Page 5 - General Giuseppe GARIBALDI - english version

INTRODUCTION

Garibaldi, the hero of the Italian Risorgimento, Garibaldi, a man of his ti-
me, “.. Garibaldi, the military commander, the sailor, the strategist and the
guerilla man, Garibaldi the Hero of the Two Worlds, Garibaldi, the careful
politician …”. These and many others were and are the interpretations that
can be made about such a complex figure, one that is difficult to frame in the
schemes and stereotypes of his time, but also in those of subsequent epochs.
For this reason there is a plentiful Italian and international historiography, al-
though its outlook and objectives are different because they are connected to
the different phases of our national history and show extreme evaluations
ranging from hagiography to denigration, due to the very easy “political” use
of such a multifaceted figure. Garibaldi was a democrat, a republican, a Free-
mason, a lay-person. And yet he was able to accept different ideological solu-
tions, to step aside as long as the main and greatest interest could be realized,
i.e. the establishment of a national State. This is a further demonstration of
the intellectual honesty that characterized all his life.

His relations with the institutional military world have not been always
easy. It suffices to recall the parliamentary discussion that accompanied the
“inclusion” of the soldiers in Garibaldi’s army into the regular army, although
his way of leading his men in a battle, his tactical and strategic solutions have
always been at the core of the studies of those more advanced officers able to
appreciate their modernity. The various essays forming this volume – a
reprint of a volume published in the ‘30s - belong to this current of studies.
They reconstruct the 35 years of fundamental importance in our hero’s life,
from South America to Dijon, going through the Roman Republic, the
Hunters of the Alps, the Mille, and the volunteers of Mentana.

We would like to underline that this nowadays out-of-print volume, excel-
lent for the quality of its essays and the precise historical reconstruction of
events and occurrences not of secondary importance in the history of the