In medieval Rome, when swords were drawn in factional street fighting, the battle cries of the two most powerful families were "Orsini for the church!" and "Colonna for the people!" For more than a millennium the princely Orsinis have stood firmly beside the Vatican; tradition credits them with five Popes, 18 saints, 40 cardinals. Eleven Orsini women became queens; Orsini men married twelve daughters of kings and emperors. In 1725 Pope Benedict XIII sought to end the continuous feuding between Orsini and Colonna by ordering that the leader of each house should alternate as his Prince Assistant at Mass and other ceremonies of the church, a dignity that ranked them just below a cardinal.
The current Prince Orsini is 37-year-old Filippo Napoleone, who replenished the declining fortunes of his house by marrying Franca Bonacossi, a provincial sugar-beet heiress from Padua. Franca, a woman of ambitious piety, filled her home with cardinals, bishops, monsignors and assorted clergy, urged that her husband be appointed Prince Assistant to the Pope in place of his father (who had been disqualified when he married a U.S. divorcee). She succeeded. But stocky, handsome Filippo Napoleone was bored by cardinals as dinner guests. He preferred to drink cocktails and talk to pretty girls in nightclubs. He never went home until his wife tracked him down and scolded: "Remember your position—remember you are Prince Orsini!" Groaned Filippo: "I'm never allowed to forget it."
Last year-in a nightspot near Rome's glossy Via Veneto, Filippo met a pretty, lissome British starlet named Belinda Lee. Soon Belinda was announcing her intention to divorce her photographer husband, and confiding to friends and the press: "Only Italian men know how to treat women, how to make a woman feel she is really a woman." Last week Belinda flew into Rome from South Africa, where she had been making a film. Filippo met her at the airport, took her to a friend's apartment, worriedly tried to explain that he could not leave his wife without becoming a public sinner.
Over breakfast next day, Belinda fell to the floor, was rushed to a Rome hospital and stomach-pumped of an excess of barbiturates. Filippo rushed after her and created such a scene that attendants had to remove him bodily. When his wife and her lawyer appeared next morning at the flat he had shared with Belinda, Prince Orsini tamely let himself be led home, but then—in a burst of anger—slashed his wrists with a razor blade.
Belinda recovered. So did Orsini. Princess Orsini stated, "I stand by my husband," and bundled him off to a hilltop castle called La Catena (The Chain).
But the Vatican State Secretariat had the last word. Said an official spokesman: "The rank of Prince Assistant to the Holy See will be filled by Aspreno Colonna alone. It is to be expected that Filippo Orsini will have sufficient respect for himself and for others not to show himself at the Vatican again."