It hasn’t always gone this way for rulers in the midst of natural disasters; It didn’t always go the same way as it did for King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia, the target of protests while they were visiting the sites of the flood that destroyed Valencia.
In the history of the last century, at the beginning of the twentieth century, there were rulers who involuntarily built a myth on cataclysms: this is the case of Vittorio Emanuele III and above all of Queen Elenawho at 9 am on 30 December 1908 arrived by ship from Naples to Messina devastated by the earthquake.
And they found themselves faced with this scene: «In the waters of the port – wrote the then director of the Gazzetta di Messina, Riccardo Vadalawoken up by the 7.1 magnitude shock – everything was floating: corpses, carts, furniture, animal carcasses, beams, barrels, sunken ships such was the intensity of the shock and the violence with which the walls were moved and the subsoil shook , that not only did the walls bend like sheets of paper, but I myself, who was in the editorial office that morning, felt myself being thrown two or three times at a height of one meter from the floor. Coming out from under the rubble, holding along the wall, I tried to walk through the streets. The noise of the collapsing houses deafened me. There was nothing but a long, mournful, immense scream from all parts of the city: Help, Help! (AGI) Fab (Continued) (AGI) – Palermo, Nov. 4. – The King got off the ship, and began to wander among the rubble: «The press – writes the historian John Dickie in «The Messina earthquake. A patriotic catastrophe (Laterza) – he spoke at length about moments in which he burst into tears”. Queen Helena was not allowed to disembark: the aftershocks and continuous collapses suggested that she remained on board the ship. She, at that point, moved to the warship that bore her name to assist the wounded. «Beautiful, healthy and elegant, having studied as a nurse (), she had acquired the necessary nerve strength», Queen Mother Margherita said of her daughter-in-law. The sovereigns remained in Messina for three days, during which Elena acquired a role and a charisma that ended up overshadowing the King himself and giving life to a real cult, fueled by the illustrated covers of the Domenica del Corriere: it was «L ‘Angel of Charity’, the ‘Sister of sweet comfort’, who on that ship worked for the survivors, giving away her clothes to those who had none, taking care of the wounds of those who had been pulled from the rubble: the minister of Justice, Emanuele Orlando, said that “the queen had personally cared for more than one hundred wounded” and that “she had bandaged over two hundred people”. It was said, again the historian Dickie reports it, that “the queen had held a patient’s leg during surgery” and that blood had stained her shoulders “used to cover themselves with ermines”. Messina, as a sign of gratitude, dedicated a monument to her which stands in one of the central squares of the city of the Strait.