2 - A well-off family of Nice

Second of five children, he had three brothers who became either sailors or merchants (Angelo, the elder brother, sailor then merchant in New York, ended his career as consul of Piedmont - Sardinia in Philadelphia). His father Domenico, owner of coastal navigation ship, belonging to an old family of Nice, and qualified as merchant in Giuseppe's birth certificate, would have wanted that Giuseppe became a lawyer or a doctor. His mother Rosa Raimondo, a Piedmontese from Loano, fervent Christian, would have wished him to become a priest. His parents had been able to acquire enough wealth to give their children a good education in the point to recruit three private tutors, two priests and a layman, for Giuseppe, and a nurse for the youngest daughter Teresa who died in a fire at the age of two years.
Garibaldi did not belong to the low classes, but to this social fringe which had not totally broken its links with the previous plebeian history and which meant marking its difference by a more intense sociocultural environment. The three tutors of Giuseppe played a determining role in the making of the young man’s personality. Priest Giaume had a recognized scientific quality but lacked authority on his young pupil, which brought Garibaldi to have, at the end of the life, a particularly hard judgment on the clerical tutor ship: "I believe that the physical and moral inferiority of the Italian race results especially from this custom which consists in giving priests as private tutors to the children " (quoted by Max Gallo, Garibaldi, la force d'un destin; Paris, Fayard, 1982, pp. 34-35). On the other hand, the recollection of mister Arena was much stronger. Giuseppe owed him the knowledge of Italian, considered as his " maternal " language, without neglecting French, and rudiments of national history concerning the greatness of the eternal Rome. In fact, the young Giuseppe lived in the town of Nice which was disturbed by the convulsions of the end of the Empire and which in 1814-1815 changed of country, culture and history. The laic tutor knew how to give him the intellectual powers to understand the world which was changing under his eyes.

Joseph Garibaldi's apocryphal representation listening to mister Arena