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  • Garibaldi: Citizen of the World. A Biography
  • Spencer M. Di Scala
Garibaldi: Citizen of the World. A Biography. By Alfonso Scirocco. Translated by Allan Cameron. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 442. $35.00.

In his introduction, Alfonso Scirocco states that Giuseppe Garibaldi’s life, “so rich in extraordinary enterprises in the Americas and Europe, reads like an adventure novel with its typical love of the exotic” (p. ix). This characterization, along with his subtitle, permeates the book. Readers associate Garibaldi so closely with Italy and the Risorgimento that they forget his activity, lasting years, outside the country, especially in South America. Scirocco’s book does not add anything appreciably new to what is already known about Garibaldi’s life, but it is notable for its emphasis on parts of his biography that are not generally accented and because it provides the facts of an uncommon life in one convenient source more than do existing, older biographies in English.

Garibaldi’s remarkable exploits as a soldier frequently lead observers to overlook his career on the sea and that his first battles as a freedom fighter were fought as a privateer. Scirocco devotes considerable time to Garibaldi’s feats as a sailor and reminds us that his first battle that took place solely on land occurred in 1840. The author zeros in as well on another little-known fact: Garibaldi fought his South American battles with the support and participation of Italian exiles who had fled their native country after the revolutions of 1820–21 and 1831, who established communities in Brazil and Uruguay imbued with the love of liberty, and who followed very closely the events occurring in their homeland. Scirocco shows how Garibaldi successfully honed the fighting (and romantic) skills that he would later employ in Italy in South America and how he created a core following there that fought with him in the Italian wars. He gained his reputation as a freedom fighter there, making him and the cause of Italian freedom popular. Modern revolutionaries need popular support because of the military weakness of the people for whose causes they fight, as was the case with the Italians; Scirocco demonstrates how Garibaldi’s immense popularity, especially in England, was central to the successful outcome of the Risorgimento.

Another merit of the book is its description of the military actions for which Garibaldi has remained famous—the defense of the Roman Republic, his participation in the 1859 war, and the expedition of The Thousand to make Southern Italy part of the Italian Kingdom that was formally proclaimed on March 17, 1861. It is difficult to come up with anything substantially new here, but Scirocco describes the military actions in a clear and comprehensive manner and avoids the stereotypes that abound in the writings describing Italian history of the period. He reevaluates the Neapolitan troops even while describing the strategic errors of their commanders and emphasizing Garibaldi’s military skill. He discusses how Garibaldi took Sicily in 1860 but also the little-discussed battles against the Bourbons on the mainland, particularly the “Battle of the Volturno,” and he does it with skill and historical accuracy and with an eye for the international context. While historians pay homage to Garibaldi’s talent as a guerrilla fighter, Scirocco reminds us that Garibaldi distinguished himself in pitched battles as well by calling attention to his successes against larger and better-trained Prussian forces in the Franco-Prussian War, winning the only battle on the French side in the conflict. Indeed, this is an area where something new might be said about this remarkable personage. [End Page 953]

Spencer M. Di Scala
University of Massachusetts
Boston, Massachusetts
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