ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the events of 1885, from the first steps taken by students of the University of Turin, over the course of the revolt, which spread all over the kingdom, until the sudden disappearance of all the manifestations in just a few weeks. By the late 1870s and early 1880s, student political associations had become common and widespread, the most active and well organised among them being republican and radical groups. Turin, the capital city of Piedmont, situated in the northwest part of Italy, hosted one of the most important universities of the kingdom. Political activism among students of Turin was probably not livelier than elsewhere, but, as far as police surveillance was concerned, student-police relations in Turin were particularly strained. In the spring of 1885, students around Italy seemed united by a refreshed esprit de corps, replicating in each university the actions of their Turin counterparts as if they intended to display publicly their renewed collective identity.
