Word: umbertos
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...time it produced Prince Victor Emmanuel, the 900-year-old House of Savoy was wearing a bit thin. The Prince's father, King Umberto I, decided to improve the breed by marrying off little (5 ft. 3 in.) Victor Emmanuel.to booming, strapping (6 ft.) Elena, daughter of Montenegro's peasant king, Nicholas. In his 46 years as King of Italy, and sometime ruler of Albania and Ethiopia, Victor Emmanuel confirmed his father's early suspicion that there was room for improvement...
King's Ransom. By some standards Victor Emmanuel seemed to do very well indeed. Canny King Umberto took out ?1,000,000 insurance a short time before he was assassinated in 1900. Victor Emmanuel III acquired not only a throne but lots of money. He collected old coins, as well as new, and wrote about them in numismatic journals. Tidy and penurious, he was described by a friend as "a good husband, a loving father, a conscientious bureaucrat...
...fall and Italy's capitulation in 1943, it was only a question of time before opportunism would collect its due. But stubbornly the King procrastinated, hoping somehow to hang on to his throne. In 1944, he named his tall (6 ft.) playboy son and Crown Prince, Umberto, as "Lieutenant General of the Realm," subject to the people's will to be expressed by free vote. Victor Emmanuel remained a king in name only...
Victor Emmanuel, in a last effort to save his line, decided to abdicate in favor of Umberto. Wearily, he penned his abdication, got the date wrong, corrected it, and paid a notary a 129-lire (15?) fee to register the document. Queen Elena cried. By this time, Italy's politicians professed not to care what he was doing or what his plans were; informed of the impending abdication, Premier Alcide de Gasperi said: "It's not even fourth or fifth on my list of matters of importance...
...little pizzeria Romualdo on the Piazza della Torretta, a little way from Corso Umberto, you have to wind through narrow streets whose buildings seem to teeter perilously close to each other above, almost shutting out the clear winter sky overhead. It is a pleasant meander to a pleasant place. The unpainted wood tables and slightly rickety straight-back chairs promise the compensation of good food. The promise is kept with true Neapolitan pizza-the best water-buffalo cheese melted with just the right amount of garlic into a flour pancake, light as the finest bread...