1885 in Italy - Misplaced Pages

←

→

Decades:

Kingdom of Italy

Monarch – Umberto I (1878–1900)
Prime Minister – Agostino Depretis (1881–1887)

The total population of Italy in 1885 (within the current borders) was 30.511 million. Life expectancy in 1885 was 36.9 years.

Events

Italy still suffers from the cholera outbreak in 1884. According to official estimates, cholera killed 50,000 Italians between 1884 and 1887. The course of the disease led to a slide into a state of near anarchy in Sicily in 1885 and 1886 as fear of infection engulfed the island and the people of towns and villages desperately set up makeshift sanitary cordons in defiance of the authorities.
Italy was hit by the global fall in agricultural prices after 1880. The price of wheat fell from an average of 331 lire per tonne in 1878-80 to 245 lire in 1883 and 228 lire in 1885, official figures show. There was competition from cheap US grain and Asian rice, but also the return of the lira to gold convertibility in 1883 caused import prices to fall further.

January

15 January — A law to the redevelopment the city of Naples is approved after a devastating cholera outbreak in 1884 due to extremely poor sanitary conditions. The law provided the needed 100 million lire for the renewal of the city. The radical transformation of the city called risanamento intended to improve the sewerage infrastructure and replace the most clustered areas, considered the main cause of insalubrity, with large and airy avenues.

February

5 February — Italian troops of the Corpo Speciale per l'Africa (Special Corps for Africa), commanded by Colonel Tancredi Saletta, move into Massawa in Italian Eritrea without resistance or protest from its Egyptian garrison. The outbreak of the Mahdist uprising in the Sudan had changed the political situation in the Horn of Africa. Egypt was unable to maintain its garrison in Massawa and, with British approval and using the massacre of the explorer Gustavo Bianchi in 1884 as a pretext, the government had decided to take action in December 1884. The move will eventually lead to the Italo-Ethiopian War of 1887–1889.

March

22 March — Construction of the Monument to honour Victor Emmanuel II, the first king of a unified Italy, (Vittoriano) begins in Rome (1885–1911). The solemn ceremony of laying the foundation stone of the Vittoriano took place on 22 March 1885 in the presence of King Umberto I of Savoy. To erect the Vittoriano it was necessary to proceed with numerous expropriations and extensive demolitions of the buildings that were on the site.
The overall aim was also to make Rome a modern European capital that would rival Berlin, Vienna, London and Paris by overcoming the centuries-old urban planning of Papal Rome. In this context, the Vittoriano would have been the equivalent of Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, London's Admiralty Arch and the Opéra Garnier in Paris: these buildings all share a monumental and classical appearance that metaphorically communicates the pride and power of the nation of which they are the symbol.

May

20 May — The sixth International Sanitary Conference opened in Rome convened by the Italian government as a result of the outbreak of cholera in the country in 1884.

June

29 June — Reshuffle of the Depretis government.

Births

11 January — Arnaldo Mussolini, journalist and politician. He was the brother of fascist Prime Minister of Italy Benito Mussolini (d. 1931)
21 January — Umberto Nobile, aviator, aeronautical engineer and Arctic explorer. The first man to fly over the North Pole. (d. 1978)
12 May — Mario Sironi, Modernist artist who was active as a painter, sculptor, illustrator, and designer (d. 1961)
22 May — Giacomo Matteotti, socialist politician, kidnapped and killed by the secret political police of Benito Mussolini. (d. 1924)
27 August — Cordula Poletti, writer, poet, playwright, and feminist. One of the first women in Italy to openly declare her lesbianism (d. 1971)

Deaths

20 October — Michele Novaro, composer (b. 1818)
26 December — Rosa Vercellana, commonly known as 'Rosina' and, in Piedmontese, as La Bela Rosin, was the mistress and later wife of Victor Emmanuel II, King of Italy. Despite this, the morganatic status of her marriage meant that she was never recognized as Queen of Italy (b. 1833)

References

"L'Italia in 150 anni. Sommario di statistiche storiche 1861–2010" (PDF). Istat. Retrieved 17 May 2021.
"Life expectancy". Our World in Data. Retrieved 28 August 2018.
Snowden, Naples in the time of cholera, 1884-1911, p. 85
Snowden, Naples in the time of cholera, 1884-1911, p. 169
Clark, Modern Italy, 1871 to the Present, p. 23
Snowden, Naples in the time of cholera, 1884-1911, p. 193
"Il Piano di Risanamento di Napoli". Eddyburg (in Italian). Retrieved 2024-07-04.
Tripodi (1999), pp. 15–16.
Pakenham (1991), p. 281; 471.
Maria Rosaria Coppola, Adriano Morabito e Marco Placidi, Il Vittoriano nascosto, Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali, 2005, ISBN 978-88-240-1418-2.
Agnew (2005, pp. 229–230).
Agnew (2005, p. 233).
Agnew (2005, pp. 231).
The International Sanitary Conference of Rome, 1885, Nature, volume 33, page 25 (1885)
On the Results of the International Sanitary Conference on Cholera Lately Held at Rome, British Medical Journal, 29 Aug 1885, 2(1287):386-387

Sources

Agnew, John (2005). The Impossible Capital: Monumental Rome under Liberal and Fascist Regimes, 1870-1943. Wiley Blackwell.
Clark, Martin (2008). Modern Italy, 1871 to the Present. Harlow/New York: Pearson Longman. ISBN 978-1-4058-2352-4.
Pakenham, Thomas (1991). The scramble for Africa 1876-1912. London: Abacus. ISBN 0-349-10449-2.
Snowden, Frank M. (1995). Naples in the time of cholera, 1884-1911. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-585-13106-1.
Tripodi, Paolo (1999). "An Historical Perspective on Italian Colonialism". The Colonial Legacy in Somalia. Rome and Mogadishu: From Colonial Administration to Operation Restore Hope. Macmillan and St. Martin's Press. pp. 9–48.

v t e Years in Italy (1861–present)
19th century	Pre-1861 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869 1870 1871 1872 1873 1874 1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 1880 1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890 1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899 1900
20th century	1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000
21st century	2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024

v t e 1885 in Europe
Sovereign states	Andorra Austria-Hungary Baden Belgium Bulgaria Denmark France Germany Greece Italy Liechtenstein Luxembourg Monaco Montenegro Netherlands Norway Ottoman Empire Portugal Prussia Romania Russia San Marino Spain Sweden Switzerland United Kingdom
Dependencies, colonies and other territories	Cyprus Gibraltar Guernsey Isle of Man Jersey Malta

Categories: