The results surpassed even Mazzini's sanguine hopes. The first lodges of Young Italy were planted at Genoa and Leghorn, and they spread thence to a good many towns of North and Central Italy. The chief strength of the society lay at Genoa, where the nationalist and anti-Piedmontese parties made common cause, and men of every class came in--nobles and commoners, lawyers and civil servants and priests, seamen and artisans. Outside Genoa the working men seem to have kept aloof as a rule; years had yet to pass before Mazzini's social teaching reached them. The recruits came chiefly from the young men of the middle classes, sons of the men who had had their importance under the French rule and had been cribbed and kept under since the restoration. Here and there a young noble joined; in Piedmont and at Genoa at all events there was a sprinkling of older professional and business men; a few priests welcomed a movement, which bore so strong a religious imprint. Everywhere the scattered remnants of the Carbonari enrolled themselves. Buonarrotti, _doyen_ of the conspirators, descendant of Michelangelo, friend of Robespierre and Baboeuf and Napoleon, attached his society of the _Veri Italiani_. Early in 1833 Mazzini, it is impossible to say with what accuracy, put the number of affiliates at fifty or sixty thousand. Many a man, who came to the front in the later nationalist movement or in the first Italian parliaments, began his political life as a member of Young Italy. Garibaldi, a young sailor who wrote verses, just promoted to be captain in the Genoese mercantile marine, whose fearlessness and charm of manner made him the idol of the men under him, and who had already learnt from Foscolo a belief in the destinies of Italy as ardent as Mazzini's own, met the chief at Marseilles and joined the society. Gioberti, who was teaching a transcendental and literary patriotism to the novices in the Archbishop's seminary at Vercelli, sent warm words of encouragement to the cause of God and the People.