Unto the Sons

by Gay Talese

  During these years, Giuseppe Mazzini, a brooding, high-strung intellectual who clothed his small body in black garments and appeared to be in a perpetual state of mourning—and who, as a lifelong bachelor and antisocial idealist, rarely let human contact influence his singular viewpoint and radical solutions—lived at various times in France, Switzerland, and England. From these countries he would occasionally sneak back into Italy to organize a raid and then would slip out again before the Austrian troops, or the Piedmontese police, could capture and punish him. Austria’s foreign minister, Prince Klemens von Metternich, labeled Mazzini the “most dangerous man in Europe.”

  Garibaldi was also a frequent fugitive during these years. After joining the Piedmontese royal navy in 1834, he began to recruit sailors for the revolutionary cause, and soon he became involved in a scheme to steal a ship in Genoa for the use of the insurrectionists. But the plan was discovered in advance, and Garibaldi was captured and sentenced to death. Shortly before the appointed time of his execution, he escaped and went to France, where he lived under assumed names for the next two years. The cautious life he was forced to live made him feel unimportant to his radical cause, however; so he soon left for South America, where in 1836 he joined other Italian exiles who had allied themselves with Brazilian rebels fighting against the dictatorship of the Brazilian government.

  Garibaldi did not return to Italy until 1848, when sudden political upheavals resulted in an amnesty, which led him to join the Piedmontese king in a war against northern Italy’s Austrian overlords. The Piedmontese king’s army and the radicals were now working together for the first time to establish a free and united Italy; and while the royal Piedmontese troops would be defeated by the Austrians at the gates of Milan in 1848, and again at Novara in 1849, the volunteer units led by Garibaldi and other officers would invade Rome in 1849, and for five months would rule the Papal City as a republic under the political directorship of Mazzini.

  Garibaldi was seen as a great hero at this time to most Italians except the peasants, who refused to join his army because their priests told them that if they followed Garibaldi they would be damned to hell. Garibaldi did not need them. He had more volunteers than muskets, and was obliged to arm some of his six thousand followers with lances. And their uniforms were anything but uniform. They were dressed in an ill-fitting assortment of multicolored jackets, tunics, and trousers until they decided to follow Garibaldi’s fashion—and the fashion of his inner circle, who had fought under him in South America—of wearing red shirts. While some journalists claimed that the red shirts of the Garibaldini were traceable to his youthful fascination with the scarlet-robed Saint-Simonians, the color choice actually originated years later, while Garibaldi was in Uruguay in 1843, rallying his four hundred Italian Foreign Legionnaires to support the Republic of Uruguay’s war with the dictatorial regime of Argentina. Wanting to lend distinction to the appearance of the Italian legion, but unable to obtain the funds for uniforms from the Uruguayan government, Garibaldi one day learned that a warehouse in Montevideo was storing many boxes of red smocklike shirts for export to slaughterhouses in Argentina, to be worn by butchers not wanting the bloodstains to be so obvious. Garibaldi took these shirts for his Legionnaires, and thus began the fashion that would follow him from the battles of South America into Italy.

  In addition to red shirts, Garibaldi often wore ponchos that he had brought from South America. He also favored, as did many of his closest cavaliers, a wide-brimmed felt hat decorated with an ostrich plume. But Garibaldi was always distinguished from the other men by his shoulder-length reddish hair and his beard, his dignified manner, and his deep-set brown eyes, whose gaze often mesmerized his followers and made them regard him less as a military commander than as a prophet or messiah.

  But his triumph was destined to be brief, for a few months after his march into Rome, the French government dispatched an army that would total forty thousand by June 1849, when it broke through the barricades and advanced into the Papal City. Sitting on his horse and wearing a bloodstained red shirt as his enemy drew nearer, Garibaldi paused and addressed his loyalists in Saint Peter’s Square: “This is what I have to offer those who wish to follow me: Hunger, cold, the heat of the sun. No wages, no barracks, no ammunition. Continued skirmishes, forced marches, and bayonet fights.” Then, his voice resounding with confidence, he added: “Those of you who love your country and love glory, follow me!”

