Vittorio Emanuele of Savoy, son of Umberto II, the last king of Italy, and Maria José, has died. He would have turned 87 on February 12th. Death in Geneva. The announcement in a note from the ‘Royal House of Savoy’: ‘At 7.05 this morning, 3 February 2024, His Royal Highness Vittorio Emanuele, Duke of Savoy and Prince of Naples, surrounded by his family, passed away peacefully in Geneva. The place and date of the funeral will be communicated as soon as possible.
On 8 September 1943, at the age of 6, he left Rome together with his mother Maria José and, after the 1946 referendum which sanctioned the victory of the Republic, he lived in exile until March 2003, when the XIII provision that prohibited the return of male descendants to Italy and he was able to return.
He was married to Marina Doria, with whom he had a son, Emanuele Filiberto.
He was investigated, and then acquitted, for the death of Dirk Hamer, a nineteen-year-old German killed in a shootout in 1978 on the island of Cavallo, in Corsica. The case was at the center of a bitter and long legal battle between the Savoys and the Hamer family, in particular their sister Birgit.
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In 2017, the Supreme Court of Cassation established that “the fact that the French judges, in 1991, acquitted Vittorio Emanuele of Savoy of the charge of voluntary murder of the nineteen-year-old German Dirk Hamer “does not, however, mean” that the ‘prince’ “is exempt from responsibility under any other profile, since it still takes on importance from a civil and also ethical point of view” that that death “took place during a shootout in which Savoia participated, outside of any hypothesis of legitimate defense”.
Last year the story was also at the center of the Netflix series Il Principe, developed and directed by Beatrice Borromeo Casiraghi, which prompted her son Emanuele Filiberto to intervene, defining the documentary “an excuse for fake news”.
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