Dottore Giovanni Barone is a highly respectable lawyer, a public notary for the joint districts of Vicenza and Bassano del Grappa. There are worse places to live. Vicenza is a beautiful, historic city, with a healthy bustle of modernity. Artists, art-lovers and lovers of artists abound. The local wine is Valpolicella. Palladian villas on smoothly rolling hills complete the vision of one of the most pleasant parts of Northern Italy, lying between the enchantment of Venice, the bustle of Milan, and the romantic scenery of the Alpine lakes.

On April 3, 1987, Dottore Barone held his door open and deeply bowed to an octogenarian lady. She wore dark glasses and used a light walking stick. Though she was obviously used to having her way, she let herself be guided into a chair, and motioned the lawyer to take his place behind his desk.

'Dottore,' she said, 'I want you to take this down.'

She produced a document that the lawyer examined thoroughly, without demonstrating particular surprise or astonishment. He called in two witnesses, Avvocato Ernesto Pesce, and Dottore Pio Salvatore Verga, and proceeded to the formal procedure of reading, authenticating and recording. Copies of that document might freely be made, but he was to keep the original—which was intended for a specified person.

The handwritten document comprises six sheets of paper, each numbered and sealed with the ancient arms of Portugal. The escutcheon, supported by two flowered boughs, is crested with a royal crown. The document is written in Italian, in a large, spiky, uneven hand. It is titled 'Sovereign Act No. 5', and deserves to be quoted in full:

Having come to an advanced age, in full possession of my capacities, practically blind, totally deprived of the support of my descent, betrayed by a few monarchists who do not respect either the tradition of the House of Braganza or the Constitution of the Monarchy, a victim of the continuous apathy of republican governments, from Salazar down to Mario Soares,

I have decided:

To transmit by the present deed all my rights as Head of the House of Bragança to Dom Rosario Poidimani, a prince and an enterprising businessman, who has deserved it well through the great love and sincere devotion he has demonstrated towards my beloved fatherland, Portugal.

Consequently:

I Abdicate

In favour of the aforesaid person, with all the rights and honours owed to the new head of the House of Braganza.

I retain the incontrovertible right to receive fifty per cent of all the goods and chattels, properties, lands, palaces and town estates, as well as the jewels, works of art, tapestries, etc., etc., from the entire entailed estate of the ancient ducal house of Braganza to which I am entitled, until today, in their totality.

I retain the grand masterhood of all the knightly orders of which I am, by right and through the acknowledgement of the international commission of chivalry, the present Grand-Master in my life. It is obvious that, during my lifetime, I shall accept all propositions of admittance in the Orders formulated by Dom Rosario Poidimani, 22^nd head of the Royal House who, as such, shall be entitled to such priority. At my death, the grand masterhood of the Knightly Orders will pass to Dom Rosario.

I retain for myself, moreover, the nobiliary titles of

1. Duke and Duchess of Oporto
2. Duke and Duchess of Beja
3. Duke and Duchess of Coimbra
4. Count and Countess of Neiva
5. Count and Countess of Penafiel
6. Count and Countess of Arraiolos

and to my death I shall retain the title of 'Duchesse douairière de Bragance'.

In Faith, Fidelissima,

Maria Pia, the Duchess of Braganza.

Eight years later, on May 6, 1995, the old lady passed away, aged 88. She was buried in Verona, the town of Romeo and Juliet, where she had lived some of the years of her long and adventurous life. A life perhaps more strange even than this 'Sovereign Act No. 5'.

Indeed, this act of abdication is astonishing in many ways, and firstly because of the language it is written in. It is not seemly to set down in Italian a document that intends to settle rights established in Portugal. It is also astonishing because the beneficiary, Dom Rosario Poidimani, becomes at the graceful stroke of a pen the 22^nd Duke of Braganza, while none of the royal families of Europe acknowledge having ever been aware of his existence. It is more astonishing still because of its content. Most interested parties seem to admit the existence in Portugal of a person called the Duke of Braganza, seemingly in perfect health, who is the twenty-fourth holder of that title. Needless to say, this person, HRH Dom Duarte Pio, acknowledges no relationship to Dom Rosario.

