The 19th Century: the development of the prison system
Notorious criminals of the 20th Century
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Gaetano Bresci the anarchist who killed the King of Italy
On the evening of 29 July 1900, King Umberto I of Italy was driving away from the gymnasium of the Forti e Liberi gymnastic association in Monza, where he had awarded prizes to some athletes, when suddenly a young man shot him dead with a Hamilton and Booth Co. revolver.
The young assassin was immediately arrested and identified. His name was Gaetano Bresci, a thirty-one-year-old Tuscan anarchist and weaver by profession.
Bresci lived in New Jersey in the United States and had come back to Italy on 17 May with the precise aim of assassinating the king. Bresci himself supplied the motive for his action: he wanted to avenge the workers killed two years earlier in Milan during a demonstration against the high cost of living. The order to fire the cannons had been given by General Bava Beccaris, but, according to many, the king in person was politically responsible for the attack on the workers.
Gaetano Bresci was sent up for trial by the Milan Court of Assizes and the trial was unusually rapid for those days. Found guilty of the crime of regicide, Bresci was sentenced on 29 August 1900 “… to life imprisonment, the first seven years of which to be spent in solitary confinement, to permanent disqualification from public office, to being debarred from legal rights, to being forbidden to make a will, since the will made before he was sentenced is considered null and void.”
On his arrest Bresci stated that he championed revolutionary anarchist principles and that he was a member of an anarchist circle that published the periodical The Social Question at Patterson in the United States, where he was officially employed in a textile factory. However, he claimed that the plan to kill Umberto I had been his own initiative, therefore no other anarchist was implicated. He was transferred to the Santo Stefano Penitentiary on the island of Ventotene, on the morning of 22 May 1901, and after ten months he was found dead. He had a towel tied in a slip-knot around his neck and a verdict of suicide was pronounced.
