# Assassination of Umberto I

The Assassination of Umberto I of Italy, the Italian king, took place on 29 June 1900 in the Royal Villa of Monza in Monza. King Umberto I of Italy was shot three of four times by Italian anarchist Gaetano Bresci and died few minutes later. Bresci commited the act as the revenge for the Bava Beccaris massacre, violant action against the protesters in Milan in 1898. Before this event, Umberto I was targeted twice, in 1879 and 1898, but in both cases he survived the assassination attempt.

## Prelude

In the second half of the 19th century, radical anarchism in Italy was on the rise. Having succeeded his father Victor Emmanuel II on 9 January 1878, Umberto I became the main target for the anarchists almost immediately. Just ten months after ascending the throne, on 17 November 1878, he was attacked while he was visiting Naples with his wife, son and Prime Minister Benedetto Cairoli. King was suddenly attacked with a knife by the Lucanian anarchist Giovanni Passannante, while shouting "Death to the King! Long live the Universal Republic! Long live Orsini!" The king managed to defend himself and an officer of the Cuirassiers in his entourage lunged at the attacker, wounding him on the head with his sabre, while Cairoli, in an attempt to block the attacker, was wounded in the thigh. Umberto I suffered just a light cut on his arm. The violent attempt generated numerous protest marches, both against and in favor of the attacker, and clashes between the police and anarchists occured. Following the attempted assassination, the Chief of Police Luigi Berti was forced to resign a month later. Passannante was later sentenced to life imprisonment and transferred to prison where he began to show serious mental problems, committing suicide in 1910.
The second attempt for the kings life occured on 22 April 1897, in Rome. Umberto was riding in his carriage at the Capannelle racecourse when the anarchist Pietro Acciarito rushed towards his carriage armed with a knife. The king, having promptly noticed the weapon in his hand, was able to easily dodge the anarchist's attempt to strike him and remained unharmed. Having just managed to scratch the royal carriage, Acciarito then calmly walked away and, in the confusion that followed his gesture, was stopped only after he had walked about 50 metres from the place of act. Acciarito was then arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment. Like Passannante, his sentence was very harsh and had serious consequences on his mental health.

## Milano riots

Between 6 and 8 May 1898 the population of Milan took to the streets to protest against working conditions and the increase in the price of bread in the previous months, in which also women and children participated. The Italian government of Antonio Starabba di Rudinì declared a state of siege and gave full powers to General of the Royal Italian Army Fiorenzo Bava Beccaris to repress the revolt. The results were drastic: 81 people were killed and 450 injured.
After the events in Milan, on 5 June Bava Beccaris received from the king the honour of Grand Officer of the Military Order of Savoy and on 4 July 1898 he was appointed Senator of the Kingdom by the king, a position he held until 1924, at the dawn of fascism, of which he supported.
The bloody repression of the revolt and the honours of Bava Beccaris aroused strong indignation among part of the population, including Gaetano Bresci.

## Preparations

Bresci, young weaver and anarchist originaly from the city of Prato, Tuscany, was in Italy twice arrested and inprisoned for leftist activities and organising labor strikes, including stay in Lamperusia island prison collony. To start a new future he immigrated to the United States in 1897. In 1898, while living in Paterson, New Jersey, Bresci received news of the Bava Beccaris massacre and after that swore revenge against Umberto I, who he held personally responsible for the massacre.
With money from La Questione Sociale, newspaper which he founded and published, Bresci bought a .38 caliber revolver and a one-way ticket back to Europe. They respectively costed him $7 (equivalent to $256 in 2023) and $27 (equivalent to $989 in 2023), with the latter discounted for the occasion of the 1900 Paris Exposition. Before leaving, he told his wife that he was returning to resolve his deceased parents' estate. Bresci set sail in May 1900, disembarking at Le Havre and briefly staying in Paris, before leaving for Italy. In June 1900, Bresci returned to his home in Prato, where he stayed with his brother's family. Although the local police chief was aware of Bresci's presence and knew that police records had listed him as a "dangerous anarchist", the chief did not follow procedure of informing Italy's Ministry of the Interior or retaining Bresci's passport. Unsurveilled, Bresci was free to practice firing his revolver daily.
In July 1900, Bresci visited his sister in Castel San Pietro Terme, before moving on to Milan. On 25 July, he toured Milan with his friend Luigi Granotti before traveling to Monza. Bresci learned that the King of Italy was due to attend a gymnastics competition at the Royal Villa of Monza. Bresci found a room near the Monza train station and waited to strike. For two days, he scouted the area and inquired about the king's activities.

