There is a strong connection between them, an evident complicity. In each of their appearances, Carlota Casiraghi and Alexandra of Hanover demonstrate the unique bond that unites them. Since the birth of the young princess, twenty-six years ago, her older sister has always kept a close watch over her. A close relationship that today is a source of pride for their mother, Caroline of Monaco, who has always placed her four children at the center of her life.
Despite the thirteen-year age gap between them, Carlota Casiraghi and Alexandra of Hanover share common interests, starting with the fashion taste that they both cultivate. It is common to see the two young women in the front row of the most important runways and the two have inherited their mother’s elegance. Their second and more unexpected shared passion is literature, in which both sisters have immersed themselves since childhood.
It is this shared objective that has brought them together at the fifth edition of the Paris Book Fair. Carlota Casiraghi signed copies of her first book, La Fêlure, and attended a colloquy with her readers. Alexandra of Hanover, who has followed in her sister’s footsteps, has also debuted at this literary festival with the stories she has published in the travel magazine Passager.
Genuine 360-degree royals, Carlota earned a degree in Philosophy at the Sorbonne and in 2015 founded the Monaco Philosophical Encounters. Before publishing her first solo title, she had already been co-author of the book Archipelago of Passions, a treatise on human feelings written together with Robert Maggiori. For her part, Alexandra also studied Political Science and Philosophy, “more for the wish to nourish myself intellectually than for a professional aim,” as the young woman explained at the time.
Carlota Casiraghi evokes her ‘fracture’
The two sisters had their own signing booths to meet their readers and dedicate their respective works at the Paris book fair. A moment that Alexandra of Hanover documented with emotion for her followers on Instagram, writing: “My first festival as a writer!! I loved signing some copies of Passager, the magazine in which I have contributed, and I loved wandering through the festival’s aisles».
Alexandra of Hanover reads the Passager magazine, where she publishes her stories.
Invited to participate in a panel on the topic “writing about the crack,” Carlota Casiraghi spoke about the contents of her book with the writer Sylvie Germain. A work that from the publisher Julliard is described as a series of philosophical, literary, and emotional reflections on inner fracture. Throughout the talk the princess did not shy away from questions about the fundamental drama of her life: the death of her father, Stefano Casiraghi, when she was only four years old.
“The death of a father is, at first, a fracture in your biography. It is not a crack. Something breaks completely,” confessed Carlota Casiraghi, before explaining that “a crack is a small break that may precede a total rupture or remain after one has rebuilt oneself. As Fitzgerald says in Tender Is the Night, it is like the head of a pin that always remains.”
Carlota and the memory of her brother Pierre Casiraghi
Carlota Casiraghi explores in her book “that crack we all carry inside through the writings and destinies of writers, poets and adventurers.” Among them, a certain Bernard Moitessier, a sailor who, in 1968, participated in the first solo circumnavigation of the world, but abandoned it when he was about to complete it. A story she hadn’t planned to address in La Fêlure, and that she ultimately included at the instigation of another great navigator, as is her brother Pierre Casiraghi.
“It was my brother who brought me closer to this story and who allowed me to develop another way to approach madness,” the royal explained during the talk. “I told myself that one has to be very crazy to cast off to sea as Bernard Moitessier did. From what fracture does he undertake this gesture? Writing, on the other hand, occupies a central place in his journey.”
