Bersaglieri

The Bersaglieri are represented as a military corps whose actions at Aspromonte helped halt Giuseppe Garibaldi’s advance and preserve, in Colonel Pallavicino’s account, the precarious political settlement of the Kingdom of Italy. Their musket fire and distinctive insignia give them a double presence in the narrative: they are an armed force capable of disarming and wounding Garibaldi’s followers, but also a vivid emblem of a newly unified state still shadowed by conflict.

Military Presence and Public Image

At a formal gathering, Colonel Pallavicino appears in a well-padded, double-breasted uniform, with epaulettes, chains, spurs, a plumed hat, and a curved sabre. The Bersaglieri are visible on his lapel as flames, a martial detail that accompanies his polished manner and public reputation. Women at the gathering are captivated by his accounts of the encounter with Garibaldi, reassured, the narrator notes, by the force represented by his soldiers’ musketry. The corps thus enters the scene both as military power and as part of Pallavicino’s carefully cultivated public image.

The Action at Aspromonte

Pallavicino explains that he ordered his men to fire on Giuseppe Garibaldi under written instructions. He recalls facing a crowd of several hundred followers, whom he describes as a mixture of fanatics and agitators, and says he believed that without the order his soldiers and he might have been hacked to pieces. After the firing, the Bersaglieri disarmed Garibaldi’s men. In the clash, Garibaldi was wounded in the foot and captured; Pallavicino’s courtesies to the wounded leader, including a genuflection, became widely discussed.

Pallavicino’s Political Interpretation

Pallavicino presents the order not simply as an act of obedience or self-defence, but as a means of preventing a wider crisis. He argues that a defeat of his troops could have brought French and Austrian intervention and endangered the Kingdom of Italy. He also believes the shots helped Garibaldi by freeing him from followers whose intrigues, in Pallavicino’s view, were using the General for inept purposes. The account distinguishes these followers from the volunteers who had landed with Garibaldi at Marsala and who, he says, had believed Italy could be created by repeating the Revolutions of 1848. Pallavicino interprets Garibaldi’s warm handshake and quiet thanks as recognition that the violence had exposed the failings of the men around him.

A Sign of Unfinished Unification

The Bersaglieri’s role does not resolve the political tensions that their intervention suppresses. Pallavicino predicts that red-shirted forces will return, followed by opponents in other colours and then red shirts again. He sees the Kingdom as deeply disunited despite its recent formation: different cities resent or distrust the new administration, while Sicily faces what he calls a growing irrational disaster. The corps’s gunfire can stop one confrontation, but the Colonel’s forebodings leave its larger consequence unsettled. In this episode, the Bersaglieri embody the force holding the new state together and the continuing divisions that force alone cannot settle.