Giuseppe Garibaldi

Italian general whose Expedition of the Thousand in 1860 conquered southern Italy and helped unify the country.

Biography

Giuseppe Garibaldi was born in Nice in 1807 and became a sailor. He joined Mazzini's Young Italy movement, was sentenced to death after a failed rising in 1834, and fled to South America, where he fought for over a decade in the wars of Brazil's rebel south and Uruguay.

He returned to Italy in the revolutions of 1848 and led the defence of the Roman Republic in 1849. In 1859 he fought Austria for the Kingdom of Sardinia.

In 1860 he sailed from Genoa with about a thousand volunteers, the Redshirts, and conquered Sicily and Naples from the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. He handed his conquests to Victor Emmanuel II, which made possible the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. His later attempts to take Rome failed. He died on Caprera in 1882 and is remembered as one of the founders of modern Italy.