Whether you’re venturing down the alleyways of a centro storico or sitting in traffic on a busy road, you might wonder at some point who the people who gave their names to Italy’s streets were.

Italy’s vie ‘hide’ the stories of notable Italian figures of decades and centuries past. Here are seven of the most famous.

Giuseppe Garibaldi 

Giuseppe Garibaldi is a big name in Italian history. 

He was a general and soldier of the Risorgimento, a 19th-century political and social movement aimed at unifying Italy, which was then divided into a number of small states.  

His conquest of Sicily and Naples along with his Redshirts (volunteers who followed Garibaldi through his unification campaigns) played a major part in the ultimate unification of Italy under the royal house of Savoy in 1861.

His most famous campaign, known as the Spedizione dei Mille (Expedition of the Thousand), started in Genoa on May 6th 1860 and reached Sicily’s Marsala five days later, where he proclaimed himself Dictator of Sicily on behalf of the then Duke of Savoy (and later Italy’s first King) Victor Emmanuel II (Vittorio Emanuele II).

Garibaldi was admired abroad, particularly by Abraham Lincoln, who offered him a commanding role on the Union side during the American Civil War. 

As well as numerous streets in both major cities and small towns around the country, it is far from rare to find statues of Garibaldi in major Italian squares.

Giuseppe Mazzini

Giuseppe Mazzini was a Genoese propagandist and founder of secret revolutionary group Young Italy (1831), which called for a united Italian nation. The group was eventually disbanded after 12 followers were executed and Mazzini was condemned to death in absentia.

Mazzini lived in London for a long time, where he started a school and founded a newspaper titled Apostolato Popolare (Popular Apostleship), where he wrote extensively about his ideas of unification.

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He returned to Italy later on in life and was arrested in Gaeta in 1870, before being pardoned and released by Italian troops. He died from pleurisy in Pisa in 1872. 

Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour

The Count of Cavour has numerous streets named after him in Rome, Palermo and Florence. He was Italy’s first Prime Minister following Italian unification.

Benso was the heir of an ancient noble family based in Piedmont and was a staunch supporter of the Risorgimento, so much so that he founded a newspaper called Il Risorgimento.

Cavour also publicly demanded that Rome be made Italy’s capital (Turin was the country’s first). 

He died in June 1861, nine years before Rome became the capital.

Guglielmo Marconi

Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian physicist and inventor who’s credited as the inventor of radio.

Born in Bologna in 1874 to an Italian father and an Irish mother, Marconi filed the patent for his invention in England and later set up the world’s first wireless  telegraph and signal company in Chelmsford, England, which shut down in 2008.

In 1924, his company obtained a contract to establish a shortwave communication between England and other British Commonwealth countries. 

Marconi won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1909 and passed away in 1937 at the age of 67.

Cristoforo Colombo

Cristoforo Colombo is one of those household names that rarely need an introduction. 

The famous explorer and admiral is often referred to as the ‘founder of the new world’ after he crossed the Atlantic to reach the Americas in 1492.

The voyage was financed by Isabella I of Spain and her husband Ferdinand II of Aragon.

Columbus died in the Spanish city of Valladolid in 1506.

Giordano Bruno

Giordano Bruno was an Italian philosopher, astronomer and priest whose theory of an infinite universe contributed to the birth of modern science. 

Bruno’s theories were fiercely opposed by the Catholic Church. 

He was sentenced to death for heresy by Pope Clement VIII and burnt at the stake in 1600. 

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A statue of him can be found in Rome’s well-known Campo de’ Fiori square, in the same place where he was burnt.

Margherita of Savoy, Queen of Italy

Margherita of Savoy became the first Queen of unified Italy after marrying her first cousin King Umberto I. 

Born to Prince Ferdinand of Savoy, Duke of Genoa, and Princess Elisabeth of Saxony in Turin in 1851, Margherita served the Kingdom of Italy as crown princess for ten years between 1868 and 1878.

When her father-in-law, Vittorio Emanuele II of Savoy (the first King of Italy), passed away in 1878, she became Queen Consort. 

Margherita of Savoy lived until the age of 74, dying in 1926.

Her burial site can be found in Rome’s Pantheon alongside that of her father-in-law and her husband.