. Thus, the play Salvatore Maniscalco (the hated Bourbon chief of police) was immediately followed by Vittorio Emanuele's entrance in Palermo at the Teatro Nazionale. The same theatre staged a reading of a new poem ‘Garibaldi in Sicily’ by the editor of L'Unità Italiana, Ignazio Lombardi. The paper was (understandably) keen to stress the success of the event and reported that the author was called back on stage and encouraged to read another poem, ‘Il Cacciatore delle Alpi’: ‘And now to the Vespers – on its fiery earth – We will fight with you – the same war’. At this, the paper wrote, the audience erupted in applause, waved their handkerchiefs and, tying them together in a long chain, sang a nationalist song, ‘then shouts, cheers, hands raised and everything else you can imagine from a people enthused for its freedom’.36 The Teatro San Cecilia organised a huge patriotic celebration. The performance included musical staples of the Risorgimento canon – the overture to William Tell, the duet from I Puritani, and an aria from Norma – as well as specially composed hymns to Garibaldi and Vittorio Emanuele and some ballet. The theatre was decorated with elaborate sets: one was simply a mass of flags, swords and soldiers; another was a recreation of the recent battle scene around the royal palace and Porta Nuova, complete with fortifications and tricolour flags.37

  On a less spectacular level, literally hundreds of ephemeral publications were produced. These included patriotic flyers, such as a Garibaldi version of the ‘Pater Noster’ and ‘Ave Maria’:

  Our father who art in Sicily, glorious and content from the liberation of the Italian land, hallowed be thy name, because your love for Italy is as great as your glory, because you came down to earth from heaven for love and to deliver your children with your precious blood … Virgin Italy, mother of Garibaldi, pray for your children, now, and until the hour of death of the last tyrant…38

  Poems and songs proliferated, published mostly in newspapers but also separately as pamphlets, and these too followed a standard patriotic formula. One of the most productive writers was Ignazio Lombardi, editor of L'Unità Italiana. He responded to the political crisis of early July with the triumphant national–religious hymn, ‘Garibaldi and Italy’, which imagined Garibaldi as the ‘new Archangel’ resurrecting the glories of Italy's past (‘now the new heroes embrace the ancient heroes’).39

  This nationalist poetry used an eclectic, arguably even blasphemous, mix of religious, mythological and patriotic vocabularies. It proposed Garibaldi as the saviour of Sicily by referring to him almost simultaneously as a saintly or even Christ-like figure, a classical hero and a mythological creature. ‘The Angel of Italy has touched our shores’, wrote Pietro Chiara; while, in the words of the liberal priest Carmelo Pardi, Garibaldi was ‘sent by heaven’: he was the ‘lion of Caprera’, with ‘the soul of Cincinnatus and the heart of Brutus’.40 One liberal writer, the author of ‘Il Torquato Tasso’, ‘Procida’ and the previously banned ‘Jacopo Ortis’, wrote a tribute to Garibaldi in five canti, and told his readers that they could expect thirty-five more:

  Hail immortal Genius, warrior spirit…

  you will have at your side

  The sword of Archangel Michael.

  He seemed a brave knight from olden times

  An enchanted being, a God who reigned

  Over nature, and much more besides.41

  Perhaps the most complete expression of the reception of the Garibaldi cult in Sicilian culture was an extended dramatisation of a Sicilian legend, in which Garibaldi is imagined as the offspring of an angel (Elim) and a young girl. In the final canto of the play, Elim gives Garibaldi his mission on earth, which is to follow the model of Christ and save Sicily (‘in the midst of so much exhaustion and agitation, of so much life and decay, You will shine, Alone, like the guiding star …’).42

  It is extremely significant that the Church in Sicily, for the most part, tolerated the blasphemous use of its own vocabulary to promote an alternative religion of ‘humanity’ with strong Saint-Simonian overtones. Its attitude is all the more surprising when we remember the considerable, and growing, rejection by Rome of everything that Italian liberalism and nationalism represented in these years. ‘Here in Palermo, as in the rest of Sicily, the clergy is truly national’, Nino Bixio wrote to his wife in early June: ‘what a difference from our lot.’43 In many cases, moreover, the clergy openly endorsed the nationalist message. ‘What is most striking’, according to another commentator:

  is the zealous support given by the Sicilian clergy for the insurrectionary cause: priests and monks go through the streets preaching a new crusade against the Bourbon government, and encouraging the enthusiasm of the islanders for the fight; they fight alongside them in the most awful and bloody frays, raising their spirits with word and deed.44

