In October 1990, three children were staying in a rented villa in the south of France. The eldest was six, the youngest three. Their father, a world champion at the wheel of a high-speed powerboat, had gone out onto the water between Monaco and Nice that morning and never come back. Eight years earlier, almost to the week, the same family had buried a Hollywood actress turned princess on a mountain road above that same coastline.

Two catastrophes in one bloodline, and three small children who would spend the next four decades learning how to carry both quietly. Princess Caroline of Monaco had already survived one failed marriage by the time she met Stefano Casiraghi, an Italian businessman from Milan. Her first husband, a Parisian financier seventeen years her senior, had lasted twenty-eight months. Casiraghi was different: grounded, sport-obsessed, uninterested in the nightclub circuit that had swallowed the first marriage whole.

They married in a civil ceremony in the palace’s Hall of Mirrors on December 29, 1983, beneath a portrait of Caroline’s late mother, Grace Kelly, because the Vatican had not yet annulled the first marriage and a Catholic wedding was not possible. Three children arrived in quick succession. Andrea came first, on June 8, 1984. Charlotte followed on August 3, 1986.

Pierre completed the trio on September 5, 1987. For a family the tabloids had nicknamed cursed, these years looked like a clean rebuttal. Caroline and Stefano split their time between Monaco and a home outside Milan. The paparazzi who had once documented her nightclub years now photographed a woman at ski slopes and tennis matches, a mother rather than a headline.

Stefano was building a serious career on the water. He competed in eighty offshore powerboat races, won roughly a dozen of them, set a speed record on Lake Como in 1984, and took the world championship title off Atlantic City in 1989. Going into the 1990 season, he was the reigning world champion and had privately decided this would be his last year of racing. Three weeks before the race that killed him, Stefano’s boat exploded during a competition off the Isle of Guernsey.

He climbed out of the wreckage unhurt. He kept racing. The World Offshore Championship ran that week along the coast between Monaco and Nice in waves running three to four feet. Stefano Casiraghi, thirty years old, was driving a forty-two-foot catamaran with his throttleman, Patrice Innocenti, beside him.

Roughly fifteen minutes into the second heat, the leading boats turned off Nice. Casiraghi and Innocenti were pushing to make up time because earlier in the race they had stopped to help pull another competitor’s crew from a burning vessel, an act of decency that had cost them the lead they were now trying to reclaim. At close to 150 kilometers an hour, the catamaran struck a wave and flipped backward. Innocenti was thrown clear and survived.

Casiraghi was pinned beneath the hull. Rescue crews pulled both men from the water. Casiraghi was pronounced dead on arrival at the Princess Grace Hospital, the same hospital where all three of his children had been born. He was thirty years old.

Caroline was thirty-three, a widow for the second time in her family’s recent history, and the mother of three children aged six, four, and three. Experts who examined the wreck concluded he would likely have survived with a fully enclosed cockpit. His death drove the sport to change: closed hulls, mandatory safety harnesses, twin hull designs, races moved closer to sheltered harbors. No champion was named for the 1990 season out of respect.

The funeral was held at Monaco’s Cathedral of St. Nicholas, the same cathedral where the family had buried Grace Kelly exactly eight years earlier, almost to the week. Stefano was laid to rest at the Chapelle de la Paix beside Caroline’s own grandfather, Prince Pierre. Caroline did not stay in Monaco to grieve in front of the same cameras that had covered her mother’s funeral.

In the months after Stefano’s death, she relocated with her three children to Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, in order, as she would later describe it, to mourn away from the gossip and noise that had defined her entire life up to that point. Her brother, Prince Albert, would later put it plainly: she needed distance from what he called the hoopla of Monaco. The children were enrolled in local schools. Grandchildren of Grace Kelly sat in ordinary French classrooms among children whose families had never appeared in a single magazine.

Caroline could have kept her children inside the palace, tutored privately, surrounded by staff and protocol. Instead, she chose anonymity as protection, ordinariness as armor. Andrea would later be described by people who knew him growing up as secretive by nature. Charlotte would grow into one of Europe’s more unusual public figures precisely because her foundational years were spent reading and thinking rather than performing.

