Post-War
After a period of rest and recovery, Zita found herself regularly going back to Europe for the weddings of her children. She decided to move back to the continent full-time, in 1952, to Luxembourg, in order to look after her aging mother. Maria Antonia died at the age of 96 in 1959. The bishop of Chur proposed to Zita that she move into a residence that he administered (formerly a castle of the Counts de Salis) at Zizers, Graubünden in Switzerland. As the castle had enough space for visits from her large family, and a nearby chapel (a necessity for the devoutly Catholic Zita), she accepted with ease.
Zita occupied her final years with her family. Although the restrictions on the Habsburgs entering Austria had been lifted, this only applied to those born after 10 April 1919. This meant Zita could not attend the funeral of her daughter Adelheid in 1972, which was painful for her. She also involved herself in the efforts to have her deceased husband, the "Peace Emperor" canonised. In 1982, the restrictions were eased, and she returned to Austria after having been absent for six decades. Over the next few years, the Empress made several visits to her former Austrian homeland, even appearing on Austrian television. In a series of interviews with the Viennese tabloid newspaper Kronen Zeitung, Zita expressed her belief that the deaths of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria and his mistress Baroness Mary Vetsera, at Mayerling, in 1889, were not a double suicide, but rather murder by French or Austrian agents.
Read more about this topic: Zita Of Bourbon-Parma
Famous quotes containing the word post-war:
“Much of what Mr. Wallace calls his global thinking is, no matter how you slice it, still “globaloney.” Mr. Wallace’s warp of sense and his woof of nonsense is very tricky cloth out of which to cut the pattern of a post-war world.”
—Clare Boothe Luce (1903–1987)