Paola of Belgium turns 89 this September 11: the Belgian press isn’t publishing big special features on her, and so far the official channels also haven’t marked the day with a new photo or a public gesture, as they tend to do when it’s a milestone birthday. It’s been a while since the woman who was queen consort for two decades stepped into the background; she suffered a stroke in 2018, from which she recovered, and now lives a quiet life between Belgium and the south of France.
© Patrick van KatwijkTogether with her husband, Albert II, she has finally found the peace, happiness, companionship, and complicity that they didn’t always have. Paola didn’t have a reign that left a deep institutional footprint, but she did leave an undeniable human legacy: she has been one of the few European queens brave enough to say that life in a palace is not a fairy tale, that royal marriages also go through crises, silences, and painful wounds.
Paola Ruffo di Calabria was 21 when she met then‑Prince Albert in Rome, during a diplomatic reception with the Belgian embassy to the Holy See. Paola was an aristocrat who turned heads with her beauty; she was considered the most beautiful woman in Europe and was constantly compared to Princess Grace of Monaco.
© PhotonewsShe came from one of the oldest and most distinguished families in Italy. They married nine months later, on July 2, 1959, in Brussels. He was 25; she was 22. In time, Paola would admit that everything happened “too fast” and that both of them lost their youth and their freedom along the way.
Media pressure, the expectations placed on her as a future queen, official life, and motherhood shaped those early years, which Paola described as difficult and lonely. Although the couple was popular and photogenic, and although Albert’s older brother, King Baudouin of Belgium, married to the Spaniard Fabiola de Mora y Aragón, a much‑loved consort, was on the throne, Paola never managed to feel at ease in the role she was expected to play.
© REPORTERS ASSOCIESOfficial life, Albert’s military duties, and constant public exposure kept happiness out of reach. While living at the Belvedere, their three children were born: Philippe, the current sovereign (1960), Astrid (1962), and Laurent (1963), the only one who has also dared to say that he spent more of his childhood with tutors, nannies, and household staff than with his parents.
Between 1970 and 1980, Paola went through what she herself called “the most unhappy years” of her life. In the documentary Paola, côté jardin, which aired in 2022 on Belgian public television, she spoke with total candor: institutional life was suffocating her, her marriage was going through profound crises, and there were infidelities on both sides.
© PhotonewsIt’s also worth remembering that when Queen Paola spoke out, a court in Brussels, after a long legal battle, had already recognized that Albert II was the father of Delphine Boël, who went from being an illegitimate daughter to Princess of Belgium. Even so, Queen Paola’s honesty about a subject royalty never talks about, her own infidelities and her deep sadness, gave a human face to an institution that had always preferred silence.
“For ten years I was very, very unhappy. I was very sad and I felt very alone. I didn’t know where to turn. And there was the danger of divorce, but in those days people didn’t get divorced,” recalled Queen Paola, speaking about a period that coincided with her children’s childhood, a life stage that is often idealized and from which she stripped away any romanticism.
© Patrick van Katwijk“When we talked about divorce, the lawyers told me that she would lose the children in the separation. It seemed unfair to me,” King Albert himself explained in the documentary. That was when they decided to fight to move forward, and she remembers that one thing in particular pushed her to make that choice: something Albert II said to her.
“He told me, ‘I have always loved you.’ It was so good to hear that again,” said the queen, who also admitted that she would like to go back in time and do some things differently. “Only now do I realize how important it is to show enough affection. I am increasingly fascinated by the love I feel now. It’s the love I wanted when I was 20, without social limitations, without borders,” she explained. Perhaps Queen Paola’s greatest legacy is that she has been a woman who never tried to airbrush the truth.
