200th Birthday of Giuseppe Garibaldi

Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882), Italian freedom fighter, alongside the country name "SAN MARINO", the year 2007, the initials of designer Ettore Lorenzo Frapiccini and the "R" mintmark of the Rome mint.

Giuseppe Garibaldi holds particular significance for San Marino: the small state granted the persecuted freedom fighter refuge in 1849, when, after the collapse of the Roman Republic, he fled through central Italy with his exhausted troops. San Marino let him pass and protected him from the pursuing Austrian and papal troops - an act of political boldness that documents the republic's liberal stance towards the Risorgimento. Garibaldi, born in 1807 in Nice, was already by this point one of the central figures in the struggle for Italian unity: guerrilla leader, popular hero and military strategist, whose campaigns - including the famous Expedition of the Thousand of 1860 - laid the foundation for the emergence of the united Kingdom of Italy. His death in 1882 on the island of Caprera marked the end of an era in which he embodied Italy's national movement like no other.

The relationship between San Marino and the Italian Risorgimento was no coincidence. The republic, which had asserted its independence since the Middle Ages, saw itself as a stronghold of republican tradition amid a peninsula dominated by principalities and foreign rule. Garibaldi expressly admired San Marino and in 1861 declined the offer to take over the leadership of the small republic - a step that testified to his respect for its independence. On Garibaldi's 200th birthday, San Marino honoured in 2007, with a 2-euro commemorative coin, a man whose life is bound up with the country's history in an unusually direct way.