2016-04-07 Thu

A frock-coated bust of the Italian statesman Francesco Crispi, facing right, with enormous walrus mustache has been portrayed on a 65.8-millimeter bronze medal bearing the dates of his his 80th birthday on Oct. 4, 1898, designed by sculptor Adolfo di Nicola Farnesi.

The reverse features the radiant Star of Italian Destiny and the three-legged Triquetra and Medusa head of Crispi’s birthplace, the island of Sicily, with legend ‘TO FRANCESCO CRISPI ON HIS 80TH BIRTHDAY FROM THE SICILIANS’.

Crispi was a prominent leader in the struggle for Italian unification, the Risorgimento. He belonged to the Albanian ancestry or the refugees from Ottoman Turkish conquest who formed the Catholic Byzantine Rite that retained Greek liturgy while maintaining union with the pope. He would die an outspoken freemason and atheist.

Crispi is known for the Italian invasion of the ancient kingdom of Ethiopia and the disastrous defeat of Italian forces by Emperor Menelik II at Adowa in March 1896.