Why Garibaldi, one of the founders of Italy, is also celebrated as a hero in Uruguay and Brazil

Giuseppe Garibaldi went down in history as one of the great heroes of the unification of Italy.

But that European country is not the only one that idolizes him. Thousands of kilometers away, two South American nations, Brazil and Uruguaythey also celebrate him for the outstanding participation he had in key conflicts there.

In fact, the French novelist Alexandre Dumas, who wrote Garibaldi’s memoirs, famously dubbed him the “hero of the Old and New World” for his exploits on both sides of the Atlantic.

Curiously, while in Italy Garibaldi was looking for unificationin South America he fought for fragmentation of the former European colonies.

Here we tell you how one of Italy’s greatest figures ended up playing a key role in the founding stories of these two Latin American nations.

Giuseppe Garibaldi was born in 1807 in Nice, which today is part of France, but in those years it belonged to the Kingdom of Sardinia.

At that time what is now Italy was composed of various states which were ruled by the great dynasties of the time, such as the Savoys, the Habsburgs and the Bourbons.

Garibaldi’s family were sailors from Genoa, at that time the main port of the Kingdom of Sardinia, so Giuseppe began working at a very young age on commercial ships that sailed the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

It was on those trips that he came into contact with the reformist political ideas that inflamed 19th century Europe.

At only 25 years old, in 1832, he was named captain of the ship Clorinda and returned to Genoa after an absence of more than five years.

There he joined the group La Giovine Italia (Young Italy), a secret society created to promote the unification of the country and founded by another Genoese patriot, Giuseppe Mazzini.

Garibaldi participated in an insurrectional attempt in Genoa, obtaining the position of captain in the Navy of the Kingdom of Sardinia, but the expedition failed and he was forced to flee.

Sentenced to deathsailed around the Mediterranean under a false name until 1836 when he decided exile to South America and left for Rio de Janeiro.

He settled in Rio Grande do Sulthe southernmost province of the Brazilian Empire, where it began to trade pasta.

But he also consolidated his political training, coming into contact with other Italian dissidents of Young Italy (he would eventually become president of that organization’s branch on the American continent).

In addition, he was part of the Asilo di Vertud Masonic lodge.

This is how he met Bento Gonçalves da Silva, a politician and soldier from Rio Grande do Sul who wanted make that province independent from the Brazilian empirewhich had been formed after the War of Independence that separated the Kingdom of Brazil from that of Portugal.

Garibaldi joined the fight, known as the Revolution Farroupilha or War of the Farrapos (1835-1845).

In a letter to a friend, written in 1837, Garibaldi told him that “tired of dragging out a useless existence” he obtained a letter of marque from Gonçalves da Silva and then commanded his war fleet against the Brazilian navy.

“Garibaldi’s contribution was fundamental from two points of view,” explains historian Maria Medianeira Padoin, professor at the Federal University of Santa Maria, in Rio Grande do Sul.

“On the one hand, he contributed his military knowledge, using effective combat tactics in the water, both at sea and in the river, and contributing to the formation of military shipyards in the area.”

“On the other hand,” Medianeira Padoin continues, thanks to “his charismatic personality he spread his ideals of equality and the fight for freedom.”

During the four years in which he fought in the Farroupilha Revolution, Garibaldi was captured and tortured, suffered a shipwreck and met the woman who would become the love of his life, Ana Maria Ribeiro da Silva, “Anita”.

“My great-grandparents’ story was a very romantic story,” says Annita Garibaldi Jallet, historian and president of the Associazione Nazionale Veterani E Reduci Garibaldini from Italy.

The Italian privateer met Anita in the province of Santa Catarina, neighboring Río Grande del Sur, where he had gone to take the port city of Laguna (an feat that would later be key to the creation of the Catarinense Republic or Julian Republic, which formed a joint confederation with the Riograndense Republic).

Anita, who was 18, was married when she fell in love with Garibaldi.

She abandoned her husband, began to wear men’s clothing so she could ride a horse and He fought with his partner in all military campaigns in Brazilian lands.

They managed to get married in 1842 and had four children: Menotti, Rosita (who died at the age of two), Teresita and Ricciotti, the grandfather of Annita Garibaldi Jallet.

Around 1841 Garibaldi left the fight in Brazil (which would conclude in 1845 with the declaration of independence of the Riograndense Republic) to settle in Montevideo, Uruguaywhere a large community of Italian exiles and emigrants resided.

But his break from the battlefields was short-lived.

That country was also going through an armed conflict, the so-called Great Warbetween the targets of the Uruguayan president Manuel Oribe, supported by the Argentine federal forces led by the leader Juan Manuel de Rosas, and the Colorado government of General Fructuoso Rivera, installed in Montevideo.

It was a conflict that transcended beyond those two sides, since Brazil, France and the British Empire also intervened.

Garibaldi took sides with Rivera and created the Italian Legionwhich under his leadership obtained victories in Colonia del Sacramento, Gualeguaychú, in the defense of Montevideo and in the battle of San Antonio, in the department of Salto.

However, “in the case of a civil war, Garibaldi was considered a hero of the Colorado Party, rather than of the entire nation, for a long time,” explains Mario Etchechury, an expert at the ISHIR (Regional Socio-Historical Research) center in Rosario. Argentina.

“The fact that the first monument authorized in Montevideo, along with that of the hero José Artigas, was to Garibaldi himself,” continues Etchechury, “is justified on the one hand by its importance and, on the other, because that year the same Colorado Party, which even today preserves a portrait of the Italian in its headquarters.”

In addition to its bravery in combat, the Italian Legion was characterized by an element that would soon break into the popular imagination as a symbol of bravery and dedication to patriotic causes: their red shirts.

According to several historians, it is likely that the characteristic emblem of Garibaldi’s troops was due to a shipment of red fabrics destined for the workers of the Montevideo salt mines that the Italian general bought at low cost to clothe his soldiers.

“From the experience in South America, Garibaldi surely took away the awareness of being a charismatic and guerrilla tactics which he would use effectively in the battles on Italian soil during the following years,” adds Medianeira Padoin.

But Garibaldi’s training in the “New World” was not only political and military.

In his memoirs he tells how he was captivated by the immense grasslands of the Pampas and the free and independent way of living of its inhabitants. the gauchos.

In them he possibly saw the embodiment of his ideas of popular freedom, and their capacities for resistance, courage and frugality were an inspiration for his military campaigns in Italy.

It was in those years when, along with the emblematic uniform, the myth of the “hero of two worlds” was born and Garibaldi’s fame also began to circulate in Europe.

With the arrival of the new Pope Pius IX, the amnesty so that the Italian exiles would return to their homeland.

And this is how Garibaldi left South America in 1848 along with his family and some of his fellow fighters in America, to face the prolonged fight for the unification of Italy that would consecrate him as one of the greatest romantic heroes of the 19th century.

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