Giuseppe Garibaldi

Giuseppe Garibaldi is chiefly a presence felt through news, political consequences, and other characters’ recollections in The Leopard. His landing at Marsala in May 1860 unsettles Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, but Garibaldi’s growing authority also confirms the Prince’s suspicion that power is changing hands without necessarily transforming the society beneath it. Later, the account of Garibaldi’s capture at Aspromonte presents him as both a national symbol and a political actor caught between his own followers and the state whose creation he helped advance.

Identity and First Reports

Garibaldi first enters the narrative through a newspaper brought to the Prince at Palermo. The report dates the landing of armed men at Marsala to 11 May, estimates their number at about eight hundred, and says that they avoided an encounter with royal troops before moving toward Castelvetrano. Its language casts the expedition as criminal and disorderly. The Prince, reading beyond that hostile account, recognizes that Garibaldi’s name carries genuine political weight.

The Prince initially associates Garibaldi with Mazzinian politics and considers him a dangerous adventurer. Yet he reasons that if the King has allowed the expedition to proceed, the government must believe it can control him. That conclusion briefly reassures him. The newspaper goes into a drawer, and the immediate threat recedes into the domestic routine of the household. This response establishes the distance between Garibaldi’s historical force and the Prince’s instinctive confidence in existing authority: even alarming news is first interpreted as something the monarchy must have arranged or contained.

In retrospect, the Prince sees that he was not alone in understanding the political moment. During the months of Garibaldi’s occupation, most people in Palermo publicly celebrated the new order, while a small group of dissenters included the Prince’s brother-in-law Màlvica, who was arrested by Garibaldi’s police and spent ten days in prison. The Prince finds the public processions and political speeches increasingly hollow once the first excitement has passed. Garibaldi’s presence has changed who governs, but the noisy display of political change does not persuade the Prince that Sicily’s deeper social and economic conditions have been remade.

Power in Sicily

The Prince’s view of Garibaldi shifts through the consequences of the expedition and the conduct of the new authorities. The Prince had expected the fundamentals of life around his estates to remain stable, and events partly bear him out: Don Pietro Russo keeps his promises, while the loss of a service of Chinese porcelain from the Palermo palace is attributed to Paolo’s careless packing during the shelling, rather than to a wider collapse of property or order. The contrast between upheaval in public life and continuity in private arrangements reinforces the Prince’s sense that political change can coexist with entrenched social habits.

Garibaldi’s forces nevertheless reach the Prince’s own household. Around 20 June, after Tancredi Falconeri has given advance notice, a general in a red uniform arrives with an aide-de-camp to see the palace frescoes. Beforehand, the family replaces a portrait of Ferdinand II with a religious painting, a small adjustment that serves both political prudence and aesthetic convenience. The visitors are treated courteously, and the general addresses the Prince with a respect that contradicts one of the Dictator’s early decrees. Tancredi, newly made a captain on the battlefield, appears with them and demonstrates an easy familiarity with the victors.

Garibaldi is not at this visit, but his authority shapes its atmosphere. The officers’ cordial manner and Tancredi’s place among them make the new political alignment tangible inside the Prince’s home. The family later hosts the visitors for dinner, and the general helps secure an exemption from the order expelling the Jesuits so that Father Pirrone can remain. To the Prince, this accommodation confirms his confidence in his reading of events: the regime can make exceptions, cultivate old elites, and preserve valued institutions even as it announces a new political order.

Aspromonte and the State

At a later ball, Garibaldi’s confrontation with Colonel Pallavicino at Aspromonte is recalled through several layers of political interpretation. A remark praising Pallavicino for his conduct sounds like ordinary social approval, but it carries a more consequential meaning: the Colonel’s action stopped and captured Garibaldi, helping preserve the compromise between the old order and the new Kingdom of Italy. The Prince listens to Pallavicino explain that he acted under written orders and feared that refusing to fire would expose his soldiers and himself to attack, while also risking French or Austrian intervention and the collapse of the new state.

Pallavicino further presents the confrontation as a service to Garibaldi. In his account, Garibaldi’s followers included people exploiting his standing for political schemes he regarded as inept; the clash freed him from their influence. Pallavicino recalls Garibaldi thanking him after the encounter. This reported response complicates the public image of the two men as simple enemies: the state’s force has stopped Garibaldi, yet Pallavicino understands the act as protecting both the fragile kingdom and Garibaldi himself from followers who could misuse his prestige.

The story does not present Pallavicino’s reasoning as a settled account independent of perspective. It comes through his explanation at a fashionable gathering, where the same gesture can be admired as tact, assessed as military competence, or valued for its political result. The Prince’s attention to these different meanings exposes how the new national order is maintained not only through force but also through ceremony, deference, and carefully managed public interpretations.

Historical Change and Symbolic Role

Pallavicino’s reflections widen the episode into a diagnosis of post-unification Italy. He describes a country divided among regions with competing grievances and predicts that political conflict will return under successive colors. Even a seemingly stable national future, he suggests, may be stable only in appearance. Garibaldi accordingly remains more than the leader of an expedition: his rise and temporary defeat mark the unresolved tensions within a state assembled through revolutionary action and compromise.

Near the end of the novel, as the Prince reflects on the decline of his family and his own approaching death, Garibaldi reappears in memory as the bearded figure associated with Vulcan. The Prince recognizes that the old Salina world has not endured as he once assumed, and treats Garibaldi as the victor in that historical contest. The image gathers together the novel’s contrast between aristocratic continuity and political transformation. Garibaldi is largely absent from direct action in the narrative, but the changes attached to his name expose the limits of the Prince’s confidence: old forms may persist for a time, yet the power that seemed safely containable has helped make the Prince’s world irretrievable.