With its new outlook Garibaldi Square in downtown Sofia has more than ever become a magnet for local people and visitors to the city.

The small cozy square carries the name of Giuseppe Garibaldi, an Italian liberator and hero of 19th-century liberal nationalism, and of the Risorgimento, the 1860 reunification of Italy. The reunification apart from being one of the most influential, far-reaching political events in 19th-century Europe, also had intellectual and political consequences extending far beyond the boundaries of Italy. It provoked liberation movements in other countries on the continent.

Garibaldi, being a great fighter for freedom was among the first people from the West who supported the Bulgarian movement for liberation and opposed the atrocities of the Ottoman soldiers in suppressing the 1876 April Uprising of the Bulgarian people. Together with prominent figures such as William Gladstone, Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde and Victor Hugo, he waged a campaign for the right of the Bulgarians' to freedom.

Garibaldi, often called the Father of Modern Italy, was born on July 4, 1807 in Nice. His father Domenico was a fisherman and coastal trader. Garibaldi worked as a sailor in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea from 1824 to 1833. In 1834 he received his Master's Certificate as a merchant captain.

After getting in touch with Mazzini's patriotic organization, Young Italy, he visited its headquarters at Marseilles and was strongly taken by the republican idea. In 1834 Garibaldi took part in a revolt for the republican cause. As a result he was sentenced to death by default.

After spending a year taking casual jobs in France, Garibaldi sailed to Rio de Janeiro from Marseilles. There he met his Brazilian-born wife Anita who became his companion-in-arms and heroine of the Risorgimento, and who fought side by side with her husband.

As a soldier, corsair, and naval captain, Garibaldi fought for the break-away province of Rio Grande in its attempt to free itself from the Brazilian Empire in 1836-40.

In February 1849, as an elected Member of Parliament in the Roman Assembly, he proposed the creation of a Roman Republic. Later the same year Garibaldi led a brigade which beat off an attack by the French at the St. Pancrazio gate of Rome, and took a principal part in defending Rome against further French attacks.

Because of his republican ideas, Garibaldi was pursued by 100,000 of the Pope's soldiers. The Pope had placed an enormous bounty on his head but not one Italian betrayed him to the Papal Army.

Garibaldi's greatest triumph, however, was the 1860 overthrow of the Kingdom of Naples, the event which precipitated Italian unification. In May the same year, Garibaldi landed in Sicily with a volunteer force of 1,070 men, which was generally referred to as the Thousand. Within two weeks the force took the city of Palermo, forcing the capitulation of an army of 20,000. In August Garibaldi, with the connivance of the British navy, crossed to the Italian mainland, routing the Neapolitan army in a series of victories and capturing Naples itself within a month.

Garibaldi's March became one of the great legends of the 19th century, both because of the genius with which Garibaldi overcame vast military troops, and, equally importantly, because of the political symbolism of the event.

In 1870, Garibaldi joined republican France in the Franco-Prussian war and was made commander of an army in the Vosges. The same year, after 1,260 years, Rome ceased to be governed by a Pope and became the capital of the new united Italy. Pope Pius IX declared himself infallible. Garibaldi became a hero of Italian history.