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Garibaldi, history's sexiest revolutionary?
- mrlonglong 11mo agoThere's a character in Babylon-5, the sci-fi TV series of the 90s, also named Garibaldi. Professional hater of authority.
- a3w 11mo agoLet's hope the reboot, who changes between canceled and "soon" every few months, happens with a good casting for him, again!
- al2o3cr 11mo agoIt's amazing how many Italian dictators had biscuits named after them. You've got the Garibaldi of course, you've got your Bourbon, and you've got your Peek Freens Trotsky assortment!
- thomassmith65 11mo agoIt's weird to remember Garibaldi as a dictator, as though he were similar to Mussolini or Hitler. That said, he was one, for a few months in 1860.
- golem14 11mo agoI know little more than what is written in Giovanni Guareschi’s work. But he feels more like the Napoleon of Notting Hill. I wonder where Chesterton got his inspiration from…
- gattilorenz 11mo agoWhich of Guareschi’s work is about Garibaldi? I can imagine he’s mentioned a lot in Don Camillo since the communist and socialist parties in the first republican election of Italy joined in a coalition called “the Garibaldi front”, but Garibaldi himself was already long dead by then.
- toyg 11mo agoHe's a unique figure. Running across the world, finding himself constantly drawn to battles for the freedom of this or that group, he had a penchant for winning military campaigns that were then politically squandered by the people he trusted. A committed republican at a time when it was a revolutionary and scandalous position, he won half of Italy for a king he didn't like (and who really didn't like him) and then effectively self-exiled. More than once, he had to be held back by aristocratic leaders scared by his "uppity" plebeian success. And he was as popular as the Beatles - all over Europe, men wanted to die for him and women wanted to run away with him. The difference between him and Napoleon (the real one from Corsica, not Notting Hill) was that he sincerely never wanted to rule anything or anyone.
- bjourne 11mo agoThat description fits Che Guevara too. Who, coincidentally, also was considered to be incredibly handsome.
- colinb 11mo agoI have happy memories of the struggle to open the Trotsky boxes. In my house we used to have them with cocktails, so it was easiest to just pull out the bar tools and hack away. (Oh the embarrassment. My ears are burning)
- petesergeant 11mo agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11CvBKpKbn8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11CvBKpKbn8 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bambi_(The_Young_Ones) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bambi_(The_Young_Ones)
- teo_zero 11mo ago> how many Italian dictators had biscuits named after them. So, how many?
- esperent 11mo agoWell, it seems Garibaldi biscuits were genuinely named after this guy. However Bourbon was named for the House of Bourbon, a French royal family. I'm discounting the Peek Freens Trotsky assortment because Trotsky was, of course, Russian. So, one. Which is still more than you might expect.
- _zagj 11mo agoGaribaldi wasn't a dictator.
- thomassmith65 11mo agoWhile it's misleading to characterize him as a dictator without further context, he momentarily was. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_Giuseppe_Garibaldi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_Giuseppe_Garib...
- jjgreen 11mo agoThe original quote (from "The Young Ones") uses "revolutionaries" rather than "dictators", which make more sense.
- olelele 11mo agothis is weirdly similar wording to https://old.reddit.com/r/TheYoungOnes/comments/u93yfd/revolutionary_biscuits_of_italy_rise_up_out_of/ https://old.reddit.com/r/TheYoungOnes/comments/u93yfd/revolu...
- meindnoch 11mo agoGaribaldi was not a dictator.
- frostyel 11mo ago[dead]
- timterim 11mo ago‘Garibaldi’ is the German word for pressure cooker!
- golem14 11mo ago? It is? Which part of Germany?
- zoltanse 11mo agoNone. That’s a bad pun.
- rkomorn 11mo agoI love bad puns but this one escapes me. Help?
- CharlesHorsey 11mo agoGaren means cook, bald means soon, I guess a pressure cooker cooks your food quickly (soon)?