One is at first incredulous, supposing a mistake, or some elaborate joke, or the delirium of a indulged old lady subject to delusions of grandeur. One may also frown, suspecting some malign, inscrutable plot. But such doubts disperse for lack of any reasonable motive. Then, without any prejudice, the intrigued sleuth embarks on a quest for truth—of one possible truth at least in this curious state of affairs. In other words, one attempts to clear the mystery around the personality, the life, and the very birth of that elderly lady known to the good notary Dottore Giovanni Barone as 'Her Royal Highness, Dona Maria Pia of Saxe-Coburg Braganza, princess royal of Portugal'.

In 1957, Editions Mondiales (del Duca) published a pretty book, whose title Mémoires d'une Infante Vivante (Memoirs of a living Infanta) is a nod to Maurice Ravel's 'Pavane pour une infante défunte', as well as to the story of Inès de Castro, the Portuguese queen crowned posthumously. On the cover, one may admire the photograph of an elegant blonde woman, sitting on a couch, wearing a court dress, with its skirts flared as in a portrait by Winterhalter. The blonde lady is in her prime, and her thoughtful gaze, slightly myopic, has an incontestable charm. The book, illustrated with a few sketches by Touchagues, could have taken as its sub-title 'Memoir of a half-century', and the author herself, at the end of her book, desires that she may, 'in the year 2007 return to Portugal, and there write an additional Memoir of another half-century'.

No longer with us, Maria Pia will never see the realization of her wish, and others must now fulfil her project, and tell a tale worthy of Dumas.

Once upon a time, in the first years of the 20th Century, there was a family of Brazilian nouveaux riches, Baron and Baroness de Laredó, who had made a fortune in Amazonia and were spending it grandly in Europe. They had a beautiful daughter, tall and lissom, a brunette with a pearly skin, with the temper of a spoilt child. This young lady, who had received a particularly careful education, had the sweet name of Amelia, and was in no hurry to marry.

The seductive beauty of Amelia Laredó e Murçá is the first established fact, and the primary cause of all the events, true or false, which constitute this story. Because it was Amelia who, on 13. March, 1907, gave birth to a girl. This girl's birth was registered only later in Portugal, without any indication of paternity, under the name Maria Pia.

Maria Pia is an uncommon name among the Portuguese. It is not even Portuguese: It is an Italian name. It was the name of the Queen Mother, born Maria Pia of Savoy, who received it in honour of her godfather, Pope Pius IX. Maria Pia, the widow of King D. Luis I of Portugal — very beautiful, very communicative, very generous — was loved by everyone. She was a woman of fearsome temperament who, thirty years before on the afternoon of one of Portugal's many military coups, had dared confront the terrible Duke of Saldanha with the words: 'Marshal, if I were a man, I should have you shot'. She was now sixty, still full of energy, and when turmoil was brewing in Lisbon, she had no qualms about walking the streets with no escort other than that required by protocol. She had no concept of the value of money and was the despair of the Royal exchequer. For some time she had been showing signs of mental instability, but she continued to charm all those who come near her. This probably ruffled her daughter-in-law, Amélie of France, a woman of marmoreal handsomeness and poise, ever so perfect, ever so boring.

King D. Carlos, the husband of Amélie and the son of Maria Pia, was a stout forty-year-old, who compensated with intense physical activity the political inaction to which the Constitution reduced him. Carlos Fernando Luis Maria Victor Miguel Rafael Gabriel Gonçalo Xavier Francisco de Assis José Simão, of Braganza, Bourbon, Savoy, Saxony-Coburg and Gotha (such was his name in full) had inherited the main traits and contradictions of the lines from which he came: he had the earnestness of the Saxe-Coburg, the rustic simplicity of his grandfather Victor-Emmanuel of Savoy, the strong carnal appetite of the Bourbons, the taste for intrigue of the Braganzas. A great sportsman and bon vivant, he had often patronized the pleasure-spots of Paris, together with his friend and close cousin Bertie, Prince of Wales, now King Edward VII. Come Summer, he would leave Lisbon for the pleasant resort of Cascais where he enjoyed a game of tennis with the very young misses of Society. He had set up a lady of excellent breeding and family, the widow of a Brazilian diplomat, in an unobtrusive house conveniently close to his palace of Ajuda. There whenever he chose he could walk quietly, to spend a cosy evening away from etiquette and queenly tantrums, able to forget affairs of state.

