By the time he died in 1882 at the age of 74, Giuseppe Garibaldi had freed the Italian peninsula from its abhorred Habsburg and Bourbon rulers and united all Italy under the liberally inclined House of Savoy. With his whiskery good looks and wardrobe of red blouses, he was the ideal vehicle for romantic notions of free nationality. When he visited London in 1864, crowds flocked to greet the Risorgimento liberator as he got off the train at Nine Elms. A new football club, Nottingham Forest, adopted Garibaldi red as its colour and a ‘squashed fly’ biscuit was named after him. In Queen Victoria’s estimation, though, Garibaldi was an outlaw figure who threatened to subvert the established order. ‘Garibaldi – thank God – is gone!’ she declared on his departure. Like Che Guevara, the Italian patriot combined the adventurer’s contempt for bureaucracy with a deep-dyed hatred of social injustice.

In May 1860, backed by an army of 1,000 eager but ill-armed volunteers, Garibaldi ousted the absolutist Bourbons from Sicily and declared himself lord of the island. The cult of garibaldinismo was born at that moment. Tim Parks, who has lived in Italy for almost half a century, has followed the route the volunteers took that historic year when, against the........

© The Spectator