ITALY NAPLES and SICILY (Two Sicilies) silver 20 grani 1855
$40.00
ITALY, NAPLES and SICILY (Two Sicilies), Ferdinand II, 1830-59, 20 grani, 1855, silver, 0.1229 ozT, KM332, edge nicks, VF
Out of stock
Description
What we call “Naples and Sicily” they themselves called “Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.” Ferdinand II became King on the death of his father, Francis I. He started out as a moderate progressive absolute monarch. But when people called for a Constitution he repressed them with violence. Reform agitation continued. Ferdinand’s response got more and more repressive. After 1849 he ruled through the army as an iron first guy. There was an assassination attempt. He died three years later.
Naples and Sicily had been entwined in dynastic and political affairs since the 12th century. They broke apart in the 13th century. Spain owned both for a while, then both became independent in the 18th century, though both were ruled by junior members of the Spanish royal family. After Napoleon the two kingdoms were combined into one, called the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which endured as the largest Italian state until Unification.
After the devolution of the Western Roman Empire into a German kingdom the Italian peninsula went through about 1800 years of disunity and foreign conquest before the War of Unification in the 1860s.
The political arrangements that resulted in the nations of modern Europe began to emerge out of local autonomy starting in the 7th century AD or so. Europe, for our purposes, stretches from Greenland to somewhere in Russia. Collectors of Europe would likely include Russia. Collectors of Asia, even though about 2/3 of Russia is in Asia, probably not.
By “Modern World Coins” we mean here, generally, the round, flat, shiny metal objects that people have used for money and still do. “Modern,” though, varies by location. There was some other way they were doing their economies, and then they switched over to “modern coins,” then they went toward paper money, now we’re all going toward digital, a future in which kids look at a coin and say “What’s that?” We’ll say: “We used to use those to buy things.” Kids will ask “How?” The main catalog reference is the Standard Catalog of World Coins, to which the KM numbers refer.
