Giuseppe Garibaldi

He sailed for Rio de Janeiro in September 1835 under the name Joseph Pane, and arrived at the end of that year. In March 1837 he put to sea in a small boat he had renamed Mazzini, with a dozen men and letters of marque from the rebels of Rio Grande do Sul, then at war with the Brazilian Empire. That June a bullet in the neck nearly killed him; the next year he was captured and tortured.

He went on to command the rebels’ few ships on the coast, and in 1839, at Laguna in Santa Catarina, he met Anita. In 1841 they crossed into Uruguay on a long march — he had been paid in cattle, and none of them survived it — and reached Montevideo that June, where he taught mathematics to make ends meet.

For Montevideo, at war with Argentina, he raised the Italian Legion in 1843: a black flag with a volcano, and red shirts cut from cloth meant for slaughterhouse workers. Its victory at San Antonio del Salto on 8 February 1846 made his name known in Europe. He refused the land the government offered him.

Ana Maria de Jesus Ribeiro was born around 1821 near Laguna. A Santa Catarina court ruling of 1998 gives 30 August 1821 at Morrinhos, now part of Tubarão; some historians argue for Lages, and no record from the time survives. At about fourteen she was married to a shoemaker, Manuel Duarte de Aguiar.

She met Garibaldi at Laguna in October 1839 — in his memoirs he says he first saw her through a telescope from the deck of his ship — and on 23 October she sailed with him. Within weeks she was in the naval fights at Imbituba and Laguna. Later, pregnant, she was captured at Curitibanos and escaped on her own.

They married in Montevideo in 1842 (on 26 March, by most accounts; one source says 16 June) and had four children: Menotti, Rosita, who died at about two, Teresita and Ricciotti. In 1849 she joined him in besieged Rome and followed him on the retreat. She died on 4 August 1849 at a farm at Mandriole, near Ravenna, pregnant with their fifth child. Sources differ on the cause.

In Tangier he began writing his memoirs. On 30 July 1850 he reached New York, where he worked in Antonio Meucci’s candle factory on Staten Island. Then he went back to sea: Central America, Peru, a voyage as captain to Canton in China. His mother died in Nice in 1852; their children had been in her care.

He was back in Italy by 1854 and, with an inheritance from his brother Felice, bought part of the small island of Caprera, north of Sardinia, in 1855–56. He had given up the republican line: he would make Italy with the House of Savoy.

On the night of 5–6 May 1860 he sailed from Quarto, near Genoa, with about a thousand volunteers on two steamers, the Piemonte and the Lombardo. They landed at Marsala on 11 May. Four days later they won at Calatafimi, and by the end of the month they were fighting in the streets of Palermo.

Milazzo followed in July. On 19 August he crossed the Strait of Messina, on 7 September he entered Naples, and on 1–2 October he held the line at the Volturno. On 26 October he met King Victor Emmanuel II and greeted him as King of Italy — at Teano, as the story is told, though some historians place the handshake a few miles away, near Vairano.

He handed over the south he had won, refused rank and reward, and on 9 November left for Caprera.

He spent his last years on Caprera, farming with his son Menotti and writing — three novels, and the memoirs he had begun in Tangier, finished in 1872. In 1880 he married Francesca Armosino, the mother of his youngest children. Arthritis left him almost unable to move, but in the spring of 1882 he still travelled to Naples and Palermo.

He died on Caprera on the afternoon of 2 June 1882. He had asked to be cremated; instead he was buried on the island, where his house and his grave are national monuments.