As to the affairs of the heart, they were not, at that time, his main preoccupation: Carlos had always taken seriously his job as hereditary chief of state, and he was then very deeply and personally involved in a modernization of Government that embittered the political establishment. Bi-partisanship, that element essential in the British parliamentary system, does not easily bloom in Latin countries. In Portugal, it had given birth to a system called 'rotativism', a simple occasional shifting of personnel and perquisites, without any true political design, with the Portuguese Parliament, a byword of noisy and verbose inefficiency all over Europe, forever squabbling over trifles. King Carlos I was trying to break this vicious circle with the support of a small group of men of great personal integrity, great intelligence, and great political candour. To this effect, he had given dictatorial powers to his Prime-Minister, João Franco, an sincere authoritarian who lacked shrewdness, unloved by his fellow politicians. He was, of course, reviled by all sides, and his thirteen patron saints would not save him from the fate that awaited him. A few months after the birth of our Maria Pia, on 1. February, 1908, he and the Prince Royal were assassinated on one of the capital's streets, in front of the Queen and her younger son, who became King D. Manuel II.

Meanwhile, scandal and slander were rife. The most evil and absurd libels ran around Lisbon, especially since the strange suicide of Joaquim Mouzinho de Albuquerque, Tutor to the Prince Royal in 1903. Queen Amélie, ignominiously treated by a roman à clefs published in Brussels by another Albuquerque, António, was veering farther and farther away from the King, at a time that he increasingly needed her moral support. She was reportedly tired of her husband's pleasures; she was also deeply disturbed by the course of events. A conservative and a devout Catholic, she did not approve of the populist and modernising bent of the King. A great-great-niece of Marie Antoinette, the French queen beheaded in 1793, she would forgive no breach of the divine right of monarchs and even refused to sail off with D. Carlos for a visit to Brazil, essential for the execution of his diplomatic plans, out of rancour against the Republic that, in 1889, had sent into exile their great-uncle, the old emperor D. Pedro II.

It may be surmised that some charitable rumour might have informed Queen Amelia of the illegitimate birth of a child, and that such news could only feed her resentment against the King. A few months later came the assassination of D. Carlos I, then the ephemeral reign of D. Manuel II and the instauration of the Republic, which would condemn to oblivion this petty family drama, overshadowed by the great drama of History.

Thirty years later, History was to add another layer of shadow when another Franco, this one Spanish and military (and no relation to the former), decided to rebel against the Marxist and anticlerical government of the 2^nd Spanish Republic.

That day was 18. July, 1936 and in the popular uprising that followed the very next day, the rabble set fire to scores of churches and convents in Madrid as in the rest of the country, soon to be relayed by revolutionary committees of great ferocity, in the massacre of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of priests, monks and nuns, during this misnamed 'Civil War' where Spain served as a full-scale testing ground for totalitarian countries, and a crucible to prove and amalgamate the ideals and enthusiasms, convictions and sectarianisms, heroisms and cruelties of a whole generation.

Among the churches burnt down in Madrid, was the church of San Fermin de los Navarros, a rather ugly monument built in 1884. Some fine works of art went up in smoke, notably a St John the Baptist, by Juan Pascual de Mena, and several sculptures by Luis Salvador Carmona. The parish registers, too, disappeared for ever. They were to be gradually reconstructed, thanks to testimonials and certificates piously kept by the interested parties and their families. Thus, on March 29, 1958, the head archivist of the bishopric of Madrid-Alcalá could certify that baptism had been given on April 15 1907 to Maria Pia of Saxe-Coburg, born on March 13 of the same year, the daughter of D. Carlos of Saxe-Coburg and Savoy, of the house of Braganza in Portugal,^[5] and D. Maria Amelia Laredó e Murça.

