Savoia-Genova

[KarlandZita]

Lydia di Arenberg, Duchessa du Pistoia in 1929 :

[KarlandZita]

Lydia d'Arenberg :



She could be called " the little duchess "  because of her much smaller height than other Princesses of the Italian royal family.

[KarlandZita]

Ducesa Lydia di Pistoia :

[Marc]

Wow,very glamorous picture of Lydia...

[KarlandZita]

Lydia was so beautiful, in my opinion, as the other feminine members of the family of Savoia as the Princess of Pietmont or the Duchess of the Apulia, but contrary to the latter, she was of a very small height which conferred her less imposing presence.

[Hector]

This is an excerpt from Quarterly Review, 1872.

The private lives of royal personages long to history and the Duchess of Genoa was too tempting a subject to be omitted. A princess of Saxony by birth, she was married to the Duke of Genoa, the king's brother, who died in 1855. The marriage was not esteemed a happy one, and shortly his death, she privately and suddenly married M. Rapallo, a lieutenant in the army, of mean birth who had belonged to the staff of her deceased lord. 'How came it to pass that this proud woman, who had never been suspected of irregularity, was hurried into startling the court of Turin by the scandal of a secret union and so strange a mésalliance!' The dramatic and mysterious stories that were whispered about are dismissed by M. d'Ideville as void of foundation, with the exception of one, equally apocryphal, which attributes the event to a fit of vexation and pique, to smothered auger resulting from disappointed ambition. 'She had dreamed it was said, and there was nothing extravagant in the dream of becoming queen of Sardinia. She was handsome, insinuating: the King, her brother-in-law, was already captivated. But at the first advances of the princess, and from the moment when she had declared the conditions on which she would accept the royal attentions, he drew off in terror. At this particular epoch the thought of such a union was tinged with a sadness and fatality which frightened the superstitious monarch.

Not long since, this same palace of Turin, within the space of fifteen days, had opened its gates to give passage to three coffins of the royal family; the Queen, the Duke of Genoa, and the Queen Dowager. Although still in love with his sister-in-law, his Majesty came to an explanation with her: on its conclusion there remained to the Duchess no hope of mounting the throne of Sardinia. Disappointed in her projects, maddened by resentment and eager for revenge, she was bent on humiliating the sovereign and exasperating the lover at any price. To attain this end, she did not hesitate to sacrifice herself. She was secretly married to Rapallo at night in a chateau some leagues from Turin; and, as soon as the ceremony, was over she caused it to be made known to the King. His anger knew no bounds: in the first burst of passion he resolved on banishing his brother's widow from his realm, take away her children, forbid her to bear the title of Duchess of Genoa, and send her back in disgrace to her father, the King of Saxony. But he calmed down by degrees: the representatives of Saxony at Paris and Turin interposed, and she was simply forbidden to abide in any Piedmontese town; the villa of Belgirate on the Lago Maggiore being resigned to her for a residence Rapallo received the title of Marquis and became the chevalier d'honneur, or lord in waiting of the Duchess. This adds M. d'Ideville, was the sole function that he ever fulfilled at Belgirate.

Her exile was brief. The female nobility of the newly annexed states, Milan, Parma, Modena, and Florence, claimed the privilege of presentation, and there was no royal duty or prerogative for which the King felt more thoroughly disqualified or disinclined than that of holding a levée or a drawing room. The Duchess was recalled to do the honours of the court, with a suite comprising two ladies-in-waiting. Their husbands bore the same title as the Marquis Rapallo, who was named chamberlain, and regularly took his stand in the antechamber to introduce the personages officially presented to his wife.