## Attack

On the morning of 29 July 1900, after preparing his weapon and thoroughly grooming himself, Bresci left his hotel intent on assassinating the king at the end of the contest. He spent most of the day walking around town and eating ice cream, briefly stopping for lunch with a stranger, whom he told, "Look at me carefully, because you will perhaps remember me for the rest of your life." That evening at 21:30, Umberto took his car to the stadium, where he was to hand out medals to the competition's athletes at 22:00. There were very few law enforcement agents (Carabinieri) stationed along the route and not enough to effectively carry out crowd control at the stadium.
Bresci had positioned himself along the road exiting the stadium to give himself a chance at escape; the excited crowd swept him within three meters of the king's car and blocked his way out. While amongst the crowd, Bresci drew his revolver and shot Umberto three or four times. As the king lay dying, the angered crowd wrestled Bresci to the ground and a Carabinieri marshal intervened before Bresci could be lynched. He accepted arrest without resistance, declaring: "I did not kill Umberto. I have killed the King. I killed a principle."
Monarch was hit both in the face and in the throat. The horses of the royal carriage became restless and the king was immediately taken to the Royal Villa, but arrived there lifeless. Bresci was surrounded by the Carabinieri, with whom he had a fight, tore the uniform off one of them and was finally captured by the carabinieri marshal Locatelli, in collaboration with a fireman, and taken to the guardhouse of the carabinieri barracks. The king, entrusted to the surgeons Vincenzo Vercelli and Attilio Savio, was declared dead by them at 10:40 p.m.
On July 30 members of the royal family arrived in Monza. The new king Victor Emanuel III interrupted the cruise in the Mediterranean with his wife Elena of Montenegro, landed in Reggio Calabria port, and then reached Naples, where he met with the former Prime Minister Francesco Crispi. From here the new rulers arrived by train at 6:30 p.m. at the Monza station, guarded by the "Genova Cavalleria" Regiment. Victor Emmanuel was thus able to meet his mother and see his father's body in the chapel of rest.
On August 8, after a ceremony in the funeral chapel of Villa Reale, the body of Umberto I was accompanied to the station, from where it left for Rome in a special carriage with the high clergy and court dignitaries, who had also been entrusted with the Iron Crown. At 6:30 p.m. train arrived at Rome Termini station, from where the funeral procession, led by General Amedeo Avogadro, again accompanied by the crowd, reached the Pantheon, where the body was buried.

## Trial and conviction

A month after the assassination, Bresci was tried, convicted, and sentenced on 30 August 1900, a single day. His lawyer, Francesco Saverio Merlino, argued that the idolization of kings had weakened Italy and that the criminalization of the anarchist movement had directly led to Umberto's assassination. He proposed that the decriminalization of radical ideologies and the resumption of civil liberties would put an end to propaganda of the deed, the anarchist practice of political assassination. Bresci's character was further defended by his old foreman, a long-time co-worker, and his own wife, who herself expressed surprise that her husband could have committed the assassination. Examinations by the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso found no evidence of mental illness and the prosecution was thus unable to establish criminal insanity.
The government of Italy assumed Bresci had acted as part of a conspiracy. The then Interior minister Giovanni Giolitti was convinced the assassination had been plotted by Paterson anarchists such as Errico Malatesta together with the exiled Neapolitan Queen Maria Sophie of Bavaria, whom Giolitti alleged was planning to return to power in Italy. Another popular conspiracy theory asserted that Giuseppe Ciancabilla had originally been selected as the assassin by a revolutionary committee in London but was replaced by Bresci after he got into a conflict with Malatesta over the editorship of La Questione Sociale. In the investigation that ensued after Bresci's trial, eleven associates of Bresci – including his brother, travel companions, and epistolary partners – were arrested and held in solitary confinement under suspicion of collaborating on the assassination. They were finally released the following year, when the Milan appellate court found insufficient evidence of their involvement and dropped the charges. Further investigations in the United States likewise found no evidence of a conspiracy by Paterson anarchists to assassinate Umberto. The Italian diplomats Giovanni Branchi [it] and Saverio Fava were themselves left thoroughly dissatisfied with the "worthless" investigations conducted by the New York City Police Department, United States Secret Service, and the Pinkerton detective agency.
Bresci himself was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, the most severe punishment available, as Italy had already abolished the death penalty. Bresci was initially held in Milan's San Vittore Prison, then transferred to a prison in Elba, where he was illegally held in an underground cell below sea level. Fears of news leaking about the conditions of his imprisonment, combined with unrest among Bresci's supporters in the prison, resulted in him being transferred again on 23 January 1901. He was moved to solitary confinement on the remote Santo Stefano Island, where he was held in a small, unfurnished cell, with his feet shackled.
Facing the harsh prison conditions, Italian govenrment was worried about the attempt to set Bresci free by the members of Italian anarchist groups, preventing this to set additional guards. On 22 May 1901, Bresci was found hanging by the neck in his cell. Vengeance had been carved into the wall. Suspicious circumstances of this event are leading to theories, than Bresci was murdered by his guards.
Bresci's wife and daughter were forced to leave their home in West Hoboken, New Jersey.

