Victor Emmanuel of Savoy, son of Umberto II, the last king of Italy, died this Saturday in Geneva, where his family went into exile in the post-war period, at the age of 86, as announced in a statement by the former royal house of Savoy. “At 7:05 this morning, His Royal Highness Victor Emmanuel passed away peacefully, surrounded by his family,” indicates the note from the noble house, which reigned in Italy from its birth in 1861 until 1946 (and also briefly in Spain, between 1871 and 1873, with Amadeo I).
Considered by monarchists as heir to the throne of Italy, Victor Emmanuel of Savoy, born in Naples on February 12, 1937, was the heir to the House of Savoy, known as Prince Victor Emmanuel, a rank that would correspond to him because he was the son of last king of Italy and Queen María José. In 1946, at the age of nine, he left Italy along with his family when the republic was proclaimed after a referendum by which the people abolished the monarchy with 12.7 million votes in favor compared to 10.7 million.
During his exile he traveled with a Belgian passport and with a diplomatic passport, which was granted to him by former French president Giscard d'Estaing. Familiarly nicknamed Buddha because of his plump appearance, Victor Emmanuel of Savoy was educated in Switzerland and Portugal. His main tutor was the Italian professor Renato Cordero and among his teachers was the Nobel Prize winner August Picard. Graduated from the Geneva Faculty of Economic Sciences, he moved to the United States, where he began his professional career in a banking entity. He was a director in a securities agency in Geneva, director of a bank in Lugano, owner of a real estate company and member of the board of directors of the Swiss aeronautical company Augusto-Bell, in Cascina.
In his youth he was considered a member of the so-called jet set and he was associated with Dominique Claudel (1957) and Nicole Le Vien. A great fan of motor racing, in 1958 he suffered his first serious accident. In 1962 he had another one with a Jaguar he owned, which made his courtship with Marina Doria, a ski champion and daughter of an industrialist, publicly known. Doria was not part of the nobility, which motivated Humbert II's opposition to the courtship of the couple who, despite this, married on October 7, 1971 and took up residence in Vesenar, near Geneva (Switzerland). .
Entrepreneur and businessman, he was closely linked to the world of sports, participating in regattas, aviation championships, swimming, skiing, mountaineering, underwater fishing and hunting. He owned a significant collection of weapons. On August 18, 1978, in the waters of Cavallo Island, south of Corsica (France), he fired a shot in a confrontation with an unknown person and wounded the young German, Dirk Hammer, who died after several months in a coma. , in December of that year. For this reason, he spent seven weeks in a prison in Ajaccio (Corsica) and was provisionally released on bail.
In 1988, following a judicial investigation into illicit arms trafficking between Italy and Iran, he was accused of allegedly being involved. A year later the trial was held, but he was not allowed to enter the country to be tried for defamation. In August 1996, Italian newspapers reported on a symbolic but informal meeting between the Italian Foreign Minister, Lamberto Dini, and Victor Emmanuel of Savoy. It was the first meeting in the history of the Republic between a member of the Government and an heir of the royal house.
On June 16, 2006, he was arrested on charges of conspiracy to commit a crime for the purposes of corruption and exploitation of prostitution by order of a judge in Potenza (southern Italy) and was imprisoned. After being held in Potenza prison for several days, he was placed under house arrest. On December 18, 2006 he was released. Initially the case was heard in a court in Pontenza, but in February 2010 it was transferred to another in Rome after the first court declared territorial incompetence to pursue the case, accepting an application filed by Victor Manuel's lawyers.
With Marina Doria (born February 11, 1935) he had a son, Manuel Filiberto. He had three sisters, princesses María Pía, María Gabriela and María Beatriz. In 2023 he and his wife sold his mansion on the outskirts of Geneva and auctioned off some of the most exclusive objects they had hoarded there.
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