Garibaldi Ladies' Man
Party Guy
In one of the more exhilarating moments in Giuseppe Garibaldi’s memoirs he recounts his first meeting with Anita – the lady usually identified as the principal love interest in his adventurous life, or “main squeeze,” as might have been said at one time.
“I greeted her, finally, and said: ‘You must be mine.’ I didn’t speak much Portuguese and articulated these daring words in Italian. I was however magnetic in my insolence.”
Anita went for this fern bar pick-up line and after a dramatically short courtship became in fact “his”. Whether it was the silver tongue or Garibaldi’s trademark red shirt, she spent the rest of her life paying for that moment of weakness in one way or the other.
Who exactly she was depends on whose historiography you’re looking at. For the anti-papal republicans, she was a sort of female Che Guevara, a freedom-loving amazon, a heroine quite as courageous in battle as her companion. The propagandists loyal to the Pope instead usually managed to get a word like “puttana” in there somewhere since she was, ah, kind of married to someone else for much of the time she and the Hero of Two Worlds were together.
Ana Maria de Jesus Ribeiro, in art “Anita,” had in fact at an early age married a certain Manuel Duarte de Aguiar, a Brazilian, as was she. Poor Mr. de Aguiar later got a terrible press from his wife’s admirers, who variously describe him as a layabout shoemaker, a drunk and a monarchist. They agree, without any evident proof, that the marriage must not have ever been consummated.
However that may be, some years later the unhappy de Aguiar passed to a better life and she was free to become Mrs. Garibaldi, which she did in 1842, giving a legitimate father to their three children.
The couple never had a stable home and the two passed the rest of their life together travelling or, more accurately, on the run. Anita died in 1849 in slightly mysterious circumstances while hiding from both the Austrian and the Papal police in a farmhouse near Ravenna. She was 28.
At this point Anita Garibaldi became the “Mother of the (Italian) Republic,” a sort of lively Martha Washington. Her story ends there,
principally with an impressive monument in Rome’s Gianicolo park, positioned partly to piss off the Vatican, and occasional citations as a model for Italian womanhood.
Garibaldi though, who was something of a party guy in his free time, did not hang up his stirrups. There is a certain historical piquancy about the “Garibaldi slept here” slabs on the side of quite a number of Italian buildings, and there were two more wives.
The most interesting of these marital stories – and the sleaziest, so we will go into some detail – was the union between Garibaldi and the nobly-born Marchesina Giuseppina Raimondi of Fino Mornasco, near Como in Northern Italy.
The tale begins in 1859 in the countryside around Varese, a place somewhat to the north and west of Milan. Garibaldi was, rather as usual, engaged in combat with Austrian troops and was struck by the spirit and possibly the features of the 17-year old Marchesina Raimondi, who had courageously passed the enemy lines alone in her carriage to bring him a message. A “tender friendship” sprung up between the two, culminating in marriage a few months later, on the 24th of January 1860. Garibaldi was 52.
Immediately after the marriage ceremony though, literally at the door of the chapel, he received an urgent letter detailing the young Marchesina’s lively sentimental relationship with one of his staff officers. She denied nothing and evil words flew, as did a chair. She was a “puttana” and he, a “brutal soldier.” The two, history says, never met again.
Garibaldi later had these not very gentlemanly observations to make about the whole matter, presumably in the course of seeking an annulment: “I had some copulations with her, but toward the 20th (of January, a few days before the marriage) she fell ill and there was no further carnal contact. I feel, since there was no further copulation, that the marriage can be considered as ‘non consumato’.”
The marriage was annulled 19 years later, in 1879, allowing Garibaldi to make an honest woman of Francesca Armosino, who had in the meantime given him another two children.