The Battle of Calatafimi was a victory for Giuseppe Garibaldi’s Redshirts over Bourbon troops in 1860, during the campaign that brought Sicily within reach of the Italian unification movement. Beyond its place in the campaign, the battle became a measure of the changing political fortunes of Garibaldi’s revolution: a later account contrasts the Bourbon failure to stop him at Calatafimi with his eventual defeat and capture by Italian government forces at Aspromonte.

Background and Campaign

When the book opens, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies is nearing its end. Ferdinand II has just died, and the movement for Italian unification, the Risorgimento, has gathered force after an earlier crisis in 1848. In early May 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi sails from near Genoa with a thousand volunteers, acting against Cavour’s wishes and aiming to wrest Sicily from the Bourbons.

The Redshirts land at Marsala and defeat Bourbon troops at Calatafimi. The account places the battle early in a rapid advance: within three weeks, Garibaldi’s forces have occupied Palermo. The victory is thus presented as a step in a campaign that moves from the island to the mainland, rather than as an isolated engagement.

Course and Immediate Consequences

After the capture of Palermo, Garibaldi gathers more volunteers, crosses to the mainland, advances up the coast, and enters Naples in triumph. In the autumn, Bourbon armies are defeated on the Volturno, and Piedmontese forces besiege Francis II in Gaeta. Garibaldi then hands southern Italy to Victor Emmanuel II and withdraws to private life.

Plebiscites follow, with the states of the peninsula agreeing to join the new united kingdom except for the Papal States, which are occupied by troops of Napoleon III. The Calatafimi victory therefore belongs to a chain of military and political changes that carries the campaign beyond Sicily and brings the Bourbon state to its close; it is not, by itself, the completion of unification.

Retrospective Meaning

The battle acquires a second significance when Colonel Pallavicino is praised at a later gathering for his actions at Aspromonte. The narrator distinguishes the public compliment from its political implication. On one level, the praise concerns Pallavicino’s military dispositions and his ability to succeed against Giuseppe Garibaldi where Landi had failed at Calatafimi. At its deepest level, it recognizes that Pallavicino stopped, defeated, wounded, and captured Garibaldi, thereby preserving what Prince Ponteleone regards as a hard-won compromise between the old order and the new.

That contrast recasts Calatafimi as an earlier moment when the forces defending the Bourbon state failed to halt Garibaldi’s advance, while the later action by Italian government troops checked the revolutionary leader after the southern campaign had already transferred power. The novel’s retrospective emphasis is less on the battle’s tactics than on this reversal: a victory that advanced revolution becomes the reference point for praising the force that later contained it.