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Garibaldi was born in 1807, on July 4—an auspicious day for a future national liberator. His father was a captain in the merchant marine and owned, at least in part, a ship. After resisting paternal pressure to direct him toward one of the standard professions for aspiring lower middle-class men (the law or medicine), Giuseppe followed in his father's footsteps and trained to become a skipper. However, from the start he felt, as he was later to put it, "a propensity to a life of adventure" such as even sailing was unlikely to satisfy. His formal education was purely naval, and Garibaldi was largely self-taught in all the areas in which he was later to establish his reputation, including politics and warfare. Nice then being on the linguistic border between Italian and French, he acquired complete command of both languages, but developed a political and cultural commitment to Italian (whose classics he studied and learned by heart). Although never a literary man, let alone a scholar, he went on to become fluent in Portuguese and Spanish and learned some English and German as well. Last but not least, in between conquering a kingdom and fighting for doomed republics, he managed to produce both a number of (mediocre) historical and political novels and an autobiography.
After decades of comparative historiographical neglect, the second centenary of his birth was marked by the publication of two biographies, both inspired by admiration for the democrat in a red shirt. Alfonso Scirocco is a veteran Italian historian, a defender of the Risorgimento against the politically inspired revisionism which has plagued Italian historiography for years (with often pathetic attempts to rehabilitate the pre-Unification states, whether Papal, Bourbon, or Habsburg). Here he does not engage with the recent historiographical debate, for his aim is to present the Anglophone public with an accessible introduction to his fascinating subject. He does so with elegance and brio, illustrating a life which was full of color and adventure, with more material for a Hollywood script than the lives of any of the heroes recently celebrated by blockbusters, including William Wallace or Leonidas. In fact, unlike the leader of the Spartan "Three Hundred," Garibaldi led his "Thousand" not to self-immolation in a hopeless bloodbath but to victory against a standing army comprising some 100,000 well-equipped regular soldiers—a feat still unmatched in the military history of Western civilization.
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