funeral

Vittorio Emanuele of Savoy has died, son of Umberto II, the last king of Italy, and Maria José. He would have turned 87 on February 12th. Death in Geneva. The announcement in a note from the ‘Royal House of Savoy’: ‘At 7.05 this morning, 3 February 2024, His Royal Highness Vittorio Emanuele, Duke of Savoy and Prince of Naples, surrounded by his family, passed away peacefully in Geneva. The place and date of the funeral will be communicated as soon as possible.

On 8 September 1943, at the age of 6, he left Rome together with his mother Maria José and, after the 1946 referendum which sanctioned the victory of the Republic, he lived in exile until March 2003, when the XIII provision that prohibited the return of male descendants to Italy and he was able to return.
He was married to Marina Doria, with whom he had a son, Emanuele Filiberto.

He was investigated, and then acquitted, for the death of Dirk Hamer, a nineteen-year-old German killed in a shootout in 1978 on the island of Cavallo, in Corsica. The case was at the center of a bitter and long legal battle between the Savoys and the Hamer family, in particular their sister Birgit.

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In 2017, the Supreme Court of Cassation established that “the fact that the French judges, in 1991, acquitted Vittorio Emanuele of Savoy of the charge of voluntary murder of the nineteen-year-old German Dirk Hamer” does not, however, mean “that the ‘prince'” is exempt from responsibility under any other profile, since it still takes on importance from a civil and also ethical point of view” that that death “took place during a shootout in which Savoia participated, outside of any hypothesis of legitimate defense”.

Last year the story was also at the center of the Netflix series Il Principe, developed and directed by Beatrice Borromeo Casiraghi, which prompted her son Emanuele Filiberto to intervene, defining the documentary “an excuse for fake news”.

Vittorio Emanuele, Hamer and that bullet on horseback

It was the night between 17 and 18 August 1978, a summer night that influenced the entire life of the son of the last king of Italy: Vittorio Emanuele of Savoy was on board his yacht off the island of Cavallo, in Corsica, and next to it there were two other boats, the one on which there were some German tourists including the nineteen-year-old student Dirk Hamer and the ‘Coke’ of the billionaire Nicky Pende, Stefania Sandrelli’s ex-husband. At a certain point Pende’s guests decide to use Emanuele Filiberto’s dinghy to reach the marina, without asking the owner who, as soon as he notices this, goes to ask the owners of Coke for explanations. And he carries a rifle. A furious argument ensues, with Vittorio Emanuele firing a shot. He was supposed to serve, he later declared, “to intimidate his opponents”.

Pende goes into a rage and throws himself at Vittorio Emanuele and that’s when a second shot goes off, hitting Hamer in the leg. The bullet severed his femoral artery and reached his coccyx: he was transported to Ajaccio hospital, then to Marseille and finally to a clinic in Heidelberg, Germany where he died after months of agony. The Hamer family began a long legal battle to obtain justice but at the end of 1991 Vittorio Emanuele was acquitted by the ‘Parisian Prosecutor’s Chamber’ of the full voluntary murder charge, but was sentenced to six months in prison with probation for illegal possession of firearms. Ballistic tests verify that the young man died from the consequences of a wound caused by a gunshot. In 2006, prosecutor Henry John Woodcock, during an investigation into a corruption and bribery ring known as ‘Vallettopoli’, arrested Vittorio Emanuele who spent seven days in Potenza prison.

After being acquitted of the charges, he will receive 40 thousand euros in compensation from the state. But in those seven days Vittorio Emanuele, who does not know that he is being listened to by a bug placed in the cell, will reveal something about the death of Dirk Hamer to a co-defendant: “Even if I was wrong, I must say that I cheated them”, he said referring to the judges French. A ‘confession’ confirmed in some way by the Court of Cassation in 2017 in a trial in which Vittorio Emanuele accused the director of Repubblica Ezio Mauro and a journalist of defaming him for having written that he was “the one who casually used the rifle on the island of Horse, killing a man”.

The stoats stated that the fact that the French judges had acquitted Vittorio Emanuele of the charge of voluntary murder of Dirk Hamer, “does not however mean” that the ‘prince’ “is exempt from responsibility in any other respect, since it still assumes importance “”civil and also ethical” that that death “took place during a shootout in which Savoia participated, outside of any hypothesis of self-defense”. If the Paris verdict “did not allow the French authorities to make any other objections, this does not mean – wrote the Supreme Court – that any connection between the Savoy and the Cavallo ‘accident’ is illegitimate and therefore defamatory given that “this connection is peaceful in its materiality”. Without success, Vittorio Emanuele invoked the right to be forgotten: for the stoats, a self-styled “heir to the throne” cannot “complain about the exhumation” of an affair that is certainly “suitable” for the formation of public opinion .

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2024-02-03 16:11:00


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