Garibaldi, History's Sexiest Revolutionary?

Summary

With his sun-bleached auburn hair, heroic exploits and easy charisma, Guiseppe Garibaldi was adored from London to New York, hailed as the man who turned the 19th-century dream of a united Italy into reality.His admirers wore his trademark red shirt, while poets and painters immortalised him in their works. Even Queen Victoria reportedly found him very handsome.But, as historian Dr David Laven explains on the HistoryExtra podcast, Garibaldi’s magnetism was more than skin-deep. His courage, compassion and populist flair made him not only a romantic icon, butthe embodiment of the new Italian nation that was taking shape.The fracturing of Italy“Garibaldi is probably the most famous Italian of the 19th century,” says Laven. “He’s famous for a series of events from the late 1840s through to the 1860s, in which he’s one of the key drivers of Italian unification.”Understanding his importance to Italy depends on understanding what the region looked like before unification.“Italy in the 19th century had been divided into many smaller states for a very long while,” Laven explains. For centuries, the peninsula had been a mosaic of duchies, city-states and foreign-ruled territories. The north lay under Austrian control; the Papal States dominated the centre; and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies ruled the south.“Briefly, it was semi-united under Napoleonic rule in the early 19th century, but basically it was a divided peninsula.”It was the fragmented nature of the region that caused the emergence of the Risorgimento (‘the resurgence’), a political and cultural movement seeking national rebirth. It blended liberal reform with revolutionary zeal, and its leaders included not only Garibaldi, but figures such as Giuseppe Mazzini and Camilo Benso, Count Cavour.Garibaldi, as a sailor-turned-soldier whose daring captured the public imagination, was by far the most recognisable face of the movement. But before he became a national hero, Garibaldi was an outlaw.This 19th-century engraving...