Giuseppe Garibaldi

Giuseppe Garibaldi was born 4 July 1807, follower of nationalist Mazzini and the Young Italy movement's republican vision. Sentenced to death after an 1834 uprising in Piedmont, he fled to South America for 14 years of exile - joining Brazilian Ragamuffins fighting for the Riograndense Republic, raising his Redshirt force in Uruguay's civil war, learning the guerrilla methods he'd carry home. He returned in 1848 and the provisional Milan government made him general; by 1849 he was General of the Roman Republic. In 1859 his Hunters of the Alps seized Varese, Como, and Lombardy's cities to the South Tyrol frontier. The next year he led the Expedition of the Thousand - with King Victor Emmanuel II's nod - annexing Sicily, the southern mainland, Marche, and Umbria before Italy unified on 17 March 1861. He commanded once more in the Franco-Prussian War, then spent his last years as the hemisphere's most admired revolutionary, praised by Lincoln and Hugo and Dickens, the only figure A. J. P. Taylor called "wholly admirable in modern history." He died 2 June 1882.