Umberto I
Umberto I was called the good king for visiting epidemics and earthquakes, and was shot by an anarchist for decorating a general who had fired cannon into a crowd. He inherited in 1878 a kingdom that was seventeen years old and barely a nation: most of its subjects did not speak Italian, the south had been annexed rather than joined, and the papacy refused to recognise the state occupying Rome. His response to the two great disasters of his early reign was to go to them in person, to cholera-stricken Naples in 1884 and to the earthquakes, which was genuinely brave and earned him the epithet he kept. His foreign policy was to attach Italy to the powers that had most recently humiliated it. France took Tunisia in 1881, which Italy had expected for itself, and the answer was the Triple Alliance of 1882 with Germany and Austria-Hungary - an odd treaty, since Austria still held Trento and Trieste and Italian opinion wanted them, and the alliance was therefore aimed at France by a country whose real quarrel was with its own ally. It held for thirty-three years and Italy left it the moment war came. The other ambition was an African empire, and it ended at Adwa in 1896, where Menelik II destroyed an Italian army of twenty thousand in a morning. It was the first defeat of a European power by an African state in the age of the scramble, it brought down the prime minister who had sought it, and it kept Italy out of Ethiopia for forty years. Underneath both was a country emptying itself. From about 1880 Italians left at a rate no European nation had matched, mostly from the south and mostly for the Americas, until some fourteen million had gone. In 1898 bread riots in Milan were put down by a general who used artillery on the crowd and killed at least eighty people; the king gave him a decoration and a Senate seat. In July 1900 an anarchist weaver who had come back from a silk-mill town in New Jersey to do it shot Umberto three times at Monza, and said at his trial that he had killed the decoration rather than the man.
- Lived: 1844 CE – 1900 CE
- Nationality: Italian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
