Kings That Pass . . .

Haile Selassie's titles used to sound absurd when he was a deposed royal out cast -- Power of Trinity I, King of Kings, Conquering Lion of Judah. . . . Last week Haile Selassie arrived in Naples, a dignified, honored potentate passing through the beaten country of his onetime conquerors. Only the day before, another king had sailed out of the same harbor, bound for voluntary exile in Egypt.* The world could read the disgrace of the House of Savoy in the titles that the abdicated Italian king had just shed from his thin, aging shoulders -- Vittorio Emanuele (Ferdinand Maria Gennaro) III, King of Italy and Sardinia (1900-46) and Albania (1939-43); Emperor of Ethiopia (May 1939 November 1943); also King of Cyprus, of Jerusalem, of Armenia--ancient honors meaningless these many centuries.

Behind him the tired, 76-year-old ex-monarch left his son Umberto (41) to become the fourth, and perhaps last, King of Italy. With the major political party, the Christian-Democrats, and virtually all the others, on record for a republic, Umberto II faced national elections a fortnight hence, launched an 11th-hour, last-ditch campaign to sell the people on the idea of "a renovated monarchy."

Leftists, confident that the June 2 referendum would establish an Italian republic, dubbed Umberto Il Re di Maggio (King of the May).

* On the invitation of pro-Italian King Farouk Vittorio Emanuele III can live comfortably in Egypt on a Britain-invested fortune founded by his father, Umberto I, who took out -L-1,000,000 life insurance just before his assassination in 1900.

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