Anita Garibaldi: The Woman Everyone Else Got to Describe
Twelve days after giving birth, she was on a horse.
The camp was surrounded. Her son Menotti was maybe two weeks old, tied against her chest or laid across the saddle in front of her, and Anita Garibaldi spurred a fiery horse straight through the enemy’s fire and out the other side. A bullet went through her hat and burned a lock of her hair.
She was unharmed. So was the baby.
Now here is the thing I need you to hold onto for the next fifteen hundred words, because it changes everything about how you read this: the only reason you know that story is that her husband wrote it down, in his memoirs, twenty-three years later.
Almost every sentence anyone has ever told you about Anita Garibaldi came out of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s pen.
The Girl Her Mother Wanted Out of the House
She was born Ana Maria de Jesus Ribeiro in 1821, near Laguna in southern Brazil, third of ten children in a poor family of Azorean descent. Her father was a tropeiro, a cattle drover.
She was, by every account, difficult. Unruly. Too much.
So in August 1835, on or around her fourteenth birthday, her mother pressured her into marrying a twenty-five-year-old shoemaker named Manuel Duarte de Aguiar. Anita told a friend she did not want to. She went anyway.
Four years. No children. Then in 1839 Duarte was called into the national guard, and after that he simply evaporates from the historical record. Nobody has ever found his death certificate. Nobody knows what became of him.
Which means that when Anita Garibaldi married Giuseppe Garibaldi in Montevideo in 1842, it is entirely possible she was still legally married to another man, and had been living openly with a foreign revolutionary for three years.
Modern retellings call this romantic. In 1839, in Catholic Brazil, applied to a woman, there was a different word for it, and everybody knew what it was.
“You Must Be Mine”
Here is the scene as it has been told for a hundred and eighty years.
Garibaldi, an Italian exile fighting for a breakaway republic in southern Brazil, is standing on the deck of his ship at Laguna. He puts a telescope to his eye and sweeps the shore. He finds a young woman.
He goes to find her. He looks at her. He says: You must be mine.
It is the most famous sentence in Anita Garibaldi’s life.
He said it. He wrote it. He published it. In his own memoir. About himself.
I am not saying it did not happen. I am saying that the single most quoted moment of this woman’s existence is a line a man attributed to himself, decades later, in a book that made him internationally famous. We have no idea what she said. We have no idea what she thought. We have no letters. She could not write.
She began learning to read and write a few months before she died. She got as far as being able to sign her name.
What She Actually Did
Strip out the telescope and the romance and look at the record.
She boarded the Rio Pardo in October 1839 and went to war. The Ragamuffin War, the Guerra dos Farrapos, a decade-long republican revolt against the Brazilian Empire.
She fought at sea. At Laguna she was aboard when the fighting started and she stayed, working the guns, and when the order came to abandon the vessel she refused to leave it.
She was captured at Curitibanos. She got permission to search the battlefield for her husband’s body among the dead, did not find him, and used the opportunity to escape. She stole a horse. She rode.
She came to the Canoas river, flooded and running like a cataract, hundreds of yards across, with Brazilian troops firing at her from the bank. She went in. She held onto the horse’s mane and swam it.
Eight days. No food. She rejoined the rebel column.
Garibaldi, telling this story to a room of men later, said only: my wife is valiant.
Then Uruguay, and another war, and the Italian Legion in their red shirts. Four children. Menotti, Rosita who died as a toddler, Teresita, Ricciotti. She bore all of them in the middle of campaigns.
Then 1848 happened, and Europe caught fire, and they went home to his country.
Rome
In February 1849 the Roman Republic was declared. The Pope fled. For a few months an actual republic ran the eternal city, and then France sent an army to put the Pope back.
Anita was in Nice with the children and Garibaldi’s mother. She was six months pregnant. She had malaria.
She left the four children with her mother-in-law, slipped past enemy spies, entered Rome on July 26, and found her husband at the Villa Spada, where the defense was collapsing.
And then she did the thing that I cannot stop thinking about.
She was sick, pregnant, and starving, and she hid all of it. She endured the retreat without a word of complaint, deliberately, so that Giuseppe would have no reason to send her back.
Read that again. She was dying, and she performed wellness, so that a man would not make her leave the war.
Four thousand of them fled Rome. They were hunted across Italy by the French and the Austrians, on foot and on horseback, over mountains, hiding, eating what they could find. She got worse. They carried her by skiff through the Comacchio marshes and then on an old mattress to a farmhouse at Mandriole, near Ravenna.
She died there on August 4, 1849, at 7:45 in the evening, in his arms.
She was twenty-seven years old.
They Would Not Let Her Rest
Garibaldi was a hunted man. His officer convinced him to run. They buried her fast, in a shallow grave, in sand.
Days later a dog dug her up.
And then it got worse, in a way I did not expect when I started researching this.
The Papal authorities took her body. They performed an autopsy. And they announced to the world that Anita Garibaldi’s corpse showed unequivocal signs of strangulation, and that Giuseppe Garibaldi had choked his pregnant wife to death because she was slowing down his escape.
Two brothers who managed the farm were arrested and charged with her murder. They were released five days later, once it was established that she had arrived at Mandriole already burning with a malignant fever. The doctor who had attended her denied the strangulation finding outright.
It was propaganda. It was a lie manufactured by a state that had just been overthrown by her husband, using her body as the raw material.
Her remains were exhumed and moved repeatedly over the following decade. She was a political object before she was cold.
This is the same machinery that gave us Ona Judge, a woman whose own words survive almost entirely inside the paperwork of the men hunting her.
