Anita Garibaldi

This book is the first complete and accurate biography of the remarkable life and revolutionary career of Anita Garibaldi. Illiterate and poor, the daughter of a herdsman in 19th century Brazil, Anita lifted herself from a life of obscurity to one that is the stuff of romance and adventure. When she and a young Italian exile by the name of Captain Giuseppe Garibaldi met in 1839, they ran off (she was married), joined the cause of founding a Brazilian republic and went on to lead the defense of Montevideo from an Argentine siege-just one episode among many in their crusade for democratic ideas: representative governmemnt, fair taxation. political and personal freedom–at a time of immense revolutionary upheaval. She fought side-by-side with Captain then General Garibaldi while giving birth to four of their children and organizing and recruiting men and women to the republic’s cause, both insouth America and Europe. And it was Anita who taught Garibaldi the all-important guerrilla ways of the gauchos, which served him first in defending the Roman Republic of 1849 and then in ousting the peninsula of Austria in 1860. Returning to Italy in 1848 to fight for a united republican Italy, as revolution swept throughout Europe, Anita and Garibaldi were tragically separated by her untimely death the following year. Garibaldi went on to ultimate fame as the father of modern Italy-while Anita’s story drifted into the mists of legend. This work brings life to an amazing, important, revolutionary woman..