Skip to content
VitrineRoyal Houses of Europe
Sign in

Teresa de Borbón y Ruiz

1925–1965

Born
9 Oct 1925, Florence
Country of birth
Kingdom of Italy, today Italy
Died
6 Sep 1965
facts
7
sources
1
images and files
0

Facts and their sources

Tap a fact to see where it comes from.

A life in time

  1. Born · Florence

    Birth, Florence

  2. Died

    Death

What was it like?

The world around Florence, 1925: who ruled, who else was alive, how people lived. This is general history, not a record about the family, and every item shows where it comes from.

When Teresa was born in 1925, Florence belonged to the Kingdom of Italy, ruled by Otto I the Great.

Who ruled

  • Otto I the Great

    Monarch of Italy, 951 · Kingdom of Italy

  • Adelaide of Italy

    Monarch of Italy, 947 · Kingdom of Italy

  • Victor Emmanuel III of Italy

    Monarch of Italy, 1900–1946 · Kingdom of Italy

Born the same year

  • Giorgio Napolitano

    President of Italy from 2006 to 2015

  • Luciano Berio

    Italian composer (1925–2003)

  • Yukio Mishima

    Japanese author (1925–1970)

  • Paul Newman

    American actor (1925–2008)

  • Peter Sellers

    British actor and comedian (1925–1980)

  • Nílton Santos

    Brazilian association football player (1925-2013)

Fashion

Homemade Clothing and Tailoring Prevailed

Most Italians wore clothing made by home seamstresses or tailors because ready-to-wear garments were not yet common. Women often sewed, remade, or dyed garments at home as a productive leisure activity.

Rural Women Wore Regional Costumes

Rural housewives were sometimes permitted to wear traditional regional costumes during parades as an alternative to the official uniform. The regime promoted this to emphasize national tradition rather than personal style.

Music

Domestic dancing in working-class homes

Working-class families often hosted dances at home by moving furniture aside to make space, playing music on a gramophone or the radio.

Radio opera in rural homes

Rural families listened to opera broadcasts on the radio at home, treating the experience as a theatrical event.

Getting around
Around 1926–1926

Rome to Milan rail journey in 1926

In 1926, traveling from Rome to Milan by direct train took 13 to 14 hours, as there were only three direct options available.

Carriage travel San Marino to Rimini

Traveling 25 km between San Marino and Rimini by horse-drawn carriage took three hours in summer, increasing to four or five hours in winter when horses were replaced by mules or oxen.

Daily life

Cramped sleeping and cold winters

Sleeping arrangements were often cramped, with some families sharing a single bed among many people or using mattresses filled with cornhusks or sheep wool that felt as hard as a rock. In cold weather, they relied on warmers, such as the prete or trabiccolo, to heat their beds.

Limited access to basic utilities

Many homes lacked electricity or running water; families often used lanterns with oil wicks for light and fetched water from public town fountains.

Food

Meatless days as patriotic duty

To promote autarky, the regime mandated meatless Wednesdays and closed butcher shops on Tuesdays, framing these restrictions as a patriotic duty for consumers.

Around 1900–1924

Boiled chestnuts as a main course

For one soldo, street vendors in Naples sold nine boiled chestnuts in a reddish juice, which the poor used as a main course by soaking their bread in the liquid.

Prices and wages
Around 1900–1924

Cost of basic meals

A typical dinner for a family of six or seven consisting of five pounds of bread and macaroni cost about thirty-five to forty cents (lire). Supper for a working man, often bread and a pint of coffee, cost about four cents (lire).

Around 1900–1924

Daily wages for Italian laborers

Some unskilled laborers in Italy earned as little as seven cents (lire) for a fourteen-hour workday, while very few skilled mechanics earned as much as one dollar (lire) per day.

Work

Labor, pay, and songs of rice workers

To endure 8- to 12-hour workdays in the rice paddies, mondine sang to pace their labor and pass time. In 1938, a worker could earn 220 lire plus a few kilograms of rice for the entire 40-day season, while a kilogram of rice cost nearly 2 lire.

Life for the mondine rice weeders

In 1938, 62,500 female migrant rice weeders, known as mondine, traveled to Northern Italy for a 40- to 60-day weeding season. They often slept in converted horse stables, living in large collectives of 40 to 60 women.

During their lifetime

  1. 1927

    Economic crisis, 1927-1935

    Following the Great Depression, the poorer classes in Italy suffered a fall in nominal wages of up to 70 percent between 1927 and 1935.

  2. 1946

    Italy becomes a Republic

    In 1946, Italian voters chose to abolish the monarchy in a referendum, leading to the birth of the Republic.

  3. 1957

    Fiat 500 launched

    The launch of the Fiat 500 in 1957 helped transform the daily lives of families by making private motorization widely accessible.

Family

Parents

Ancestors and children

Open the full tree

Four generations back to the right, the children to the left. The number beside a child counts the generations of descendants known after them.