Art News

Spanish Duchess Gives Up Billions Including Priceless Works of Art to Marry for Love

MADRID (REUTERS).- Spain’s fabulously rich Duchess of Alba has signed away her enormous wealth, string of palaces, priceless works of art and vast swathes of Spanish real estate to marry for love at 85, Spanish media has reported. Cayetana Fitz-James Stuart, a regular subject of gossip in Spain’s glossy magazines and said by Guinness World Records to have more titles than any other royal on the planet, wants to marry a humble civil servant 25 years her junior. The duchess has divided her fortune between her six children to convince them that her suitor is besotted with her rather than her money and the kinds of possessions that are considered national treasures, reports said. “Every great love story should end in marriage,” the duchess told Vanity Fair magazine in May as she posed in the garden of one of her palaces, explaining why she wanted to make social security worker Alfonso Diez, 60, her third husband. All her children were born to her first husband, engineer Luis Martine