Maria Jose of Savoy; Italy’s Last Queen

Maria Jose of Savoy, 94, Italy’s last queen, who was married to King Umberto II. Her late husband was king for a month in 1946, until a referendum in which Italians voted to scrap the monarchy and make the country a republic. After Italy’s war defeat, many blamed the country’s plight on the royal family’s earlier support for the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini. Two years later, the republic’s new constitution barred Umberto and his male descendants from Italy, and the ban remains in force. Maria Jose was born in 1906 in Belgium, the daughter of King Albert I and Elizabeth. She married Umberto in 1930, and they had four children, including exiled crown prince Victor Emmanuel. She fled to Switzerland after the fall of Mussolini in 1943, returning to Italy at the end of World War II. Her husband became king when his father, King Victor Emmanuel III, abdicated on May 9, 1946. At her home in exile near Geneva, Maria Jose wrote many historical essays on her royal family, the house of Savoy. Although Italian royalists will conduct memorial services in Rome’s Pantheon, where many members of the former ruling family are entombed, Maria Jose will be buried in France. On Saturday in Geneva, Switzerland.