There aren't many families that can claim among their ancestors a classical Roman poet, a couple of Popes and an admiral to Emperor Charles V. Fewer still live in a palace that has hosted the likes of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the SS and Queen Elizabeth II.
But then the Doria Pamphilj family is no ordinary one. For over a thousand years they have collected surnames and titles like some people collect stamps. Theirs isn't so much a family tree as a forest.
But it is a family that is being torn apart by an inheritance battle. Nothing new there, of course: the Agnellis and Pavarottis, among others, know a thing or two about such struggles. What's extraordinary in this case is that the protagonists fighting for control of the family fortune are two British orphans who were adopted nearly 50 years ago.
Back then, they were known as Archibald and Mary. They were spotted in the orphanage by an Italian aristocrat, Princess Orietta Pogson Doria Pamphilj and her English naval officer husband Frank. Like a rags-to-riches fairy-tale, they were taken abroad to live in a sumptuous palace and given new names: Jonathan and Gesine.
The palace they grew up in was the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj in Via del Corso in Rome. Not to be confused with another family pad, the Palazzo Pamphilj (now the Brazilian embassy in Rome), it houses one of the most impressive private art collections in the world: paintings by Titian, Velazquez, Raphael and Caravaggio adorn the walls and the children, by their own recollection, grew up climbing over, and hiding between, classical marble sculptures.
Both were educated at private schools in England: Jonathan at Downside, the Benedictine abbey in Somerset, and Gesine at a school in the Isle of Wight. They were both brought up, like their parents, as Catholics. But it soon became clear that they had very different characters and inhabited different worlds.
Gesine married a widely respected art historian, Massimiliano Floridi, who is also a Catholic deacon. They live in the countryside to the south of Rome, where Gesine is a full-time mother to the couple's four daughters. They sometimes stay in their suite of rooms in the family palazzo at weekends.
Jonathan, however, lives and works in the old palazzo, administering the family's vast real estate portfolio. He's one of the country's most visible supporters of gay rights, and has recently been seen at Gay Pride marches in Genoa and Catania. A few years ago, he and a Brazilian man, Elson Edeno Braga, were united in a civil partnership in the UK.
It was the decision of Jonathan and Elson to adopt two children that caused the controversy. They adopted a young girl, Emily, from America, and a young boy from the Ukraine. The legal uncertainty surrounding those children arises because Italy recognises neither civil partnerships nor surrogate motherhood. Indeed, the latter carries a jail term of up to two years. The situation is further complicated by the fact that each child, according to news reports in Italy, has not one but two mothers. For each child, one woman donated the egg, while another carried the baby to term.
Gesine has let it be known that her legal action is intended for clarity not exclusion. She told the BBC this week that Jonathan "failed to realise that, under current Italian law, if you are a sperm donor, you cannot claim parentage. Only the mother who actually gives birth to a child has the right – and the obligation – to look after that child. I wanted to clear things up for the future because, sooner or later, when we die, this situation will explode. We don't know what the future is. I am taking this action as much for the benefit of Jonathan's children as for my own."
It isn't, she maintains, about disinheriting her niece and nephew, but merely about ascertaining their legal position and ensuring that the family fortune doesn't pass to the two women, from Kansas and the Ukraine, who brought them into the world.
Presumably, if either surrogate mother knew Italian law, and knew quite who they'd had in their wombs, they might have more than a passing interest in the pending court case. They were carrying the heirs to one of the noblest families in Europe.
The family descends, according to legend, from the Roman poet Virgil. Even if that is slightly fanciful, the rest is well documented. One half of the remaining surname comes from the Doria clan of Genoa. The Doria family was rather like the Medici, Borgia or Sforza families, monopolising military, political and ecclesiastical positions on their own turf. Andrea Doria was an admiral in Charles V's army and his family dominated Genoese history. Centuries later, one of the city's football teams even called itself Andrea Doria (in the 1890s it merged with Sampierdarenese to form one of Italy's most famous clubs: Sampdoria). The other side of the family is perhaps even more illustrious. The Pamphilj family was descended from one Pope (Alexander VI) and, in 1644, provided another: Innocent X. He crushed his rivals, the Barberini and Farnese families, declared the Jansenists heretical (prompting Blaise Pascal's Lettres Provinciales) and supported the Irish against Cromwell. Velazquez's portrait of the stern pontiff is the star attraction of the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj and it inspired Francis Bacon's "screaming pope" paintings.
