Book review: On the trail of Garibaldi

 History, it is well known, is written by the winners, involving an inevitable distortion of the past retrospectively. Giuseppe Garibaldi was feted worldwide in his lifetime for his military prowess in scoring a rash of victories that helped to unite the disparate states of the peninsula that together became Italy. But he was outmanouvred politically by Piercamillo Cavour, the Piedmontese prime minister, who cut a deal with Napoleon III to cede Garibaldi’s beloved home city of Nizza, or Nice as it became, to France, despite all that he had done to unite Italy under the Piedmontese royal family of Savoy.

 To that extent the great guerrilla general remained to some degree an underdog, licking his wounds on the remote island of Caprera that was a poor consolation prize for Nice, where his mother was buried and from where as a young sailor he set out on the journeys around the world that led to him cutting his teeth as a freedom fighter in Latin America.

The English traditionally support the underdog and so it is appropriate that a British journalist, Jim Holden, should undertake an extraordinary labour of love on the tracks of the bearded warrior, visiting a constellation of towns and cities in Italy, France and elsewhere in the world to reconsider Garibaldi and his legend by looking at how different Italians and others have paid tribute to him in statues, museums and other memorabilia.

 “Garibaldi and his story is so often the prism through which different factions try to assert their ideas of Italian history and society,” Holden notes. Garibaldi admired the Socialist International movement and his fighters’ adopting red shirts was surely not only because a butcher’s outfitter was selling off a job lot cheaply.

 Yet Mussolini and the ‘post-fascist’ government of Giorgia Meloni, whose party has a Fascist symbol in its logo, brazenly have sought often to lay claim to Garibaldi’s legacy, though one might think it was more convincingly adopted by the anti-Fascist Garibaldini soldiers who bravely defeated Italian fascist troops at the Spanish Civil war battle of Guadalajara.

 Holden argues that there is an enduring obsession in Italy with Garibaldi, not least in Rome. True, undoubtedly, though the great journalist and Garibaldi scholar Desmond O’Grady who wrote a book about the only ‘Australian Garbaldino’ told me that after decades of research he thought more Romans prefer to hark back to the days of Imperial Rome rather than to the swashbuckling general and the great adventure of the Roman Republic that climaxed in the battle for the Eternal City fought on the Janiculum hill.

 There are other Romans, too, who believe Rome was more liveable when ruled by the papacy, before, for example, the advent of ugly Umbertine architecture. Whatever the case, Garibaldi and his followers did not have it all their way in their battles to conquer Rome. Holden visits the burial site in Mentana where 150 courageous Red shirts perished because French troops defending the pope had new chassepot guns that fired 12 rounds a minute.

 While Garibaldi was feted when he visited England, not all Englishmen supported his ambitions. One of my favourite monuments in Rome is in the church at the Venerable English College in the Via Monserrato, transferred there from Mentana after it was vandalised. It recalls Julian Watts Russell, an English papal zouave who was the youngest soldier to give his life at Mentana, fighting for the pontiff alongside the French, at the age of 17 and 10 months. The surviving Zouaves were feted by the population of the Eternal City after the Redshirts were ignominiously defeated at Mentana, the last battle won by a pope. Watts Russell is sometimes known as the last English martyr for the Catholic faith. 

 Holden charts a steady course through the oiften kitsch hagiography surrounding Garibaldi though one might argue that sometimes he is harder on the Bourbons than perhaps they deserve. Francis II’s decision not to stand and fight in Naples was largely due to the king’s not wishing to impose suffering and bloodshed on the population of his capital rather than out of cowardice, for example. The Bourbons' final stand at the castle of Gaeta was after all, heroic in its way, and might have endured had they not been abandoned by the craven French fleet.

 Not everyone would agree, either, that, calling the putative bridge between Calabria and Sicily the Ponte Garibaldi would be a valid example today of the spirit of the great man, who might not have approved of the destruction of the pristine eco-system on the Sicilian side that the grandiose project would entail.

 But Via Garibaldi is a moving and entertaining biography that will be essential reading for all scholars and lovers of Italy who want to understand the cryptic legacy of the indomitable Hero of Two Worlds better by looking through the enchanting prism of memory.

 Via Garibaldi. On the trail of Italy's hero. Jim Holden. Amberley, 2026. hardback, illustrated, £22.99

     jp