The most accurate biography of Margaret, Queen of Italy, with an Invitation to the Reading of three of her direct descendants: princes Amedeo of Savoy-Aosta, Maria Gabriella of Savoy and Sergius of Yugoslavia

Already the author of two biographies on Helena and Maria Jose, Regulus concludes the cycle on the queens of Italy by bringing out many previously unpublished writings and accounts. From the difficult relationship between Margherita and her stepfather, Rapallo, who secretly married her mother Elizabeth of Saxony, to her arranged marriage to her cousin Umberto I, with whom she built a “professional” alliance but never a genuine marital bond. With her son Victor Emmanuel, Margaret alternated maternal outbursts with extreme rigors due in part to the guilt caused by the appearance of the heir, who was just over five feet tall. Hitherto unknown letters reconstruct her relationship with Baron Peccoz, perhaps her only true love, to whom, moreover, Margaret never sacrificed the dynastic cause. She was the architect of the thaw between the Savoy and the Church after the Taking of Porta Pia, but she was also a Latin devotee, a muse to poets such as Carducci, and capable of bewitching even Garibaldi. Her shopping receipts reveal a compulsive appetite for shopping, but also her perfectionism, from details for carnival costumes to mandolin lessons.
With her contradictions, Margherita, who was among the first women to drive cars and to embrace the cause of women’s emancipation despite political reactionarism, won the hearts of Italians and was greeted by wings of weeping crowds on her last train ride from Bordighera, where she died in 1926, to Rome, where she still rests in the Pantheon.