Train of a thousand
The march of a 1067-strong troop of volunteers, called red shirts because of their uniforms , landed in Sicily on May 11, 1860 under the leadership of Giuseppe Garibaldi , and the southern Italian troop in the course of the Risorgimentos as the march of the thousand ( Italian spedizione dei mille ) Island liberated from the rule of the Spanish Bourbons . The city of Bergamo provided the largest share of the so-called "Garibaldinis" .
background
After the " Sardinian War " and the Armistice of Villafranca , popular uprisings against the Bourbons led by supporters of Giuseppe Mazzini took place in Sicily at the end of 1859 and especially in April 1860 . They called for the Kingdom of Sardinia to intervene , but both King Victor Emmanuel II and Prime Minister Cavour officially refused. They feared a republican turn in the Italian unification movement, but de facto, together with England, they secretly supported the intervention of Garibaldi and his thousand volunteers, which were subsequently reinforced by further volunteers from Sicily and Naples , as well as by Piedmontese soldiers in civilian clothes. Garibaldi's volunteers have been known as “red shirts” since his involvement in Uruguay's war of independence . Garibaldi had these "uniforms" from a factory in Montevideo that were to be exported to Argentine slaughterhouses as protective clothing.
The train
In the night of 5 to 6 May 1860 embarked "The Thousand" in Quarto in Genoa of two chartered by the Sardinian government ships Rubattino - Reederei one. With these two merchant ships, the “Lombardo” and the “Piemonte”, they first went to Talamone and Porto Santo Stefano in Tuscany , where they received provisions, weapons and coal. In this way they also tried to avoid the Neapolitan fleet . On May 11, they landed under the protection of two British warships near the western Sicilian city of Marsala and attempted to reach Palermo through the interior. In this way they wanted to avoid the Bourbon troops in the critical initial phase. But on May 15, between Marsala and Palermo, there was the battle of Calatafimi , in which the "red shirts" were almost defeated. On May 27th, after a fierce battle at the " Ponte dell'Ammiraglio ", they entered Palermo. At Milazzo , Garibaldi defeated the Neapolitan army again on July 20 and definitely secured control of the island. On his further advance on the mainland, Garibaldi faced no further resistance. It was not until October that the King of Naples tried to defeat the “red shirts” in Campania , but failed in the Battle of the Volturno . After the fortress in Gaeta was blown up , the Bourbons had to surrender.
Result
The government in Turin was now troubled because they feared for the privileges of the House of Savoy in the new Italy. Garibaldi's successes in the south could have resulted in the republic . His impetuous revolutionary spirit did not stop at Rome and the Pope either, which, as in 1849, could lead to international intervention. To prevent this, the Piedmontese government troops to the south, the most 18 September 1860 at first sent Castelfidardo ( Ancona beat) the papal troops and then with Garibaldi's volunteer corps united. The papal state was thus reduced to the area around Rome; this attack was strongly condemned in the papal allocation Novos et ante . On October 26, 1860, the famous meeting between Victor Emanuel II and Garibaldi took place in Teano near Naples . Garibaldi greeted Victor Emanuel as "King of Italy" and thus did his political opponent Cavour a favor to renounce his own political ambitions and secure the crown of Italy for the House of Savoy.
literature
- Denis Mack Smith: Modern Italy. A Political History . New edition Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn. 1997, ISBN 0-300-04342-2 .
- Denis Mack Smith: Cavour and Garibaldi, 1860. A Study in Political Conflict . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1985, ISBN 0-521-31637-5 .
Fiction
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel The Gattopardo and the film of the same name by Luchino Visconti, based on this novel, is set against the backdrop of the invasion of Sicily by Garibaldi's troops.
Frederica de Laguna wrote the youth novel The Thousand March: Adventures of an American Boy with the Garibaldi , which appeared in 1930, about the train of the thousand .