  More than forty-five hundred followed him in formation northward out of Rome, in the twilight of a sweltering day, before the charging French from the opposite direction could complete their rout of Mazzini’s Roman Republic—executing along the way many of the trapped resisters, beating back the lines of teenaged boys and other civilians who jeered or cursed them in the streets, cutting down the tricolored flags of the Italian Republic from the balconies of buildings, and gradually paving the way for the return of Pope Pius IX, who had fled south under the protection of the Spanish Bourbons.

  But the cautious Pope, not feeling secure as long as Garibaldi roamed free, took nine months to reenter Rome—by which time it did indeed appear that the revolutionary spirit in Italy had completely expired. Although Garibaldi and his group had zigzagged their way through the hills and valleys of the northern provinces, miraculously avoiding capture by the search party of eighty thousand soldiers from France, Naples, Spain, and Austria, the Garibaldini Redshirts were too ill-equipped, exhausted, and famished to regroup and resume the offensive. Along the road many had died of war injuries and infections, and among the fatalities was Garibaldi’s wife, Anita, whom he had met in South America, and who died of fever. After her grieving husband had arranged for her burial behind a farmhouse in a remote village in the area of Ravenna, he led what was left of his army into a pine forest to avoid being seen by Austrian cavalry regiments that were fast approaching between two adjacent hills.

  Hiding by day, traveling by night, Garibaldi spent the next few weeks being guided by members of the underground toward the western coast of Italy, where a fishing boat awaited him. His army was now divided into many small parties and scattered in many places, each group trying as best they could to find their way home through the thickets and byways, away from the enemy roadblocks. Before they said good-bye to each other, Garibaldi had reassured his troops that the revolution was not over, that they would reunite in the future. But there was nowhere in Italy—or what we now call Italy—where Garibaldi could feel safe. This was why, in 1850, Garibaldi sailed for the United States.

  When he arrived in New York City, many political refugees from northern Italy who had escaped imprisonment for their revolutionary activities had preceded him, and many of these men were gathered along the pier to greet their compatriot. Among them was a general who had served earlier with Garibaldi in Rome; another man had been involved with members of the Italian underground group who called themselves Carbonari, and this man—Felice Foresti—had spent years in Austrian prisons, and was now a professor of Italian literature at the esteemed American university called Columbia; and there was also a prosperous Italian businessman in New York, Antonio Meucci, who provided the funds for Italian refugees and who would be Garibaldi’s host.

  Garibaldi was very tired after the Atlantic crossing, and during his first days in New York he made it clear that he did not want to be feted at great banquets or honored in the streets with the ceremonial parade that had been suggested by the mayor. Despite the glorious headlines that had been devoted to Garibaldi by American newspapers that had covered the Italian revolution, Garibaldi had no heroic sense of himself. The revolution had failed. Italy was still a fractured nation—ruled in the north by the Austrians, in the center by the Pope, and in the south by the Spanish Bourbons. Garibaldi was still sad about his wife’s death. He did not know what he would do next, but he was in no mood for celebration.

  After a month in the hamlet of Hastings outside New York City, and another month in a guesthouse owned by an Italian in downtown Manh
attan, Garibaldi moved to the quieter Staten Island, which was being favored by many Italian settlers because it had the familiar atmosphere of our own agricultural villages; and it offered a seaside view as well. Garibaldi lived in Meucci’s home as his guest. But Garibaldi’s pride could not long abide being an almost penniless guest, with little more than two red shirts in his valise. Later he gave one to Meucci, who put it in a museum in Staten Island.

  Finally, after Garibaldi had grown tired of playing dominoes and lawn bowling along the shoreline mall, he asked Meucci to give him a job. First he worked in Meucci’s sausage factory; later in his candle factory. This experience brought no happiness to either man, since Garibaldi was not a good indoor worker. Fortunately for both Meucci and Garibaldi, during the spring of the following year, some Italian friends of the revolution purchased a large ship quite inexpensively in San Francisco. Many ships had been left idle there by skippers looking for gold, which was said to be plentiful on the west coast of America. And so it was proposed that Garibaldi pilot the ship and become temporarily engaged in merchant shipping, which had been the career of his youth. Garibaldi accepted the offer and did this for the next two years, once crossing the Pacific into Canton with a cargo of guano, cruising through Chinese waters aswarm with pirates who had been raiding and trading in the First Opium War.

