America in Italy, Italy in America

What two centuries of 'cultural borrowing' got right, and what it got wrong

A nearly forgotten chapter in the life of Giuseppe Garibaldi was written during the Italian founding father’s three-year exile in the United States in the 1850s.

Garibaldi occupies a unique place in Italy’s history: a swashbuckling general and a folk hero whose thousand red-shirted volunteers helped stitch nearly a dozen kingdoms and duchies into a single country.

Starting in the 1830s, he became a student of insurgency while fighting in revolutions in Brazil and Uruguay. He returned to Italy with an understanding of the guerrilla tactics and symbolic politics that would define his life.

In 1848, Pope Pius IX fled Rome for the town of Gaeta amid extreme political unrest. Garibaldi and other revolutionaries stepped into the void, establishing the secular and progressive Roman Republic. But it was short lived.

After just five months, the fledgling state was crushed by French troops sent by Napoleon III, the pontiff was restored to the Vatican, and Garibaldi became a wanted man. He secretly left Europe and eventually settled on a farm on Staten Island in New York.

There, he admired many aspects of the American system -- the absence of monarchy, for example, and the revolutionary origins of the country -- though he was staunchly opposed to slavery. He lived quietly as a farmer and candle maker, but in his free time he plotted his return to Italy and the unification of the Italian peninsula.

Abraham Lincoln and Giuseppe Garibaldi (EJL image)