The Expedition of the Thousand

The story

Italy half made

In 1860 Italy did not yet exist as a state. After the Congress of Vienna it had been divided into many states. But something had changed: in 1859, with the help of Napoleon III's France, the Kingdom of Sardinia, led by King Victor Emmanuel II and the prime minister Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, had defeated Austria in a Second War of Independence, with the battles of Magenta and Solferino, and had gained Lombardy. The following year, through plebiscites, that is votes by the people, Tuscany, Emilia and Romagna had joined the kingdom. In exchange, France had received Nice and Savoy: Nice was the birthplace of Giuseppe Garibaldi, who suffered over it.

Still outside were Veneto, still Austrian, Lazio and Rome, ruled by the Pope, and the whole south, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, ruled by the Bourbons, an ancient and powerful monarchy with a large army, but weak, and with a government often accused of being backward and of not granting freedoms.

The hero of two worlds

Garibaldi, born in 1807, was already a legend. A sailor, he had fought for freedom in South America, in Brazil and Uruguay, where he had met Anita, the brave woman who became his wife and who fought at his side. That is why he was called “the hero of two worlds”. In 1849 he had led the defence of the Roman Republic, and had become the symbol of the Italian patriot. He wore a red shirt and a poncho, and his men were ready to follow him anywhere.

In April 1860 a revolt broke out in Palermo, quickly put down, but other uprisings continued in Sicily. Some patriots, among them the Sicilian Francesco Crispi, asked Garibaldi to step in. Garibaldi hesitated: he knew it was dangerous, and he knew that Cavour did not want to put the kingdom at risk with an adventure that could anger France and Britain. But in the end he accepted.

The night of 5 to 6 May

On the night of 5 to 6 May 1860, at Quarto, near Genoa, about a thousand volunteers secretly boarded two steamships, the “Piemonte” and the “Lombardo”. There were in fact about 1,100 men, and one woman, Rosalia Montmasson, Crispi's wife, the only one recognised among the Thousand. They were students, lawyers, doctors, craftsmen, workers, ex-soldiers, many of them very young, from all over Italy, above all from Lombardy, in particular from Bergamo. They were not professional soldiers, they had old rifles, and they wore the red shirt. It looked like a hopeless enterprise.

The two steamships landed at Marsala, in Sicily, on 11 May, under the eyes of British warships that happened to be there, and that, perhaps deliberately, stopped the Bourbon ships from attacking at once. On 15 May, at Calatafimi, the outnumbered Garibaldians faced the Bourbon army in a hard battle. On the point of giving way, Garibaldi, it is said, told his lieutenant Nino Bixio: “Here we make Italy or we die”. They won, and the news led many Sicilians, the “picciotti”, to join him.

Palermo, Naples, Teano

At the end of May Garibaldi entered Palermo, after days of fighting in the streets. In July he won at Milazzo. On 19 August he crossed the Strait of Messina and landed in Calabria: by then the Bourbon army was falling apart, and cities were surrendering. On 7 September Garibaldi entered Naples, almost alone, by train, welcomed by cheering crowds. King Francis II had withdrawn to Gaeta.

Garibaldi was a republican, but he wanted the south to be joined to the Kingdom of Sardinia. Meanwhile a Piedmontese army entered the Papal States, passing through the Marche and Umbria, and moved south. After the battle of the Volturno, on 1 and 2 October, in which the Garibaldians defeated the Bourbons, on 26 October 1860, at Teano, near Naples, Garibaldi met Victor Emmanuel II and greeted him as “King of Italy”, handing the south over to him. A few days earlier, on 21 October, a plebiscite had approved the union of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies with Piedmont. Garibaldi refused rewards and returned to his island of Caprera, with a small amount of seed and a sack of stockfish, so the story goes.