X-Nico

2 unusual facts about Battle of Mentana


Battle of Mentana

However, the Italian government could not take its seat in Rome because Emperor Napoleon III maintained a French garrison there to prop up Pope Pius IX.

Napoleone Colajanni

He arrived too late when the Battle of Mentana – in which Garibaldi was defeated by Papal troops and a French auxiliary force – had already ended.


George Collingridge

He was born in Oxfordshire, England, educated in Paris, served in the Papal Zouaves (alongside his brother Alfred, who died in the Battle of Mentana), and migrated to Australia in 1879 aboard the Lusitania (not the ship of the same name that sank in 1915).

Needle gun

In the following year it made its first appearance on the battlefield at Mentana on 3 November 1867, where it inflicted severe losses upon Giuseppe Garibaldi's troops.

Ricciotti Garibaldi

In 1866, alongside his father, he took part in the Battle of Bezzecca (1866) and the Battle of Mentana (1867); in 1870, during his father's expedition in support to France during the Franco-Prussian War, he fought in the Vosges, where he occupied Châtillon and, at Pouilly, captured the sole Prussian flag lost during the war.


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