La scommessa dei Mille

The night of the fifth of May 1860, two steamships set sail from the rock of Quarto, near Genoa, with on board little more than a thousand volunteers poorly armed and a flag tricolor that no state recognized yet as its own. Garibaldi, who them led, not had received any mandate official: Cavour, prime minister of the Kingdom of Sardinia, pretended to ignore the venture and himself worried only so that, should it have failed, no document could compromise Turin. It was, if viewed with the eyes of reason, an expedition absurd; and yet precisely the absurdity of it constituted the strength political, because it allowed to each power European to believe that it was of a private adventure private destined to die out on the coasts Sicilian.

Who were these thousand? In large part not they were Sicilians, and not even southerners: there appeared students Lombard, lawyers Tuscan, a few worker Ligurian, some exiles Mazzinian whom the repression of 1849 had forced to wander around Europe. Them united less a project political defined than a weariness shared, the conviction that is that Italy, after decades of insurrections suppressed, could no longer any longer await the consent of the chancelleries. If they had waited until the conditions were fully favorable, probably no expedition would have ever set out; they took instead to sea precisely because everything suggested that not one should depart.

The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, against which they were heading, was for some time the sick man sick of the peninsula. Ferdinand II had died the year previous, leaving to the son Francesco a apparatus administrative corrupt, an army numerous but demoralized, and a nobility Sicilian that for generations considered Naples a power foreign. In the countryside, where the latifundium crushed a peasantry reduced to a misery almost feudal, any promise of change found ground fertile; in the cities, especially in Palermo, there circulated committees conspiratorial that awaited only a signal from outside to rise up. It was necessary that someone dare the first move, and Garibaldi it dared.

The landing at Marsala, on the eleventh of May, had something miraculous. Two ships of war Bourbon patrolled the coast, but when the steamships Garibaldian themselves approached to the port there happened to be, by pure coincidence, anchored alongside two frigates British arrived to protect the interests of the merchants of wine of Marsala. The commanders Neapolitan hesitated: they feared a incident diplomatic with London, and while they awaited orders the Thousand were able to land almost undisturbed. It has been debated at length whether that presence English was accidental or prearranged; the historians more cautious lean toward toward the coincidence, but remains the fact that without of it the expedition would have ended before even of beginning.

Four days later, on the heights of Calatafimi, the volunteers confronted for the first time the troops regular of the Kingdom. The clash was hard, uncertain, at moments desperate: the Thousand, inferior in number and in discipline, climbed with bayonet along terraces that the adversaries defended with tenacity. It is told that, at a moment critical, the lieutenant Nino Bixio whispered to the general to retreat, and that Garibaldi replied with the phrase that would become proverbial: "Here one makes Italy or one dies." Calatafimi was not was, militarily, a great victory; but was a victory symbolic, and in wars revolutionary the symbol counts more than tactics.

In Palermo, where the Thousand entered on 27th of May after a march daring and a series of feints that deceived the command Bourbon, the reality revealed a complexity that the narrative patriotic would later have wanted to simplify. The squads of the picciotti — bands of peasants armed who themselves had joined to Garibaldi along the way — did not share necessarily the idea of a nation Italian: they hoped rather for the distribution of the lands, in the abolition of the tithes, in a social revenge that the general, although sympathizing, could not could grant without alienating the moderates Piedmontese. When some uprisings peasant, in the weeks following, were suppressed with harshness, it was clear that the revolution southern was already beginning to betray its own very promises.

The plebiscite of October, by which the provinces southern approved the annexation to the Kingdom of Sardinia, is one of the documents most ambiguous of the Risorgimento. The percentages Bulgarian — over the ninety-nine per cent of yes — are not to be read as expression of a consent real: the vote was public, the pressure of the authorities manifest, and in many villages no one would have dared to declare himself opposed. It would be naive, however, to reduce the entire operation to a fiction; what that the plebiscite sanctioned was not was so much a will popular as the existence of a new equilibrium of forces, in which the class ruling southern had calculated that its own reasons patrimonial would be better defended better within a kingdom constitutional than within a monarchy absolute in dissolution.

For a peasant of the countryside around Corleone or of Bronte, the unity of Italy meant in concrete terms the conscription compulsory, taxes more burdensome than those Bourbon, and the arrival of officials Piedmontese who spoke a language incomprehensible and administered a justice distant. The lands state-owned, which the picciotti had believed to have conquered, were in large measure assigned to the same notables as before; whoever protested was executed as brigand. If him one had asked, years later, whether he had voted in the plebiscite, he would have probably answered that not remember it, or that not have understood what thing was being voted on: and he would have been, at bottom, the only witness honest of that autumn.

The thesis most persuasive on the success of the Thousand is perhaps also the least heroic: the venture succeeded because each of the its actors it interpreted in a way different, and each believed that the misunderstanding played to his own advantage. Cavour thought to use of Garibaldi to then disarm him; Garibaldi thought to hand over the South to a king constitutional who him would respect; the picciotti thought to fight for the land; the notables Sicilian thought to exchange a sovereign with an other without losing anything; the powers European thought to witness a a comedy that itself would resolve by itself. When everyone themselves realized account of having read wrongly, it was too late: the Kingdom of Italy existed already, and no one had interest in dismantling it.

At more than a century and a half of distance, the expedition of the Thousand remains the moment founding of the rhetoric national Italian, celebrated in the schools as the epic that is said to have transformed a geographical expression into a state. It is right to recognize the courage individual, the generosity of so many volunteers, the political intuition of Garibaldi. But it would be historically more honest to admit that what that was born at Quarto was not was a awakening collective, but rather a wager most fragile, survived thanks to a series of misunderstandings converging. Italy united, if it one looks at from that perspective, is not is a destiny fulfilled: is a agreement provisional that endures, still today, because no one has found the moment right to renegotiate it.