Let us not forget that 2011 marks the 150th Anniversary of the unification of Italy, which was led by Giuseppe Garibaldi and his Il Spedizione dei Mille (Expedition of the Thousand), I Mille (The Thousand),  or Le Camicie Rosse (The Red Shirts).  Lest we forget, Italy as a country did not exist until 1861.

 Those of us who trace their ancestry to the Italian peninsula take pride in our roots, but for most of the Italians who immigrated to the United States in the late 19^th, early 20^th centuries, our roots also can be traced to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the largest and wealthiest of the Italian states before Italian unification.  The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies resulted from the unification of the Kingdom of Sicily with the Kingdom of Naples (called the kingdom of peninsular Sicily), by King Alfonso V of Aragon in 1442. The two had been separated since the Sicilian Vespers of 1282. At the death of King Alfonso in 1458, the kingdom became divided between his brother John II of Aragon, who kept Sicily, and his bastard son Ferdinand, who became King of Naples. Garibaldi started his campaign in Sicily, which was still ruled by King Francis II, who was the last of the Spanish Bourbon kings of the Two Sicilies. The Bourbons were descendants of French King Hugh Capet of France, who ruled Navarre and France in the 16th century.  The Capetian dynasty is the largest and oldest European royal house, consisting of the descendants of  the male line. By the 18th century, members of the Bourbon dynasty also held thrones in Spain, Naples, Sicily, and Parma. Today, both King Juan Carlos of Spain and Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg are members of this family, both through the Bourbon branch of the dynasty.

Il Risorgimento (the Italian unification movement) involved countless other Italian patriots, but Garibaldi was by far the most renown.  Before he made his way back to Italy to lead the Camicie Rosse, Garibaldi lived briefly (July 1850 - April 1851) with the true inventor of the telephone, Antonio Meucci, in his Staten Island cottage. Meucci employed Garibaldi in his cottage/candle factory, which is listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places and is preserved as the Garibaldi Meucci Museum   Garibaldi started his march in Marsala, Sicily, where he landed with Camicie Rosse. From there, they fought their way through Sicily, and up the Italian peninsula to unify the separate kingdoms and principalities (except for the Papal States, which succumbed in 1870) under the reign of King Vittorio Emmanuelle II.