Pierre, the youngest, gravitated toward water and engines, the same passions that had defined and then ended his father’s life, without anyone forcing that inheritance onto him. In 1993, eight months after Caroline’s first marriage was finally annulled by the Vatican, Pope John Paul II formally legitimized the three Casiraghi children’s status under canon law, since their parents had married civilly rather than religiously back in 1983. It was proof of how many separate institutions had to sign off before three grieving children’s legal identities were even settled. On January 23, 1999, Caroline’s forty-second birthday, she married for a third time in a quiet civil ceremony in Monaco.

Her new husband was Ernst August, Prince of Hanover, head of a German royal house that had lost its actual throne in 1866. The marriage came with a genuine upgrade in rank: Caroline’s style shifted from Her Serene Highness to Her Royal Highness, Princess of Hanover. On July 20, 1999, in Vöcklabruck, Austria, she gave birth to Princess Alexandra Charlotte Ulrika Mariam Virginia of Hanover, the only one of Caroline’s four children who holds a formal royal title today. Through her father’s side, Alexandra descends from Queen Victoria and from the last German emperor.

Through her mother, she is Grace Kelly’s granddaughter. Alexandra grew up in a household unlike anything her three older half-siblings had known. Her father’s legal troubles across Kenya, Germany, and Austria would eventually fill court records in three countries. Caroline separated from him by around 2009 and returned to live permanently in Monaco.

The couple has never formally divorced. Andrea, Charlotte, and Pierre had grown up with a father who was present, loving, and then suddenly gone. Alexandra grew up with a father who was legally present but functionally absent. Two different flavors of loss delivered to the same set of siblings thirteen years apart.

Andrea Casiraghi is, on paper, one of the most significant people in Monaco who almost nobody outside the principality could pick out of a crowd. As Grace Kelly’s eldest grandchild, he stands fourth in the line of succession to the Monegasque throne. He has never held and will likely never hold the crown itself. After his childhood in France, Andrea studied international politics and visual arts at the American University of Paris, later adding an MBA from IE Business School in Madrid.

Since January 2012, he has held the rank of Brigadier in the Compagnie des Carabiniers du Prince. His personal life took its defining turn through Tatiana Santo Domingo, heiress to a prominent Colombian-American business family, introduced to him by his own sister Charlotte. The two dated for nearly a decade before marrying in a civil ceremony at the Prince’s Palace on August 31, 2013. Their first child, Alexandra, had already been born that March.

Two more children followed. Andrea’s adult life has been defined less by what he’s done than by what he has consistently declined to do: give interviews, court photographers, or build a public brand around his royal blood. Charlotte Casiraghi was three when her father died. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne.

She became a face of Chanel, a fixture of international fashion weeks, and simultaneously a working journalist, editor, and eventually film producer. Her most lasting institutional achievement has nothing to do with fashion at all: she co-founded the Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco, a forum bringing serious philosophers and writers into a principality more commonly associated with casinos than seminars. For that work, Monaco named her a knight of the Order of Cultural Merit. In 2013, she had her first son, Raphaël, with the French actor and comedian Gad Elmaleh.

Because the two never married, Raphaël does not appear in Monaco’s line of succession. In June 2019, Charlotte married the film producer Dimitri Rassam. Their son, Balthazar, born in October 2018, was already part of the family before the wedding took place, and is part of the succession. In January 2024, reports surfaced that Charlotte and Dimitri Rassam had separated after a period described as a prolonged and difficult crisis.

As of this account, the divorce has still not been formally finalized. Charlotte, now regularly seen with the novelist Nicolas Mathieu, told one interviewer that reading the work of female writers had helped her stop living by other people’s expectations and judgments. Of Princess Caroline’s four children, Pierre carries the family’s original wound most literally, because Pierre chose to go back to the exact element that killed his father. He was three years old in 1990.

