On a warm June morning in 1946, a man climbed the steps of a waiting aircraft at a Rome airport. Thirty-four days earlier, Umberto II had become the last king Italy would ever have. He left believing he would return within a year or two. He never did.
His reign had been decided in a private study of the Quirinal Palace on May 9, 1946, when his father, Victor Emmanuel III, signed away a crown the family had worn for 85 years. The 76-year-old king had been discredited by two decades of association with fascism, having appointed Mussolini to lead the government and put his name to the regime’s laws. His advisors had told him the monarchy might survive only if he stepped aside. The abdication made Umberto the king, but only for a matter of weeks.
Italy held its first national referendum on June 2 and 3, 1946, with women voting for the first time. The choice was simple: monarchy or republic. The republic won by a margin of 54 to 46 percent, with roughly 12. 7 million votes for a republic against 10.
7 million for the crown. The vote split the country sharply. Northern and central Italy backed the republic, while the south and the islands remained strongly monarchist. Umberto refused to accept the result, issuing a bitter statement accusing the government of a coup before flying to Lisbon.
He would never set foot in Italy again. On June 5, three days after the vote, Umberto ordered his household minister to move the crown jewels of the House of Savoy to safety. A black leather case containing thousands of pearls, sapphires, emeralds, and rubies was sealed with 11 wax stamps and deposited at the Bank of Italy in Rome. The receipt was carefully worded to hold the jewels for whoever should turn out to be entitled to them.
Umberto settled at a villa called Villa Italia in Cascais, Portugal, maintaining a small court and waiting for the mood in Italy to turn. It never did. He remained there for 37 years, performing the rituals of a monarch for an audience that had voted him away. Meanwhile, the men writing Italy’s new constitution meant to shut the door on the dynasty completely.
The 13th transitional provision of the 1948 constitution forbade the former kings, their wives, and their male descendants from entering or living on Italian soil. They also lost the right to vote and hold office, and their property inside Italy was transferred to the state. The ban extended even to death. Victor Emmanuel III died in Alexandria, Egypt, in December 1947, less than two years after abdicating.
His remains stayed in Egypt for 70 years until an agreement between Italian and Egyptian presidents brought them home to a sanctuary in Piemonte in 2017. Umberto’s wife, Queen Marie José of Belgium, had lived largely apart from him throughout their arranged marriage. In exile she settled in Switzerland with their four children and wrote scholarly books about the House of Savoy. The marriage had effectively ended long before the ban made their separation official.
The scandal that would define the family for decades came in 1978. Umberto’s only son, Vittorio Emanuele, was 41 and living among the wealthy of the Mediterranean. Born in Naples in 1937, he had been raised entirely in exile, barred by law from the country he was still titled to rule. In the early hours of August 17, 1978, on the island of Cavallo between Corsica and Sardinia, Vittorio Emanuele argued with a man over a rubber dinghy.
He was carrying a rifle. The shot he fired missed the man he was arguing with and struck a 19-year-old German named Dirk Hamer, who was asleep on a nearby boat and entirely uninvolved in the dispute. Hamer was gravely wounded and died in December, nearly four months later. Vittorio Emanuele was not brought to trial until 1991, eleven years after the event.
The French court acquitted him of causing Hamer’s death and convicted him only of illegal possession of a firearm, handing down a six-month suspended sentence. The case refused to stay closed. In 2006, while jailed during an unrelated corruption investigation, investigators recorded a conversation in which Vittorio Emanuele appeared to say he had been in the wrong and then boasted that he had fooled the judges. He insisted afterward that it was not a confession, but the recording prompted Hamer’s sister Birgit to demand the case be reopened.
The constitutional ban on the male Savoys outlived the Cold War and the men who wrote it. By 2002, many Italians saw it as a punishment visited on grandchildren for the choices of the dead. That autumn, the Italian Parliament struck the exile clauses from the 13th transitional provision, opening the country to the dynasty for the first time since 1946. Emanuele Filiberto, Vittorio Emanuele’s 30-year-old son, had never set foot in Italy.
Born in Geneva in 1972, he had grown up knowing his family’s country only through photographs and stories. When he crossed the border for the first time, he wept. He went on to become a television personality, winning a celebrity dancing contest and later selling pasta under the family name. His grandfather never saw the door open.
Through the early 1980s, Umberto lay dying of cancer in a Geneva clinic. His family and Italian public figures asked the government to let him come home to die on Italian soil. The request was refused. Umberto died in March 1983 at the age of 78, having spent 37 years in exile.
He was buried at Hautecombe Abbey in the French Alps, the ancient resting place of his dynasty. The May Queen outlived him by 18 years. After the government ruled that a widowed queen was no longer covered by the ban, Marie José was allowed to return for a visit in 1988. She died near Geneva in 2001 at the age of 94.
The crown jewels remained where they had been placed in 1946. The black case sat unopened in the Bank of Italy vault on Via Nazionale for nearly 80 years, its contents estimated to be worth as much as 300 million euros. In February 2022, Umberto’s descendants—his son Vittorio Emanuele and his three daughters—went to court in Rome to have the jewels returned to the family. Vittorio Emanuele died in February 2024 at the age of 86, before hearing the answer.
In May 2025, the court ruled against the family. The judge reached back past the Republic to the old royal constitution of 1848, finding that the jewels had been given to the crown as an endowment for the performance of its duties rather than as personal property. They belonged to an office that no longer exists. The family’s lawyer said the heirs intended to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
Nearly eight decades after a king sent his crown jewels away for safekeeping, his heirs still cannot open the box.