https://www.midjourney.com
Getting married is pretty much one of the hugest deals in most people’s lives, and women worry themselves sick over every little thing until it’s over. But they can take comfort in knowing that no matter how bad the ceremony goes, the cursed wedding of Maria Vittoria dal Pozzo, 6th Princess della Cisterna was far, far worse.
When Prince Amedeo of Savoy announced that he was going to marry Maria, King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy was completely against the marriage. For one, he thought his dapper son could have done better than a mere “Duchess consort.” Secondly, his son’s chosen bride was not of royal birth. Basically, King Victor was a man of very high standards.
Nevertheless, Prince Amedeo I married Princess Maria on May 30, 1867 in an event that can safely be described as the single most god-damned wedding in recorded history.
The wedding day kicked off with the bridal party discovering that the woman responsible for laying out the Princess’ wedding dress had “hanged herself instead of the bridal gown.” A superstitious Maria insisted on being married in a different gown (and honestly, most of us probably would too).
Then, as the bridal party made their way from the palace to the church, the colonel leading the procession fell off his horse and died of sunstroke. After they found a replacement for him, the party was stopped again at the palace gates, which for some reason refused to open. The gatekeeper was sent for, which is when they found him laying dead in a pool of blood.
Immediately after the wedding, the best man toasted the couple by shooting himself in the head. The party promptly hauled ass to a nearby rail station, we’re guessing to take the first train out of town. But even this hit a wall as well, once the man who drafted the marriage contract fell into “an apoplectic fit”, which is old timey speak for massive internal bleeding — usually in the brain — that almost immediately results in death. It’s amazing that they even had a phrase for that. Anyways, after that, a stationmaster got At this point King Victor Emmanuel II realized that this wedding was going to cost him a fortune in funeral expenses, and insisted that nobody was to board the train and instead tiptoe as quietly as possible back to the palace before the gods realized there was someone else they forgot to kill. The retreat went splendidly until a certain Count of Castiglione also got pulled under the wedding carriage, “crushing his new Order of the Annonciade into his chest and wounding him beyond hope”, a phrase which here means “he was stabbed in the heart by his medallion.”
The Count was the last one to die, but the wedding jinx of Maria Vittoria dal Pozzo and Prince Amadeo I didn’t officially end until ten years later when Princess Maria died after complications from childbirth at age 29.
https://imgur.com/gallery/cursed-wedding-Ay1SfVv