Garibaldi and islands

In 1852–1853 Garibaldi captained a clipper (the Carmen) to the Far East. He returned to Lima, Peru, via Australia and New Zealand. En route, he spent a day on Three Hummock Island, a small desert island off the coast of Tasmania. He was alone, in utterly foreign surroundings: an exile at the end of the world. Something happened on that day.Footnote ¹ Chapter ten of his autobiography is entitled ‘Exile’ (Garibaldi Reference Garibaldi1889, 52–69). It narrates a true world odissey. It ends at ‘home’, with a visit to Nice, and finally Caprera, his island, the site of his deliberate sub-exile that follows failed revolution at the end of exile. Garibaldi was at home in exile, and an exile even when at home. A turning point in that odyssey was when he realised that ‘home’ may be impossible in some islands and possible in others. Caprera and Three Hummock Island are related.

Historians have been suspicious of memoirs in general (see, for example, Caruth Reference Caruth1995; Smith and Watson Reference Smith and Watson2001) and of Garibaldi’s memoirs in particular. Lucy Riall argues, however, that it is precisely because he was so committed to continuously revising them that they hold an extraordinary documentary value (Riall Reference Riall2007, especially 155–157). It is a convincing argument: writing his memoirs while an exile, he was reflecting on the meaning of ‘home’. Redacting his memoirs heavily in following decades, he was concerned with the notion of ‘home’ his audiences should think he had while in exile. Home and exile emerge as dialectically linked, a typically colonial circumstance.Footnote ¹ Chapter ten of the memoirs opens in Peru, where he had returned after the crossing that followed his Bass Strait experience. Garibaldi narrates how he had become involved in a fight with a local notable who had ‘insulted’ all Italians. Garibaldi could not restrain himself. On that occasion, he had restored his countrymen’s honour but the local authorities had become involved. Garibaldi was saved from arrest and prosecution by the ‘resolve’ of the local Italians (Garibaldi Reference Garibaldi1889, 62–63). To protect him, the local Italian community had challenged the local sovereign order. This community was a ‘colony’ established within an independent polity, part of what would later become known as Italy’s ‘ethnographic empire’ (see Choate Reference Choate2003). Garibaldi was impressed:

‘Free soil’ somewhere other than Italy had produced better Italians. Garibaldi was a revolutionary hero who, disappointed in Italy (the Roman Republic of 1849 had been defeated), could be proud abroad. In Garibaldi’s reconstruction, the local Italian community exercised a quasi-sovereign claim: it challenged the local authorities and it was self-determining. A capacity to ostracise was, after all, a crucial marker of sovereignty already in the Greek polis. That this is the beginning of sovereignty, Garibaldi would know well: he himself had been ostracised by the Piedmontese government. But Garibaldi would know it in another sense too: he had been there before. In Uruguay he had led the ‘Italian legion’ – an armed formation defined by nationality, another critical claim to sovereignty (Mack Smith Reference Mack Smith1973, 25). The experience with expatriate Italians in Uruguay was crucial to his formation, including his military education; being saved by Italian expatriates in Peru would inevitably remind him of Uruguay.

Garibaldi’s reflection on the specific character of the Italian diaspora is particularly significant. These are potentially ‘better Italians’ even though they reside away from the motherland. This trope is typical of settler colonialism, a particular mode of domination characterised by the ambition of establishing regenerating replicas of the old country elsewhere (Veracini Reference Veracini2010; Veracini Reference Veracini2013; on the global ‘settler revolution’ of the nineteenth century, see Belich Reference Belich2009). The existence of the ‘new Italies’ abroad, a diaspora that Garibaldi was acutely aware of, suggests the applicability of a settler colonial studies lens to understanding the evolution of his politics. Garibaldi saw the Italian ‘colonies’ abroad in their own terms and was always much closer to the emigrants and to the possibility of permanently displacing than Mazzini was. Mazzini typically saw the emigrants as potential cannon fodder for failed insurgencies, or as individuals that should put pressure on their new sovereigns in order to make them intervene in Italy’s favour. In the disillusionment of his later years, Garibaldi ended up revising his opinion about the expatriate communities. He read about the New York Herald’s anti-Italian campaigns and sadly approved: the Italian emigrants were the dirtiest, the least civil and honest (yet again, Garibaldi argued, the problem was the way Italy was, where they were coming from, not the diaspora, where they were going to; see Mack Smith Reference Mack Smith1973, 189). Even then, he claimed he knew them.

