Princess Marie-José was born in Ostend, the youngest child of King Albert I of the Belgians and his consort, Duchess Elisabeth in Bavaria.

[3] During the First World War, the Princess resided mainly in Great Britain but was often escorted by the Belgian King's Messenger, Archibald Alexander Gordon to her parents in Belgium.

[4] On 8 January 1930, she married Crown Prince Umberto of Italy, from the House of Savoy, at the Quirinal Palace in Rome, and so became Princess of Piedmont (Italian: Principessa di Piemonte).

[2] A British diplomat in Rome recorded that the Princess of Piedmont was the only member of the Italian Royal Family with good political judgment.

Mussolini's mistress, Claretta Petacci, claimed in her diary that in 1937 the then princess and wife of the heir to the throne tried and failed to seduce the dictator at a beach resort near Rome.

[8] In 1943, the Crown Princess involved herself in vain attempts to arrange a separate peace treaty between Italy and the United States; her interlocutor from the Vatican was Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, a senior diplomat who later became Pope Paul VI.

After her failure (she never met the American agents), she was sent with her children to Sarre, in the Aosta Valley, and isolated from the political life of the Royal House.

Following Italy's defection to the Allied side in the war, her discredited father-in-law, King Victor Emmanuel III, withdrew from government.

[2] Umberto and Marie-José had been widely praised for their performance over the last two years, and it has been argued that had Victor Emmanuel abdicated sooner their relative popularity might have saved the monarchy.

The republican constitution forbade the restoration of the monarchy and also barred all male members of the House of Savoy, as well as former queens consort, from returning to Italian soil.