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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Drusus, post: 966241, member: 6370&quot;]By no means do I think he is the earliest but King Vittorio Emanuele III collected italian coins going as far back as the Roman Empire and I think he published a book about them. Not the earliest but a more well known early collector / numismatist.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><i>Victor Emmanuel III had a passion for coins. May 9th was a very important date in his life: on May 9th 1881 Colonel Egidio Osio became his tutor and transmitted to him the passion for coins; their relationship, affectionate on both sides, is documented in over 400 letters (from 1881 to1902) written by Victor Emmanuel, all mentioning coins, new acquisitions, books. On May 9th 1946, at the moment of leaving Italy for Egypt, Victor Emmanuel donated his coin collection to the Italian people; a collection that – as he wrote –was the greatest passion of his life: the gravity of this remark does not diminish the magnitude of the gift and the scale of the collection (over 100,000 coins, dating from the fall of the Roman Empire in the West to the Unification of Italy, issued by Italian mints, in Italy and abroad). On top of this, the King left a work as grand as the collection itself: the 20 volumes of the Corpus Nummorum Italicorum, which he edited personally, with the help of a number of successive numismatic secretaries. Moreover, the collection is also an enormous archive, considering that each coin has a ticket, personally handwritten by the king, recording provenance, auction or dealer with price, or name of donors (many were given to him by his family or subjects).</i></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><img src="http://www.cachecoins.org/italy01.jpg" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" />[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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