The Statue
Eighty-three years later, in 1932, Benito Mussolini needed something.
He needed to graft his Blackshirts onto Garibaldi’s Redshirts. Nineteen thirty-two was both the fiftieth anniversary of Garibaldi’s death and the tenth anniversary of the Fascist March on Rome, and the Vatican had just quietly asked Mussolini to take Giuseppe’s statue off the top of the Janiculum Hill.
Mussolini’s answer was to leave Giuseppe exactly where he was and put Anita up there too.
Her remains were transported to Rome. Five surviving veterans of Garibaldi’s army, old men now, carried her body wrapped in the Italian flag from Piazza Venezia up the hill. They interred her in the base of a bronze equestrian statue: Anita on a rearing horse, pistol raised.
And in her other arm, a baby.
Mussolini personally insisted on the baby. The sculptor had not planned one. The regime wanted motherhood in the frame, and so a woman who had ridden through gunfire with a two-week-old infant because she had no other choice was cast in bronze doing it forever, as an advertisement. The added weight threw the statue off balance. It requires a support strut to this day.
At the dedication, in front of the King and Queen, Mussolini praised her as the mother who protects her child, and as a warrior chasing the enemy, and said she had always reconciled the duties of motherhood with fighting at her husband’s side. He said almost nothing about what she was fighting for.
The crowd began chanting Duce.
She fought for a republic. Two of them. She was buried under a monument to a dictatorship, holding a child that the dictator put there.
The Point
Anita Garibaldi crossed a flooded river under fire holding a horse’s mane. She refused to abandon a burning ship. She rode out of an encirclement twelve days postpartum with a bullet through her hat. She hid a fatal illness so that nobody could send her home from a war.
And we cannot hear her voice, not once, not anywhere, because nobody taught her to write until she was dying, and by then the men who loved her and the men who hated her had already decided what she meant.
Every statue of her was commissioned by somebody who wanted something.
The horse was real. The river was real. The bullet was real.
Start there.
Related: Ona Judge, who we know mostly through the letters of the men pursuing her. And Gwendolyn Lizarraga, who got to speak for herself.
Learn More
Websites
- Garibaldi, Anita (c. 1821-1849), Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia, https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/garibaldi-anita-c-1821-1849, 2002
- The monument to Anita Garibaldi on the Janiculum Hill, Turismo Roma, https://www.turismoroma.it/en/places/monument-anita-garibaldi-janiculum-hill, n.d.
- Fascism and Historic Representation: The 1932 Garibaldian Celebrations, Claudio Fogu, Journal of Contemporary History 31(2), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/002200949603100206, 1996
Book
- Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero, Lucy Riall, Yale University Press, 2007. (The definitive scholarly account of how the Garibaldi myth was deliberately manufactured, which is precisely the problem with reading Anita’s life.)
Video / Show
- Camicie rosse (released in English as Anita Garibaldi), starring Anna Magnani as Anita, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044504/, 1952
A Note on Contested and Widely Oversimplified Claims
The sourcing problem is the story. Anita Garibaldi was illiterate for all but the last months of her life and left no writing of her own. The overwhelming majority of biographical detail, including the telescope, the “you must be mine” line, the ride with the newborn, and the bullet through the hat, comes from Giuseppe Garibaldi’s Memorie (1872), a self-consciously mythologising text written by a man who had become an international celebrity. Lucy Riall’s Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero documents how deliberately that image was constructed. None of this means the events did not happen. It means we are reading a legend written by an interested party, and the honest position is to say so.
Her first marriage is unresolved. She married Manuel Duarte de Aguiar in August 1835, at fourteen (some sources say fifteen). Accounts differ on whether he abandoned her, was conscripted, or whether she left him. His death certificate has never been found and nothing is known of him after 1839. Whether Anita was legally free to marry Garibaldi in 1842 cannot be established. Some historians suggest they married in Montevideo precisely because news of Duarte’s death had reached her; that is inference, not evidence.
She was 27 when she died, born 30 August 1821 and died 4 August 1849, twenty-six days short of her twenty-eighth birthday. Several reputable sources say 28. Some give her birth as “c. 1821” or place it at Morrinhos rather than Laguna.
The strangulation claim. After her body was discovered, Papal authorities conducted an autopsy and asserted signs of strangulation, alleging Garibaldi had murdered her. The Ravaglia brothers, who managed the Guiccioli farm, were arrested for murder and released within days when evidence showed she had arrived already gravely ill. The attending physician rejected the finding. Historians treat it as political fabrication. Cause of death is usually given as malaria compounded by exhaustion and starvation; typhoid is sometimes proposed. Her body was moved and exhumed multiple times over the following decade; counts vary, and sources disagree on whether the 1932 transfer to Rome came from Nice or Genoa.
Her military role should not be inflated. She fought, sailed, carried dispatches, and worked guns. The bronze reliefs on the Janiculum monument show her leading troops across the pampas, and later retellings sometimes upgrade her to a commander. Documentary evidence for independent command is thin. What is well attested is combat participation, extraordinary horsemanship, and physical endurance, which is quite enough.
“Heroine of Two Worlds” is a retrospective epithet, coined to mirror her husband’s “Hero of Two Worlds.” She was not called that in her lifetime.
The 1952 film’s authorship is itself disputed. Camicie rosse is credited to Goffredo Alessandrini, who was removed during production; Francesco Rosi and Franco Rossi are variously credited with completing it, and Anna Magnani is said to have exerted heavy control. Even the film about Anita Garibaldi has a fight over who gets to tell it.
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