Umberto I of Italy

Son of Victor Emmanuel II, Umberto commanded Sardinian forces in the wars that unified Italy before ascending the throne in 1878. He pushed colonial expansion into Eritrea and Somalia, formalized the Triple Alliance in 1882, and backed military solutions at home and abroad. The gambit in Ethiopia collapsed at Adwa in 1896. Two years later, demonstrations over food costs in Milan were crushed by artillery — the Bava Beccaris massacre — and Umberto publicly decorated the general responsible. Socialist opposition and economic crisis mounted. On 29 July 1900, Gaetano Bresci, an Italian-American an…