On March 20, 1944, a member of the Royal House of Karadjordjevic and the last king of Yugoslavia, Peter II married Princess Alexandra of Greece and Denmark in a ceremony ...
From April 21 to 24, 1969, Sotheby’s of London held its first auction in Italy. At the request of Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, it sold important Italian and French furniture, ...
In 1933, Villa Sparta, situated on the hillside leading up to Fiesole, just behind the San Domenico convent, became home to a royal refugee: exiled Queen Helen of Romania. She soon set to work lavishly embellishing the rooms of the fifteenth-century villa, and, in 1935, employed British garden designer
The epitaph on her tombstone at the Cimitero degli Allori (Evangelical Cemetery of Laurels), just outside Florence, tells us ‘she was gay, unselfish, brave,’ but Alice Frederica Keppel had one other invaluable quality: she was discrete. This was to make her the last and longest-serving mistress of
If, like me, you are a fan of the British costume drama series Downton Abbey, you were probably pleased to read in the newspapers recently that the show has generated enough money to pay the 11.75 million pounds so desperately needed for the repairs at Highclere Castle in Berkshire,
John Blake MacDonald's 1880 painting Lochaber No More depicts the mournful moment on September 20, 1746, when Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender to the English throne, commonly known as ?Bonny Prince Charlie,' left Loch Nam Uamh in his beloved Scotland forever. After his rout at the battle
At the end of World War II, Italians were asked to decide whether they wanted to retain their monarchy or to become a republic. Women, for the first time, also voted in the plebiscite. In the referendum held on June 2 and 3, 1946, the republican side won by a