We are all Garibaldini

In almost every Italian town there is a Via Garibaldi, a square, a statue of the general on horseback or with his hand on his sword hilt, and we see him so often that we no longer look. He has become a street name, the bearded gentleman of the school textbook. And yet, if there is one Italian the world truly loved, without reservation, it is him.

The nickname "hero of the two worlds", to begin with, is no flourish of patriotic rhetoric. Before the Expedition of the Thousand, Garibaldi spent more than ten years in South America. He fought in Brazil for the rebel republic of Rio Grande do Sul, where he met Anita, a young Brazilian woman who became his wife and comrade in arms, and then in Uruguay, where he led the Italian Legion in the defence of Montevideo. The red shirts were born there: the story goes that they were a batch of cloth meant for the workers of the city's slaughterhouses, bought cheaply because nothing better could be found. The most famous symbol of Italian unification thus comes from a make-do, in a city of emigrants, on the other side of the ocean, and it would be hard to find a more Italian origin than that.

After the 1860 expedition he became a global celebrity. The following year Abraham Lincoln offered him a command in the Union army, and he declined; when he arrived in London in 1864, hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets to greet him, and across half the world squares, beers and even biscuits took his name. The reason for all that enthusiasm is fairly simple: Garibaldi fought for other people's freedom, not for his own power, refused titles and rewards, and after handing half a kingdom to the king went back to the island of Caprera with a sack of seeds.

We landed in New York, Buenos Aires and Melbourne with suitcases, not gunboats.

Every nation, when it introduces itself to the world, needs a story. The British have empire and parliament, the French revolution and the rights of man, the Americans the frontier. And us? We cannot tell ourselves as a colonial power, and thank goodness. Our colonialism came late, lasted briefly and had nothing glorious about it, from the defeat at Adwa in 1896 to the war in Ethiopia and its darkest pages, which those inclined to forget would do well to revisit. It is not a story for export.

But we have another one, far stronger: that of a people who came to know the world as emigrants. We landed in New York, Buenos Aires and Melbourne with suitcases, not gunboats; we were looked at with suspicion, we worked, and little by little we were accepted. Garibaldi is the symbol that fits this story perfectly: the Italian who sides with the weaker party, who fights for other people's freedom and then goes back to hoeing his vegetable patch.

It is something of an Italian paradox. We were never strong enough to dominate anyone, and over time that has made us likeable: around the world the Italian is the one you are happy to share a meal with, the one who isn't frightening, the one who knows how to live. Some see weakness in that; I see an enormous store of trust that many countries more powerful than ours can only dream of. Those who live abroad spend it every day, often without realising, because an Italian surname opens doors that other passports find closed. It is time to make it a strategy, and to give it the right face. Deep down we should all be a little Garibaldini, with one foot always across the border.