The Battle of Aspromonte was the 1862 encounter in Calabria in which Piedmontese troops stopped Giuseppe Garibaldi’s march on Rome, routed his men, and wounded and captured him. Its importance in The Leopard lies not only in the end of the immediate campaign: remembered by Colonel Pallavicino at a ball, the clash becomes a test of military duty, personal reverence, and the compromises holding the new Kingdom of Italy together.

Background and Stakes

The confrontation grew out of the unfinished Risorgimento. The movement for Italian unification had gathered strength after the Napoleonic Wars and had already reached a crisis in 1848. In 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi had sailed from near Genoa with a thousand volunteers, landed at Marsala, defeated Bourbon troops at Calatafimi, and taken Palermo. After crossing to the mainland and entering Naples, he handed southern Italy over to King Victor Emmanuel and withdrew from public life. His 1862 attempt to march on Rome reopened the question of how far unification should proceed by revolutionary action.

Rome remained outside the new kingdom because the Papal States were occupied by troops of Napoleon III, whose presence was attributed to French domestic politics. Garibaldi’s advance therefore threatened to turn an unresolved political issue into a new conflict. The force opposing him was Piedmontese, representing the state-centered authority that had become the main leadership of unification. At Aspromonte, Italian troops confronted a popular revolutionary who had helped create the conditions for the kingdom they were now defending.

The Clash and Garibaldi’s Wounding

Pallavicino later described facing a force of a few hundred men on the Calabrian slopes. He recalled that some seemed fanatical and others like professional agitators, and said that he carried written orders to open fire. He also admitted that those orders accorded with his own feelings: he believed his soldiers would otherwise have been hacked to pieces. The encounter was thus presented as both obedience to command and a choice he considered necessary in the circumstances.

The firing routed Garibaldi’s men, and Garibaldi was wounded in the foot. Pallavicino said that his Bersaglieri disarmed the defeated force while its members cursed Garibaldi, the one man among them who had paid for the campaign with his own body. In the Colonel’s account, their anger exposed a split between Garibaldi’s personal authority and followers whom he believed were using that authority for their own, inept purposes. He associated those followers with figures such as Zambianchi and suggested that the Tuileries or Palazzo Farnese stood behind them; these were Pallavicino’s suspicions, not independently established facts in the episode.

Pallavicino’s Recollection

The novel brings the battle into view through a conversation at a ball. When the Prince of Ponteleone praises Pallavicino for what he did at Aspromonte, the compliment carries several meanings. It can sound like conventional praise for the tact and delicacy with which the Colonel treated Garibaldi after the shooting. It also recognizes the military skill of deploying his battalions at the right moment. Beneath both readings lies the political consequence: Pallavicino stopped, defeated, wounded, and captured the same adversary whom Bourbon commander Landi had failed to defeat at Calatafimi.

Pallavicino recounts that he approached the wounded Garibaldi beneath a chestnut tree and performed gestures of deference, including kneeling and kissing his hand. He says Garibaldi shook his hand warmly and thanked him in a low voice. Pallavicino understood this response not as gratitude for being shot, but as recognition that the clash had exposed the shortcomings of the men surrounding Garibaldi. The memory unsettles any simple division between victor and victim: the Colonel had fired on a man he sincerely admired, while the wounded leader, as Pallavicino remembered him, could acknowledge the political meaning of his defeat.

The Colonel insists that his courtesies were sincere. He remembers Garibaldi suffering in body and mind, and describes him as childlike despite his beard and wrinkles. The hand-kissing, bows, and expressions of respect that followed the battle were therefore more than social display in Pallavicino’s account. He regarded sentiment and ceremonial deference as politically useful, and saw his act of homage as a way of honoring the figure whose removal from the immediate struggle had helped save the kingdom. The novel’s ballroom setting sharpens the contrast: a defeated revolutionary is discussed amid polished manners, praise, and the rituals of the very society whose order the new state was negotiating.

Consequences and Political Meaning

The immediate consequence was the collapse of Garibaldi’s 1862 advance on Rome. The wider consequence, in the book’s historical framing, was that Italian government forces ended the revolutionary phase of the Risorgimento. The unification process reached its official culmination when Rome was declared Italy’s capital in 1870. Aspromonte therefore marks a transition from revolutionary action toward state consolidation, though the intervention did not resolve the divisions within the newly united country.

Pallavicino’s reflections at the ball make that instability explicit. He describes a mainland still divided after unification: Turin was unwilling to give up its position as capital; Milan judged the administration inferior to the Austrian one; Florence feared losing its works of art; and Naples lamented the industries it had lost. In Sicily, he sensed an unnamed, irrational disaster growing. He predicted that the disappearance of the red shirts would not end political upheaval, since forces of other colors might rise and red shirts return again. His image of a fixed star that is fixed only in appearance echoes the event’s larger irony: the battle checked a revolutionary advance and protected a political compromise, but neither the clash nor the new kingdom could make the future secure.