Enrico Montanari's work told how in 1927, when he was a young lieutenant in Turin, he was insistently courted by the then Prince Umberto, who even gave him a silver cigarette lighter bearing the inscription ‘Dimmi di sì!’ (‘ Say yes to me!’). No scandal arose from the hints contained in the biographies of the film-director (and duke) Luchino Visconti concerning – in more or less explicit terms – his relationship with the prince at the time when Umberto was considered one of the most eligible bachelors in Europe's royal families. Yet in 1930 Umberto married Princess Marie José of the Belgian Royal family, with whom he had four sons (including the current claimant to the Italian throne, Vittorio Emanuele). Nevertheless, the fact that the first was born only after four years of the couple's marriage gave rise to much gossip and rumors that the children had been conceived by artificial insemination; it was also said that they were the sons of other fathers, among them the Fascist leader Italo Balbo. Even Count Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law, wrote in his diary on the occasion of a new pregnancy of Marie José: ‘I was left to understand that the child who will be born is his [Umberto's] without the intervention of doctors or syringes.’ This does not prove that the rumors were true – even if Domenico Bartoli comments on Ciano's assertions: ‘It can be seen that there were grains of truth to the gossip’ – but they do indicate the sort of notoriety which followed Umberto through his life. (Similar rumors circulated about his brother-in-law, Ludwig von Hassen).
Umberto did little to avoid such a reputation. For instance, he spent his wedding-night and his entire honeymoon in Courmayeur not with his wife but with a group of Turin officials and ‘friends’, to whom Umberto presented diamonds in the shape of a ‘U’. Afterwards, when Umberto called on his wife, he always had himself announced and visited her accompanied by someone else. It is not surprising that the Fascist secret police soon began to gather information about the ‘pederasty’ of the heir, either in order to blackmail him or as leverage to control him in the future, as Balbo himself disclosed to the king, in an attempt to safeguard himself from charges which enemies had circulated about his own relationship with Marie José. Furthermore, Umberto and his wife lived apart, except for a mimimun of contact necessary for the sake of appearances; they kept separate apartments, separate beds and separate friends.
Umberto, unlike his Savoy predecessors, was a fervent Catholic. He experienced his sexual transgressions, according to his biographers, as guilt-inducing erotic raptures. For Bartoli, ‘The prince was a true believer and a practicing Catholic almost to the point of fanaticism. Therefore, sensual urges had a satanic origin, yet he was unable to resist them. … Thus the consequences of his sins became a devastating burden. The exact nature of the sins, however, could only be whispered.’
Umberto liked to choose his partners from the military, with a preference for officers – Visconti was an officer at the time of their liaison – rather than common soldiers...
Among his supposed lovers at the time were the handsome French actor Jean Marais (later the companion of Jean Cocteau) and the boxer Primo Carnera, who won the world boxing championship in 1933. In response to questions about why Umberto once wanted to meet him in private, Carnera (quoted in Petacco) simply answered that ‘the prince had received him wearing a swimming costume and asked him to go for a swim with him in the pool. They then spent the afternoon alone together.’ Clearly, bathing costumes are fit for a king – especially when the visitor is endowed with a fine physique.
