Page 6 - General Giuseppe GARIBALDI - english version

Italian Risorgimento, had been reprinted by the History Office of the Army
Staff, but in the span of a few months also the new edition was about to be
sold out thanks to the interest of scholars and enthusiasts. This is quite
unusual for a volume of military history and therefore demonstrates how
widespread is the attention towards one of the major protagonists of our
national history, also in times when that heritage of ideals and struggles seems
to be questioned by those centrifugal trends accompanying the periods of cri-
sis and/or of transformation of society. Despite all that, the figure of
Giuseppe Garibaldi can and must represent a positive example of how inno-
vation and tradition can be put together, and the activities of the National
Commission for the Celebrations of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s Birth have demonstrat-
ed how the figure of this hero is of topical interest today, as a historical char-
acter but also as myth, in Italy and abroad. The success of this volume, now
reprinted, demonstrates what is stated above, but it also provides evidence of
the quality of its authors, all of them officers, who knew how to narrate with
a professional approach these complex events in a smooth, simple and at
times pleasant narration, as a further demonstration of a practice that com-
bined military characteristics and the “belles-lettres”.

In publishing this “classic” of the military historiography on Garibaldi, I
would like to underline that the previous re-edition represented, for this
writer, the last deed performed as Head of the Historical Office of the Army
Staff. This is therefore the volume with which I took my leave from a mili-
tary but also a cultural institution in which I had different assignments and
spent several significant years of my life and of my career.

THE PRESIDENT OF THE ITALIAN
COMMISSION OF MILITARY HISTORY
Colonel Matteo PAESANO