Emanuele Filiberto seeks to have his grandparents Umberto II and Maria José buried in Pantheon.
The grandson of Italy’s last king and queen has called for the remains of his grandparents to be brought back to Italy and laid to rest at the Pantheon in Rome, eight decades after the House of Savoy was driven into exile.
In an interview with Italian newspaper Il Giornale, Emanuele Filiberto di Savoia extended a “heartfelt appeal” to Italy’s president Sergio Mattarella: “May he allow the remains of Umberto II and Maria José to return to Italy and rest in the Pantheon, where the first two kings of Italy and Queen Margherita already lie”, adding: “I hope that the time for serenity has arrived”.
The appeal comes a week after Italy marked 80 years as a republic, a milestone that recalls the 1946 referendum in which Italians voted to abolish the monarchy and, with it, consign the Savoy dynasty to exile.
Pantheon
The Pantheon in Rome already serves as the burial place of the founders of unified Italy – Victor Emmanuel II, who became the first king of a united Italy in 1861, his son Umberto I, who was assassinated in 1900, and Queen Margherita.
If Italy were to extend that honour to Umberto II and Maria José it would be symbolically significant, and would place the last king alongside the first in a monument whose use as a royal necropolis ended with the fall of the monarchy.
The end of the monarchy
The June 1946 referendum chose a republic over the monarchy by 54.3 per cent to 45.7 per cent, forcing Umberto II into exile after a reign of merely 34 days.
Umberto II had previously served as Lieutenant General of the Kingdom of Italy from 5 June 1944 to 9 May 1946, before formally becoming king on 9 May and reigning until 13 June 1946.
Following the abolition of the monarchy, Umberto II spent the rest of his life in exile in Portugal. He died in Geneva in March 1983 and is currently interred, together with his wife Maria José, at the Abbey of Hautecombe in France.
The Italian republican constitution originally contained a transitional clause permanently banishing all male descendants of the former royal house from entering Italy. That exile provision was officially lifted in 2002, after the House of Savoy formally renounced all claims to the throne.
Exile
The Savoy story after the exile is one of dispersal and long separation. Umberto and Maria José – a Belgian princess who had been queen for only a single month – lived apart in their years of exile.
Umberto settled in Portugal with three of their daughters – Maria Pia, Maria Gabriella and Maria Beatrice – while Maria José moved to Switzerland with their son, Vittorio Emanuele, Emanuele Filiberto’s father.
Maria José, described by her grandson as an extraordinarily cultivated and unconventional woman and an amateur historian who wrote extensively about the House of Savoy, died in 2001.
Vittorio Emanuele – the son of Umberto II and the father of Emanuele Filiberto – died in Geneva in February 2024 aged 86 and was buried at the Basilica of Superga in Turin in July 2024.
Historical precedent
In 2017, the remains of Victor Emmanuel III – Umberto II’s father and the king discredited for backing Benito Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship – were repatriated from Egypt, where he had died in exile in 1947, and interred in a family mausoleum at the Sanctuary of Vicoforte in northern Italy.
The repatriation was made possible through an agreement between presidents Mattarella and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt.
Members of Italy’s Jewish community and Italians devoted to the memory of partisan fighters expressed dismay at the repatriation, given Victor Emmanuel III’s complicity with the fascist regime and the infamous racial laws.
At the time, Emanuele Filiberto expressed dissatisfaction that the remains had not been placed at the Pantheon in Rome, where Victor Emmanuel II and Umberto I – Italy’s first two kings – and Queen Margherita are buried.
Renewed appeal
Now, his appeal on behalf of Umberto II and Maria José renews that same aspiration.
Umberto II’s reign, whatever its brevity, was untainted by collaboration with fascism; it was Umberto who, as Lieutenant General, signed the decree in February 1945 extending the vote to women for the first time in Italy – a measure Emanuele Filiberto was at pains to recall in his interview.
“I truly believe that Umberto and Maria José would have been great kings for Italy,” Emanuele Filiberto told Il Giornale. “The freedom that the Republic later brought had already begun with them, from the arrest of Mussolini in 1943 and certainly from the lieutenancy of my grandfather from June 1944.”
He also stressed that he has always “condemned with absolute firmness” the complicity of his great-gradfather with the fascist regime.
“I hope that Italy is now mature enough to recognise this legacy and neither erase nor forget the memory of the past”, he concluded.
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