Le Confessioni d'un italiano (Confessions of an Italian)

"He was one of the one thousand who followed Garibaldi. He was an intellectual and writer but he wanted to be with Garibaldi unifying Italy in the 1860s. He was born in 1831 and died very young, at 30 years old. He drowned because his ship was attacked by the Austrian army, travelling to Sicily. He was Venetian. These Confessioni are his memoirs and he writes about when he was a child. You can see how people lived in the north of Italy, very poor in these small societies. He wanted the readers to know how poor and ignorant the peasants were at his time, and he attributes this condition to the Austrians who ruled the north of Italy and were against every change in the country. That’s why he fought with Garibaldi, for the unification of Italy. He wrote a portrait of a girl called La Pisana, a famous figure in Italian literature, because it is such a beautiful portrait of this little girl, and the poor people, the peasants.."