Garibaldi's famous red shirts may have come from an Argentine meat trade order
Before he helped unite Italy, Giuseppe Garibaldi spent 14 years as an exile fighting in South America's wars. Popular history says his Italian Legion in Montevideo got its trademark red shirts from a factory whose stock was meant for Argentine slaughterhouses, though no contemporary source mentions them. The shirts became a symbol anyway.
Garibaldi was born in Nice in 1807 to a Ligurian family in the coastal trade, and went to sea. He taught languages and mathematics in Istanbul for several years, and on a voyage to the Russian port of Taganrog in 1833 met a member of Giuseppe Mazzini's secret Young Italy movement, which wanted a unified Italian republic. After joining a failed Mazzinian uprising in Piedmont in 1834 he was sentenced to death, escaped, and made his way to Brazil.
There he joined the Ragamuffin rebels trying to break Rio Grande do Sul away from the Brazilian empire, and met Anita, a skilled rider who fought beside him and, it is said, introduced him to gaucho culture, including the red shirt, poncho and hat he adopted. In Montevideo he commanded Uruguay's fleet in its civil war and raised an Italian Legion from a city where about 4,200 of 30,000 residents were Italian. He learned guerrilla and amphibious tactics, and after one defeat in 1842 survived only because the Argentine admiral William Brown let him escape, calling him a brave man.
The revolutions of 1848 drew him home with about 60 legionaries. Rebuffed by the king of Sardinia, he fought for Milan against Austria and then led the defence of the short-lived Roman Republic, beating a much larger French force at the Porta San Pancrazio in April 1849. When Rome fell he urged the assembly to carry the resistance into the mountains, declaring that Rome would be wherever they went.
His decisive stroke came later. Setting aside his republican convictions, he allied with the monarchist Cavour, and in 1860, with King Victor Emmanuel II's consent, led the Expedition of the Thousand, which brought Sicily and southern Italy into the Kingdom of Sardinia before Italy was proclaimed on 17 March 1861. Admired by Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens, and later an inspiration to Nehru, he was called by the historian A. J. P. Taylor the only wholly admirable figure in modern history.
Source: Giuseppe Garibaldi