With that sort of heritage, it's perhaps not surprising that Jonathan and Gesine's mother Orietta had four princedoms, two dukedoms and eight marquisates. She was the sole heir to the vast Doria estates, a Norman castle in Apulia, an abbey in Liguria and the church of St Agnese in Piazza Navona in Rome, not to mention the vast, historic palazzi in both Rome and Genoa. But the family was also noble in the other meaning of the word. In the 20th century, the Doria Pamphilj were renowned for their altruism and courage. Orietta's father, Prince Filippo Andrea VI, was a well-known anti-fascist; so much so that his daughter wasn't even allowed to attend school because she lacked the formality of a fascist card.
Filippo Andrea was sent to a concentration camp during the Second World War and, after his release following the fall of Mussolini, went into hiding in the working-class district of Trastevere. Remarkably, he planned, along with Italian partisans, to blow up his own family's palace because the Waffen SS, like Garibaldi before them, was stationed there. He carried explosives along tunnels he had known since youth, and, although the plan came to naught, it says a lot about the man that he was prepared to sacrifice his own palatial mansion to rid Italy of its Nazi invaders.
After the war, his daughter, Orietta, was working for the Catholic Womens' League when she met sub-lieutenant Frank Pogson. There had always been British links in the family: Orietta's grandmother was a daughter of the Duke of Newcastle and her great-grandfather had met his bride, Lady Mary Talbot, at Queen Victoria's coronation. Orietta and Frank corresponded for over a decade, deciding not to marry while Orietta cared for her elderly father. Shortly after his death, Frank added the surnames Doria Pamphilj to his own and they married at the Brompton Oratory.
The couple were exceptional in many ways: they opened up their invaluable private collection to the public, sold the Palazzo Pamphilj to the state and, concerned to promote ecumenism, opened an Anglican centre in the midst of their devoutly Catholic home. Their adoption of two British orphans was merely the most public example of their altruism.
But this new adoption is far more controversial, in part because the Italian parliament has maintained a strong aversion towards gay union and adoption. The country doesn't recognise civil partnerships and just this week the parliament threw out a proposed law banning homophobia as a hate crime, a move which the UN's High Commissioner on Human Rights criticised as "a backward step". Legislation surrounding IVF is also very traditionalist: surrogacy and the involvement of third parties is strictly illegal, with the result that last year more than 10,000 Italians went abroad for treatment on so-called "procreative tourism" trips.
One friend who knows the siblings says that they are both "lovely, bright, intelligent people. The trouble is just that they are chalk and cheese. They have completely different characters and temperaments."
Jonathan is a campaigner for gay rights, a beacon for those who long for Italy to modernise its gay and reproductive legislation. "He's a very important symbol," says Sergio Rovasio, secretary of the civil rights group Certi Diritti. "In a country that still seems to be living in the Middle Ages, with a reactionary Vatican shuffling its political puppets, he's a very courageous person." Although his lifestyle is, to some, unorthodox, he clearly treasures the heritage of his mother's family: he has dropped his paternal surname, the lumpy, Anglo-Saxon Pogson and his son is called – in memory of his great-grandfather – Filippo Andrea VII.
Gesine's attitude is closer to the traditional position of the Catholic church. "I don't agree at all with surrogate mothers," she said this week. "People have a right to children, but children have a right to parents. It has caused a lot of tension with my brother and our relationship has suffered."
That, apparently, is an understatement. They're no longer on speaking terms. Nor is Jonathan speaking to the press, so his side of the story, unlike his sister's, still hasn't been heard. He is expected to make a public statement after the court verdict, due on Wednesday.
