PRINCE Victor Emmanuel of Savoy made a flying visit to his homeland yesterday after 56 years of exile, for a meeting with the Pope.

In an apparent snub to Italy’s Government and people, the son of their last King failed to pay a courtesy call on President Ciampi or even to spend a night in the country to which he had long fought to return. Within hours of stepping on to Italian soil for the first time since he was aged nine, the prince had flown back to his home in Geneva.

“We wanted to come before Christmas to visit His Holiness, but we’ll be back when my health is better,” the prince told reporters as his family prepared to board their flight. He would return next year, he said. “I want to go to Naples and then we will go to Venice and visit all the other parts of Italy — like someone who doesn’t know the country.”

At 9.07am a chartered Swiss-registered aircraft landed at Ciampino airport in Rome carrying the prince, 65, his wife, Princess Marina, and his son Prince Emmanuel Filiberto.

It was the first time that Victor Emmanuel had set foot in Italy since going into exile with his father, Umberto II, after a republic was declared. Soon afterwards the House of Savoy’s male heirs had been constitutionally barred from Italy as punishment for having supported Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime.

The princes and their entourage were whisked away from the airport in two limousines that ferried them to the Vatican City for a 20-minute audience with the Pope in his private library.

Victor Emmanuel presented the Pope with two books about the family and a print. The Pope gave the family a rosary and wished them a merry Christmas.

Members of the prince’s family had been issued with Italian passports last month after the Government of Silvio Berlusconi pushed legislation through Parliament that ended the House of Savoy’s 50-year battle to amend the constitution to allow their return. Opponents of that return failed to gather the 500,000 signatures required to put the matter to a referendum, and President Ciampi signed the law.

In lobbying for their return the family had sent a formal letter to the Senate this year renouncing all claims to the Throne. They had won the support of the European Parliament.

Prince Victor Emmanuel has worked in Switzerland as a businessman. Prince Emmanuel Filiberto, 30 and considered one of the most eligible bachelors in Europe, is already well known to Italians as a television football commentator.

Explaining his brief visit, Victor Emmanuel said that he was unable to stay longer as he was suffering from a serious back injury caused during a car rally and had to return to his doctors in Geneva.

Italian republicans expressed concern over the secrecy surrounding the visit and suggested that Signor Berlusconi might be negotiating to return to the House of Savoy, royal estates and property that were confiscated by the postwar Italian republic.

Evidently turning up his nose at the Italian state was just the latest embarrassment that Victor Emmanuel has caused to Italians. The faux pas began with his trial in a French court for the manslaughter of a young German tourist whom he had shot with a rifle while his yacht was anchored off the coast of Corsica. The prince was cleared of the charges.

He went on to refuse to apologise for the Italian racial laws that were approved by his grandfather Victor Emmanuel III in 1938, under which Jews were persecuted in Italy and deported to Nazi death camps partly so that Mussolini could curry favour with Hitler.

On May 9, 1946, Victor Emmanuel III abdicated in favour of his son Umberto II. But Umberto lasted only a month before a referendum in which Italians voted to scrap the monarchy and make the country a republic.

Two years later the republic’s new constitution barred Umberto and his male descendants from Italy.

Public outrage at the snubbing of President Ciampi was expressed by Enrico Buemi, the spokesman on judicial affairs of the Italian Democratic Socialist Party. He said that he and 41 other MPs had tabled an urgent parliamentary motion demanding to know the full details of negotiations between the centre-right Government and the Savoys.

“This surprise return by the Savoys to honour the Pope indicates that they are not morally committed to Italy,” he said. They are only interested in their family wealth, in our state property, which they want to barter for who knows what,” Signor Buemi said.

The Green Party said that the flying visit only confirmed its opposition to the Savoys’ return. Even monarchists such as the Royal Guards, who watch around the clock over the tombs of Italian Kings at the Pantheon in Rome, said that they were disappointed by what had happened.

“Obviously we were hoping for a visit to the Pantheon. But perhaps they preferred to visit the Pope to break the ice,” Antonio Atticciati, 81, said.

The aristocracy in the northern city of Turin, from where the Savoys built their power base, also expressed umbrage. “Not even the most loyal of us can be anything but surprised at this visit, because we all would have preferred that the first visit was in Italy,” the Marquis Niccolo Palizzi di Sunisaid.

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