Garibaldi sbarca a Marsala

In the spring of 1860, Italy did not exist yet as a nation. The peninsula was divided into states different, each one with its own laws and its own sovereigns. In the south, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was governed by the Bourbons, a dynasty that many considered by now weary and oppressive. In Sicily had broken out a revolt against the government of Naples, and itself was hoped that someone would come to the aid of the insurgents.

That man was Giuseppe Garibaldi, a general from Nice who had already fought in South America and in the wars of independence. He gathered in Quarto, near to Genoa, just more than a thousand volunteers, for the most young middle-class men driven by ideals romantic and patriotic. They wore a shirt red that would become legendary, and they dreamed of an Italy free and united under a single only king.

The expedition set off on the night between the fifth and the sixth of May aboard of two steamships, the Piemonte and the Lombardo. It was a undertaking daring to the limit of recklessness: a thousand men poorly armed against an army regular of over one hundred thousand soldiers. Cavour, the prime minister of Piedmont, did not want that Europe think that the government was involved, and so therefore he pretended to not know anything, while hoping for secretly that the undertaking would succeed.

The evening before of the landing, Garibaldi gathered his officers on the deck of the Piemonte. The sea was calm, but no one slept. It was said that the general had walked for a long time alone watching the horizon. He knew that if he had failed, Italy perhaps would not have ever existed. When at dawn of the eleventh of May appeared the coast of Sicily, a silence deep fell upon the steamships.

In the port of Marsala were anchored two ships of war British, the Argus and the Intrepid. Their presence would have been decisive, even if not because of what they did, but because of what they did not do. When the ships Bourbon themselves approached to prevent the landing, they hesitated to fire, fearing to hit the vessels English. That delay of a few hours allowed the Mille to touch land almost without losses.

Officially the navy British was there only to protect the interests commercial linked to the wine of Marsala, produced largely great part by families English such as the Woodhouses. In reality, London watched with sympathy the unification of Italy, seeing it a blow against the influence of Austria and of France in the peninsula. It would have been embarrassing an intervention direct, but the mere presence of the ships was enough to change the course of events.

Once on land, Garibaldi himself proclaimed dictator of Sicily in the name of Vittorio Emanuele, king of Sardinia. It was a move political shrewd: although he was a republican convinced, he understood that only under the crown of Savoy Italy would be able to unify itself. In the weeks that followed, with a boldness that seemed to defy all logic military, the Mille defeated the army of the Bourbons at Calatafimi and took Palermo.

The success of the undertaking depended in large part on the support of the population local, exasperated by years of poverty and of misrule. The farmers of Sicily hoped that the new government would distribute to them the lands common, but this promise would never be truly kept. When later some themselves rebelled, they were crushed with harshness by the same Garibaldians. Unity of Italy, that would be proclaimed less than a year later, on the seventeenth of March of 1861, would be born full of contradictions.

And yet, the landing at Marsala remains one of the moments most romantic and most debated in the history of Italy. Without that audacity on the verge of madness, without that delay providential of the ships Bourbon, the unity would perhaps have come later , or not would have come at all. The red shirts of those young men who landed on the pier of Sicily are become the symbol of an idea that has managed to transform a dream into reality.