Via NOR: Pope Benedict XVI sets up anti-terrorist squad
By Malcolm Moore in Rome

And--Alessandra Borghese: the prodigal daughter

Alessandra Borghese's personal wealth - her mother, Countess Fabrizia Citterio, was one of the heirs to the San Pellegrino water fortune- funded her very own cultural centre in Rome, and she married into more money in the form Greek shipping tycoon, Constantine Niarcose. All of which feels a million miles away from the slight, guarded woman sitting opposite me, sipping an espresso in a London café, her clothes simple, her face without a hint of make-up, and her conversation all about God.

Her websites: Alessandra Borghese; Alessandra Borghese

Nuovo Libro Per Alessandra Borghese

The Conversion of Gloria TNT: Fame & Scandal: vanityfair.com

Gloria bought a small palazzo close to the Palazzo Borghese, the ancestral home of Alessandra's father's noble Roman family, which has included the 17th-century Pope Paul V and St. Catherine of Siena. (Her mother's family fortune came from Citterio salami and San Pellegrino mineral water.) In 2000 the two princesses co-authored Our Etiquette: The World of Good Manners from A to Z, which became a best-seller in Germany and Italy. Four years later, Alessandra published With New Eyes: The Story of My Conversion, a memoir about jettisoning her discotheque lifestyle and re-discovering her Catholic faith. Her new book, Thirst for God, has been on Italian best-seller lists for months.

Alessandra has said she owed her conversion to the late Leonardo Mondadori, the socially prominent publisher who had not long before brought out a book about his own conversion. Mondadori, a sympathizer with Opus Dei, introduced Borghese to the powerful Catholic lay organization and also made her Vatican correspondent for the newsweekly Panorama.

Meanwhile, when Gloria told her old friend Monsignor Schmitz, from the Institute of Christ the King, that she was moving to Rome, he was delighted. He encouraged her, she said, "to create a salon" to help restore the relationship between the Vatican hierarchy and the old Roman aristocracy—families such as the Borgheses, the Corsinis, and the Colonnas—whose titles went back to the Papal States and whose privileges had been curtailed by Pope Paul VI in the 1960s.

"I said, 'That's a difficult task, but I will see what I can do,'" Gloria recounted. "And I was really lucky, because la divina provvidenza saw to it that Alessandra became very interested in doing that. I couldn't push her too much in the beginning, because I didn't want her to feel that I was using her. But she started to get a kick out of me wanting to meet people in the Vatican and to go regularly to the Pope's Masses."

In 1999 the Princesses Borghese and Thurn und Taxis organized a Mass combined with a concert at the Santa Maria in Aracoeli Church. Cardinal Ratzinger delivered the homily, and his brother's choir sang. The following year, they invited Giuseppe Sinopoli to conduct the Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra at a requiem Mass in San Paolo Fuori le Mura, one of Rome's four major basilicas. The German ambassador gave a dinner. "It was very Vatican-oriented, with old Roman families, not café society at all," said Marina Cicogna. "There were several cardinals, as I recall, including Ratzinger."

In the Footsteps of Joseph Ratzinger by Alessandra Borghese
PAPA RATZINGER FORUM - PEOPLE AROUND THE POPE
Italian Princess in the Vatican - Spero Forum - Baptist ...

The book: Noblesse oblige. Le nostre buone maniere dalla A alla Z

Misc: The Roving Medievalist