  In 1853, Garibaldi learned that a new government had been formed in the Piedmont area of northern Italy, one that would allow his return to the realm whenever he wished. Immediately he made plans to return. En route to Italy in 1854, Garibaldi visited his revolutionary friend Mazzini in London, and spent long hours listening to Mazzini’s political strategy and plans for additional assaults. Before leaving London for Italy, however, Garibaldi decided against working directly with his old radical comrade. Too many of Mazzini’s recent uprisings in Italy had been just noise and destruction without results. What Garibaldi thought was needed now was patriotic men within the political and military ranks of the Piedmontese kingdom. Piedmont was still an autonomous kingdom in the mid-1850s. Its king, Victor Emmanuel II—who, since ascending to the throne, had remained distant from the Pope and the reactionary royal houses of Europe—was steadfast in his desire to eliminate somehow Austria’s hold over the Italian territories that included Milan, Florence, and Venice. The Piedmontese king’s new prime minister, Count Camillo Benso di Cavour, had similar ambitions; and the latter said he wanted to meet Garibaldi. An introduction was arranged between Cavour and Garibaldi in Turin, and from then on Cavour decided to use Garibaldi’s popularity to win public support for another war that Cavour wanted to wage against Austria.

  To this end, Cavour held secret meetings with Garibaldi’s old enemies, the French; and by 1858, Cavour had succeeded in getting France to pledge two hundred thousand troops to Piedmont’s effort to win from Austria the lands that included Milan, Florence, and Venice. As a reward, Cavour promised to give to France two areas of Italy that the French valued highly, both of which touched upon the French-Italian border. One part was Savoy. The other part included a Mediterranean seaport city the name of which Cavour kept secret from his new friend Garibaldi throughout the Austrian war of 1859, which Garibaldi would help him to fight and win. This city was Garibaldi’s hometown of Nice.

  When the infuriated Garibaldi first learned of this, he was tempted to lead his best guerrilla fighters into Nice, to seize the local government, and to deny to his death France’s right to receive Cavour’s traitorous gift. Having recently reburied his wife’s body in Nice, transporting it from the distant village in eastern Italy where she died in 1849, Garibaldi was further offended by Cavour’s insensitivity. But friends dissuaded Garibaldi from letting personal feelings interrupt the unfinished business of making Italy into one nation.

  After recapturing Milan from the Austrians, together with much of the Florentine region, the combined forces of French and Piedmontese then won a major victory in June 1859 at Solferino, east of Milan, in which twenty-two thousand Austrian soldiers were killed. It was considered a Pyrrhic victory, however, for the French lost twelve thousand and the Piedmontese fifty-five hundred—and many thousands of injured soldiers were left unattended for days on the hot battlefield, their boots stolen by peasants, their cries of pain unheeded because there were too few stretcher-bearers and medics to tend to the wounded. (One Swiss stretcher-bearer who witnessed the shocking scene was named Henri Dunant, and this experience led him years later to found the International Red Cross.)

  The French-Austrian armistice in July 1859 temporarily ended the war, and so Garibaldi, in December 1859, resigned his major general’s commission and drifted off on his own, planning to resume the armed revolution with volunteer troops who would not be directly answerable to King Victor Emmanuel II or to Prime Minister Cavour, whom Garibaldi would never again trust.

  By the spring of 1860, after making speeches asking for rifles and men to revive the stalled revolution, Garibaldi set sail from Quarto, near Genoa, with more than a thousand volunteers, and they headed down the western coast toward Sicily. When they landed and began to unload their weapons and supplies, many of the Sicilian citizens fled in fear; and those who remained viewed Garibaldi’s men at best with suspicion. They were confused by the language of the Garibaldini, most of the latter speaking the dialects of the better-educated classes of northern Italy. The peasants of the north, as Italian peasants everywhere, had generally avoided Garibaldi’s crusade; as he himself explained it: “That sturdy and hardworking class belongs to the priests, who keep them ignorant.”