He studied economics at Bocconi University in Milan and later law at the University of Paris the Second. From a young age, he gravitated toward boats and speed. He became skipper of Team Malizia, competing in the GC32 racing tour aboard a foiling catamaran named for Il Malizia, the cunning, the nickname of the family’s own medieval ancestor, François Grimaldi. He later supported the German sailor Boris Herrmann’s IMOCA 60 campaigns, and joined an Atlantic crossing aboard an IMOCA 60 alongside the climate activist Greta Thunberg.

In the summer of 2025, sailing as skipper of the yacht Tuiga for the Yacht Club of Monaco, where he now serves as vice president, Pierre helped the club win the Admiral’s Cup for the first time in its history. The final margin of victory over Australia came down to ten seconds. Prince Albert himself presented Pierre with the yacht club’s Sailor of the Year trophy for 2025. Thirty-five years after the boat flipped off the coast between Monaco and Nice, Stefano Casiraghi’s youngest son crossed the finish line in first place.

Pierre married Beatrice Borromeo, an Italian journalist, in a civil ceremony in the gardens of the Prince’s Palace on July 25, 2015. Their first son, Stefano Ercole Carlo, named in part for his late grandfather, was born in February 2017. Francesco Carlo Albert followed in May 2018. On October 4, 2025, the couple welcomed their first daughter, Bianca Caroline Mata, arriving almost precisely on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the accident.

Alexandra is the only one of the four who has spent her adult life actively moving away from Monaco. She is formally a Monegasque figure skater, having begun skating at ten years old after receiving a pair of ice skates as a Christmas present. Her education took her through a Master of Arts in History and Literature at Reid Hall, the Paris site affiliated with Columbia University. By 2026, she was based not in Monaco or Paris but in Los Angeles.

Since 2025, Alexandra has written travel and literary essays for the bilingual publication Review Passager, and she keeps her own Substack newsletter, publishing reading lists and original writing under her own name rather than through a palace press office. In February 2026, Alexandra moved out of her mother’s household and into her own apartment, a step she described in a personal essay on her own website rather than through any palace statement. For the first time since Alexandra’s birth in 1999, Princess Caroline was, in the literal sense, living alone. Alexandra turned twenty-seven in July, marking the occasion with her own words on her own platform.

She remains close to her three much older half-siblings, describing them in the rare interviews she gives as sources of guidance rather than distant relatives from a previous marriage. Princess Caroline, now sixty-nine, continues running the institutions her own mother left behind. She has presided over the Princess Grace Foundation, which supports emerging theater, dance, and film artists in the United States, for more than four decades. She founded Les Ballets de Monte Carlo in 1985, realizing a project her own mother had wanted before her death.

She has led the Prince Pierre Foundation’s literary and musical prizes since 1988, chaired the World Association of Children’s Friends, and served as a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador since 2003. Her children absorbed this instinct in different registers. Andrea works quietly behind charitable programs rather than in front of them. Charlotte built a new institution rather than simply inheriting an existing one.

Pierre channels a version of the same instinct into environmental advocacy through his sailing career. Alexandra, the least institutional of the four, is building a literary voice entirely her own. For over a century, tabloids have attached a piece of medieval folklore to this family, a legend claiming a Grimaldi ancestor once wronged a woman who cursed the entire bloodline to never find happiness in marriage. There is no thirteenth-century document that records any such curse.

What exists instead is a marital and mortality record across generations so consistently difficult that the supernatural framing eventually felt less like superstition than like shorthand. The tragedy is real: a mother killed on a mountain road, a father killed on the open sea, both before their children had grown up enough to properly know them. What the record actually shows is that none of what came after represents a continuation of that curse. Andrea built a quiet, stable marriage and a low-visibility diplomatic career.

Charlotte’s marriage did not survive, but she navigated its ending with more agency and less public wreckage than either of her mother’s first two marriages produced. Pierre did not avoid the water that killed his father out of superstition. He went back to it with better equipment, better training, and an actual championship to show for it. Alexandra did not inherit her biological father’s instability.

She inherited instead her mother’s capacity to build something entirely her own once the noise died down. The sea took one man from this family in 1990. Thirty-five years later, his son went back for what was his.