Giuseppe Garibaldi, born June 13, 1807, in the Mediterranean port city of Nice, grew up to become one of the great revolutionary military leaders of the 19th century. His campaigns in South America and, decisively, his conquest of Sicily and Naples with his volunteer 'Redshirts' in 1860, made him the most romantic and celebrated figure of the movement to unify Italy.
Garibaldi's early life gave little hint of the legend he would become. Born to a family of sailors in Nice, then under French control, he first went to sea as a teenager and spent years as a merchant mariner before revolutionary politics consumed him. Sentenced to death in absentia by the Kingdom of Sardinia for his part in a failed 1834 uprising, he fled to South America, where he spent over a decade fighting in civil wars in Brazil and Uruguay, honing the guerrilla tactics that would later make him famous.
He returned to Italy in 1848 amid a wave of European revolutions and spent the next decade building his reputation as a military commander devoted to Italian unification. His most audacious moment came in 1860, when he sailed from Genoa with roughly 1,000 volunteers, nicknamed I Mille, wearing red shirts, and conquered the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, a force many times larger than his own, through a combination of daring, popular uprising, and sheer momentum.
Rather than keep the conquered territory for himself, Garibaldi handed it over to King Victor Emmanuel II, a selfless act that cemented his status as a national hero and cleared the path toward a unified Italian kingdom in 1861. He died in 1882, but statues of him on horseback still stand in nearly every Italian city.
Key people: Giuseppe Garibaldi, Victor Emmanuel II