Prince Victor Emanuel (Vittorio Emanuele) of Savoy, son of the last king of Italy, died this Saturday at the age of 86 in Geneva (Switzerland) after a long exile, said his lawyer Sergio Orlandi, confirming information from the Italian media.
“His Royal Highness Viktor Emmanuel, Duke of Savoy and Prince of Naples, died peacefully in Geneva surrounded by his family,” said a brief statement from the Royal House of Savoy, which was quoted by the local press.
The text stipulates that the place and date of the funeral will be announced later. When asked by the AFP agency, Orlandi confirmed his death. “Yes, he died this morning,” he wrote.
Victor Emmanuel of Savoy, born on February 12, 1937 in Naples, He was the patriarch of the House of Savoy, which ruled unified Italy from 1861 to 1946, and the son of the last monarch, Umberto II, who briefly held the throne between May and June 1946, when Italy became a republic.
The aristocrat left the transalpine country at the age of nine, banished along with all male descendants of the royal family by the constitution of 1946, as a sanction for the collaboration of his grandfather Viktor Manuel III. with the fascist regime and the signing of two racial laws. He returned to the country in December 2002 after the Italian parliament voted to lift his exile. To obtain it, he had to swear allegiance to the Republic, a gesture he had long rejected.
The prince’s life was marked by scandals and controversies. In 1978 he was accused of shooting the young German tourist Dirk Hamer in southern Corsica. After a long trial, the prince, who maintained his innocence, was acquitted in 1991. Netflix recounts this event in the series “In the Shadow of the Throne,” which has been broadcast on the platform since July 2023.
In 2006, he was involved in a pimping and slot machine case that landed him a week in jail and a month of house arrest. The monarch married the heiress of a wealthy Swiss industrial family of Italian origin, Marina Recolfi-Doria, a water skiing champion, in a civil ceremony in 1970.
Since Umberto II was against the marriage, The religious ceremony took place in private a year later and with the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, as a witness.
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