Members of the government of the Kingdom of Italy had different perspectives on this issue, and the internal tensions that followed caused Prime Minister Bettino Ricasoli to resign in 1862.

Meanwhile, General Giuseppe Garibaldi reached Sicily and began to form an army, with the intent of marching on Rome.

The intransigent reaction of France (which was, at the time, the most influential ally of Italy) and the Pope caused the Italian government to intervene.

Garibaldi, now wounded, was immediately assisted by surgeons and taken prisoner; he was later sent to the jail at Varignano, near Porto Venere.

Giuseppe Mazzini's party declared that, after the events of Aspromonte, any silent agreement between the Monarchy and the Republicans had been factually broken; supporters of the Monarchy maintained that the Republicans' support for such rash initiatives as Garibaldi's expedition proved that they were too irresponsible to lead the nation.

Eventually, the Questione Romana was solved under Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Lanza, when Rome was finally captured in 1870.

In Joseph Conrad's Nostromo (1904), the aged Italian exile, Giorgio, mourns "the fatal day of Aspromonte, when the treachery of kings, emperors and ministers had been revealed to the world in the wounding and imprisonment of his hero."