Just weeks after the end of fascist rule and World War II, Italians went to the polls and voted decisively, about 54 percent to 46 percent, to replace their monarchy with a republic. King Umberto II, who had reigned only a month, went into exile, and June 2 has been celebrated ever since as Festa della Repubblica, Italy's national day.
The House of Savoy had ruled parts of Italy for nearly a thousand years and the unified kingdom since 1861, but its association with Mussolini's fascist regime, which King Victor Emmanuel III had appointed and tolerated for two decades, left the monarchy fatally compromised by 1946. Victor Emmanuel abdicated in favor of his son Umberto in a last-ditch effort to save the crown, but the gesture, delivered only a month before the referendum, changed few minds.
On June 2, 1946, roughly 89 percent of eligible Italians turned out, an extraordinary figure for a country still digging out of war rubble, to vote simultaneously on the monarchy question and for delegates to a constituent assembly that would draft a new constitution. The republic side won with about 12.7 million votes to the monarchy's 10.7 million, a split that revealed a sharp regional divide, the south largely favored keeping the king, the north voted overwhelmingly republican.
Umberto II, dubbed the "May King" for his brief reign, left for Portugal rather than risk civil conflict, and a member of the House of Savoy would not be allowed back into Italy for over fifty years under a constitutional exile clause. Women voted in that referendum for the first time in Italian history, a detail as consequential as the outcome itself. June 2 remains Italy's Republic Day, marked in Rome with a military parade and flyover.
Key people: Umberto II, Victor Emmanuel III, Alcide De Gasperi