I have happy memories of the struggle to open the Trotsky boxes. In my house we used to have them with cocktails, so it was easiest to just pull out the bar tools and hack away.

(Oh the embarrassment. My ears are burning)

It's weird to remember Garibaldi as a dictator, as though he were similar to Mussolini or Hitler. That said, he was one, for a few months in 1860.

I know little more than what is written in Giovanni Guareschi’s work. But he feels more like the Napoleon of Notting Hill. I wonder where Chesterton got his inspiration from…

He's a unique figure. Running across the world, finding himself constantly drawn to battles for the freedom of this or that group, he had a penchant for winning military campaigns that were then politically squandered by the people he trusted. A committed republican at a time when it was a revolutionary and scandalous position, he won half of Italy for a king he didn't like (and who really didn't like him) and then effectively self-exiled. More than once, he had to be held back by aristocratic leaders scared by his "uppity" plebeian success. And he was as popular as the Beatles - all over Europe, men wanted to die for him and women wanted to run away with him. The difference between him and Napoleon (the real one from Corsica, not Notting Hill) was that he sincerely never wanted to rule anything or anyone.

That description fits Che Guevara too. Who, coincidentally, also was considered to be incredibly handsome.

Which of Guareschi’s work is about Garibaldi?

I can imagine he’s mentioned a lot in Don Camillo since the communist and socialist parties in the first republican election of Italy joined in a coalition called “the Garibaldi front”, but Garibaldi himself was already long dead by then.

this is weirdly similar wording to

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheYoungOnes/comments/u93yfd/revolu...

> how many Italian dictators had biscuits named after them.

So, how many?

Well, it seems Garibaldi biscuits were genuinely named after this guy. However Bourbon was named for the House of Bourbon, a French royal family.

I'm discounting the Peek Freens Trotsky assortment because Trotsky was, of course, Russian.

So, one. Which is still more than you might expect.

> House of Bourbon, a French royal family

Which also ruled in Spain and multiple different parts of Italy (like Parma and the Two Sicilies).

Also, Trotsky was only a only a butcher and repressor, never a dictator, as he didn't held power.

Garibaldi wasn't a dictator.

While it's misleading to characterize him as a dictator without further context, he momentarily was.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_Giuseppe_Garib...

The original quote (from "The Young Ones") uses "revolutionaries" rather than "dictators", which make more sense.

Garibaldi was not a dictator.