Discussion of Emanuel's 'Garibaldi' connection

The entire family have passed down the belief that Emanuel fought with Garibaldi. In Rita Coe's version he was actually Garibaldi's batman (!) One piece of oral "evidence" is that he is reported to have applied for a pension which was subsequently made available to the ex-Garibaldini. He did not obtain his pension since he had no proof; but my father certainly believed the story and that the application had been made in good faith.

There is an 'official' list readily available on the internet of the original 1000 of Garibaldi's volunteers who landed at Marsala - he certainly wasn't one of those. There is now a larger list of abour 35,000 names ( Go to http://archiviodistatotorino.beniculturali.it/work/garb_search.php ] and he isn't there either. However the total size of Garibaldi's army is thought to have reached 40,000 or even 50,000 in total, so the list still isn't complete. Given the irregular volunteer nature of the army, and that, once the fighting was over, most had little choice but to go back home, it seems likely that no written record will ever be found for many of them.

June's information (again presumably via Grandad Gary) is that he claimed to have walked down the length of Italy to join Garibaldi and walked all the way back again. This isn't very promising. The history books seem to say that Garibaldi's first party and all subsequent re-inforcements from the north all went by ship. It was the Piedmontese army which which would have marched there and back. However, his entry in the Lista di Leva marks him as 'Renitente' which means that he failed to present himself for military service - so he certainly wasn't in the official Piedmontese army at the time.

Another pointer to the Garibaldi story is that his son Andrew was always known as 'Gary' reputedly because of the Garibaldi connection. It seems this name may also have applied to others in the family - see Andrew William Azzaro, son of Antonio, who changed his name by deed-poll to 'Gary'. Now Brighton had a fairly large immigrant Italian community, and someone probably would have known whether the story was true or not. Would the name have stuck if the story wasn't true?

[Now that I think about it again, maybe June's comment about walking up and down again might have meant something completely different. ie. Maybe it meant that he walked from Sestri Levante to England (how else would he have got here?) and then walked all the way back to join up with Garibaldi.]