Garibaldi and the Making of Italy

Giuseppe Garibaldi was a sailor, a revolutionary, a failed farmer, and eventually the most celebrated military commander in nineteenth-century Europe. This is his story, and through him, the story of how Italy became a nation. George Macaulay Trevelyan traces Garibaldi's extraordinary arc from his early days as a mercenary in South America, through his failed uprising in Italy that forced him into exile, to his triumphant return as the leader of the legendary Expedition of the Thousand. In 1860, aboard two old steamers, Garibaldi and his volunteer army of red-shirted fighters crossed the Strait of Messina and conquered the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in a campaign that reads like Homeric epic. Trevelyan, writing with the narrative verve of a novelist and the precision of a scholar, captures both the idealism that drove the Risorgimento and the raw violence of its implementation. The book remains essential reading not because history demands it, but because Garibaldi himself demands to be remembered: a man who genuinely believed that nations, like people, deserved to be free.