Last Queen of Italy dies aged 94

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

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

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��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.

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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.

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

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

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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.

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

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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

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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.'