The third attempt was the one that worked

A king was shot dead leaving his carriage

Umberto I of Italy had just watched a gymnastics competition when he climbed back into his carriage to go home. It was quarter to eleven at night. The carriage had barely started moving when a man stepped close and fired three or four shots. The king died within minutes, despite two doctors trying to save him. The shooter was Gaetano Bresci, an anarchist who had traveled from New Jersey to do it.

Bresci was avenging the Assassination of Umberto I of Italy, when soldiers had opened fire on food rioters in Milan two years earlier. He saw the king as responsible for the order to shoot. For Umberto, the bullets in Monza were the third attempt on his life, not the first.

In 1878, only months after taking the throne, Umberto was attacked in Naples by a man with a knife shouting for revolution. An officer struck the attacker down with a saber before he could do real harm. The king got a shallow cut on his arm. His prime minister, trying to help, was stabbed in the thigh.

In 1897, riding at a racecourse in Rome, another anarchist rushed his carriage, knife in hand. Umberto saw the blade coming and dodged. The man barely scratched the carriage itself before walking calmly away.

By 1910, the ground where the shots were fired carried a monument built to answer them: an Expiatory Chapel of Monza, commissioned by Umberto's widow and finished by his son. Its cross rises 115 feet over the exact point in the road.

A widow built a chapel on the killing spot

Queen Margherita did not let the road forget what happened on it. Within a year of her husband's death, she had a cross planted on the spot where he fell. She then commissioned the architect Giuseppe Sacconi to design something permanent. Sacconi died before the work finished, and his student Guido Cirilli carried it through. The chapel opened on the tenth anniversary of the murder, July 29, 1910.

Wrought iron gates by Alessandro Mazzucotelli seal the front. Inside the enclosure, a sculpted Pietà by Lodovico Pogliaghi sits at the base of the stone shaft. The shaft rises toward two crosses cut from translucent alabaster. At the very top, an urn holds a carved cushion bearing the scepter and crown of the House of Savoy. Every piece of it points at one thing: the ground itself, and what was owed to it.

Bread riots in Milan set the assassin's motive

The debt Bresci came to collect was two years old. In May 1898, soldiers in Milan opened fire on crowds rioting over the price of bread. The order to shoot came with the crown's backing. Bresci held Umberto responsible for the killings, and he crossed an ocean, from New Jersey back to Italy, to settle it. He fired his shots on this same road that now holds the chapel.

A Duchess of Milan also died on this ground

Five centuries earlier, another figure tied to Milan's ruling house ended her life on this ground. Caterina Visconti, Duchess of Milan and wife of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, the first Duke of Milan, died at Monza in 1404. She had married into a family that built its power through conquest and consolidation across Lombardy. Monza held her death the way it later held Umberto's: as one more ruler's ending, folded into the same stretch of river and road.

A queen made kings sacred with a crown

Before any of that, this stretch of the Lambro River was where a queen made a king sacred rather than accountable. Theodelinda, ruler of the Lombards, founded the basilica here that grew into the Duomo of Monza. She died at Monza in 616. The church she began came to house the Iron Crown, the relic used to crown Charlemagne and later kings of Italy. One king was made holy by that crown a quarter mile away. Another king bled out in the road three hundred years later, in a different empire.