Just call me Your Tremendousness: UK-born DJ fights to become Italian ruler

A BRITISH-born DJ is vying to become the ruler of a tiny self-declared principality in Italy, an honour that would earn him the enviable title “His Tremendousness”.

Mark Dezzani hopes to become the Prince of Seborga, a village on the Italian Riviera that unilaterally declared its independence from Rome in the Sixties, arguing that it was never properly incorporated into Italy when the country was unified in 1861.

He will go head-to-head with the current ruler of the minuscule territory, His Tremendousness Marcello I, a businessman and former speedboat champion whose real name is Marcello Menegatto.

The 39-year-old Marcello I, who inherited a hosiery and textile company, is putting himself up for re-election for the largely ceremonial post.

He and his German-born wife, Princess Nina, have ruled Seborga since being elected in 2010. But the position is not hereditary, and elections are held in the village, in the north-western region of Liguria, every seven years.

The next polling of the village’s 200 voters will take place on April 23.

Mr Dezzani, 55, who was born in Crawley, West Sussex to Italian parents, has lived in Seborga for nearly 40 years, working as a DJ for a regional online radio station, and is brimming with ideas for the future of the principality.

He wants to increase tourism by introducing more pomp and pageantry, revive a medieval currency called the “luigino” as an online currency similar to Bitcoin and establish relations with similar self-declared micro-nations around the world.

While “His Tremendousness” certainly has a ring of grandeur about it, he is also thinking of other titles.

“Each person can choose their own name and I’m thinking of ‘His Awesomeness’, although it doesn’t translate very well into Italian,” he told