Do you know how Sicily and the rest of Southern Italy have become part of Italy? The answer is linked to the name of the glorious Italian leader Giuseppe Garibaldi well known abroad because he realized the annexation of southern Italy to the new Italian state through the “Expedition of the Thousand”. Garibaldi is also known as the “Hero of Two Worlds” in honor of military expeditions performed in South America and Europe.
Garibaldi loved liberty and justice.
He began his political adventure when he met Giuseppe Mazzini, a passionate supporter of the unification through social and political reforms. He joined the movement “Young Italy” and the massonic association of “Carbonari”. He spent several years outside Italy knowing Antonio Meucci, the true inventor of the telephone and he lived in New York working as candle makers for a short time.
The riots of Messina and Palermo in 1860, both part of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, offered Garibaldi a great opportunity. He managed to put together a thousand volunteers, who landed on May 11, 1860, with two ships docked in Marsala, the westernmost tip of Sicily. These volunteers were called “The Thousand” or even the “Red Shirts”. A few days later 3000 Sicilians volunteers were ready to fight with him.
When American Civil War started in 1861, he offered his services to President Abraham Lincoln and was invited to serve as a major general in the army of the American Union, Garibaldi said he would accept two conditions – first, that slavery would be finally abolished and the second, to have full command of the army. Both these conditions were deemed unacceptable by Lincoln and the offer was withdrawn, but in January 1863, Lincoln proclaimed the abolition of slavery only in the splinter States.
The story of Garibaldi and Lincoln are parallel; they both tried very hard to change the fate of their people, Lincoln was the sixteenth President of the United States and the main architect of the victory of the Unionists in the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery. He was killed by a fanatic secessionist who was afraid that the right to vote was extended to blacks. Garibaldi instead offered his help to the Third French Republic, by going to France and taking command of an army of volunteers in the Vosges after which he retired with his third wife and children on the island of Caprera, where he would die in 1882.
