ITALY SARDINIA silver 5 lire 1826 Genoa mint

Description

Carlo Felice was the last male of his branch of the House of Savoy. There was reformist and revolutionary activity in Sardinia during his time. He was fond of extreme measures in the repression of those tendencies. He did work on agricultural development and started to work on the modernization of roads. A rebellion in 1821 eventually forced his abdication, but negotiations about what to do next did not bring any resolution. Austria eventually got involved, restoring him to the throne. He continued to rule as an absolutist for most of another decade.

Sardinia is the second largest Italian island. The Kings of Sardinia went on to become the Kings of Italy.

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.