author
Gian Battista Cuneo
1809–1875
An early biographer of Giuseppe Garibaldi, he was also a journalist, patriot, and political exile whose life crossed Italy, Uruguay, and Argentina. His writing grew out of the Risorgimento and the wider world of 19th-century Italian emigration.
1 Audiobook
Biografia di Giuseppe Garibaldi
by Gian Battista Cuneo
About the author
Born in Oneglia in 1809, Gian Battista Cuneo was an Italian journalist, writer, and patriot closely tied to the republican world of Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi. Sources describe him as an early member of Giovine Italia, and note that he helped introduce Garibaldi to the movement in Taganrog in 1833.
Exile shaped much of his life and work. After leaving Italy, he spent years in South America, where he promoted Mazzinian ideas among Italian emigrants and was active in the Italian-language press, especially in Montevideo and Buenos Aires. That mix of politics, journalism, and migration gives his writing a lived-in, eyewitness quality.
He is best remembered by many readers as the author of Biografia di Giuseppe Garibaldi, one of the earliest book-length accounts of Garibaldi's life. Cuneo later returned to Italy and also served in public life before his death in Florence in 1875.