Events from the year 1885 in Italy

1885
in
Italy

Decades:
See also:

Kingdom of Italy

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The total population of Italy in 1885 (within the current borders) was 30.511 million.[1] Life expectancy in 1885 was 36.9 years.[2]

Events

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Agostino Depretis in 1885

Italy still suffers from the cholera outbreak in 1884. According to official estimates, cholera killed 50,000 Italians between 1884 and 1887.[3] 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.[4]
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.[5]

January

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  • 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.[6] 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.[7]

February

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March

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A completed Vittoriano in 1944
  • 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.[10]
    The overall aim was also to make Rome a modern European capital that would rival Berlin, Vienna, London and Paris[11] by overcoming the centuries-old urban planning of Papal Rome.[12] 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.[13]

June

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Births

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Deaths

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References

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  1. ^ "L'Italia in 150 anni. Sommario di statistiche storiche 1861–2010" (PDF). Istat. Retrieved 17 May 2021.
  2. ^ "Life expectancy". Our World in Data. Retrieved 28 August 2018.
  3. ^ Snowden, Naples in the time of cholera, 1884-1911, p. 85
  4. ^ Snowden, Naples in the time of cholera, 1884-1911, p. 169
  5. ^ Clark, Modern Italy, 1871 to the Present, p. 23
  6. ^ Snowden, Naples in the time of cholera, 1884-1911, p. 193
  7. ^ "Il Piano di Risanamento di Napoli". Eddyburg (in Italian). Retrieved 2024-07-04.
  8. ^ Tripodi (1999), pp. 15–16.
  9. ^ Pakenham (1991), p. 281; 471.
  10. ^ 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.
  11. ^ Agnew (2005, pp. 229–230).
  12. ^ Agnew (2005, p. 233).
  13. ^ Agnew (2005, pp. 231).
  14. ^ The International Sanitary Conference of Rome, 1885, Nature, volume 33, page 25 (1885)
  15. ^ 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

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