Expedition of the Thousand (1860)

The Expedition of the Thousand (1860) was Giuseppe Garibaldi’s volunteer campaign in Sicily, joining a long struggle against Bourbon rule to the larger project of Italian unification. Its landing and advance helped the island’s insurgents seize Palermo and overthrow Bourbon control, but the expedition’s promise of liberation sat uneasily beside what followed: after unification, Sicily again experienced government from outside the island, this time under the institutions of the Kingdom of Sardinia.

Causes and political setting

Sicily’s revolutionary unrest did not begin with Garibaldi’s volunteers. Bourbon centralization had extinguished earlier aspirations to restore an independent Kingdom of Sicily, including those raised during the 1820 revolt, and resistance persisted through secret networks, political writing, and failed uprisings. In 1848, the island’s revolt briefly established a revolutionary government; its defeat sent many of its leaders into exile, but did not end their opposition to Bourbon rule.

By 1860, Francesco Crispi sought to bring together revolutionary action and the support of the wider Italian national movement. He proposed that Giuseppe Garibaldi undertake an external insurrection: volunteers would assist Sicilian rebels, with the eventual aim of uniting Italy. To persuade Garibaldi, Crispi claimed that an insurrection had already begun in Palermo, referring to the Gancia revolt that he had directed from April 4 to 18. The expedition thus arose from a deliberate connection between local resistance and a national political objective, rather than from a military landing considered in isolation.

That connection also reflected different political calculations. Revolutionary unrest and clandestine publicity sustained the independence cause, while parts of the nobility and intellectual middle classes preferred to involve Victor Emmanuel II, king of Sardinia, in ending Bourbon rule. Garibaldi’s campaign offered a way to combine these forces: an armed intervention in support of Sicilian rebels that could also advance Italian unification.

The expedition and its advance

Garibaldi and the Expedition of the Thousand, a volunteer force identified by its red shirts, sailed from Quarto on May 5 without the king’s explicit support. They 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 proclamation made the expedition’s double allegiance plain: it claimed authority in Sicily while invoking the Sardinian king as the figure in whose name the campaign proceeded.

The force then marched toward Palermo. At the same time, Garibaldi’s name and actions began to reshape the atmosphere in the capital. He had called the island’s people to arms and occupied Alcamo and Partinico; yet the memory of the Gancia revolt’s suppression and the death of Rosolino Pilo fighting at San Martino delle Scale kept the danger of revolt close at hand. For Vincenzo Florio, uncertainty was immediate: he went to the Royal Bank with a bag and a decision, leaving his nephew Ignazio in Via dei Materassai because he did not want him involved.

As Garibaldi approached, Palermo was divided between expectation and fear. Some families prepared to barricade themselves at home, while young men took up rifles. Residents faced a choice between going out to meet the red shirts and the Sicilian peasants who had joined them, or attempting to defend the city against an assault that seemed unlikely to be stopped. The approaching force was therefore not received by a city with a single, settled view of its arrival.

The capture of Palermo

On May 23, Garibaldi’s men reached Palermo by way of the mountains rather than by sea. Residents watched the clashes from the city as cannon fire and gunshots marked the approach. Four days later, a group of attackers stormed Porta Termini, Palermo’s most vulnerable entrance. Bourbon forces then shelled the city from the sea, but, after fighting in Via Maqueda, the city was conquered.

The entry of the red-shirted volunteers did not erase the divisions exposed by the siege. Some residents joined the arriving crowd; others watched with suspicion. The streets had been obstructed by furniture used for barricades, and the advance left them to be cleared. Amid visible signs of upheaval, people waved flags and hid their family jewels. Liberation and apprehension occupied the same streets, just as the city’s families had been divided over how to respond.

Palermo’s capture formed part of the campaign’s wider success. Garibaldi entered Naples on September 7. On October 26, his meeting with Victor Emmanuel II at Teano marked the beginning of the Kingdom of Italy. In the sequence from landing, to dictatorship proclaimed in Sicily, to the taking of Palermo and the meeting at Teano, a volunteer expedition became an instrument of national political change.

Outcomes and limits of unification

The campaign helped bring Bourbon rule in Sicily to an end and made the island central to the formation of a united Italy. Yet the political result did not satisfy every expectation attached to the struggle. 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 circumstances, and refused compromise. Nobles resented the loss of privileges and cultural identity, while the people continued to face an economy working under difficult conditions with little apparent prospect of improvement.

The expedition’s significance therefore rests in both its achievement and its aftermath. Garibaldi’s advance gave force to the unionist objective of the Sicilian revolt, but the new state’s centralized policies left many islanders feeling that the change of rulers had not delivered self-government or economic improvement. Sicily, in the narrative’s concluding judgment, had once again become a conquered land.