  Garibaldi’s men moved eastward the next day into the village of Salemi, where the people were more cooperative: women waved from balconies, and a few casually confident townsmen wearing dark suits and straw hats, who might well have been mafiosi, politely warned the revolutionaries that they were marching directly into the firing range of three thousand Bourbon troops who were poised for an attack, eight miles north, in Calatafimi.

  Being outnumbered nearly three to one did not discourage Garibaldi, for he had a low opinion of the Bourbon soldier’s ability to fight, and great confidence in his own guerrilla tactics that he had first mastered in South America. Garibaldi led the charge toward the town of Calatafimi on horseback, exhibiting the fearless disregard for his own safety that was his style in battle. His bayonet-thrusting musketeers sent the Bourbons into a confused and scattered retreat, killing nearly forty of them and leaving one hundred fifty wounded. Although there were also thirty dead and two hundred wounded among the Garibaldini, the victory at Calatafimi inspired hundreds of Sicilians, then thousands, to follow Garibaldi’s triumphant march through the hot and dusty roads into Palermo.

  Three months later, Garibaldi had conquered the whole island of Sicily, proclaiming it part of the Kingdom of Piedmont—even though the Piedmontese king, Victor Emmanuel II, and his prime minister, Cavour, had earlier repudiated Garibaldi’s invasion. They were even more critical when Garibaldi, in mid-August 1860, transported his troops in small boats from Sicily onto the southern mainland with the intention of toppling the entire Bourbon kingdom that was ruled from Naples; and Garibaldi later intended to carry the war into Rome, and, after defeating the papal forces, secularizing the Holy City and the Papal States and defining papal power as being based less in Italy than in heaven.

  By now, the summer of 1860, Garibaldi’s fame had spread from Italy throughout Europe and Asia. His conquest of Sicily and his invasion of southern Italy had made headlines in every major newspaper in the world, and books about his adventures were already being translated into many languages. The elder French novelist Alexandre Dumas had joined Garibaldi and was moving with five thousand of his followers up into the hilly southern mainland. Most Protestants in the United States, if not its many Irish Catholic immigrants, were favorably impressed with what they read about Garibaldi. In Protestant England there were fund-raising rallies for Garibaldi’s benefit, and his supporters included Florence Nightingale, Charles Dickens, and the second duke of Wellingt
on, son of Britain’s victor at Waterloo. Also in London were clothiers who featured the latest in female fashion—red-colored Garibaldi blouses.

  By late August 1860, five days after Garibaldi’s Redshirts had landed on the tip of southern Italy, they had moved more than sixty miles up the western coast, but they still had about two hundred miles to go before reaching Naples. At this time Garibaldi learned that Cavour was sending royal Piedmontese troops down from the north, hoping that they would get to Naples before Garibaldi, thereby denying him total credit for being the kingmaker of a united Italy. Garibaldi, however, moved quickly and unopposed with help from many citizens in southern Italy who were eager to be on the winning side. In Vibo Valentia, which is about twenty miles southwest of us, there was a local baron who had contributed handsomely to Garibaldi’s war chest and had also provided a three-hundred-man posse of farm workers and shepherds, armed with shotguns, axes, and scythes, to thwart eighty Bourbon soldiers who had been trying to block the road leading into Vibo Valentia.

  After Garibaldi’s Redshirts had stormed through Vibo Valentia, and continued northward through the coastal town of Pizzo, Garibaldi accompanied an advance guard into the Maida valley on August 29, 1860. Arriving at the crossroads, he was greeted by five elderly men who, hats in hand, were standing under a tree next to a large statue of Saint Francis, in the arms of which someone had stuck the tricolored flag of the Italian Republic. The most senior of the delegates, a slightly stooped white-haired gentleman, Signor Farao, stepped forward in front of Garibaldi’s horse, and called out: “Hail to you, invincible General. We salute you as the redeemer of Italy.”