Garibaldi set out to conquer a kingdom with about a thousand volunteers
In 1860 Giuseppe Garibaldi sailed from near Genoa with roughly a thousand volunteers to take on the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, a state with a bigger army and a stronger navy. Within months southern Italy had fallen, and less than a year later the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed.
The volunteers left Quarto al Mare and landed at Marsala in Sicily, aiming to topple the Bourbon dynasty that ruled the south. As local recruits and reinforcements joined, the force swelled into a Southern Army. A handful of battlefield wins over Bourbon troops, spread across only a few months, left it master of the whole kingdom. A plebiscite then brought Naples and Sicily into Piedmont-Sardinia, the last territorial gain before Italy was declared a kingdom on 17 March 1861.
Unusually, all four men later hailed as fathers of the nation backed the venture, though each wanted something different. The republican Giuseppe Mazzini hoped to free the south and Rome. Garibaldi meant to win the south for King Victor Emmanuel II and push on to Rome. Cavour, prime minister of Piedmont-Sardinia, wanted to stop short of Rome to avoid clashing with Napoleon III of France, protector of the Papal States. Francesco Crispi used his political influence to set the expedition in motion. Participants had their own motives too: Sicily's middle classes wanted autonomy within a united Italy, and ordinary people hoped for land and an end to oppression.
The background stretched back centuries. After the Western Roman Empire fell, the peninsula splintered into many small states, and the French Revolution and Napoleonic-era republics sparked a movement for national unity that Piedmont-Sardinia came to lead. Cavour treated unification as his life's work.
The immediate trigger was frustration with the Second Italian War of Independence, which ended on 11 July 1859. The Villafranca armistice, sought by Napoleon III, handed Lombardy, minus Mantua, to Piedmont-Sardinia but left Venice and the Veneto under Austria, angering many patriots. Meanwhile Tuscany, Modena, Parma and Romagna had expelled their rulers and asked to join Piedmont, while papal forces reasserted harsh control over Umbria and the Marche.
Source: Expedition of the Thousand
