With his thousand “red-shirts,” as they were called, Garibaldi landed on the island of Sicily, at Marsala.  The inhabitants rose to welcome him, and everywhere they drove out the officers who had been appointed by their king to rule them.  In a short time, all Sicily had risen in rebellion against the king. (You will remember that this family of kings had been driven out by Napoleon and restored by the Congress of Vienna in 1815.  They were Bourbons, the same family that furnished the kings of Spain and the last kings of France.  They stood for “the divine right of kings,” and had no sympathy with the common people.) Crossing over to the mainland, Garibaldi, with his little army now swollen to ten times its former size, swept everything before him as he marched toward Naples.  Everywhere, the people rose against their former masters, and welcomed the liberator.  The king fled in haste from Naples, never to return.  A vote was taken all over the southern half of Italy and Sicily, to decide whether the people wanted to join their brothers of the north to make a new kingdom of Italy.  It was so voted almost unanimously.  Victor Emmanuel, king of Sardinia, thus became the first king of United Italy.  He made Florence his capital at first, as the country around Rome still belonged to the pope.  The pope had few soldiers, but was protected by a guard of French troops.  However, ten years later, in 1870, when war broke out between France and Prussia, the French troops left Rome, and the troops of Italy marched quietly in and took possession of the city.  Rome, for so many years the capital, not only of Italy but of the whole Mediterranean world, became once more the chief city of the peninsula.  The pope was granted a liberal pension by the Italian government in order to make up to him for the loss of the money from his former lands.  The dream of Italians for the last 600 years had finally come to pass.  Italy was again one country, ruled by the popular Victor Emmanuel, with a constitution which gave the people the right to elect representatives to a parliament or congress.  One of the worst blunders of the Congress of Vienna had been set right by the patriotism of the people of Italy.

It should be noted, however, that there are still Italians who are not part of this kingdom.  The county of Venetia, at the extreme northeast of Italy, was added to the kingdom in 1866 as the result of a war which will be told about more fully in the next chapter, but the territory around the city of Trent, called by the Italians Trentino, and the county of Istria at the head of the Adriatic Sea, containing the important seaports of Trieste, Fiume, and Pola, are inhabited almost entirely by people of Italian blood.  Certain islands along the coast of Dalmatia also are full of Italians.  To rescue these people from the rule of Austria has been the earnest wish of all Italian patriots, and was the chief reason why Italy did not join Germany and Austria in the great war of 1914.