Childhood and Parentage
Queen Silvia was born in Heidelberg, Germany, on 23 December 1943.
She is the daughter of the late Walther Sommerlath and his Brazilian wife Alice, née de Toledo, also deceased. Her maternal grandfather was Artur Floriano de Toledo (1873–1935), a descendant of King Afonso III of Portugal and his concubine Maria Peres de Enxara. Artur was the great-grandson of Antónia de Almeida de Aguiar, a descendant of fidalgo families established in São Paulo during the Portuguese colonial period, among them the Alvarenga family from Lamego, Portugal. She is also of very distant Amerindian Brazilian ancestry. One of her ancestors was Chief Tibiriçá.
The Queen has two older brothers: Ralf and Walther Sommerlath. They and their families were guests at the 2010 Wedding of Victoria, Crown Princess of Sweden, and Daniel Westling. Her third brother, Jörg Sommerlath, died in 2006. The Mother-Child House Jörg Sommerlath in Berlin, operated by Queen Silvia's World Childhood Foundation, is named after him.
The Sommerlath family lived in São Paulo, Brazil, between 1947 and 1957, where the Queen attended the traditional German school Colégio Visconde de Porto Seguro and Walther Sommerlath held various positions, including President of the Brazilian subsidiary of Swedish company Uddeholm. The family returned to West Germany in 1957.
Read more about this topic: Queen Silvia Of Sweden
Famous quotes containing the words childhood and, childhood and/or parentage:
“The route through childhood is shaped by many forces, and it differs for each of us. Our biological inheritance, the temperament with which we are born, the care we receive, our family relationships, the place where we grow up, the schools we attend, the culture in which we participate, and the historical period in which we live—all these affect the paths we take through childhood and condition the remainder of our lives.”
—Robert H. Wozniak (20th century)
“Indeed, my mother’s beautiful face still shone with youthfulness that night when she so softly held my hands and sought to stop my tears; but, precisely, it seemed to me that this should not have happened, her anger would have saddened me less than this new sweetness that my childhood had never known; it seemed to me that, with a hidden and impious hand, I had just traced the first wrinkle and made appear the first grey hair in her soul.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“The great advantage in noble parentage is that enables one to endure poverty more easily.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)