Giuseppe Garibaldi

Garibaldi in 1866

Giuseppe Garibaldi (4 July 1807 – 2 June 1882) was an Italian general, politician and nationalist who played a large role in the history of Italy.

Quotes

• I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor provisions; I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles and death. Let him who loves his country in his heart, and not with his lips only, follow me.
  • From G. M. Trevelyan, Garibaldi's Defense of the Roman Republic [1907-1911]

• Qui si fa l'Italia o si muore.
  • Here we either make Italy, or we die.
  • To his lieutenant Nino Bixio at the Battle of Calatafimi, 15 May 1860. Quoted in Giuseppe Cesare Abba, Storia dei Mille, ch. Dopo la vittoria.

• Roma o morte!
  • Rome or death!
  • Announcement of the expedition to conquer Rome, Palermo Cathedral, 1862. Quoted in Denis Mack Smith, Garibaldi, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1993, p. 152.

• Il giorno in cui i contadini saranno educati nel vero, i tiranni e gli schiavi saranno impossibili sulla terra.
  • The day the peasants will be educated in the truth, tyrants and slaves will be impossible on earth.
  • Alla Società del Tiro in Ganzo, Caprera, 29 August 1864, in Scritti politici e militari, ricordi e pensieri inediti, p. 356.

• Obbedisco.
  • I obey.
  • Bezzecca, 9 August 1866. Telegraphic answer to the message by general Alfonso La Marmora who ordered the retreat of the troops from Tyrol (see the image of the telegram).

Quotes about Garibaldi

• As to his Goddess Reason, I understand by it simply an adoption of what are called on the continent the principles of the French Revolution. These we neither want nor warmly relish in England.
  • William Ewart Gladstone, Letter to Henry Edward Manning after Giuseppe Garibaldi's visit to Britain (c. July 1864), quoted in The Correspondence of Henry Edward Manning and William Ewart Gladstone: Volume Three, 1861–1875, ed. Peter C. Erb (2013), p. 28

• We who have seen Italia in the throes,
  Half risen but to be hurled to ground, and now,
  Like a ripe field of wheat where once drove plough,
  All bounteous as she is fair,
  we think of those Who blew the breath of life into her frame:
  Cavour, Mazzini, Garibaldi: Three:
  Her Brain, her Soul, her Sword; and set her free
  ruinous discords, with one lustrous aim.
  • George Meredith, "For the Centenary of Garibaldi", stanza 1, The Times (London, July 1, 1907), p. 9; reprinted in Phyllis B. Bartlett, ed., Poems of George Meredith (1978), p. 790

• All in all, there is no great figure of modern times so wholly admirable.
  • A. J. P. Taylor, 'The last hero', The Observer (17 October 1965), p. 27

• He evoked from the people and even from the politicians a personal devotion almost without parallel in modern history; again and again he chose the right course by instinct; and he showed himself the greatest general that Italy has ever produced.
  • A. J. P. Taylor, 'Cavour and Garibaldi', Europe: Grandeur and Decline (1967), p. 85

• In our own day classics have been dethroned without being replaced. But throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries our statesmen were so brought up that they thought of Rome as the hearth of their political civilization, where their predecessor Cicero had denounced Catiline; where the models of their own eloquence and statecraft, as taught them at Eton, Harrow and Winchester, had been practised and brought to perfection. And, therefore, the ruins of the Forum were as familiar, as sacred, and as moving to Russell and to Gladstone as to Mazzini and Garibaldi themselves. This was a prime fact in the history of the Risorgimento.
  • G. M. Trevelyan, 'Englishmen and Italians: Some Aspects of Their Relations Past and Present', read before the British Academy (June 1919), quoted in Clio, A Muse: And other Essays (1913; rev. ed. 1930), p. 107