From the left, Ilario Bortolan, president of AIRH, the co-director of Famiglia Cristiana and Maria con te Luciano Regolo and Prince Sergio of Yugoslavia, son of Maria Pia of Savoy.
Here is Mafalda of Savoy holding the flag to start a car race from the 1920s a century ago, or smiling, as a child, with her brother Umberto, dressed in a sailor suit, and her three sisters, Jolanda, Giovanna and Maria, or even with the veil and imperial style dress on her wedding day, with her husband Philip of Hesse, a German prince. Just some of the images from the exhibition dedicated to the second daughter of Vittorio Emanuele III and Queen Elena, promoted in Turin by the International Association Regina Elena Odv (AIRH) and the Savoy Coordination on the eightieth anniversary of her disappearance in the Buchenwald extermination camp.
In the showcase in the Western Corridor of the Palazzina di Caccia di Stupinigi are vintage covers, postcards (many obtained from shots of his mother, a photography enthusiast), prints and other souvenirs that made “Muti” or “Mauve” known and loved, as The princess who was a victim of Nazi barbarism was called in her family by Italians in the first decades of the twentieth century, a distant era, for her carefree, when nothing foreshadowed the sad fate that awaited her.
The exhibition opened its doors last September 23rd, a non-random date because on that very day “Muti”, in 1925, married her “Fili” at the castle of Racconigi, with whom she had four children, while in 1943, returning to Rome from Bulgaria, where she had wanted to participate in the funeral of her brother-in-law King Boris III, wife of Joanna of Savoy, was captured in her home, Villa Polissena, by deception by the Nazis. They told her that her husband, Germany’s special diplomatic envoy to Italy, whom she had not heard from for 5 months, was about to call her at the German embassy. But Philip, who tried to insist that Hitler let Italy out of the Second World War, had already been arrested by Hitler and deported to the Flossenbürg concentration camp. Thus, having arrived in front of Villa Volkonsky, Mafalda was abruptly loaded into another car and taken to Ciampino, where the plane that took her was ready, perhaps after a stop in Bolzano, to Munich, from where she was then deported to Buchenwald.
«It is very important that tourists who come to admire the architectural beauty of the palace can also focus on important insights of this kind, reliving the emotions of the personalities who passed through it», said Marta Fusi, director of the Palazzina di Caccia di Stupinigi. Mafalda came there several times as a child with her parents to visit her grandmother Margherita who settled there for a long period after the assassination of her husband, Umberto I.
The figure of Mafalda, a woman full of joy in life and with multiple interests (from archeology to dance or the harp which she played with mastery), animated by a spontaneous enthusiasm towards the needy which she had fully inherited from her mother Elena, born a princess of Montenegro, was recalled by our co-director Luciano Regolo, author of several essays on the history of the House of Savoy and president of the Committee, created within the AIRH, to promote the resumption of the process for the beatification of the sovereign Elena herself, in a stalemate phase after starting in France, in Montpellier, twenty years ago.
Mother and daughter were animated by the same desire to give a better future to the suffering and by the ability to never lose hope even in the hardest trials. Muti did not maintain it even in the horror of Buchenwald, continuing to mold figurines out of mud for the interned children, or to set aside for them slices of black bread and sugar from the meager meals he received. And Elena’s thoughts ran to her, when a few months before her death from an incurable tumor, she wanted to go to Lourdes and, in the cave, in front of the simulacrum of the Virgin, she asked her entourage not to pray for her but for all the mothers who they had lost children in a war, which she had tried to avert, writing in 1939 to the six sovereigns of the still neutral European nations that “all mothers are mothers no matter which nation, which is why we must all work for peace”. Words that resonate with dramatic relevance in today’s international context.
The exhibition, which can be visited free of charge until 3 November with the entrance ticket to the palace, was presented in detail by the knight Pierangelo Calvo, vice-president for Italy of the Regina Elena International Association, which, in 1989, established the Prize international peace organization Mafalda di Savoia-Assia and in 2019 in Chambéry it created the Principessa Mafalda Study Centre.
The poster of the exhibition.
Also present at the vernissage were the international president of the AIRH, Prince Sergius of Yugoslavia, son of Maria Pia of Savoy, eldest daughter of the last sovereigns, Umberto II and Maria Josè, who celebrated his ninetieth birthday the following day, and the National Ilario Bortolan, with other representatives of the association that continues the humanitarian commitment of Elena Petrovic Njegos: Milo Ferrua, Andrea Carnino, Alfio Torrisi, Carmen Cadar, Claudia Rusu, Paolo Facelli, Silvano Borca, Rita Salvini Antonazzo. Among those who attended were Vincenzo Corraro, councilor for culture of Reano and Luigi Corino, director of the photographic museum of Isola d’Asti.
Also last September 23rd, in the morning, a delegation from the association went to the Mafalda di Savoia square in front of the Rivoli Castle to place a bouquet of tricolor flowers at the foot of the monument and then to the Monumental Cemetery to place a cushion of flowers on the tomb of General Giorgio Carlo Calvi di Bergolo, captain of Rome Città Aperta and of his wife Jolanda di Savoia, deposed by the Germans on the same day as the capture of his sister-in-law, who he had tried in vain to avert, with a dramatic rush to Villa Polissena, where he failed to warn Mafalda of the imminent danger.
