Red Shirts Dusty Roads: Eight Voices from the Expedition of the Thousand

Sicily, 1860. A thousand poorly armed volunteers sail from Genoa under Giuseppe Garibaldi to overthrow a kingdom. Eight fictional diarists - a Sicilian farmer, a young idealist, a doomed Bourbon officer, a sardonic British journalist, a hero's anxious brother, a pharmacist-widow turned battlefield surgeon, a Polish exile fighting for someone else's freedom, and a quartermaster counting boots - tell the story of what happened when revolution came to southern Italy. Their wars were real. Their voices are imagined. Together, they reveal the hope, the cost, and the bitter aftermath of one of the most extraordinary military campaigns in modern history: the Expedition of the Thousand and the unification of Italy. A work of historical fiction built on documented events, Red Shirts, Dusty Roads is for readers who believe history is best understood through the people who lived it.