Reparations for royalty? Italian Savoys want $380 million
ROME - Italy’s ex-royals are demanding $380 million in damages - and the return of confiscated property, including the presidential palace - for being sent into exile after World War II.
The Savoy dynasty, with a lineage dating back to the 10th century, unified Italy in the 1800s and ruled the country as a kingdom until Italians voted in a 1946 referendum to become a republic.
Two years later, Italy’s new Constitution barred the last king, Umberto II, and his male descendants from Italy. They went into exile in Portugal and Switzerland.
The Savoys, led by the king’s son, Victor Emmanuel, returned in 2002 when the provision was overturned.
On Wednesday, family members and their lawyers said they have sent letters to Italy’s government and president seeking reparations. They called the exile a violation of the Savoys’ human rights based on the ban on inhuman and degrading punishment by the European Convention on Human Rights.
“We have asked our lawyers to contact the Italian government to examine the problem. It is well known that from 1948 on Italy went against the Convention on Human Rights,” Emmanuel Filiberto, Victor Emmanuel’s Swiss-born son, told the TG5 TV news program.
Government officials and politicians dismissed the request, saying Italy should be the one seeking damages for the monarchy’s support of Benito Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship and its wartime conduct.
The family has not received an official response to the seven-page letter sent last month to Premier Romano Prodi and President Giorgio Napolitano, said family lawyer Sergio Calvetti.
He told The Associated Press he would take the case to the European Court of Human Rights and ask Italian courts to award the family money and return property seized after the war, including the Quirinale, the presidential palace in Rome.
Anything gained would be donated to charity, he said.
Carlo Malinconico, secretary general of Prodi’s office, rebuffed the request.
“Nothing should be paid,” he told the Corriere della Sera daily. “It’s the state that should ask the Savoys for reparations for their responsibilities in past historical events.”
Then-King Victor Emmanuel III is largely blamed for his ties to Mussolini and for backing fascism’s persecution of Jews and its alliance with Hitler.
Victor Emmanuel III, father of Umberto II and grandfather of Victor Emmanuel, turned against Mussolini in 1943, deposing the dictator and surrendering to the Allies. But in what was widely considered a betrayal, the royals fled Rome for the Allied-occupied south, leaving large parts of the country in Nazi hands until the end of the war.