Fancy a Garibaldi?

What do you know about Garibaldi? Probably not a lot, apart from the biscuits (but more about that later). To the Italians though, he's the top man - their equivalent of Nelson or Wellington in their list of heros. His home, which has now been converted into a museum, is on La Maddalena island, just up the coast from where we were staying, and a visit to the museum was one of the optional trips available to us. As we'd not left the resort all week, we thought it would be a pleasant change of scenery and a chance to do some shopping in the main town on the island.

When we've been on day trips on previous holidays, we've been picked up by a large coach with air conditioning and comfy seats, however this time, perhaps because it's early in the season, we were picked up by the tour guide driving a Citroen people-carrier, with just an English couple from our hotel and three Germans for company. The guide was comfortable in English and German, and although she was perhaps concentrating on her linguistics a little more than her driving on a couple of occasions, we made it to the ferry in one piece.

The short ferry ride across to La Maddalena island takes about 20 minutes, just long enough for "due cappuccini" from the kiosk on the ferry, but when only one arrived, all I could say was "can I have another one?" (I didn't know the Italian for that). As it turned out, the man could speak English anyway, so I could have saved myself the bother.

View from the Garibaldi museum, Caprera Island, looking back to La Maddalena

The Garibaldi museum is actually on the island of Caprera, which is connected to La Maddalena by a causeway and a flimsy looking bridge, which can be seen in the photo above. In Garibaldi's day, access was only by ferry boat, helping maintain a high degree of privacy. The museum is extremely popular with Italians, especially in the summer, so although it was early in the season our guide did well to get us there just before two coaches arrived.

No photos were permitted in the museum, which to be honest wasn't a big deal as there was nothing there that was really worth snapping. The best we could do was outside, and even then I'm not convinced we had permission.

So what did Garibaldi do? He was a revolutionary, who fought battles all over Italy and beyond with the aim of unifying the country. Italians adored him, so much so that despite large bounties available for his capture, not one Italian betrayed him. The Garibaldi biscuit, it turns out, is named after him - Peak Freans devised the unique biscuit after he visited London in 1861. Here's Wikipedia's article about Garibaldi biscuits.