- toyg 11mo agoConsidering how he was a thorn in the side for Austrians, the pun is almost apt.
- trashtensor 11mo agohas the author never seen a young che guevara, fidel castro, or joseph stalin?
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- faidit 11mo agostalin's pictures were photoshopped when he was in power, he was actually quite ugly. napoleon similarly was ugly looking but had himself painted as a chad after he betrayed the revolution
- toyg 11mo agoOk about Che, but Fidel and Stalin were nothing to write home about. That obviously didn't stop them from having loads of women, of course.
- riffraff 11mo agoMore fun trivia about Garibaldi: he was elected to the french parliament, and he caused a stir when he showed up wearing his signature poncho rather than formal clothes. He was also the only french commander in the Franco Russian war to capture a Prussian flag. Also, he was supposedly invited to fight in the American civil war but refused since he couldn't get the level of command he wanted, although there was a Garibaldi Guard in that war. Queen Victoria wrote in her diary , about Garibaldi's visit to London, that most of the elite was far too fascinated with him. During the same visit, the servants at the house he was staying sold the water he used to wash himself to collectors.
- thomassmith65 11mo agoRe: the civil war, here's a letter Garibaldi wrote to Lincoln, congratulating him on the Emancipation Proclamation https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/giuseppe-garibaldi-president-lincoln https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/giuseppe-... "If an entire race of human beings, subjugated into slavery by human egoism, has been restored to human dignity, to civilization and human love, this is by your doing and at the price of the most noble lives in America."
- mettamage 11mo agoDamn! He has mad game, holy hell. You can’t get to those feats with good looks alone. This guy was rizzing [1] as hell when he was in his prime! [1] Rizz: from the word charisma. As I understand what it means: being amazingly charismatic towards your romantic interests in order to start a conversation with them and ultimately seduce them. It’s similar to the word game in that sense. Younger people seem to use the word rizz nowadays.
- FooBarBizBazz 11mo agoIMO "seduce" has the negative connotation that you are somehow manipulating a "target", whereas "charisma" is more positive; it means your behavior attracts positive attention -- that people find you compelling and interesting, that they will want to follow your lead. (Granted, in concrete terms these may not always be so different -- but to say that is to accept a cynical frame.) I understand "rizz" as entirely a short form of "charisma" with all the same connotations -- in which case I wouldn't focus it to "romantic interests" or to the goal of "ultimately seduce[ing] them" -- but it's possible that younger people use "rizz" differently than I use "charisma". The word "charisma" is a little gendered. You are more likely to hear a man described as "charismatic" than a woman. A woman is more likely to be -- well, honestly, the word would probably just be "hot" (or "sexy" -- as used here for Garibaldi), which would place a lot more emphasis on appearance; though to focus more on behavioral aspects, one might hear (I'm reaching here) "effervescent" or "fascinating". I suppose "magnetic" is also an option, though that seems pretty gender-neutral to me. The slang "game" you mention seems intermediate in connotation to me. The meaning is closer to "ability to seduce", but the connotation is not quite so negative. The implication is that "the game" is simply part of life, neither good nor bad; it is what it is. Of course, the connotations of "rizz" or "charisma" are less sexual overall. Possibly some amount of what I'm calling "positive connotations" or "negative connotations" simply reflects that, and our society's Judeo-Christian negativity towards sex (which in "conservative" places forces LGBT people at least a little into the closet; and in "liberal" places survives primarily for straight men, the bastards). Put another way, "charisma" or "rizz" is work-safe, indeed desirable in a CEO (and will likely be rewarded in most employees); whereas "seduction' is not work-safe.
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- Dansvidania 11mo agoJust to offer food for thought, some people in the south of Italy still regard him as a Sardo/French invader and do not buy the “national hero” persona that garibaldi got attributed after the unification.
- toyg 11mo agoThe thing is: even ignoring that campaign, Garibaldi was successful elsewhere and mostly coherent in his political positions. So really, the nostalgics of Bourbon rule are just the Italian equivalent of American Confederates: they just never got over the fact they lost.
