Garibaldi met Cuneo in Taganrog and swore an oath to fight for Italy

Taganrog is the only Russian city that Garibaldi names in his memoirs. And it is no accident that Garibaldi is commemorated in Taganrog by two monuments.

Giuseppe Garibaldi arrived in Taganrog aboard a small merchant vessel with the most prosaic of purposes: to buy flour of a variety popular in Italy, from which Taganrog pasta was made.

In a coffee house the deep-sea captain overheard a conversation of the Italian revolutionary Cuneo, was moved by his words, befriended him and, under his influence, joined the secret society Young Italy. This, on the whole, determined his future fate as a revolutionary and, accordingly, the fate of Italy.

It was in Taganrog that the 26-year-old Garibaldi swore an oath to fight for Italy.

Garibaldi later wrote of this: "…in every circumstance of my life I never ceased to consult people and to study the literature on the regeneration of Italy, but until the age of 24 all these efforts were in vain. At last, one day in Taganrog, I made the acquaintance of a Ligurian who became the man able to show me the true state of affairs in that country. I suppose that Columbus never felt so happy on discovering America as I felt to find myself among men who had devoted their lives to the liberation of their Fatherland."

I have not found the source of this particular quotation, but I did learn that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries alone, Garibaldi's writings and accounts of him went through more than 500 editions in Russia.