Last Queen of Italy dies aged 94

By Steve Cunningham< xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

MARIA Jos of Savoy, the last Queen of Italy, has died, aged 94. She was queen for 27 days and exiled for 54 years.

Press Association

The last Queen of Italy

As wife of Umberto II, she reigned from 9 May to 12 June, 1946, until a referendum voted to make the country a republic.

After Italy's defeat in the Second World War, many blamed the country's plight on the royal family's earlier support for the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini.

Maria, however, was a staunch anti-fascist, refusing to Italianise her name to Maria Giuseppina, even after Mussolini made it a rule.

She was born in 1906 in Belgium, the daughter of King Albert I and Elizabeth, and married Umberto in 1930. They had four children.

Her independent thinking and a lively mind were not valued as social skills by either her new family or buy the fascists who ran the country.

Hitler, however, took a fancy to her, once remarking that her eyes were the same colour as the sky over her country.

She found the fuehrer repulsive, revolted in particular by his sweaty hands and the way he ate chocolate all the time.

Maria Jos fled Rome to Switzerland after the fall of Mussolini in 1943, saying she regretted not having joined Italian partisans to fight the Nazis.

She returned in 1945 and Umberto II became king when his father, King Victor Emmanuel III, abdicated on 9 May, 1946, hoping that the gesture would keep the monarchy alive. It did not.

Two years after the referendum abolished the monarchy, Italy passed a law banning all male members of the Savoy family from setting foot in Italy. It is still in force, despite legal challenges by Maria Jos's oldest son, Vittorio Emanuele, and her grandson, Emanuele Filiberto, the heir to the throne.

Umberto and Maria Jose moved to Portugal before the results of the referendum were known, and she left her husband after a year and set up home in an 18th-Century villa near Geneva, where members of the ousted dynasty spent their exile. Umberto died in 1983. Maria Jose wrote many essays on the house of Savoy.

She will be buried next to her husband in Hauntecombe Abbey, France, where many rulers of the Savoy dynasty are interred.

A constitutional amendment to allow the Savoys to return was approved by the Italian parliament in 1998, but has since been awaiting full consent.

Last year, the European Parliament rejected a demand that Italy ends the 54-year exile as 'a cruel and unusual punishment with no place in a modern Europe.'