## Legacy
### Governmental and policing reforms

Prior to Umberto's assassination by Bresci, the reactionary government of Luigi Pelloux government had been replaced by a left-wing government under Giuseppe Saracco of the Historical Left and Italy experienced a return to democracy. Other than a series of arrests during the investigation of the case, the state repression Italian anarchists had expected in the wake of the assassination never actually manifested. Subsequent governments led by Giolitti passed a series of reforms of the Italian law enforcement apparatus, reining in police repression against striking workers. Giolitti himself downplayed or suppressed information about further violent attacks by anarchists, even omitting any mention of anarchism from his memoirs about Bresci's assassination, which he depicted as the result of a "deranged mind". Dissatisfied with the ineffectiveness of their foreign intelligence apparatus, as well as the investigations of the American authorities, the Italian government also established a new surveillance network to monitor emigrant Italian anarchists in Europe and the Americas.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, the then British prime minister, responded to the assassination by proclaiming that European governments had been too lenient towards anarchists, whose "morbid thirst for notoriety" he feared presented a threat to the existence of civilization. Switzerland passed a new law that punished expressions of support for crimes committed by anarchists, imprisoning Luigi Bertoni under this law after he publicly praised Bresci's actions. European governments that had participated in the International Conference of Rome for the Social Defense Against Anarchists also attempted to appeal to the United States government, calling for it to surveil the American anarchist movement and suppress the radical press. The United States State Department, without a federal law enforcement agency, responded that it lacked the means to carry out such an operation. Bresci's assassination of Umberto nevertheless contributed to a rising climate of xenophobia and anti-anarchist sentiment in the United States, culminating in the passage of the Immigration Act of 1903.

### Further assassinations and attempts

Shortly after Umberto's death, the French anarchist François Salson attempted to assassinate the Persian king Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar in Paris. Although Salson himself never disclosed his motives, international newspapers (including Corriere della Sera, The Times, and the New York Herald) all claimed that the attempt had been directly inspired by Bresci's actions. Print media also linked Bresci's actions with those of Belgian anarchist Jean-Baptiste Sipido (who attempted to assassinate the British crown prince Edward VII) and Italian anarchist Luigi Lucheni (who had assassinated Empress Elisabeth of Austria). Bresci and Lucheni shared little motive in common; Lucheni himself later expressed his admiration for Bresci's actions.
The assassination directly inspired the Polish-American anarchist Leon Czolgosz, who commited the assassination of William McKinley, 25th president of the United States.

## Memory

At the site of the attack in Monza, La Cappella Espiatoria (Expiatory Chapel) was raised in 1910 in memory of the murdered king, designed by the architect Giuseppe Sacconi, at the behest of his son, Vittorio Emanuele III. Deceased king was also themed in works of by the poets Giovanni Pascoli or Adolfo Resplendino.
Bresci's personal effects, including the gun with which he killed Umberto I and some bullets, are kept at the Museo criminologico (Criminological Museum) in Rome.
The assassination is pictured in Italian movie L'ultimo giorno del Re (The Last Day of the King) directed by Ettore Radice from 2020.

## Gallery

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