  This unusually sympathetic standpoint can be explained both by the careful policies of Garibaldi's regime and by the Sicilian clergy's own ambivalence towards the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Especially in the isolated rural communities of the Sicilian interior, priests lived very close to the people; they were thus well aware of the severe social problems caused by the exploitation of the workforce and by land hunger, and of the pressing need for social reform. They too had often suffered the effects of economic dislocation and poverty, and might feel deep resentment of the bishops and religious bodies like the Jesuits, who had enjoyed enormous wealth and privileges under the Bourbon regime. It was these radicalised priests who responded to Garibaldi's call to ‘good priests’. They fought wit
h him, helped organise the peasants into squadre on his arrival, encouraged Palermo to revolt, and seized key points in the city during the fighting for the city at the end of May. One of them, Paolo Sardo, even tried to organise a separate ‘Ecclesiastical legion’ in Garibaldi's army (this was something quite ‘extraordinary’ according to a northern volunteer, who noted that its stated aim was to ‘encourage the fighting men’ for the ‘great needs of the Italian cause’).45

  In the weeks that followed the seizure of Palermo, some priests publicly rejected their archbishop's official instructions to protect the Pope and his temporal power. A few of them openly condemned the Pope's policy on nationalism and accepted that the abolition of his temporal power was necessary, as it had no spiritual basis. Many lent their symbolic support to the regime. Dominican monks hoisted and blessed the tricolour flag during the fighting for Palermo; and others decorated a main barricade with the figure of Christ surrounded by candles and numerous images of the Madonna.46 Fra’ Pantaleo, the most famous of these radical priests, organised Garibaldi's blessing in the cathedral in Alcamo and adopted aspects of the Crusader's dress, and he went with Garibaldi both to fight and to encourage support for his campaign. The eyewitness, Forbes, observed him in Messina in ‘cowl and crucifix’, preaching to the people ‘in their own patois’, and finishing the sermon with ‘three vivas for Garibaldi, three for Victor Emmanuel, and three for the Madonna Sanctissima, who is supposed to have taken the Messinese under her especial protection’.47

  There is evidence that nuns were equally enthusiastic for the revolution. In volunteer memoirs, nuns become a compelling symbol both of female purity and of the seductive power of the nationalist cause. Alberto Mario commented that ‘the romantic figure of Garibaldi had turned the heads of the saintly sisterhood, who were one and all piously enamoured of him’. Fruits, preserves and sweets arrived every day at Garibaldi's residence, wrapped in ‘curiously-wrought baskets’ with flowers, banners and inscriptions: ‘“To thee, Giuseppe! Saint and hero! Mighty as St George! Beautiful as the seraphim! Forget not the nuns of ———, who love thee tenderly; who pray hourly to Santa Rosalia that she may watch over thee …!”’ On one visit to a convent, ‘the tables spread for breakfast resembled a fancy fair – sugar castles, cupolas, temples, palaces and domes; and in the centre a statue of Garibaldi, in sugar’. The nuns (young and of noble birth) became so excited by Garibaldi's resemblance to ‘our Lord’ that they queued up to kiss him on the lips, including the abbess, ‘who at first seemed scandalized’.48 At another convent, Sette Angeli, they got down on their knees to pray before him.49 One volunteer, Giovanni Nuvolari, even admits to an affair with ‘a simpatica young nun, an angel of beauty’, while another, Abba, sees the nuns as both sexual and unobtainable: ‘their lily hands’ reach out to him, and he is so aroused by their ‘odour of chastity’ that he kisses the grille separating the convent from the outside world.50

  Above all, of course, this evidence reveals much about the sexual attitudes and expectations of the volunteers, but it does also suggest that some Sicilian women were passionate admirers of Garibaldi. We know very little about the general attitude of women to Garibaldi's dictatorship, although there is some limited evidence of support and enthusiasm. There were women's committees which collected money for the dead and wounded,51 and letters from at least two young educated women express active engagement with the nationalist cause. Felicità Benso di Verdura seems to have known Garibaldi personally: she signed herself La Garibaldina and sent best wishes from her mother, father (‘Babbo’) and sister.52 A young intellectual, Eloisa Abramo, aligned herself explicitly with the Palermo liberals, and expressed happiness at the liberation of ‘my country’. ‘Sicily … has shown herself worthy of that liberty which she was made immense sacrifices to acquire, and the Sicilians of '60 are braver than those of the Vespers … the hour of redemption has already rung, and this great task, dreamed of by the divine poet, is about to be achieved after 6 centuries’. She responded with enthusiasm to the news of the victory at Milazzo (‘Garibaldi constantly in the line of fire for 12 long hours … It is the hand of God which guides this man in the line of fire’).53

