Giovanni Fattori was born in Leghorn on 6 September 1825 and, as a boy, he began working for his step-brother Rinaldo, showing a precocious passion and undoubted talent for drawing.  At 15, his father Giuseppe sent him to the painter Giuseppe Baldini for lessons.  In 1846, Fattori moved to Florence where he studied for some months with Giuseppe Bezzuoli and then enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts.  His rather precarious economic conditions did not stop him from regularly attending courses.  Attracted by the ideals of the Risorgimento, in 1848 he joined the Partito d’Azione (Action Party), distributing their clandestine leaflets, but not actively taking part in the revolutionary risings.  The next year he was in Leghorn at the time it was besieged by the Austrians, a tragic experience that fed his patriotism as well as his moral and artistic sensibility.