Because of this, D. Maria Pia has claimed, for herself and her heirs, 'the honours, prerogatives, pre-eminences, obligations and advantages' of the Princes of the House of Braganza, and we shall see later how time and history have so thoroughly upset the probable sequence of heredity, that, to-day, by application of the Act of Abdication signed in 1986, Dom Rosario Poidimani, an Italian citizen, calls himself the Duke of Braganza and would pretend to the Crown of Portugal, if that good and peaceful country took a fancy to re-establishing monarchy.

Dom Rosario Poidimani is an honourable man. He is a Sicilian, born in Syracuse, the hometown of Archimedes, on 25th August 1946, on St Louis' day. He is a relative of the well-known sculptor, Biaggio Poidimani. He is a professional businessman and shows great attachment to the Church, to the works of charity and to the peace of the world. He has been accepted as a Knight of the Order of St Thomas of Accra, that calls itself sovereign, military and hospitable, and that includes among its members, with some authentic lesser members of European nobility and some important people like Robert Sergeant-Shriver, Dr Salk and Mrs Barbara Sinatra, a large number of equally honourable persons, suffering from the pettiness with which the better-known Order of Malta, truly sovereign, military and hospitable, imposes a minimum of nobility to those who take its habit. The reader will not be surprised that the republican states of France, Italy, and some Hispanic countries of America, yield the largest number of recruits to the Order of St Thomas of Acre. The uniform, by the way, is extremely becoming.

In 1979 Dom Rosario Poidimani founded in Pordenone — between Venice and Trieste — the International Institute of Diplomatic Relations, with the extremely honourable and highly laudable purpose to promote peace in the world and understanding between the nations. A few diplomats, belonging to countries as far apart as Finland, Syria, Nicaragua and even Portugal,^[6] signed the founding deed of that Institute, that would certainly deserve to be better known.

Dom Rosario Poidimani is the honourable representative of a noble and ancient Sicilian family, descending from Gombaldo de Podio, baron of Cugno, Governor of the Castle of Syracuse in 1299. A genealogist, Luciano Pelliccioni di Poli, has established in a manner that he deems unimpeachable, that the name of Poidimani is in truth the contraction of the names of Poggio and Manni. The Poggio or Podio descend in an almost straight line from Bosone, king of Burgundy and Italy, the husband of Ermengarde, a great-great-granddaughter of Charlemagne. As for the Manni, their name is clearly and obviously the italianization of the German name of Mann, a most ancient lineage, of which the origin is to be found without any doubt in the Garden of Eden. The house of Braganza, a bastard scion of the House of Aviz, itself a bastard scion of the house of Burgundy, descends as directly and as legitimately from Robert the Strong, count of Paris, uncle to king Boson, and this is clearly why, on 1st July, 1986, Her Royal Highness D. Maria Pia of Braganza, Saxe Coburg and Gotha, Princess Royal of Portugal, convinced by such clear and precise arguments, could 'recognize and declare' as 'her parents consanguine for heraldic purposes' (consanguinei ai fini araldici) the most noble and most honourable Dom Rosario Poidimani and his progeny.

That document, 'Sovereign act no. IV', has also been deposited with Dottore Giovanni Barone and recorded by him in conformity with Italian law, which has been duly admitted and established by sundry foreign courts to whom, in various occasions, the honourable Dom Rosario Poidimani, XXII^nd duke of Braganza, Royal Highness, has applied after some ignorant boor had dared to doubt the validity of his titles, after the abdication of D. Maria Pia.

Thus we return to our beginning, to the strange personality of that woman, who during her lifetime fought quixotically for a kingdom. The matter of the validity of her 'abdication', the matter of the legitimacy of her pretence to the duchy of Braganza, and the very question of her parentage kindle the curiosity of the jurist and historian, yet they seem futile in relation to the Shakespearean drama of the old lady, who in her life considered herself an Infanta.