1 Lira - Victor Emmanuel II

Victor Emmanuel II issued this coinage as King of Sardinia before Italian unification, a period when Piedmont-Sardinia was engineering the political groundwork — through Cavour's diplomacy and two wars — that would produce the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. The lira of this realm became the direct template for the unified Italian lira, with the decimal system and fineness carried forward essentially intact into the new national coinage.

KM#142 spans a decade of political turbulence, including the Second Italian War of Independence in 1859, fought alongside France against Austria.