The king who did not see it coming

An anarchist shot the king at close range

Umberto I had already been shot at twice and stabbed once. He kept turning up in public anyway. On 29 July 1900, he was in Monza. He came to hand out prizes at a gymnastics club's closing ceremony. This was a routine errand. He had done it a hundred times before.

Gaetano Bresci was waiting for him. Bresci was an Italian anarchist. He had worked for years in a textile mill in Paterson, New Jersey. He sailed back to Italy that spring. He had one purpose. He carried a revolver. He fired three or four shots into the king at close range. Umberto I of Italy died within minutes, on the street. The crowd that had come to watch him hand out medals saw it happen.

Bresci gave his reason without hesitation. In 1898, soldiers in Milan opened fire on crowds. The crowds were protesting the price of bread. Scores of people died. This became known as the Bava Beccaris massacre. Umberto had decorated the general who ordered it. Bresci said he had come to settle that account. Monza was where he did it.

A chapel of atonement rose over the killing

Umberto's son, Vittorio Emanuele III, inherited the throne that night. He also inherited the question of what to do with the ground where his father died. The answer took ten years to build.

The architect Giuseppe Sacconi was given the commission. He died before it was finished. His student Guido Cirilli completed the work in 1910. It is a stone chapel with obelisk-like crosses topped in bronze. It stands a short walk from the Royal Villa of Monza entrance. The address is Via Matteo da Campione. A Pietà by the sculptor Lodovico Pogliaghi sits over its entrance. It is known today as the Expiatory Chapel of Monza. It was built to atone for a king's murder. It is one of only two such chapels in Europe raised for that purpose. The other stands in Paris, for a king who lost his head rather than his life to a bullet.

Five men were shot in reprisal on Via Pellico

The killing on Monza's streets did not end with Bresci. During the German occupation of Italy, soldiers took five men from Monza's prison. They shot them on Via Pellico. It was a reprisal. A German noncommissioned officer had been killed nearby. The occupying command answered with five lives for one. Angelo Inzoli, Giuseppe Malfasi, Luigi Dell'Orto, Pietro Colombo and Gianfredo Vignati were chosen essentially at random from the cells. They were executed in the street. No trial. No defense. The state that did this was not the one Umberto had died defending. An occupying power used the same logic Bresci had used on the king. A death answered with a death. It happened in the open. It happened in this town.

A queen founded the basilica that made Monza matter

Long before any of that, Monza was where a queen decided a kingdom needed a center. Theodelinda was a Bavarian princess who became queen of the Lombards. She chose this ground for a royal basilica. It grew into what stands today, a half mile from the killing site, as Monza. She placed the Iron Crown inside it. It was a band of iron reputedly forged from a nail of the True Cross. Kings of Italy were crowned with it for over a thousand years afterward. Charlemagne was among them. Theodelinda died in 627. She is remembered as buried at Monza. She built the object that made this town matter to power. Nine centuries later, that same idea of a king's authority resting on this ground brought Umberto here to be shot.

Fifteen spectators died in racing's deadliest crash

Power built for speed met the same abrupt ending four miles east. It was at the racing circuit. During the Italian Grand Prix, Assassination of Umberto I of Italy's Ferrari touched wheels with Jim Clark's car. This happened entering the Parabolica curve. Von Trips's car flew into the crowd lining the track. He died instantly. Fifteen spectators died with him. They were watching a race the way the crowd at the gymnastics ceremony had watched a king hand out medals. It remains motor racing's deadliest single crash. The circuit kept racing afterward. The town kept crowning kings after Theodelinda. It kept mourning them after Bresci.

The state answered violence with courts, not only chapels. On Piazza Garibaldi, three-quarters of a mile from the chapel built for Umberto, the city raised its Palazzo di Giustizia, the Monza Courthouse. Bresci himself was never tried there. He was convicted in Milan within weeks. He was sent to a penal island. He died the following year, officially by suicide. But the courthouse rose in the same town where the killing had already happened. That killing made it necessary to ask the question. What does the state do with a man who kills a king.