Dead Amedeo D’Aosta, the links with Sicily of the prince of the House of Savoy

Palermo – “I am deeply saddened. Amedeo was a generous man, available, ready to help friends but also people he did not know, of any social class they were, because he had a great love for his neighbor and felt the needs of others as his own problems. He had an upbringing as a member of the royal family, an upbringing different from the one we all receive. ” Thus the Palermo princess Signoretta Alliata Licata di Baucina remembers with emotion the Duke Amedeo d’Aosta, who died this morning in Arezzo.

“I met him 43 years ago – recalls Alliata -, he had just separated from Claudia d’Orleans and had started a relationship with Silvia (Paternò di Spedalotto, a noblewoman from Palermo, ed) one of my closest friends. very young and her father, the Marquis Spedalotto, was worried and went to Tuscany to better understand this falling in love which later turned out to be a wonderful union. Silvia entered the Savoy family with great lightness, almost on tiptoe, and she loved children of Amedeo and Claudia as if they were his “. Amedeo d’Aosta and Silvia Paternò di Spedalotto got married in 1987 in the chapel of Villa Spedalotto, in Bagheria (Pa), the eighteenth-century residence of the family which was also the set, in 1991, of some scenes in the film ‘Johnny Stecchinò by Roberto Benigni.

“What has always struck me and that I will miss a lot about Amedeo – continues Princess Alliata – is his extreme humanity: if you needed something he was the first to get going to help you solve problems. He made you feel at the center. of the world, a special person, and everywhere he left an excellent memory of himself. Moreover – and this was the result of his’ regalè education – he was always very attentive to everything that happened in Italy and he experienced unpleasant things as open wounds. He had been educated to total respect for others and so he educated his three children, Bianca Mafalda and Aimone, in simplicity and love for nature and the sea, without ever losing sight of an extraordinary sense of righteousness that made him distinguish. clearly good from evil, white from black, unlike a society like the one we live in which is immersed in the gray in which good and evil are confused “. Finally Signoretta Alliata is moved to think that Amedeo d’Aosta “had fought with extraordinary tenacity against cancer and for this reason none of us thought he would die. He loved the house in Pantelleria very much, he still wanted to live and return to the island and his sea ​​that for him was a world. I will make him say a mass in Palermo “, concludes the noblewoman.