  The help given by the Sicilian clergy to Garibaldi was not without controversy. There were, for example, dire warnings of the spread of Protestantism to Sicily, and attempts were made to denigrate Pantaleo and others.54 On the whole, however, the support of radical priests and nuns can be considered one of the dictatorship's great achievements. It meant that, whatever went on behind the scenes, in public the government could proclaim its message with one voice. At the same time, the clergy helped to publicise the government's attempts to sacralise the nation; and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence, as we saw in the previous chapter, that these attempts produced a wave of quasi-religious celebration in Sicily, which saw the revolution as the people's ‘saviour’. Perhaps the most well-known and documented example of a popular cult of Garibaldi is his identification in Palermo with the city's patron saint, Santa Rosalia. He was said to be related to her and to come under her special protection. The anthropologist, Salvatore Salomone-Marino, who researched these and other legends about Garibaldi (‘from the mouths of Palermo women, Bourbon soldiers, the lazzaroni of Naples’), summarised the Santa Rosalia legend as follows:

  under her personal protection, he received a gift from her, during the journey from Quarto to Marsala, of that rough belt in white leather which he always wears and with which, by waving in the air, he chases away all the bullets and bombs which are aimed at him in the awful moments of battle. And he withdrew every evening to a secluded place, indeed he disappeared completely, because every evening he conferred with the Saint, who taught him the right movements and actions to take and gave them those vivid words with which he provoked fanaticism in his followers and terrified his enemies.55

  This legend was still in circulation when the historian G. M. Trevelyan visited the city in the early 1900s; according to Jessie White Mario, it was originally created by the nuns of Santa Caterina convent, who observed Garibaldi's fearless behaviour during the bombardment at Piazza Pretorio.56

  It is possible that Garibaldi was famous among the peasants and urban poor even before he arrived in Sicily. Trying to stir the population to revolt in April 1860, Pilo and Corrao found that their ‘only hope’ was Garibaldi – ‘the man who does not lose battles’ – and that his promised arrival spurred the squadre leaders into renewed activity.57 That the arrival of Garibaldi in Sicily had a considerable impact on popular culture and popular memory is suggested by a number of studies undertaken by Salomone-Marino and Giuseppe Pitrè, in the decades after 1860. Pitrè's and Salomone-Marino's interest in folklore and the new discipline of anthropology led them to collect and record Sicilian popular songs: long narrative poems (cantastorie) which were passed orally from one generation to the next, and one place or region to the next, often with substantial variations.58 They found that nationalism and national unification left a strong trace in popular songs and legends, in rural communities as well as in the main cities, and that most of them were still actively in circulation over twenty years later. A large number of these cantastorie praised the revolution of 1860 and its aims, and narrated its various episodes and details in ways that were remarkably similar to the official version of events produced by the regime.59 One song, the work of an illiterate peasant from Etna, was said by him to have been composed after hearing read aloud the letter of Dumas to Carini about the battle of Milazzo; and it repeats its key episode of Garibaldi killing the cavalry captain, with a violent embellishment of its own (Garibaldi kills not one but five soldiers).60

  Song after song celebrated Garibaldi: ‘the Liberator – In his heart there is no place for fear';61 ‘Garibaldi seemed like a God to us – He shouted: Oh my people! Onwards!’62 ‘How handsome Garibaldi is’, another song began, repeating the idea of Garibaldi as an eclectic hero bringing together the qualities of the archangel Saint Michael, Jesus Christ and Charlemagne:


  …who seems to me

  Saint Michael [San Micheluzzo] the archangel in person,

  He has come to liberate Sicily

  and avenge those who died,

  his look is that of Jesus Christ

  his command is like Charlemagne.63

  Songs depicted Garibaldi as brave and invincible: ‘his thunderous voice is frightening … he disappears, flies off, and reappears’;64 ‘with that horse he rides ever onward and laughs in the midst of gunfire’.65 His arrival and conquest of Sicily were miraculous: the Bourbon troops had only to see his red shirt to run away, according to one song, while others proclaimed that ‘he took control of Palermo in a flash’, and that ‘when Garibaldi went into battle even the trees and leaves trembled’.66

  Palpably, these songs share a taste for warfare and violence. One long cantastoria recorded by Salomone-Marino delights in the fighting for Palermo and the bravery of all those on Garibaldi's side:

  Old men and young men, and everyone

  Gave a hand against those bad guys…

  And huge bombs, from the air they came

  And fell on the ground in their hundreds;

  Our Squadri, they were all in their place,

  Stern under fire, no one was scared…

  From the barricades we fired

  With a terrible fire like no other,

  And – Viva Garibardi! – we cried,

  With a shout which terrified our enemy.67

  Other songs glorified the volunteer experience: ‘Bella, I'm off with Garibaldi, under his flag to make war – off to make war against the Bourbons’;68 ‘We are young men – We have no cares – And if Garibaldi comes – We'll go off with him’;69 or ‘Vittorio Emanuele, do me a favour, – Make us a force of Sicilians – Since we must fight the Germans’ (this last song, which refers to the Austrians, was an adaptation of a Tuscan volunteer song).70 And in many songs there were references to liberty, Italy and the fight against ‘tyranny’: ‘Viva la libertà! Which scares them away – Viva l'Italia [la Talia]! Which does not let them escape’;71 ‘Viva la Talia e Garibaldi amicu!’;72 or more directly: ‘Sicily mourned, now she laughs – she broke the chains of tyranny – and Garibaldi brave and true – has told us – Now you are free.’73