Maria Immaculata von Österreich

Archduchess Marie-Immaculée of Habsburg-Tuscany was born on September 9, 1892, in Lemberg, Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She was the second of ten children of Archduke Leopold Salvator of Habsburg-Tuscany and Infanta Blanca de Borbón. Her full baptismal name was María Immaculata Karoline Margarethe Blanka Leopoldine Beatrix Anna. Her family called her “Mac.” She was given the name Marie-Immaculée in honor of her paternal grandmother, Princess Marie-Immaculée of Bourbon-Sicilies, who died in 1899. Marie-Immaculée belonged to the Tuscan branch of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine and grew up during the final era of the Habsburg monarchy. Her father pursued a military career while also working as an inventor and holding several military patents. Her mother, the eldest daughter of Carlos, Duke of Madrid and the Carlist claimant to the Spanish throne, was the dominant force in family life. Marie-Immaculée was educated together with her sisters Dolores and Margarethe. The three sisters were close in age, deeply attached to one another, and artistically inclined. Within the family, Marie-Immaculée was regarded as the intellectual. In keeping with Habsburg tradition, she devoted herself to music and played several instruments. She was especially an outstanding pianist. In addition to her native German, she learned French, Spanish, Hungarian, and Italian. As a young woman, she was considered shy and reserved. The family initially lived in considerable prosperity. Their life unfolded between the Palais Toskana in Vienna and Schloss Wilhelminenberg in the countryside. They spent their holidays in Italy, where Marie-Immaculée’s mother owned an estate near Viareggio. The First World War fundamentally changed the family’s life. Marie-Immaculée’s father and her two eldest brothers served in the Austro-Hungarian army. During the war, she herself worked as a Red Cross nurse. With the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, the family lost its properties and fortune after Austria’s republican government confiscated their estates. Marie-Immaculée’s older brothers, Archdukes Rainer and Leopold, chose to remain in Austria and recognize the new republic. Marie-Immaculée, her parents, and her other siblings instead emigrated to Spain. In January 1919, the family settled in Barcelona, where they remained for more than a decade. At first, they lived in modest circumstances. In their rented house, the daughters shared a room with their mother, while the sons shared another room with their father. Their financial situation later improved somewhat through income from their father’s military patents. Political unrest during the Second Spanish Republic eventually led the family to return to Austria. As a condition of returning to Vienna, they had to renounce their royal and princely titles. The former Palais Toskana had by then been divided into apartments, and the family was able to rent only three rooms there. Marie-Immaculée, however, did not remain in Austria for long. On July 14, 1932, she married the Italian aristocrat Igino Neri-Serneri in Rome. He was a patrician of Siena and had been born on July 22, 1891. After their wedding, the couple lived at Via di Montoro 4 in Rome. Both were already over forty when they married, and their marriage remained childless. During the Second World War, Marie-Immaculée and her husband stayed in Rome, where they faced increasingly difficult living conditions. After eighteen years of marriage, Igino Neri-Serneri died on May 1, 1950. During her widowhood, Marie-Immaculée joined her sisters Dolores and Margarethe at Tenuta Reale, a villa the sisters had inherited after their mother’s death in 1949. She spent the final part of her life there. Marie-Immaculée of Habsburg-Tuscany died on September 3, 1971, six days before her seventy-ninth birthday, at the age of seventy-eight.