3 - A sailor's career which begins in Nice

The port of Nice at the beginning of the XIX-th century

Garibaldi was therefore a man stemming from two cultures, French and Italian, cultures which brought him to open to the world and to go out of his home town. The profession of sailor which he chose by necessity urged him to travel in all the Mediterranean Sea.
At the age of fifteen, he took a job as a ship’s boy, and made his first journey to Odessa. His second journey to Rome, at the age of eighteen, in 1825, together with his father and on the family tartan, the Santa-Reparata, was for him at the same time a revelation and a disappointment. The Rome of the popes, white, corrupt and in ruins, was very different from the one he had imagined, but Rome became his obsession.
He began his sailor's career by ensuring relations with the East, Constantinople or Taganrog, (a Russian port on the Azov sea). He was an excited, independent and curious young man, speaking different languages. He belonged to this generation smothered by the counter-revolutionary, mystic and reactionnary order imposed by the Congress of Vienna and the great powers victorious of Napoleon Ist, Austria, Russia, Prussia and United Kingdom, this generation which was twenty years old under the Restoration, and which in 1830-1831 flooded Europe and the Italian peninsula of their dreams and their romantic hopes.

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