ITALY silver 5 lire 1876 R

Description

Victor Emanuel II was King of Sardinia when he engaged in the War of Unification in 1859-61. He continued working on adding bits and pieces of territory to the new, united Italy until his death in 1878. For dynastic reasons he continued to style himself Victor Emanuel II rather than Victor Emanuel I, which Wikipedia describes as a public relations problem.

Italy engaged in its war of unification at the same time as the USA was starting its Civil War. The kingdom continued until the end of World War II.

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.