ITALY: The Little King

By the time it produced Prince Victor Emmanuel, the 900-year-old House of Savoy was wearing a bit thin. The Prince’s father, King Umberto I, decided to improve the breed by marrying off little (5 ft. 3 in.) Victor Emmanuel.to booming, strapping (6 ft.) Elena, daughter of Montenegro’s peasant king, Nicholas. In his 46 years as King of Italy, and sometime ruler of Albania and Ethiopia, Victor Emmanuel confirmed his father’s early suspicion that there was room for improvement.

King’s Ransom. By some standards Victor Emmanuel seemed to do very well indeed. Canny King Umberto took out £1,000,000 insurance a short time before he was assassinated in 1900. Victor Emmanuel III acquired not only a throne but lots of money. He collected old coins, as well as new, and wrote about them in numismatic journals. Tidy and penurious, he was described by a friend as “a good husband, a loving father, a conscientious bureaucrat.”

When Italy turned up on the winning side in World War I, Victor Emmanuel reached modest heights of popularity. His subjects referred to him (fondly, at first) as il piccolo—The Little One.

In the postwar turmoil, Victor Emmanuel, appraising unrest at home and tottering dynasties abroad, handed Italy over to Benito Mussolini. It was the first —and last—time he ever defied his ministers; henceforth he was impotent to prevent his downfall. But Benito, the blacksmith’s son, promised to look after the little king. The Italian people paid the price for 23 years.

They were busy and important days for Victor Emmanuel. He read long and complicated reports, reviewed parades, pinned medals on heroes and put wreaths on graves. An American visitor was told in 1927: “The most wonderful thing about Mussolini is his loyalty to his King.” The words were spoken by King Victor Emmanuel III; by that time a lot of Italians would have disagreed. When Il Duce declared war against Ethiopia, il piccolo swiftly calculated: “If we win I shall be King of Abyssinia; if we lose, I shall be King of Italy.”

They won. His father and grandfather who had ruled Italy since its unification in 1861 reigned over some 115,000 square miles. Victor Emmanuel, standing in the shadows, boosted it to 1,358,000.

King’s Coffee. But Italians long since had learned to jeer at their little king. Two attempts to assassinate Victor Emmanuel failed prior to World War II. Casualty lists and home-front privations in war did not allay the discontent. Ran one popular coffeehouse rhyme:

When our Victor was plain King,

Coffee was a common thing.

When an Emperor he was made,

Coffee to a smell did fade.

Since he got Albania’s throne,

Coffee’s very smell has flown.

After Mussolini’s fall and Italy’s capitulation in 1943, it was only a question of time before opportunism would collect its due. But stubbornly the King procrastinated, hoping somehow to hang on to his throne. In 1944, he named his tall (6 ft.) playboy son and Crown Prince, Umberto, as “Lieutenant General of the Realm,” subject to the people’s will to be expressed by free vote. Victor Emmanuel remained a king in name only.

King’s Fishing. One May afternoon in 1946 Victor Emmanuel, wearing white gloves, went fishing for sgómbro, a kind of mackerel, in the bay of Naples. For hours he sat erect on a camp chair, his short, spindly legs clear of the royal yacht’s deck. Only one sgómbro bit. The political fishing was just as bad. The king’s few remaining friends told him that the Italian people would vote against the monarchy.

Victor Emmanuel, in a last effort to save his line, decided to abdicate in favor of Umberto. Wearily, he penned his abdication, got the date wrong, corrected it, and paid a notary a 129-lire (15¢) fee to register the document. Queen Elena cried. By this time, Italy’s politicians professed not to care what he was doing or what his plans were; informed of the impending abdication, Premier Alcide de Gasperi said: “It’s not even fourth or fifth on my list of matters of importance.” .

Italians never got a chance to find out whether the kingly breed had improved: Umberto was dubbed Il Re di Maggio (King of the May), reigned but one month after his father. The Italian voters rejected the monarchy by a 5-to-4 margin.

Victor Emmanuel and Elena sailed for Egypt, whose King Farouk had offered them asylum. Stepping off the Italian cruiser at Alexandria, the exiled king cried to the sailors lined up amidships: “Farewell. . . . You are the men I loved the most.” In his reign, Italy had embarked on five wars, two of them undeclared; more than 1½ million Italian soldiers and sailors had died in them.

In Alexandria, Victor Emmanuel and his wife found a twelve-room villa, paid for it by selling $56,000 worth of jewels. From the little king’s personal fortune in England (estimated at $6,300,000) the British government doled out enough for a simple existence. He took the name Count of Pollenza, after a village in northern Italy. He walked and fished. When he read of events in his ex-country, he was heard to murmur, “This will be the death of me.” On Christmas Eve, 1947, he was stricken with a lung infection complicated by hardening of the arteries. Four days later, in Alexandria, death, as it must to all kings, came to Victor Emmanuel. Clutching at a handkerchief, dry-eyed Elena sat up all night. In the morning a taxicab arrived with a plain wooden coffin tied on top for il piccolo.