Malta post-Garibaldi

Abstract

Like Mazzini, a kindred spirit and mentor, Garibaldi is not just a personality: he is a symbol, a movement, an inspiration, an identity tag. In commemoration of the bicentenary of his birth, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura and the University of Malta jointly hosted a fitting conference (which I had the honour to chair and address) entitled Garibaldi e it Risorgimento. Garibaldi's contribution to Italian unification has to be seen on an international no less than a 'national' canvas, especially in Europe from the Austrian borders to the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond, as Professor Sergio La Salvia showed. There were also internal differences within the Risorgimento movement itself; moderates and democrats, monarchists and republicans, clericals and anticlericals, with Garibaldi falling in between two stools as he eventually 'converted', for pragmatic purposes; from republican to monarchist. There were countless variables in diplomacy and war, the onetime 'liberal' Pio Nono and the Papacy, the shifting role of France, Austria and Naples, the various states and principalities, and particularly Britain, a constitutional monarchy which supported the movement partly for its own ends, but which was also a country whose social and political institutions - parliament, suffrage, education - were much admired by the rebels.