But it is his experience on Three Hummock Island before returning to Peru that sets the narrative in motion. There, Garibaldi had considered that perhaps displacement rather than overturning the ‘domination’ of ‘the priest’ may be an answer (he was also engaging with the idea that islands may be propitious sites of political regeneration, an important feature of utopian and colonial traditions alike; see Gillis Reference Gillis2004). The possibility of turning exile into permanent emigration had been in his mind at least since he had left Italy in 1834. Later in the same chapter, Garibaldi recounts his return to Lima via Australia:

Only geography and technical matters appear to inform this choice. There is no socio-political interest in visiting a land inhabited by exiled convicts and their native-born children. He then continues:

The island is deserted. It is this detail that awakens his political imagination; thinking about what could be is a response to absence. Settlers routinely perceive ‘empty’ spaces even when they face the obvious presence of indigenous peoples: when the space is actually empty, they can think of terra that is indeed nullius, land that is veritably unappropriated. Three Hummock Island was the veritable end of the world (it still is). It is the end of physical and human geography, a small island off a larger one off an island continent at the end of a sea of islands. Emilio Salgari’s exotic novels are located merely half-way between Italy and Three Hummock Island; even Salgari could not think about a place as remote as this one. There, Garibaldi discovered a now abandoned ‘little colony’ where society had finally dissolved:

A basic civilised life away from home is temporarily possible, especially for an ‘Englishman’, but that remove made it unsustainable. It is there, in isolation, that Garibaldi develops or rekindles his love for islands and realises the absolute need for revolution as an end to exile. It is a true paradox: islands attract him because of their isolation and yet force him to re-embrace sociality and leave isolation behind. This is a truly foundational moment of Garibaldi’s ‘hybrid’ formation (Riall Reference Riall2014, 47):

Garibaldi’s autobiographical recollection lingers on an experience that would shape his political imagination. It allowed him to imagine a ‘natural’ New World and to reject it. From the end of the world, he then returns to South America. Then the other ‘America’, the US, and then the old Old World:

Caprera follows the end of exile, but in the autobiographical narrative it is Three Hummock Island that is the beginning of the end of exile. The possibility of displacement, the possibility of joining one of the many new societies where colonies of Italians can be found, is crucial to Garibaldi’s development and politics. Yet again, moving away is something one does until one reaches the antipodes. After that, an exile is already returning whichever direction one takes. The narrative ellipsis (a period of almost five years that ‘presents no points of interest’, which is a bewildering statement considering what had happened) indicates that Garibaldi understood his Pacific crossing as a turning point. Caesar had crossed the Rubicon river to get back to Rome; Garibaldi had crossed the largest body of water on Earth, and his aim was also to get back to Rome. The following chapter of his autobiography is entitled ‘Return to Political Life’, that is, to war and to the struggle for independence. War and revolution followed his revolutionary choice. But it had been a choice: for a while, permanently displacing, the prospect of changing the world by changing worlds, had beckoned.

