Garibaldi Thousand Expedition

The Expedition of the Thousand was Giuseppe Garibaldi’s volunteer campaign to intervene in Sicily’s struggle against Bourbon rule and advance Italian unification. Its journey from Quarto through Marsala and Palermo to Naples turned a proposed outside intervention into a decisive political campaign, but the new national order did not resolve Sicily’s subordination.

Causes and Political Setting

Sicilian unrest had been smoldering beneath the surface, renewed by clandestine publicity and several failed attempts at popular uprising. Francesco Crispi brought together revolutionary hopes and the calculations of nobles and intellectuals: while some sought to involve Victor Emmanuel II, king of Sardinia, in freeing the island from Bourbon rule, Crispi proposed that Giuseppe Garibaldi support Sicilian rebels through an external insurrection, with Italian unity as its eventual aim.

To persuade Garibaldi, Crispi claimed that an insurrection had already begun in Palermo. The claim referred to the Gancia revolt, which Crispi had directed from April 4 to 18, 1860. The expedition therefore set out amid both real revolutionary activity and a strategic presentation of events designed to secure support for intervention.

Route and Campaign

Without the king’s explicit backing, Garibaldi and the Thousand sailed from Quarto on May 5. The volunteers, distinguished by their red shirts, 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, explicitly linking the campaign’s immediate authority to a wider national project.

The force marched on Palermo on May 28 and was welcomed there as liberators. It subsequently reached Naples on September 7. The campaign thus extended beyond support for a Sicilian revolt: its route carried the expedition into the political center of the south and made its advance part of the broader process of Italian unification.

Unification and Its Aftermath

On October 26, the meeting between Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel II at Teano marked the beginning of the Kingdom of Italy. The expedition’s advance had helped bring the revolutionary campaign and the king’s national project into the same political settlement.

That settlement, however, imposed rather than accommodated the new state’s terms in the south. Officials from the Kingdom of Sardinia extended their legislative, economic, fiscal, and trading systems to southern Italy and Sicily without adapting them and refused compromise. Nobles resented the loss of privileges and cultural identity, while ordinary people continued to face an economy with difficult conditions and no apparent prospect of improvement. The campaign’s liberating promise therefore ends in a sharp reversal: Sicily is once again described as a conquered land.