Giuseppe Garibaldi–Colonel Pallavicino

The relationship between Giuseppe Garibaldi and Colonel Pallavicino is defined by a paradoxical encounter at Aspromonte: Pallavicino’s soldiers fired on Garibaldi, wounding him in the foot and bringing him under control, but Garibaldi responded to the Colonel with warmth and thanks. Pallavicino later understood the clash not simply as an act against his adversary, but as a necessary intervention that checked Garibaldi’s followers and helped preserve the unsettled political compromise between the old order and the new Kingdom of Italy.

The encounter at Aspromonte

The episode is recalled at a ball hosted by the Prince of Ponteleone, where the arrival of Colonel Pallavicino calls up the recent events at Aspromonte. The Prince’s praise of the Colonel carries several meanings at once: it can sound like admiration for his tact in firing on Garibaldi, for the skill of his military dispositions, or for having stopped and captured the General. The layered compliment reflects the political ambiguity of the encounter itself. Pallavicino had acted against the celebrated leader of the expedition from Marsala, but his success also helped contain a crisis that threatened the new state.

At the ball, the Colonel appears in a well-padded uniform, with epaulettes, chains, spurs, and a plumed hat. His elegant manners include the ceremonious hand-kissing for which he has become known. To the women whose hands he kisses, the gesture recalls the widely discussed scene after the fighting: Garibaldi lying wounded beneath a chestnut tree on a Calabrian hillside, while Pallavicino bowed and showed him respect. The drawing-room recollection turns a military confrontation into a public ritual, but it does not erase the bullet or the wound behind the ceremony.

Why Pallavicino ordered his men to fire

In conversation with Don Fabrizio, Pallavicino explains that he had written orders to carry out and believed his position on the mountain left little room for hesitation. He describes facing several hundred of Garibaldi’s men, among them people he regarded as fanatics or professional agitators. He says he was relieved that his instructions to open fire accorded with his own judgment: without them, he believed, the crowd might have overwhelmed his soldiers and himself. He also feared that such a defeat could invite French or Austrian intervention and imperil the Kingdom of Italy, whose unification he regarded as astonishingly precarious.

Pallavicino presents the shooting as both a military decision and a political restraint. In his account, Garibaldi’s armed followers included men using the General for purposes that might be generous in intention but were inept in effect. He distinguishes them from the men who had landed with Garibaldi at Marsala, saying that some of the later followers sought to make Italy by repeating the failures of 1848. This is Pallavicino’s own assessment, not an independently confirmed account of every participant’s motives. It reveals how he understood his duty: firing on Garibaldi could stop the immediate danger while also preventing the General’s cause from being commandeered by people Pallavicino distrusted.

Garibaldi’s response and the Colonel’s respect

After Pallavicino’s men disarmed Garibaldi’s followers, Pallavicino approached the wounded General and made the gesture of deference that later attracted comment. Garibaldi shook his hand warmly and thanked him. Pallavicino stresses the apparent contradiction: the General had just been shot in the foot, yet showed no simple hostility toward the man who had ordered the firing. The Colonel takes that response as evidence that Garibaldi recognized what had happened around him.

Pallavicino interprets Garibaldi’s gratitude as directed not toward the injury itself, but toward the exposure of his followers’ bluster, cowardice, and obscure intrigues. That interpretation belongs to Pallavicino, who presents Garibaldi as the one genuinely decent figure among the people gathered on the mountainside. He describes the General as vulnerable and childlike despite his beard and age, and admits that he felt moved by having had to shoot him. The encounter therefore complicates the roles of enemy and hero: Pallavicino is the man who wounds Garibaldi, but also the officer who recognizes and honors him; Garibaldi is the defeated commander, but in Pallavicino’s memory he retains a personal dignity that his followers lack.

Public ceremony and political meaning

The hand-kissing and formal deference continue after the fighting, becoming part of how the encounter is remembered. Pallavicino insists that his courtesies were genuine, not empty performance. He regards sentiment and ceremonial respect as useful political acts in Italy, where the newly united country needs gestures capable of bridging antagonism. At the ball, however, his polished retelling also makes the episode a story about his own judgment and military skill. Its courtesy does not cancel the violence; it gives the violence a public interpretation.

Pallavicino’s account links the shooting to a larger fear that unity has not produced political cohesion. He describes a country divided among competing regional interests and anticipates that the red-shirted forces may return, followed in turn by other political factions. The intervention at Aspromonte thus appears as a temporary containment, not a resolution. Its immediate result was Garibaldi’s wounding and capture; in Pallavicino’s reasoning, it also checked a dangerous following and guarded the Kingdom from intervention and collapse. Yet the Colonel’s own warning that fixed stars are fixed only in appearance undercuts any assurance that the settlement will last. The relationship remains bound to this tension: mutual recognition between two opponents, set within a political order whose survival neither man’s gestures can guarantee.