It is now after 5 p.m. and I am first publishing today’s blog. Shameful, I know, after almost 650 straight days of timely posts. But that’s what happens when you have to give a presentation at 9 a.m., and then attend a 2 p.m. funeral. So, I will do the best that I can.

My presentation, to my Thursday morning breakfast group, was about Giuseppe Garibaldi and the unification of the Italian peninsula. You probably don’t know much about Garibaldi, except perhaps his name and that he was involved in the creation of the Kingdom of Italy in the middle of the 19th century. I actually wrote a blog post about Garibaldi on June 5, which I suggest you read, or re-read, and which gives the outline of his amazing life.

He was born in 1807, and died in 1881. I am not going to repeat what I said on June 5 (although maybe I should), but I want to add a few things. He was world renown, and all for good reason. He was a friend of Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo. Historian A.J.P. Taylor said that he was the “only wholly admirable figure in modern world history.” That should tell you something.

There were three men who were the leaders of the movement to unify Italy. They were about the same age, but had different goals, so their relationships were sometimes close and sometimes less pleasant. Giuseppe Mazzini, Giuseppe Garibaldi and the Count Cavour.

Giuseppe Mazzini was the founder of Young Italy, a secret organization dedicated to unifying a peninsula whose divisions had recently been confirmed by the Congress of Vienna after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. At that time, Italy was divided into many separate states – the Kingdom of Sicily (capital – Palermo), the Kingdom of Naples (capital – Naples), the Papal States (capital – Rome), the Kingdom of Sardinia and Piedmont (it’s capital was Turin, on the mainland not on the Island of Sardinia), the Kingdom of Lombardy (capital – Milan), the Kingdom of Venice, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany (capital – Florence), Lucca, Parma, Modena, not to mention tiny San Marino, which remained independent even during the Napoleonic years. You can see the challenge.

Mazzini was a 19th century intellectual social democrat, anti-monarchist, anti-clerical; he wanted to see Italy as a unified republic.

Cavour was the chief aide to the King of Sardinia, his foreign minister and prime minister rolled into one. He wanted to see the peninsula united as well, but he wanted to see if united under the King of Sardinia. He was a monarchist, an aristocrat, a staunch Catholic, and anti-republican.

Garibaldi was in the middle. He wanted to see Italy unified. Period. End of story. Philosophically, he was much closer to Mazzini, but he was willing to work with Cavour and the Sardinian royal family if that was the best way to reach his goal. Changes could always be made later.

During Garibaldi’s exiles from Italy, he was involved in revolutionary movements in South America and in commercial shipping activities everywhere else where he traveled or lived. His honed his military leadership in Brazil and Uruguay, where he also created his “red shirts”, his Italian Legion, 60 members of which he brought back to Europe.

His relationship with the King of Sardinia was fraught. At first, when he aided a rebellion in the King’s navy, he was arrested and sentenced to death. Later, although he was never pardoned, he helped Milan rid itself of its Austrian overseers which allowed it to become part of the Kingdom of Sardinia. Then, in his most successful enterprise, he worked to free both the Island of Sicily and the former Kingdom of Naples (which had combined to form the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies) from its Bourbon rulers, and handed that large territory over to the King of Sardinia in 1860, thus allowing the King (whose troops had been moving south and conquering Tuscany and neighboring jurisdictions) to call himself now King of Italy, a unified Italy lacking on the territory around Venice, and the large Papal States (which extended from south of Rome on the west side of the country to north of Ravenna in the east), and of course – San Marino.

Garibaldi wanted to conquer the Papal States for the King, but was turned back by the army of France which came to the Pope’s defense. When he tried later, the King (now of Italy) told him to stop, fearing a return of the French troops, and arrested and exiled Garibaldi once more. Garibaldi turned his attention to Venice and Venice joined the Kingdom of Italy in 1866. Garibaldi then “retired” to his house on the small island of Caprera, off the northern coast of the large island of Sardinia.

In 1870, France of Louis Philippe, and Prussia of Bismark, went to war. This meant that France needed all its troops to fight the Germans, meaning that King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy was able to march into Rome without fear of French resistance, and the unification of Italy was complete. Garibaldi had helped set the stage, but was not there at that time.

Of the three unification leaders, only Garibaldi lived long enough to see the results of a unified Italy. Cavour died in 1861, just after the major unification was accomplished, and Mazzini in 1972, shortly after the conquest of the Papal States. And of course Mazzini’s idea of a unified republican Italy never occurred, as the Kingdom of Italy lasted until the advent of the age of Mussolini in the 1920s.

There is much more to the story of Garibaldi, and it is possible that the definitive biography has not yet been written. Those few biographies that do exist, and his extensive autobiographical writings, have not been given great reviews. Nor has there been an epic film of his life. Roberto Rossellini directed a film titled Garibaldi in 1961, but it only deals with the conquest of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and IMDB gives it a review that is mediocre at best.

But there is a lot to look at on-line, including Wikipedia and Britannica, as well as the website of the Garibaldi Museum on Caprera, where his house can also be visited. There is another small museum on Staten Island, and there are statues of him in Uruguay, in Russia, in the U.S. (On Manhattan and in DC, and perhaps elsewhere), and of course in Italy.

Not taking the time to proofread today – it’s almost 6 p.m.