Who Are The National Heroes of Italy?

Before 1861

1. Caesar Augustus: Organized Italia and the Italicus Populus during the Roman Empire.
2. Charlemagne: First created the Kingdom of Italy in medieval times.
3. Napoleone Bonaparte: The first to use the title of President of the Italian Republic.

Modern Italy

1. King Vittorio Emanuele II, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Prime minister Count di Cavour and Giuseppe Mazzini have been referred to as the Four Fathers of the Fatherland. Italy was unified in 1861 and Rome became its capital in 1870.

2. The Members of the Assemblea Costituente (The Constituent Assembly of 1946–1947) are considered the “fathers” of the Italian Republic, which replaced the Monarchy after a referendum in 1946. Prominent members among them included Alcide De Gasperi, the communist Palmiro Togliatti and Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, the “Premier of victory” in WWI.

Garibaldi, Giuseppe (1807-1882) The foremost military figure and popular hero of the age of Italian unification known as the Risorgimento with Cavour and Mazzini he is deemed one of the makers of Modern Italy. Cavour is considered the “brain of unification,” Mazzini the “soul,” and Garibaldi the “sword.” For his battles on behalf of freedom in Latin America, Italy, and later France, he has been dubbed the “Hero of Two Worlds.”

Born in Nice, when the city was controlled by France, to Domenico Garibaldi and Rosa Raimondi, his family was involved in the coastal trade. A sailor in the Mediterranean Sea, he was certified a merchant captain in 1832. During a journey to Taganrog in the Black Sea, he was initiated into the Italian national movement by a fellow Ligurian, Giovanni Battista Cuneo. In 1833 he ventured to Marseilles where he met Mazzini and enrolled in his Giovane Italia or Young Italy. Mazzini had a profound impact on Garibaldi, who would always acknowledge this patriot as “the master.”