Caprera and Three Hummock Island are thus narratively and dialectically linked. They represent ‘home’ and its impossibility in a narrative Garibaldi had carefully crafted and recrafted. Are his eventual return and his revolutionary choice linked to the vision of a world without ‘priests’ or ‘secret agents’, and yet a world that even ‘an Englishman’ had to abandon? Did the ‘quenching’ of his thirst go beyond the literal in Three Hummock Island? Riall emphasises Garibaldi’s political use of Caprera (and of his memoirs); there he could be Cincinnatus or Washington and craft and control his public image. Three Hummock Island is crucial to understand Caprera. For Riall, Caprera was the ‘the physical representation of Garibaldi’s reputation’, a ‘stage’, and a means to a political end (2007, 311, 127; see especially 306–314), but for Garibaldi Caprera was also something else. Mikhail Bakunin visited him there in 1863 and recognised that Caprera was meant as a prototype of ‘a democratic social republic’ (cited in Riall Reference Riall2007, 127). Max Gallo’s recent biography of Garibaldi talks about the ‘piccola repubblica isolana’ (‘small island republic’; Gallo Reference Gallo2010). Caprera was Garibaldi’s alternative to revolution. Caprera allowed Garibaldi to practice displacement as method even after returning.

Garibaldi engaged seriously with the possibility of building another world rather than changing the old one. He had to. After defeat in 1848–1849, Garibaldi was again an exile, but in a way this was his first genuine exile; this time it was revolution that had been defeated, not a hopeless Mazzinian plot. At first, he was conducted to Tunis, but the local bey did not allow his entry. He then spent a few days near Maddalena island off Sardinia (Mack Smith Reference Mack Smith1973, 48). Beyond Three Hummock Island, there were the societies of the New World and their Italian colonies. When he visited Three Hummock Island, the further extreme of exile, he had developed a taste for islands. For Denis Mack Smith the most important feature of his Pacific voyage was his interest in climatology; Garibaldi barely mentions this experience (1973, 51). Riall notes that he had ‘disappeared into the Pacific’ (2007, 146). But I would argue that this antipodean moment was important beyond Garibaldi’s developing love for islands. Mack Smith refers to the fact that Dumas noted that on passing Juan Fernandez in the South Pacific Ocean Garibaldi had called Robinson Crusoe the happiest man and concludes: ‘Caprera was a dream come true’ (1973, 56). But the dream had begun long before and had to do with two nightmares: the end of sociality at the end of the earth, and the impossibility of revolution at home.

Garibaldi and revolution

Was Garibaldi a ‘revolutionary’? This is Riall’s original question (Reference Riall1998). As she outlines, it is complicated. Yes, he was indeed a revolutionary, even if ultimately a failed one (he himself had concluded that this was the case). But he had had options, and only rejected permanent displacement after careful consideration and never without ambivalences (whether he was a ‘hero’ or a ‘saint’, or both, or neither, while crucial to the study of the cult of his personality, becomes less relevant from this point of view). A revolutionary, then, but with a twist, and in the context of a world view fundamentally shaped by displacement. Italy was already a global diasporic nation by the time of his first exile. Garibaldi appreciated this national fact – no one could do this better than he did. Displacement was an option before ‘Italy’ itself became a possibility beyond being ‘a mere geographical expression’ (as Austria’s chancellor von Metternich had famously remarked). Garibaldi, from the outside, had opted to return and fight. We know about his fight, of course, but not as much about the conditions that shaped his choice to return. And yet the notion of a return is important. To return by definition requires an elsewhere. This elsewhere was formative in ways that go beyond received accounts focusing on guerrilla tactics and daring raids, eccentric dress, and an exotic creole spouse.

Appraising Garibaldi’s international dimension is Riall’s most significant achievement. She links Garibaldi’s ‘style’ with a type of revolutionary politics he had ‘encountered first in South America’, and with a ‘popular radicalism’ that he ‘would have observed in Britain and the United States’ (she even makes a comparative reference to Irish Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor; 1998, 195). His ‘cult’ was truly international: he was incredibly popular in France, Britain and the United States, where he had a significant public following, and almost everywhere else (Riall Reference Riall2014; Franzina and Sanfilippo Reference Franzina and Sanfilippo2008). His visit to England in 1864 was a most tumultuous event. But the internationalisation of Garibaldi should proceed further, because what Luigi Einaudi would eventually articulate at the turn of the century in Un principe mercante as ‘le colonie spontanee dove si matura la formazione di nuove Italie’ (‘the spontaneous colonies where new Italies are maturing’;1900, 20; see also Veracini Reference Veracini2018),Footnote ² a veritable global diasporic nation, cannot be neglected in his case. Garibaldi was an emigrant and a settler colonist as much as an international phenomenon. He had seen the ‘nuove Italie’; he was formed in them.

