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It's amazing how many Italian dictators had biscuits named after them.

You've got the Garibaldi of course, you've got your Bourbon, and you've got your Peek Freens Trotsky assortment!

> how many Italian dictators had biscuits named after them.

So, how many?

Garibaldi wasn't a dictator.
‘Garibaldi’ is the German word for pressure cooker!
has the author never seen a young che guevara, fidel castro, or joseph stalin?
More fun trivia about Garibaldi: he was elected to the french parliament, and he caused a stir when he showed up wearing his signature poncho rather than formal clothes. He was also the only french commander in the Franco Russian war to capture a Prussian flag.

Also, he was supposedly invited to fight in the American civil war but refused since he couldn't get the level of command he wanted, although there was a Garibaldi Guard in that war.

Queen Victoria wrote in her diary , about Garibaldi's visit to London, that most of the elite was far too fascinated with him. During the same visit, the servants at the house he was staying sold the water he used to wash himself to collectors.

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Just to offer food for thought, some people in the south of Italy still regard him as a Sardo/French invader and do not buy the “national hero” persona that garibaldi got attributed after the unification.
Other than being defined as "sexy" this article doesn't add much more than what one would have learnt at school in Italy.

There are so many aspects which are more recently brought him about his campaign (i.e. Making deals with local lords in the south, which allowed today's mafia families to de facto remain in power).

So, if you think this article was interesting, do go dig a bit deeper as it's rather shallow.

There's a character in Babylon-5, the sci-fi TV series of the 90s, also named Garibaldi. Professional hater of authority.
The article gives the impression "Italy" was always a nation in the making for all of history, just waiting to "unify". It talks of a "national rebirth".

But it's an invention. It never previously existed. Yes the penisula was referred to as Italy for a long time and the language is shared across the area and there are cultural similarities. But none of that automatically makes a nation - you don't have to think hard of counter examples. History could have panned out differently. It still could.

I think the bourgeoisies have been enormously successful in giving the impression that these nation states, whether it be Italy or Germany, or India, etc, that they're inevitable, they're permanent and anything else is a perversion. And Garibaldi was one such whose brilliance was to forge a nation so quickly from so many disparate states.

There's a small town in Oregon named after him.
As a Neapolitan, I spit on his face everytime I see it depicted somewhere.