Page 57 - General Giuseppe GARIBALDI - english version

THE 1848 CAMPAIGN 55

Let’s immediately say that Medici, who arrived in May in Le Havre, hav-
ing been informed that Mazzini was no longer in England, rapidly crossed
France and met with him in Milan. It seems that they discussed the best ways
to establish a volunteer corps. To this end, Medici also went to Tuscany to seek
the advice of Guerrazzi and also to try to convince that government to entrust
the command of the grand-ducal army to Garibaldi; this idea was not support-
ed by Neri Corsini, minister of war, and Medici, after waiting in vain for the
arrival of Garibaldi in Livorno, went to Piedmont, as it had been agreed.
th
On April 15 , Garibaldi set sail from Montevideo with 63 legionaries on
a brigantine that he named “Speranza” (Hope). The delay in sailing off was
caused by Anziani’s very serious health condition. Although suffering from
tuberculosis, Anziani wanted to go back to Italy. The need to find special
food for him induced Garibaldi to berth at Santa Pola, a Spanish town south-
west of Alicante. Here the captain of the ship went ashore and brought news
of such importance, as Garibaldi wrote in his “Memoirs”, “that men even less
excited than us would have been driven crazy”. It sparked new hopes that
overcame whatever fantasies those courageous men might have had: the
Austrians had been driven out of Milan and Venice, Lombardy and Veneto
had been freed, the war of independence had been started by Carlo Alberto,
troops from every corner of Italy had rushed to the king’s help. Garibaldi
knew also that his sentence of capital punishment had been cancelled by a
recent amnesty and therefore he could freely go back to Italy. He then abrupt-
ly changed his mind; he set sail towards Nice and decided to offer his servic-
es to Carlo Alberto. That decision was in tune with the intentions he had
already manifested.
This was the mood with which he disembarked at Nice on the morning
st
of June 21 .
But the Italian situation was far from being the one he had imagined.
Gioberti’s federal Neo-Guelphism, triumphant at first, had ideally led the
revolution, but after the allocution of April 29 th it had lost its main support,
the Papacy, and was now precipitously coming to an end. The League of
Italian princes had failed, or better, Ferdinand Bourbon, after the reaction of
th
May 15 , as he had betrayed the constitution so he betrayed the patriotic
war and ordered his army to withdraw from the battlefields of Lombardy. In
Milan, the political antagonism between the revolution and the monarchy,
started in March, immediately after the arrival of the Sardinian Army in
Lombardy, had been reinvigorated in April by the arrival of Mazzini and more