Einaudi would promote them as a ‘colonial’ tradition that remained alternative to the colonial endeavours that Prime Minister Francesco Crispi had hoped to establish in Africa.Footnote ³ Crispi, who had fought under Garibaldi and had conquered Sicily with him, would promote colonial expansion in Africa in Garibaldi’s name, something the general would never have agreed to. Crispi failed miserably, and the Italian liberal state would eventually organise the Italian ‘colonies’ abroad, but they had existed already for decades (see Choate Reference Choate2003, Choate Reference Choate2008). Decades later, Einaudi would become the first president of the Italian Republic in 1948 while in the same year the Fronte Democratico Popolare, a coalition of communists and socialists, used Garibaldi as its symbol. The Fronte would lose the national elections against the Christian Democrats and their allies. Emigration, the Italian emigrants’ furious ‘assalto al cielo’ (‘assault on the sky’; see De Clementi Reference De Clementi2014), had begun much earlier, approximately during the time of Garibaldi’s first exile, and would begin anew.

For Garibaldi there were many ‘new’ worlds and one ‘old’ world; the former were being created, the latter must be made anew. Creating the former required permanent displacement and a commitment to the new locale: remaking the latter required revolution, another kind of commitment. Both possibilities would result in the end of exile, but the outcome would be different. Following Garibaldi’s trajectory enables an exploration of the long-term relationship between revolution and displacement. Riall concludes that in his first South American exile after 1835 Garibaldi ‘affirmed his own place in the exile tradition’ (2014, 42). But ‘exile’, like return, its dialectical counterpart, is also a crucial category shaping the relationship between displacement and revolution: it can be defined as temporary displacement as a means to a revolutionary end, and therefore not permanent displacement as an alternative to that end. Exile and permanent displacement are antithetical, and exile is a revolutionary choice that endures displacement as it simultaneously rejects it. In exile, the eye remains fixed on the ‘distant fatherland’, and paradoxically one is closest (i.e., truest) to the homeland precisely because one is forced to abandon it rather than enduring tyranny. On the contrary, in the case of the settler colonists, the fatherland (of the future) travels with them. The exile moves back towards the homeland, the settler colonist moves forward towards another homeland.

Garibaldi was not alone in this predicament. Many revolutionaries had left Europe after defeat in 1848, but Garibaldi had returned to Europe for the revolutions of 1848 (and then left again). Unlike the other revolutionary exiles, he had moved the other way (Isabella Reference Isabella2011). The ‘spirit of ’48’ crucially shaped US socialist traditions, and the history of the engagement between revolution and displacement that followed this encounter is rich and well known (Levine Reference Levine1992; Blackburn Reference Blackburn2011; Honeck Reference Honeck2011). But as Garibaldi had crossed the Atlantic the other way, in his case revolution and displacement had met in the Old World, not in the New. The implications of this encounter have been neglected. Another exile followed this encounter. But in his New York exile, Garibaldi only resembled the German defeated revolutionaries of 1848 who had moved there, often after a sojourn in London, while they were waiting to see whether the reactionary phase would continue. The other revolutionaries believed that exile would be a parenthesis between revolutionary endeavours. Garibaldi, on the contrary, had reason to believe that it was revolution that could be a parenthesis between exiles. He no longer was in exile; he was of exile. Unlike the German revolutionaries, who tried to bring revolution with them in their displacements to New York and then to the Midwest (and then the South, on the back of the Union Army; see Efford Reference Efford2013, and Zimmerman Reference Zimmerman2015), Garibaldi brought very little, ideologically speaking, to the Unites States. He always travelled light. He did not go there to keep fighting.

