Clodagh Finn: The Irish shop worker who became an Italian princess

Little wonder because Rosemary Barrett-Murphy, of Mayo and Fermanagh, had married Prince Ugo Colonna, a member of the noble family which had given Italy popes, duchesses, generals, and ambassadors in a history that stretched back to the 12th century.

The Irish princess, highly intelligent, engaging, political and humorous, made an impression on Italian high society in her own right too. A few years before, she even played herself in Roma, a film from Italian director Federico Fellini.

But there was a darker side, as the Italian daily Il Messaggero spelled out after she died. It said her death by suicide was due to the “crises of depression that she tried to fight with alcohol”.

The account — sent to me and translated by Isadore Ryan, journalist and author of Roman Imbroglio: Italy and Ireland During World War Two — did not spare the lurid details, although it did try to explain the princess’s despair.

It quoted a friend who said: “Perhaps the responsibilities that came with such a high-sounding name and the routines of daily life were too much for her restless spirit.”

There might have been some truth in that because the papers here considered the difficult reality of being a literary and Left-leaning Irish woman in a conservative aristocratic milieu with all its “bird-brain shallowness”, as journalist and writer TP Kilfeather colourfully put it.

Background

We’ll come to that, but first let us join this well-travelled woman in her prime, courtesy of the Rome-based Irish poet Desmond O’Grady who described a joyful dinner in her company in the autumn of 1965.

He had invited fellow poet Patrick Kavanagh to Rome to take part in a general meeting of the European Community of Writers. The pair joined Rosemary for dinner at a trattoria overlooking the Piazza de Ricci where the princess regaled them with the story of her young son Oddone who was caught short during a papal audience (Pope John XXIII) at St Peter’s Basilica in Rome one Easter.

O’Grady (who, incidentally, also had a cameo role in a Fellini film, La Dolca Vita) had joined mother and child at the ceremony and was called upon to help when the young prince whispered to his mother that he needed to pee desperately.

“The beautiful princess,” the poet later wrote, “turned her calm, magnificently refined profile towards me and with her slowly raised eyebrows and lowered eyelids, indicated I should take little Oddone down and find a solution. This I did… But then I didn’t know where to go next. Finding a toilet in St Peter’s packed with a hundred thousand singing souls is not so simple as walking across a field.”

In the end, man and child snuck behind their VIP stand and relieved themselves. When they looked up, they saw that the temporary planking of the stand was seeping urine.

“All those aristocratic ladies in their ankle-length formal gowns were all wee-weeing too, up there. We both smiled mischievously at this profane revelation of truth and then, after adjusting our trousers and reappointing our facial expressions we returned to our places among the bluebloods, as serious as if we had been through a secret initiation rite of our own.”

The story stands out because it provides a happy snapshot in the life of a woman from Maguiresbridge, Fermanagh, who featured in the press, at home at least, only when she married a prince and, later, when she died.

Her wedding at University Church on St Stephen’s Green in Dublin on August 11, 1958 prompted an exploration of her early life. The Donegal Democrat offered this summary: “The bride, who was educated at the Convent of Mercy schools, Enniskillen, was employed in Watts and Stone factory, Lisnaskea, for some time. Later, she joined the staff of Messrs. Flanagan’s boot shop Enniskillen.”

The manager of the shop on Townhall Street, Michael Flanagan, recalled that he had hired her without interview because she had “such a lovely voice on the telephone”.

Remarkable life

Her journey from shoe shop to royal palace was fleshed out in impressive detail by journalist TP Kilfeather some weeks after she died, in a two-page spread in the Sunday Independent.

To tell the story in broad brush strokes: while still in her teens, she left for London and began to train as a nurse before winning a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. It’s not clear if she studied there before she married a Mr Francis and moved to Kenya.

The marriage broke up shortly afterwards, according to Kilfeather. Rosemary got a job as a governess in Africa and met Prince Ugo Colonna at a party. He later described his wife-to-be as “very vibrant and intelligent”.

Fast-forward to Rome in the early 1960s. The couple’s son was born four years into their marriage and was named Oddone after a member of the Colonna family who rose to the position of pope as Martin V in 1417. Life, it seems, was good. The couple had an apartment at the Colonna Palace at Ara Coeli, in Rome, and a house in Sorrento.

Things began to change in the late 1960s, though, when the princess became increasingly concerned about the violence that was erupting at home.

To quote TP Kilfeather: “As the struggle in Northern Ireland became more fierce and more bloody Rosemary found herself to be an Irish rebel in one of the oldest and most conformist Roman aristocratic families.”

Grieving for a divided Ireland, she found herself completely at odds with her milieu. She was “often to be seen at the Piazza Navona talking politics to the Hippies, the sidewalk artists, the Leftist students and the down-and-outs who gathered there”.

Journalist and writer Mary Kenny, who regularly visited her on trips to Italy, recalled that she once stood at the edge of a fountain and threatened to sing 'Wrap The Green Flag Round Me'.

She was more suited to an artistic milieu than the endless ritual of obligations that came with royal life, according to Mary. “She liked being with writers, poets, painters, filmmakers… She was rather like a writer herself: very articulate, with an endless flow of words, feelings, ideas, observations tumbling out — the romantic and the comic intermingled.”

When Mary Kenny heard of her suicide in January 1977, she wrote movingly of her first reaction; one of deep self-reproach: “If only I had done more for them; if only someone could have helped… If mere friends feel like that, imagine how a family feels”.

Nearly 50 years on, the raw pain and the utter powerlessness felt by those affected by suicide remains unchanged, although you’d like to think there is more help — and understanding.

The success of First Fortnight Festival offers some hope of that. The charity, which challenges mental health prejudice through the arts, runs until next Saturday. Check out some of its 64 events.

Meantime, if you find yourself in Rome, recall Rosemary Barrett-Murphy. Perhaps you might focus on her rich and varied life rather than her much-publicised death.