Garibaldi and the Battle of Rome (1849): Fashion, Uniform, and the Politics of Dress in the Risorgimento
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: This research examines the role of clothing in the construction and communication of political identity during the defence of the Roman Republic in 1849. Focusing on Giuseppe Garibaldi and his volunteer forces, it argues that dress, particularly the camicia rossa, functioned as a form of political language through which the ideals of the Risorgimento were rendered visible and embodied. Drawing on historiography of nationalism, material culture, and the (sartorial) visual construction of political authority, the study situates Garibaldi within a broader culture of symbolic mobilisation in which appearance was central to leadership and collective identification. Using both historical sources and material evidence, including garments and artefacts preserved in the Museo della Repubblica Romana e della Memoria Garibaldina in Rome, Italy, the article demonstrates how the red shirt operated as a flexible and reproducible marker of belonging, capable of uniting diverse volunteers while accommodating individual variation. In contrast to the regulated uniforms of state armies, the heterogeneous dress of the Garibaldini articulated a republican ethos grounded in voluntarism, equality, and transnational solidarity. By foregrounding clothing as an analytical category, this article reframes the defence of the Roman Republic as not only a military and political episode, but as a visual and embodied process in which nationalism was performed on the surface of the body. In doing so, it contributes to broader debates on the material and cultural dimensions of nineteenth-century nation-building.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".