Margherita

For some weeks distinguished medical consultants have been anxiously in attendance upon the Queen Mother Margherita of Italy, at her villa near Bordighera, famed and balmy Italian Rivera resort.

Late in the week, King Vittorio Emanuele and Queen Helena were urgently summoned to her bedside. A long standing attack of pleurisy had at length reached the crucial stage. At eleven o'clock the next morning Queen Margherita died. The Italian people as a whole unquestionably experienced a sense of a personal loss very similar to that felt throughout England upon the death of Alexandra (TIME, Nov. 30).

Queen Margherita was the only daughter of the late Prince Ferdinando of Savoy, Duke of Genoa. She exhibited throughout her life a gracious penchant for royal democracy, which the Italian people warmed to and understood.

Historians noted that, during the 74 years of Queen Margherita's life, the Kingdom of Italy was created out of a group of petty states. During that period the great Mazzini "watered the ideal of a united Italy with the blood of martyrs." Coincidentally Count Cavour, famed "Bismarck of the Princes of Piedmont," built up their power until his bluff, hearty master, Vittorio Emanuele II, King of Sardinia, became the first King of a united Italy. His son, later Umberto I, married the Princess Margherita, and their reign began in 1878 and ended in 1900. Since then the widowed Queen Margherita had retired almost entirely from public life and resided chiefly in the country. Benito Mussolini issued a proclamation :

"A loss without comparison strikes the whole country with the death of the Queen Mother Margherita, for many years the perfect symbol of the regality of Italian gentility.

"The whole people recall at this sad hour her majestic beauty, her venerable silver hair, her untiring charity, her austere composure in sorrow, her fervent love of the fatherland and her exquisite sensitiveness as a queen and woman.

"Let us all gather around the sacred majesty of the king to reaffirm our harmonious will in preparing Italy for the radiant future which the great queen expected from the people and invoked from God."