Prince remembers Italian earthquake victims
Camilla says she has happy memories of villa owned by her great-grandmother, mistress of Edward VII
The Prince of Wales yesterday examined the devastation caused in the central Italian town of Amatrice, which was struck by a powerful earthquake last year that killed more that 300 people. The Prince laid a wreath in memory of the victims of the disaster, who included three Britons, and told the town’s mayor: ‘The people of Britain mind very much what’s happened to you all here.’
By in Rome IT WAS the house in which her greatgrandmother spent her last years after earning notoriety for her affair with Edward VII.
Yesterday, revealing a little-known connection between her family and the city of Florence, the Duchess of Cornwall said that she would love to have the property back in the family.
On the second full day of her six-day tour of Italy with the Prince of Wales, the Duchess visited St Mark’s Anglican Church in the heart of Florence.
There she laid flowers in front of plaques which commemorate Alice Keppel, her great-grandmother.
That much is well known; as Camilla Shand, when she first met Prince Charles in the Seventies, she is said to have joked: “My great-grandmother was your great-great-grandfather’s mistress, so how about it?”
But on Sunday, the Duchess revealed that her great-grandmother had lived out the last years of her life in Florence, in a property called Villa dell’Ombrellino, and that she regrets that the house was sold off.
Chatting to the Rev William Lister, the chaplain, she said she remembered playing in the garden as a child. “It’s in private hands but it’s all boarded up. It’s such a tragedy. I feel like I should start a campaign to buy it back up. It was a magnificent place and it’s such a shame it was sold,” she said.
Mr Lister revealed, much to the Duchess’s surprise, that her family had given St Mark’s a substantial donation from the sale of the house. “Oh really?” she said, laughing. “Perhaps you should help us.”
The Keppels bought Villa dell’Ombrellino, not far from the Arno river, during the Twenties. It had been the home of Galileo Galilei, the astronomer, in the early 1600s. The origins of the property date back to the 14th century.
When Mrs Keppel died in 1947, the villa was inherited by her oldest daughter, Violet Trefusis, who is believed to have lived in it until her death in 1972.
A socialite and essayist, she was friends with notable figures such as François Mitterand and Vita Sackville-
‘It’s all boarded up. It’s such a tragedy. I feel like I should start a campaign to buy it back up’
West. Violet’s sister, Sonia, was the Duchess of Cornwall’s grandmother.
While the Duchess toured Florence, her husband was in Amatrice, the hilltop town in central Italy which was the epicentre of the earthquake last August that killed more than 300 people.
Wearing a hard hat, he walked amid the rubble of Amatrice’s “red zone” – the almost totally obliterated centre – and saw the remains of the medieval bell tower. It survived the quake, but was toppled by aftershocks in October.
“The people of Britain mind very much what’s happened to here,” the Prince told Sergio Amatrice’s mayor.
He laid a wreath at a monument to victims of the disaster, bowing his head and pausing in reflection for a few moments. Among the victims were three Britons – 14-year-old schoolboy Marcos Burnett, and Maria, 51, and William Henniker-Gotley, 55, friends of the teenager’s parents.
They were on holiday with their families in the hamlet of Sommati, a couple of miles from Amatrice, when the 6.1 magnitude quake struck in the early hours.
Mrs Henniker-Gotley worked for Children & the Arts, a charity which was founded by the Prince of Wales, and they knew each other well. At the time, Clarence House said the Prince was “deeply saddened” to hear of her death, and that of her husband.
The Prince yesterday met a woman who knew the Henniker-Gotleys. “I was friends of Maria and William. They used to come to our home and it is a huge loss for us,” said Luciana Cursi.