W
ith his trademark red cape, full beard and regal bearing, Italian revolutionary hero Giuseppe Garibaldi cut a swashbuckling swath through European politics during the mid-19th century. In Riall’s (Sicily and the Unification of Italy
) exhaustive and sometimes exhausting study of this supremely charismatic man and his tumultuous times, Garibaldi’s life and legacy echo through the fascist dictators of the 20th century to the Marxist revolutionaries of the 1970s. Born in Nice in 1807, Garibaldi lived a peripatetic life until he “discovered his true vocation—not as a (failed) merchant sailor nor as a (outlawed) political conspirator, but as a soldier hero” and returned to Italy in 1848, a year of widespread political upheaval in Europe. The Italy that Riall describes is a conflicted place seething with nationalist fervor, waiting for a hero to fan the flames and lead the people to their rightful place among nations. As much a product of behind-the-scenes manipulations as his own desires and ambitions, Garibaldi became that hero. A deeply researched and resourced scholarly text, this is not for the general reader. Riall’s extensive use of contemporary primary source material makes for some heavy sledding. Still, for the 19th-century European history buff or the revolutionary hero completist, this is a useful and illuminating read. (June)
