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NOT SO HAPPY EVER AFTER... They were plucked as babies from a London orphanage, and raised as royalty by an Italian princess. Now they're at war over the family's [pounds sterling]1bn fortune - and the fairytale is growing more sour by the day.

Article Excerpt
Byline: by Barbara Davies

AN ICY atmosphere has descended across the vast marble halls of the Palazzo Doria in Rome of late. Amid the Renaissance cloisters, the scent of lemon trees and the gentle sound of birdsong have done little to disguise the family drama being played out within its walls.

The Palazzo is home to Prince Jonathan Doria Pamphilj and his sister Princess Gesine, who had been abandoned as babies in a London orphanage and adopted in the Sixties by a London-born Italian princess and her British naval officer husband.

The rags-to-riches story of how they were rescued from poverty and brought up in the lap of luxury in the Italian capital is a romantic tale which, by any reckoning, deserves a happy ending.

But this week it emerged that Jonathan, 46, and 45-year-old Gesine are immersed in an ugly legal wrangle over the billion-pound legacy left to them by their mother, Princess Orietta Doria Pamphilij-Landi, who died in 2000 after a long battle with cancer, two years after her husband Frank passed away.

Since their mother's death, Prince Jonathan and Princess Gesine - both of them educated at English public schools - have shared the 1,000-room Palazzo Doria, off Rome's Via del Corsa, surrounded by priceless paintings by Titian, Caravaggio, Raphael and Rubens - and the mummified body of the family saint.

Both say they are determined to fulfil their adoptive mother's dying wish that the family legacy is held together for future generations.

But Gesine, who is married with four daughters, claims that her brother's two children have no legal standing under Italian law, and therefore cannot be claimed as heirs.

Prince Jonathan is gay and has a daughter and son by two different surrogate mothers. Surrogacy is outlawed in Italy and, under Italian law, the children - Emily, three, and two-year-old Filippo - are not recognised and have no legal rights on the family fortune.

Gesine, who is a devout Roman Catholic, told me: 'Even if you are a donator of sperm, you can't claim paternity unless you're the legal partner of the woman who gives...

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