1907
Colonel Dodge recalled:
“During the Jamestown Exposition in 1907, we had a visit from the Duke d’Abruzzi of Italy, a very charming and entertaining person. On the occasion of this visit, there happened to come, also on a sight-seeing venture, to the Mansion, my friend Judge Duke of Charlottesville, in Albemarle County, Virginia. I beckoned to him and was about to introduce him.
“But he saved me that trouble. “May I be permitted, Duke d’Abruzzi,” he exclaimed, in Italian, “to introduce myself as the Duke of Albemarle—Duke being my name and Albemarle being the geographic name of the county in which I live.”
“The Italian visitor was hugely amused—whether at the excellence of the remark or at the heroism that risked flipping that sort of pun over into Italian, I am somewhat uncertain. But the scene did go over well and they talked for a long while in the foreign tongue.”
During his visit, the Duke planted a poplar tree.