Garibaldi’s post-1848 memoir is suffused with nostalgia for Italy as well as for South America. He had undertaken a disorienting second crossing. In this second exile, his eye was no longer firmly fixed on the patria. He was again considering permanently settling elsewhere, like many exiled revolutionaries in his circumstances. Indeed, he explicitly stated his propensity to avoid the radical politics of exile and asked to ‘be permitted quietly and humbly, to become a citizen of this great Republic of Freemen’, the United States (cited in Riall Reference Riall2014, 46). Permanently displacing meant abandoning revolution. Riall remarks on Garibaldi’s sombre style while in the US; she refers to him as a ‘gentleman’. But being a bit of a gentleman in the United States meant being a bit of a settler colonist. True, this transformation was never complete and he remained a ‘hybrid’ figure, as she insightfully emphasises (2014, 47). But revolution was no longer on the metaphorical horizon. Other, literal horizons had taken over. Then again, in the end he returned.

In 1862 German Socialist Ferdinand Lassalle visited Caprera with a letter of introduction by Karl Marx (Mack Smith Reference Mack Smith1973, 120). Not much came of this meeting. By then Garibaldi was no longer a revolutionary (a fact that Marx always suspected and Mazzini now feared). In his later years Garibaldi espoused the causes of the left, and called himself a socialist, but never advocated revolution. He was much more interested in land reclamation projects (and suggested that Catholic priests should be used as forced labour to drain the Pontine Marshes; see Mack Smith Reference Mack Smith1973, 166). During his eventful 1864 visit to England he found time to visit model farms (Mack Smith Reference Mack Smith1973, 137), and when in 1875 he finally managed to get back to Rome for the first time since 1849 it was to promote the channelling of the Tiber river against periodic flooding and to support the reclamation of surrounding land. It was a project he was especially fond of (Mack Smith Reference Mack Smith1973, 183). He had been to Rome for a revolution, repeatedly tried to return there for another, but when he finally made it back, it was to reclaim. Reclamation had superseded revolution.

Garibaldi’s revolutionary commitment is non-linear; it is an evolution that interacts in important ways with permanent displacement as an alternative. A genuine revolutionary in Rome during a genuinely revolutionary year, after defeat Garibaldi had initiated what in today’s parlance would be called a ‘long march’ towards an alternative ‘insurgent stronghold’. The march towards Venice, however, while epic, was a traumatic failure – both political and personal. The love of his life died during the journey, the comrades that had followed him from America had been killed or taken prisoner; his revolutionary doctrine was in tatters. He thereafter became stubbornly ambivalent vis-à-vis revolution and decidedly abandoned Mazzinianism. In his later years, he radicalised but never embraced social revolution. In his old age, he remained sceptical. We must, he wrote, ‘[i]mprove human society with gradual and achievable advances’, lead the masses not ‘with such unworkable doctrines’, but guide ‘them on the practical path, reaching practical aspirations, without losing time and drag[ging] them towards a social cataclysm that none of us would like to witness’ (cited in Mack Smith Reference Mack Smith1973, 178). Social revolution was a catastrophe; he would rather not witness it. He was always an internationalist, but never a ‘socialist in the Marxist sense’ (Riall Reference Riall2007, 362). Marx, who consistently advocated revolution and feared that his German comrades in the United States would abandon it and embrace their new life, consistently called out Garibaldi’s ambivalence. Aleksandr Herzen, also an exile and a revolutionary, but from a country that had famously ‘colonised itself’, was more understanding (Ginzburg Reference Ginzburg2015).