- Dansvidania 11mo agoI don’t share the nostalgia for burbonic rule, but I have to point out that the fact that they lost does not mean that they were not invaded. Both things can be true.
- mk89 11mo agoIn some cases it has to do with nostalgy, for whatever reason. In most cases it has to do more with the fact that the South is primarily used as a way to steer/control the elections. Garibaldi used local (criminal) lords, the "picciotti", to achieve what he needed. A bit like today they would use local criminals to subjugate the population. Those criminals stayed until Mussolini decided to deal with them. And again they got freed by the Allies to save the country from Fascism. You could wipe out the mafia, make the land rich and use it, but there is not just enough interest to do so. On the contrary, the only interest is to use that land to move to the next step, never to actually use whatever is there. This is what makes people nostalgic or sad.
- BurningFrog 11mo agoThe victors write the history, so people assume it was good that Italy got created. I'm far less sure. Italian governance is an eternal farce. Milan and Napoli would both be happier not having to deal with each other.
- xandrius 11mo agoOther than being defined as "sexy" this article doesn't add much more than what one would have learnt at school in Italy. There are so many aspects which are more recently brought him about his campaign (i.e. Making deals with local lords in the south, which allowed today's mafia families to de facto remain in power). So, if you think this article was interesting, do go dig a bit deeper as it's rather shallow.
- thomassmith65 11mo agoI posted it, and agree that it's shallow. I reckon a majority of people outside Europe have never even heard of Garibaldi - as much as that might appall an Italian. The article may be clickbait, but now the reader knows.
- leg100 11mo agoThe article gives the impression "Italy" was always a nation in the making for all of history, just waiting to "unify". It talks of a "national rebirth". But it's an invention. It never previously existed. Yes the penisula was referred to as Italy for a long time and the language is shared across the area and there are cultural similarities. But none of that automatically makes a nation - you don't have to think hard of counter examples. History could have panned out differently. It still could. I think the bourgeoisies have been enormously successful in giving the impression that these nation states, whether it be Italy or Germany, or India, etc, that they're inevitable, they're permanent and anything else is a perversion. And Garibaldi was one such whose brilliance was to forge a nation so quickly from so many disparate states.
- thomassmith65 11mo agoWell yes, every nation is just a construct. Many interests - not just bourgeois - have used national identity to motivate people, for better or worse.
- mkoubaa 11mo agoNot only is it fake but I consider Nationalism the second most useless political ideology exported from Europe.
- titanomachy 11mo agoWas the language really shared, or is that also a more recent development? I'm not sure what they spoke in Piedmont in 1800 would have been particularly intelligible to a Roman or a Neapolitan, and the Piedmontese dialect still exists today as something pretty distinct from Italian.
- epolanski 11mo ago1. The concept of nation state is historically very young, few centuries at best in it's modern concept and that's when most modern nation states formed, the very last centuries. That's true anywhere from Asia to the balcans to the Americas and Africa. 2. Italy has been seen by Italian populations as one entity from millennia, essentially since the Roman empire when all the Italian tribes wanted to be elevated to the same status of citizenship as romans. And there's an overabundance of historical proofs of it, you're gonna find for centuries and centuries of Italian literature and diplomacy. Every single major writer in Italian history since middle ages has written openly about Italia, Dante Alighieri dedicated an entire chant in the 13th century to the woes of the Italian people "Ahi serva Italia". 3. You are absolutely right in stating that the major promoters of Italian unifications have been the elites, but that's common to most such historical events.
- semiinfinitely 11mo agono wonder they named an SSX tricky stage after him
- davidw 11mo agoThere's a small town in Oregon named after him.
- titanomachy 11mo agoAnd a huge provincial park (and mountain) near Vancouver, BC.
- 0xCAP 11mo agoAs a Neapolitan, I spit on his face everytime I see it depicted somewhere.