Life With Giuseppe Garibaldi
Giuseppe Garibaldi, a Nicois sailor of Ligurian ascent turned Italian nationalist revolutionary, had fled Europe in 1836 and was fighting on behalf of a separatist republic in southern Brazil (the War of the Farrapos). When young Garibaldi first saw Anita, he could only whisper to her, "You must be mine." She joined Garibaldi on his ship, the Rio Pardo, in October 1839. A month later, she received her baptism of fire in the battles of Imbituba and Laguna, fighting at the side of her lover.
A skilled horsewoman, Anita is said to have taught Giuseppe about the gaucho culture of the plains of southern Brazil, Uruguay, and northern Argentina. One of Garibaldi's comrades described Anita as "an amalgam of two elemental forces…the strength and courage of a man and the charm and tenderness of a woman, manifested by the daring and vigor with which she had brandished her sword and the beautiful oval of her face that trimmed the softness of her extraordinary eyes."
In 1841, the couple moved to the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo, where Giuseppe Garibaldi worked as a trader and schoolmaster before taking command of the Uruguayan fleet in 1842 and raising an "Italian Legion" for that country's war against Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas. Anita participated in Garibaldi's 1847 defense of Montevideo against Argentina and his Uruguayan allied former dictator Manuel Oribe.
Anita and Giuseppe were married on March 26, 1842, in Montevideo. They had four children, Menotti (1840–1903), Rosita (1843–1845), Teresita (1845–1903), and Ricciotti (1846–1924). Anita was carrying their fifth child when she died.
Read more about this topic: Anita Garibaldi
Famous quotes containing the words giuseppe garibaldi and/or life:
“I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor food; I offer only hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles and death. Let him who loves his country with his heart, and not merely with his lips, follow me.”
—Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882)
“... life is moral responsibility. Life is several other things, we do not deny. It is beauty, it is joy, it is tragedy, it is comedy, it is psychical and physical pleasure, it is the interplay of a thousand rude or delicate motions and emotions, it is the grimmest and the merriest motley of phantasmagoria that could appeal to the gravest or the maddest brush ever put to palette; but it is steadily and sturdily and always moral responsibility.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)