Garibaldi’s settler-colonial style followed him even if he had decided to return. He settled on Caprera as a settler colonist would, transforming it, building a house and reclaiming land for cultivation (on Caprera as a site for re-enacting Garibaldi’s colonial days, see Schwegman Reference Schwegman2010). Riall notes that he ‘planted trees, established a working farm and settled his family and some of his closest friends there. He behaved as a coloniser in the nation of his birth’ (2014, 47–48, emphasis added). Caprera became the centre of his life. It is significant that Riall’s article ends with the term ‘frontiers’, a term that is typical of settler-colonial circumstances (2014, 49). In The German Ideology (2004 [1846]: 109) Marx famously defines an artist in ideal conditions as someone who, amongst other activities, paints. In this sense, Garibaldi was a settler colonist who, amongst other activities, also fought.

Garibaldi the settler colonist

So, Garibaldi was a ‘saint’, a ‘hero’, a ‘revolutionary’, but also a settler colonist, someone who considered settling elsewhere but decided to return (and yet settled, on returning, as a settler colonist would have done). This feature of his political style should contribute to a renewed understanding of his politics. It is, I would suggest, one of the ingredients of his ‘hybridity’. Considering him as a settler colonist as well as many other things, allows a renewed understanding of the ways in which ‘exile’ followed him; he was an exile ‘in patria’ (in the homeland), and not only because Cavour had agreed to cede Nice to France. Very importantly, as the recent literature on settler colonialism has also emphasised (Veracini Reference Veracini2010), settlers are not migrants: they move endowed with a sovereign capacity. Mack Smith notes that Garibaldi had bought Caprera like many returned emigrants bought land after ‘striking it rich in the New World’, and that he sent money home from the United States, like other emigrants typically did (1973, 56). But a migrant travels towards someone else’s country. Garibaldi, on the contrary, expressed what in today’s parlance could be understood as an inherent ‘right of return’.

The politics Garibaldi brought with him in his displacements were suitable. Riall notes that Garibaldi was ‘exposed to the political ideas of the Saint-Simonians’ early on (2014, 42). Being abstracted from specific relations of production, Saint Simonian socialism is a most transportable ideology that would suit a revolutionary on the move: the Saint Simonians generally supported colonial endeavours, and many French colonial governors were Saint Simonians who saw the colonies as social laboratories, important opportunities to experiment in socio-political regeneration. Garibaldi also had close connections with Argentina’s ‘generation of 1837’, the liberals defeated by Rosas. But Rosas’ was an anti-settler colonial takeover, an argument that the Argentinian liberals often repeated; the Rosas regime represented a ‘recolonial’ throwback (Goodrich Reference Goodrich1964). Other traits defining Garibaldi’s political rhetoric are recognisably settler-colonial, and he was already fighting for a settler-colonial project when he defended Uruguay’s independence. Garibaldi routinely professed a love for the ‘untamed’ wilderness of southern Brazil, and, as Riall also remarks, unlike ‘other Risorgimento patriots [who] were not interested in the countryside, and preferred to live in the cities and adopt an urban lifestyle’, he consistently expressed an enthusiasm for farming and ‘affection for the simple life of rural folk’ (2014, 44, 45). An interest in rural landscapes as spaces of emancipatory possibility is indeed a defining characteristic of the political traditions of settler colonialism.

Garibaldi’s ostensible affinity for the gauchos and matreros of the South American pampas may even suggest a propensity to adopt an ‘indigenising’ stance (settlers routinely ‘play Indian’ to sustain their claim to their new land), a trait that is typical of settlers that have committed to a new political life elsewhere (see Riall Reference Riall2014, 45; on settlers ‘playing Indian’, see Deloria Reference Deloria1998). Like all settlers, Garibaldi understood the political benefits of ‘playing Indian’ (except that he played Indian in Italy and not in someone else’s country), and praised the gaucho and matrero as the embodiment of a genuinely independent individual (Riall Reference Riall2007, 158). He was very successful in this ‘play’, and he was unanimously perceived as having somewhat indigenised. Riall cites an observer of his Roman army: ‘all people who have come from America’, running ‘here and there in a disorganised way, active, reckless, tireless …. Garibaldi seems more like the head of an Indian tribe than a General’ (cited in Riall Reference Riall2007, 87). Garibaldi, another source noted, makes camp ‘like an Indian’ (cited in Riall Reference Riall2007, 96). Indigenising without going native is what settlers typically do.

