by Carlin Romano

The Philadelphia Inquirer (MCT)

— 12 October 2007

Due biografie a confronto:

Garibaldi un vero eroe o una montatura storica?

Garibaldi: Citizen of the World Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero

by Alfonso Scirocco by Lucy Riall

Princeton University Press Yale University Press

August 2007, 456 pages, $35.00 June 2007, 496 pages, $35.00

cover art

The second Monday in October makes every year Columbus year. But this bicentennial of the birth of Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-82), the global freedom fighter most responsible for the 1861 unification of Italy, means that an Italian of far greater import gets the main camera eye.

These two major new studies assess not only the most famous Italian of the 19th century, not only, according to Russian thinker Alexander Herzen, a “classic hero, a character from The Aeneid, but also a man who once was, according to Englishman Philip Gilbert Hamerton in 1870, “the most famous man on the planet.”

Think “the 19th century’s Che Guevera.” Garibaldi, unlike Che, thought people should be free once he freed them—not shackled by new ideological dictates. Garibaldi also struck observers as unusually selfless. He refused to accept payment for his services, only briefly wielded political power, famously surrendered the southern half of Italy he’d conquered for the greater good of the nation, and eventually retreated, Cincinnatus-like, to his farm on the island of Caprera, off Sardinia.

Of these two books, Garibaldi: Citizen of the World, by Italian historian Alfonso Scirocco, is the traditional bio that tells you who Garibaldi was, what he did, and why he’s revered. By contrast, Lucy Riall, professor of modern European history at the University of London, believes 19th-century media pumped him up to mythological dimensions, so she shrinks him back to a manufactured celeb as heroic at PR as at warfare.

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Scirocco narrates Garibaldi’s life with appropriate respect, if not reverence. At his death, after all, Garibaldi stood for many still widely admired ideals: universal free education and suffrage, a proto-European-Union or world government, racial and gender equality, elimination of the death penalty.

Riall, however, insists that Garibaldi, with an initial push by Mazzini, largely invented himself as a hero, cleverly managing his public image through a “sophisticated propaganda exercise.” She writes of the “staged” quality of Garibaldi’s ostensibly humble life, concluding that “image and reality were effectively indistinguishable” (which seems to acknowledge the authenticity of the reality). For her, the Garibaldi myth owes almost everything to the endless heroic images and accounts of him that flooded Europe.

After finishing Scirocco’s account of Garibaldi’s life, the great insurgent emerges as traditionally understood: enormously admirable, patriotic, nonmaterialistic, generous, a charismatic leader who typically refused honors.

After finishing Riall’s unquestionably provocative book, all its lithographs and media paraphernalia don’t change one’s fundamental opinion of Garibaldi, except to confirm that he grasped how people viewed him. Her claims that Garibaldi “artificially constructed” his charisma, like her assertion that late in life he sought to make his weak physical condition a “symbol of national suffering,” falls flat. What others made of Garibaldi didn’t contradict who he was.

It appears to mean nothing to Riall that intellectuals and artists as shrewd as Ivan Turgenev and Sir Walter Scott idolized Garibaldi. She attributes insincere character to Garibaldi even though virtually everyone who knew him swore by his sincerity. Her unargued ulterior conviction seems to be that Garibaldi was too good to be true.

But as the novelist and Italianista Tim Parks pointed out, some contemporary historians think Garibaldi’s basic goodness was true. A.J.P. Taylor described Garibaldi as “the only wholly admirable figure in modern history.”

Sometimes a biographer and subject wind up temperamentally mismatched. Garibaldi survives Riall’s take-down just as he eluded enough bullets to kill a regiment. Advice to professor Riall: Do that next book on a certain Italian who sailed the ocean blue in fourteen hundred ninety-two. http://www.popmatters.com/pm/books/reviews/49687/garibaldi-citizen-of-the-world-by-alfonso-scirocco/

PER RIFLETTERE SULLA BIOGRAFIA:

Dopo aver letto l’articolo, rispondi in Italiano:

1. Cosa pensa Scirocco di Garibaldi?

2. Cosa pensa Riall di Garibaldi?

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3. Qual è l’opinione di Romano sui due scrittori?

4. Secondo te, come possiamo spiegare due interpretazioni così opposte dello stesso personaggio?

5. La revisione storica si riferisce ad una tendenza attuale di reinterpretare fatti e personaggi storici attraverso nuove chiavi di lettura e quindi la tendenza a ricostruire la mappa storica di “buoni e cattivi”.Conosci altri casi di revisione storica?

6. Quali pensieri e riflessioni ti suggerisce la seguente vignetta?