[1] She was the third of ten children born to Maria Antonia de Jesus Antunes and Bento Ribeiro da Silva, a tropeiro.

[2] In 1835, at the young age of fourteen years, Anita was forced to marry Manuel Duarte Aguiar, who abandoned her in order to join the Imperial Army.

Giuseppe Garibaldi, a Niçois sailor of Ligurian descent turned Italian nationalist revolutionary, had fled Europe in 1836 and was fighting on behalf of the separatist Riograndense Republic in southern Brazil (the Ragamuffin War).

One of Garibaldi's comrades described Anita as "an amalgam of two elemental forces…the strength and courage of a man and the charm and tenderness of a woman, manifested by the daring and vigor with which she had brandished her sword and the beautiful oval of her face that trimmed the softness of her extraordinary eyes."

He was born with a skull deformity due to a blow that Anita received when she fell from her horse in the flight from the Brazilian camp.

Anita accompanied Garibaldi and his red-shirted legionnaires back to Italy to join in the revolutions of 1848, where he fought against the forces of the Austrian Empire.

In February 1849, Garibaldi joined in the defense of the newly proclaimed Roman Republic against Neapolitan and French intervention aimed at the restoration of the Papal States.

Pregnant and sick from malaria, she died on August 4, 1849, at 7:45 pm in the arms of her husband at Guiccioli Farm in Mandriole, near Ravenna, Italy, during the tragic retreat.

It was perhaps with her memory in mind that, while traveling in Peru in the early 1850s, he sought out the exiled and destitute Manuela Sáenz, the fabled companion of Simón Bolívar.

Years later, in 1860, when Garibaldi rode out to Teano to hail Victor Emanuel II as king of a united Italy, he wore Anita's striped scarf over his gray South American poncho.

The statue depicts Anita Garibaldi, mounted on a rearing horse, holding her baby son close in her left arm while brandishing a pistol in her right hand, as she leads her husband's army to victory.