Only three days earlier, Guiseppe Garibaldi and several thousand of his men had sailed from Giardini in Sicily in the ships Franklin and Torino to invade the Italian mainland. Landing near Melito, the "Redshirts" advanced on Reggio and took the fortified town after a sharp engagement with Neapolitan royal troops. Garibaldi then marched up the Calabrian coast against ever-diminishing opposition and entered Naples on September 7, 1860. (By John Osborne)
Source Citation
George Macauley Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the Making of Italy (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1912), 130.