The Expedition of the Thousand was the 1860 campaign led by Giuseppe Garibaldi that brought volunteer fighters to Sicily and helped overturn Bourbon control of the island. Set in motion by clandestine opposition and a strategy linking Sicilian revolt to Italian unification, it culminates in the capture of Palermo and Garibaldi’s march north. The narrative gives the expedition a double consequence: it opens the way to a united Italy, but the new state’s institutions are imposed on Sicily without adjustment, leaving the island once again treated as conquered territory.

Causes and Political Setting

Sicilian unrest had continued beneath the surface after the failed revolution of 1848. Revolutionary publicity and unsuccessful attempts at popular revolt kept opposition alive, while many nobles and members of the intellectual middle classes sought to enlist Victor Emmanuel II, king of Sardinia, in freeing Sicily from Bourbon rule. The desired intervention joined two aims: ending Bourbon subjection and uniting Italy.

Francesco Crispi supplied a strategy for bringing these currents together. He proposed to Garibaldi an external uprising that would support Sicilian rebels and ultimately advance unification. To persuade the general, Crispi claimed that revolt had already begun in Palermo. The Gancia revolt, which Crispi had steered from April 4 to 18, 1860, provided the basis for that claim, although the account describes it as an attempted uprising rather than presenting it as an already successful rebellion.

The expedition thus emerged from a convergence of local resistance and a broader national project. Its volunteers were not acting solely within an island revolt: Crispi’s plan made their intervention a route toward unification, while Sicilian opposition supplied the immediate political setting in which Garibaldi could land and advance.

Landing and March Across Sicily

Garibaldi and the Expedition of the Thousand sailed from Quarto on May 5, 1860. The fighters were volunteers distinguished by their red shirts. The expedition proceeded without explicit support from the king of Sardinia, a circumstance that underlined the distance between the campaign’s popular and revolutionary initiative and formal royal authorization.

The force landed at Marsala on May 11 and reached Salemi on May 14. There Garibaldi proclaimed himself dictator of Sicily in the name of Victor Emmanuel II. The declaration connected the island’s immediate struggle against Bourbon rule to the authority and political future represented by the Sardinian king. From Salemi, the volunteers marched toward Palermo, which they reached on May 28 and where they were welcomed as liberators. They later advanced to Naples, entering the city on September 7.

The campaign’s progress is set against the longer histories of trade and foreign power that had shaped Sicily. In earlier decades, Palermo’s position as a free port had drawn merchants and sailors from across Europe and beyond, with goods arriving through British, French, and Mediterranean routes. The expedition’s movement across the island therefore takes place in a setting already connected to external powers and wider networks; political sovereignty, like commerce, is never presented as an isolated local matter.

Palermo: Division, Assault, and Capture

As Garibaldi approached, Palermo was divided between anticipation and fear. The city had to reckon with whether to welcome the Red Shirts and the picciotti—the peasants who had joined Garibaldi and helped at the Battle of Calatafimi—or prepare for a defense that seemed unlikely to succeed. Households themselves were split: some families barricaded their homes, with women reciting rosaries and men waiting behind closed shutters, while many young men took up rifles and prepared to fight.

On May 23, Garibaldi’s men reached the city gates by way of the mountains rather than the sea. Residents saw dust from the clashes and heard cannon fire and gunshots. Four days later, the attackers stormed Porta Termini, Palermo’s most vulnerable entrance. Bourbon forces then tried to bombard the city from the sea, but the attempt came too late. Fighting in Via Maqueda preceded the city’s capture.

The arrival of the red-shirted fighters brought both public celebration and private caution. Young people and others joined a crowd speaking Italian in varied accents; there were embraces, wary looks, and waving flags, even as families concealed their valuables. Furniture used to barricade the streets was cleared, exposing the city’s façades. In the narrative, Palermo’s capture is not only a military outcome but a change experienced in streets, homes, and public allegiance, with relief and uncertainty present together.

From Conquest to Unification

After Palermo, Garibaldi’s advance continued to Naples. On October 26, his meeting with Victor Emmanuel II at Teano marked the beginning of the Kingdom of Italy. The expedition’s military movement had thus helped transform an island campaign into a process of national state formation.

The aftermath complicates any simple account of liberation. After unification, officials from the Kingdom of Sardinia extended their legislative, economic, fiscal, and trading systems to southern Italy and Sicily without adapting them to local conditions or allowing compromise. Nobles resented the loss of privileges and cultural identity, while ordinary people continued to face an economy with difficult conditions and little apparent prospect of improvement. Sicily’s political transfer did not resolve the material pressures affecting the island.

The novel’s historical framing consequently sets the expedition’s success against the limits of its promised change. Garibaldi’s campaign helps end Bourbon subjection and begins the Kingdom of Italy, yet the new national order reproduces a relation of domination in a different form. The closing judgment is that Sicily is once again a conquered land: the language and symbols of liberation coexist with the extension of outside institutions and persistent local discontent.