If you’ve traveled to Italy before, you’ve certainly been on a street named after Giuseppe Garibaldi. He’s one of the top guns in the Risorgimento, the movement that made the Italian peninsula into the Italy we more or less know today.
I am sorry to say I don’t know much about this part of Italy’s history. A very entertaining review of the book Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero by Lucy Hughes-Hallet in the New York Sun brought the era alive for me: The Great Man of Italy.
Giuseppe Garibaldi, hero and frontman of the 19th-century Italian national liberation movement, was one of the first political celebrities of the age of press proliferation. During his lifetime, literacy levels across Europe soared, print became progressively cheaper, travel easier, and the public’s hunger for intimacy with the great figures of their age ever more avid.
Garibaldi was quite something. One can hardly imagine a life so diverse as this man’s, who was comfortable fighting battles from Uruguay to Italy, then retiring to Caprera, an island in Sardinia, from whence the Giro d’Italia started this year in his honor.
I had no idea, however, about Mazzini’s involvement with the whole deal as a media prod for unification. I gotta learn more. Maybe I’ll start with Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero.