Clelia
Spring 1875 CE, the island of Caprera, Kingdom of Italy
An 1876 postcard featuring a black and white photograph of Giuseppe Garibaldi sitting with his daughter Clelia Garibaldi.
Clelia watched her father attentively. He was lifting very large, square-shaped boulders… at least they seemed very large to her. One atop the other. These “boulders,” pinkish granite with some white streaks and tan veins scattered within them, roughly fit together and atop each other. Sometimes he would slide one firmly into place, at other times he left them where they were. These sun‑warmed granite blocks, as they were, finished up a piece of the “fencing” (although it was more a low wall), on a slope where the sea could be seen just beyond the scrub.
Clelia asked a question, one of many which she asked each day.
“Will this stop the goats, Papa?”
Her father looked kindly at her and continued his stacking. He noticed a few small scratches which had accumulated on her calves, probably from the broom and gorse thistle she so loved to pick the yellow flowers from.
He replied, “Yes, my darling.”
Pausing a moment to look back at his work, he asked her, “You know the wall behind the two strawberry trees?”
“Mhmm,” Clelia responded. She knew it well, as it stretched almost the entire width of the island.
“Your brothers and I built it, long before you were born, when I… when we first moved here. We laid those stones out, just like this. To stop the goats, yes. But I also taught them many other things, just like I’m teaching you.”
Clelia had been gazing earnestly at her father, but broke for a moment to pick at a small wild lavender bush beside her feet.
“Menotti and Ricciotti,” she murmured.
Her father responded, echoing the names. “Menotti and Ricciotti!” It was as if he was calling them to attention in one of his “thousand man” divisions before the battle of Palermo.
The ocean breeze brushed past them both, refreshing their skin, salt air mixed with the faint smell of resin from the gum trees. The sun replied, imparting a hydrating warmth. And in the distance, the bleating of goats. Her father looked towards the sound.
“Of course, they still get in every so often.”
He smiled back at Clelia.
“But we do what we can. You know, their poop is good for the soil, to make the soil fruitful. Caprera is so stony, the soil isn’t good… well, you know this. It needs to be worked, to be mixed.”
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This man who had seen so much fighting, so much violence and whose methods had been force of arms, felt just at home imparting earthen wisdom to his daughter.
“We bring this place to life.”
Clelia seemed satisfied at his answer, and she smiled, a wholesome smile. Of course, she couldn’t articulate it as such, but what she felt was safety.
Reflecting as best an eight year old can on the day so far… her mother’s breakfast of polenta and stewed tomatoes, of the mathematics lesson that her father gave her in the courtyard, of course struggling through as she did (although she was beginning to grasp the main principles), and the swim she took earlier in the cala. Her father’s watchful eye not always there, in fact often not, but rather (and more importantly) internalized in her consciousness.
Her father spoke once again. “Your sister Anita* should be here tomorrow, maybe the day after. You know this island now better than she does, poor Anita. So you can take her by the hand and show her your favorite places. Of course you’ll have to show her the cala. Maybe collect snails on the rocks? Later, we can show Anita how to fish.”
At this last sentiment, they both shared a warm smile. Clelia hadn’t seen her sister in, well what seems to an eight year old, a lifetime. How a child thinks of time cannot be greatly understood except by comparison. Each week, a lifetime. Each year, an eternity.
”Go,” her father commanded.
“I am about to finish this section. Find out from your mother what is for dinner. You must be hungry. I am hungry.”
“Yes, Papa.”
She ran down the lane, buttoned between desert-bright slopes, the late afternoon shadows lengthening. Passionate in her step and yet careless all the same, connected to every thistle and shrub on this dry island that her father had cultivated, she felt joy and serenity.
As he watched her run down the lane, the path slightly slanting away, he felt this serenity himself. The first of such feelings, in fact, as he had had in a long, long while. He was old now, his flowing blonde hair had turned almost entirely white. Still, some blond hairs on his long beard had stubbornly refused to age over. Replete with arthritis, the pain returned to one of his hands.
Perhaps he had not always succeeded in creating his vision for Italy, whatever that was (it had changed throughout his life), this country so dear to him, and with a weight which he had used as a weapon against his foes and to rally young men around him. He was not on the move anymore now, his battlefield now being the rocky Caprera earth, although to him this seemed like the clearest battlefield of all. As Clelia slipped around the corner out of his view, he surrendered to a feeling of contentment. The house he had built with his sons, the grape vines which had sprouted up through the torn up crumbled rocks. Something different. Something more had settled in him, even more eternal than the concept of Italy. It was contentment. And he embraced it.
*Garibaldi had a daughter Anna Maria “Anita”, born on Caprera in 1859 to Battistina, who died as a teenager in 1875, probably of malaria or meningitis.
Sources
- Hibbert, Christopher. Garibaldi and His Enemies: The Clash of Arms and Personalities in the Making of Italy. London: Longmans, 1965.
- Riall, Lucy. Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.
- Hero of Two Worlds (website). “Mio padre Clelia Garibaldi.” Accessed 2026. http://www.miopadredicleliagaribaldi.it/
AI-Use
- Minor editing and help with formatting dialogue for fiction; Perplexity AI
