Anita Garibaldi

Vocation

Brazilian revolutionary, the wife and comrade-in-arms of Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi. Their partnership epitomized the spirit of the 19th century's age of romanticism and revolutionary liberalism. She met Garibaldi, an Italian nationalist revolutionary, while he was fighting on behalf of a separatist republic in southern Brazil (the Ragamuffin War). She joined him on his ship in October 1839. A month later, she received her baptism of fire in the battles of Imbituba and Laguna, fighting at the side of her lover. A skilled horsewoman, Anita is said to have taught Giuseppe about the gaucho culture of the plains of southern Brazil, Uruguay, and northern Argentina. In the Battle of Curirtibanos, the pregnant Anita was separated from Garibaldi and captured by the enemy group. She escaped on horseback and spent four days wandering without food or drink in the woods, until she found a group of people who offered her food. Finally able to contact the rebels she was reunited with Garibaldi in Vacaria. A few months later in Vacaria their first child was born, Menotti (1840-1903), who was born with a skull deformity due to a blow that Anita received when she fell from her horse in flight from her captors. Anita and Giuseppe were married on March 26, 1842, in Montevideo where they had three more children: Rosita (1843-1845), Teresita (1845-1903 ) and Ricciotti (1847-1924). In 1841, the couple had moved to the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo, where Giuseppe Garibaldi worked as a trader and schoolmaster before taking command of the Uruguayan fleet in 1842 and raising an "Italian Legion" for that country's war against Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas. Anita participated in Garibaldi's 1847 defense of Montevideo against Argentina and his Uruguayan allied former dictator Manuel Oribe. Anita accompanied Garibaldi and his red-shirted legionnaires back to Italy to join in the revolutions of 1848, where he fought against the forces of the Austrian Empire. In February 1849, Garibaldi joined in the defense of the newly-proclaimed Roman Republic against Neapolitan and French intervention aimed at restoration of the Papal State. Anita joined her husband in the defense of Rome, which fell to a French siege on June 30. She then fled from French and Austrian troops with the Garibaldian Legion. Pregnant and sick from malaria, she died on August 4, 1849 at 7:45 pm in the arms of her husband at Guiccioli Farm in Mandriole, near Ravenna, Italy, during the tragic retreat. Link to Wikipedia biography