STAMP STORY
Chris West provides an insight into Italy’s history and into the man who fought to bring the nation together
Stamps can tell us so much.this month’s example provides an insight into Italy’s history and into the man who fought to bring the nation together, and allows for reflection on how the country lost its way at the time the stamp was issued. Chris West explains all
In the 19th century, Italy was not a nation but a series of states, few of which were governed by Italians. The large, southern ‘Kingdom of the Two Sicilies’ was ruled by Bourbon kings imposed from Spain. The north, including Venice and Milan, was under Austrian control. The only native Italian rulers, apart from the Vatican and four small duchies, were in Sardinia and Piedmont, the area around Turin. As a result, nationalism became an increasingly powerful idea as the century progressed. However, it seemed fated to remain a theory.
Enter the man on this stamp (issued to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of his death): Giuseppe Garibaldi. He was born in 1807 into a seafaring family, and was a ship’s captain by the time he was 25. He became interested in nationalist politics and took part in an uprising – which failed. He fled for his life, and spent his next fifteen years in South America, fighting guerrilla wars against colonial powers.
1848 was a year of revolutions all over Europe, and Garibaldi returned to Italy to try once more to expel foreign rulers and unite the country. By now, he was a charismatic figure, with his trademark flowing hair and beard (both tidied up in this stamp) and red shirt, and was able to assemble an army of irregular fighters. At first, they had great successes, liberating Rome from French / Neapolitan forces, but they were then besieged there. Refusing an amnesty, Garibaldi and a group of followers escaped and marched across the inhospitable central mountains to the Adriatic. His freedom came at a cost: his pregnant wife died on the march.
Another period of exile, in America and at sea, followed, before he was able to return, not to mainland Italy but to a small island off Sardinia. From here, he launched a third attempt to drive out the French and Austrians. This did not succeed either, but all the time his personal renown had been growing, and he was not a man to give up. In 1860, he landed with a small band of supporters in Sicily, captured the island and began a victorious mainland campaign, marching north. Naples fell. He advanced toward Rome. By the end of the year, he controlled enough territory to do a deal with the northern Piedmontese: all these lands would become one nation with Piedmont’s king, Victor Emmanuel II, as their ruler. Garibaldi was a republican, but he understood that the only way to unite Italy at that time was under a king.
He was now a celebrity all round Europe. Half a million people lined the streets of London to see him when he visited in 1864. His legacy lives on in the modern era, too. The thin, currant-filled Garibaldi biscuit, first made by Peek Freans in 1851, is named after him. The club colour of Nottingham Forest FC is the same red as the shirts that he and his followers wore – a deliberate choice by the club’s members when it was founded in 1865.
The stamp above has a dark irony. Garibaldi supported what were then fringe, liberal causes: universal suffrage, female emancipation, abolition of the death penalty. This stamp was issued by a fascist government. By 1932, Mussolini had been in power for a decade, and had made Garibaldi’s Italy a one-party state with militia, secret police and ambitions to invade and dominate other countries.
Garibaldi supported fringe, liberal causes yet this stamp was issued by a fascist government