Click on the picture to see a larger version.
Assuming the photo was taken after 1900, these would be King Victor Emmanuel III and Queen Elena.
Source:
A reception to the King and Queen. Photo by Gribayedoff.
Outing magazine, vol. LI no. 6, March, 1908, p. 656.
Vance Thompson's Cab Drivers / 51
The Gondolier of Venice / 12
Mighty was the eating and drinking thereof. Your gondolier, soberest and frugalest of men in usual days, feasts royally upon set occasions and casts his money to the winds. For Giovanni the dinner was paid. The good man ate – upon my word – eighteen plates of macaroni and as many loaves of bread, and washed the dinner down with seven quarts of wine. It was a grown man's meal. When a merry fellow struck up a dance on the accordion – for the mandolin belongs to the fiction of Venice – Giovanni was still light on his feet. In the hot and smoky room and beyond in the little garden, under the lanterns, the gondoliers and the black-eyed girls danced until dawn. And the night went with laughter and kisses and cries of"Viva Italia!"and"Viva il re!"– for your gondolier is not discontented enough to be a socialist – and the music of dancing feet. We slipped away from the merry-makers, Giuseppe and I; he at the oar, I lolling on the cushions, we glided away into the blue night. "Go where you will," said I; "this is no time for sleep." A thin spiral of smoke went up from my cigarette, so quiet it was on the Grand Canal, so still the moon-drenched air. There was wind on the lagoon. The gondola felt the pulse of the sea, far off. We went on in a great silence, broken only by the spooning of the oar and the lap of the water. The moon left us, but there were stars, and in the east faint gray intimations of day. And always the great silence. In front of us rose an island rimmed with cypress, gray and desolate as death. Here it was that Saint Francis came preaching: "Little birds, my brothers, cease your songs, for they hinder me from praising God." And the little birds flew away. Never song of bird has been heard there since. The saint's word made a desert of the island. As Giuseppe swung the gondola round in a wide curve there came to us over the water a chant of great mournfulness. Twenty novices, all young, marched in double lines beneath the cypress trees, their white cowls drawn, wailing vague Latin prayers. And a mystic dawn came up.