Garibaldi had become a settler. After his defeat in 1848–1849, and after a brief imprisonment (this was to be a turning point), he collaborated with the authorities. In Italy there was no Italian ‘colony’ that could rescue him. The Piedmontese government decided to exile him again (though some even considered establishing a formal Italian colony in Montevideo and sending him there as governor; see Riall Reference Riall2007, 102). But after reaching the United States via North Africa and Liverpool, Garibaldi was a different man. Riall even remarks on his physical transformation. Accordingly, he was represented as eminently ‘gentlemanlike’ (2007, 111–112). He may have left psychologically too. A defeated revolutionary was meeting yet another ‘new’ world: the United States, a country he felt equally attracted to and alienated from (he never managed to speak English). This time, Garibaldi behaved very circumspectly and avoided as much as he could all public engagements, unlike other famous European revolutionaries in the same years (Hungary’s Lajos Kossuth, for example, was welcomed by massive gatherings; see Spencer Reference Spencer1977). Garibaldi avoided the politics of the exiled community and then vanished. Riall relates: ‘[f]rom December 1851 to January 1853, nothing more was heard from Garibaldi’ (2007, 112). She does not follow him to the Pacific, but this was an exile where his gaze was no longer securely fixed on the motherland, an exile that may have become something else. Garibaldi had left and this time he did not know whether he would come back (in 1850–1851 he even prepared the papers to acquire United States citizenship). It is when he was as far as he could possibly be that he decides to return again. When he does, he is a postcolonial Garibaldi.

He had changed more than his appearance and public demeanour. For one, Garibaldi had decided against insurrectionalism. He would not change his mind again. Mazzini was scathing. But Garibaldi had not become a pacifist, and was still dreaming of a ‘floating revolution’, of a group of hardened men living permanently at sea ‘ready to put in at any shore, independent and unassailable!’ (cited in Riall Reference Riall2007, 124). This global revolutionary marine corps of sorts would be based at sea. Garibaldi was seeking alternatives. In a way, he never came back. True, in 1860, departing from Quarto, as Riall remarks, ‘the revolutionary had returned’, but always ambiguously and in a subaltern position vis-à-vis the Piedmontese and the liberals (2007, 184). We know what happened at Teano; this is what a defeated revolutionary does. Riall concludes that Garibaldi ‘continued to live in exile even after his return to Italy’ (2007, 126). This exile, this bringing exile back home, this thinking of home itself as an exile, is better understood if we consider his colonial experiences.

That Garibaldi’s experience was not unique should be emphasised. Silvino Olivieri’s trajectory, for example, confirms that many defeated Italian revolutionaries embraced permanent displacement. A veteran of the wars of 1848–1849, Olivieri had been exiled to Argentina, where he led an ‘Italian legion’ (Mazzini was enthusiastic, and wanted to promote Olivieri as a possible ‘remplaçant for Garibaldi’ to ease the nationalists’ overreliance on the General; cited in Riall Reference Riall2007, 122). Olivieri had also returned to Italy and to fighting and had been imprisoned after yet another failed insurrection. In prison, in the early 1850s, he had dreamt of establishing a ‘nuova Roma’ in Argentina (‘new Rome’ – with a name like this Mazzini would certainly approve): a polity ‘che fosse di rifugio ai miseri perseguitati dall’ira de’ loro governi’ (‘that could be a refuge for those who were being tormented by their governments’ anger’; cited in Enciclopedia Treccani ). Back in Argentina, Olivieri became involved in settler-colonising efforts. The Argentinean government had decided on extending the southern frontier and Olivieri led an ‘agricultural-military legion’ to Nuova Roma, Bahia Blanca, but was killed by fellow colonists in suspicious circumstances (Bernardi Reference Bernardi1946, Bonvini Reference Bonvini2018). Citing ‘colonial’ initiatives for Italian exiles in Greece, Turkey, Algeria, and Mexico, Alessandro Bonvini recently noted ‘the birth of a transcontinental space’ where Italian exiles endeavoured to establish a number of ‘alternative homelands’ (2018, 198–199), and remarked on the growing prospect of ‘making Italy outside of Italy’ (‘fare l’Italia fuori dall’Italia’; 2018, 230).

A few decades later, another aristocrat like Olivieri would embrace displacement as an alternative to revolution. Leone Caetani, Duke of Sermoneta and Prince of Teano, a pioneering orientalist who initially sided with the radicals and the socialists, had opposed the Libyan adventure, but had supported the interventionist side when it came to the first world conflict. Caetani ended up rejecting both fascism and socialism. His lands had been briefly occupied during the ‘biennio rosso’, while other lands he owned would be reclaimed by the Fascist regime in the Paludi Pontine to be turned into a veritable settler colony. Caetani then became an actual and not just a metaphorical pioneer, and in 1921 migrated to a property he had purchased in a remote area of British Columbia, Canada (Gabrieli Reference Gabrieli1973). He had abandoned a world he perceived as torn between revolution and reaction. His ‘home’ would be in exile; Caetani did not return (unrelatedly, and yet confirming the existence of an international Garibaldi, ‘Mount Garibaldi’, the ‘Garibaldi Ranges’, and the ‘Garibaldi Provincial Park’ are in British Columbia: far from Teano, but very imposing nonetheless).

‘Nuova Roma’ was a possibility, but British Columbia would have been an unlikely option. We could think about Caprera as Nuova Three Hummock or a ‘New Uruguay’ (the house Garibaldi built there was in the ‘Montevideo style’). The economic activity he had in mind for himself on his farm was that of an ‘agricoltore’ (‘farmer’), but the agriculture he wanted to practise was that of a subsistence settler, an agriculture disconnected from markets. What he had in mind was unavailable in Italy: Garibaldi rejected both mezzadria and bracciantato (share-cropping arrangements, and day-labouring systems). He was importing a new ‘system’. As noted, he was a committed improver, like most settler colonists, but self-consumption was the aim. He wanted to reclaim, in a sense, to colonise, to turn Italy into a colony of itself. The settler colonist and the nationalist were traveling together. He did not cross that ocean again, but considered doing so several times. In 1858 he was thinking about returning to South America; in 1861 Lincoln asked him to lead an army against the South and he felt he should go; and in 1865 he contemplated joining Mexico’s fight for independence (Mack Smith Reference Mack Smith1973, 63, 116, 145).

He was a settler colonist, even though his colonialism moved inward rather than outward like colonialisms typically do. But was never a colonialist of the imperialist kind. For him it was inconceivable that Italians should move out and colonise distant lands, lands that belonged to others. True patriots, he believed, would return and colonise/reclaim. He advocated what in today’s language would be called a ‘denial of diaspora’ because he had been of the diaspora. Unlike other nations, Italy had been true to itself outside of itself and had betrayed itself at home. Liberation and repatriation were one and the same. In this sense, he was truly postcolonial – through him the ‘ethnographic colonies’, le nuove Italie, were talking back.Footnote ⁴ When Garibaldi died, the imperialist scramble had just begun. He presciently wrote against the possibility that Italy may engage in it (it did, with disastrous results). The only reasonable colonialism Garibaldi could think of was to be performed on reclaimed/redeemed national land. This was the same colonialism he had once thought about while in Three Hummock Island. Reclamation, he concluded in his later years, would stop emigration (Mack Smith Reference Mack Smith1973, 191).