ROME -- Italy hasn't had a king in 56 years, but now faces the prospect of two royal cousins fighting it out for the country's elusive throne.

The Italian Parliament's decision to lift a constitutional ban preventing male heirs of the House of Savoy from returning from exile has paved the way for Prince Vittorio Emanuele, the 65-year-old son of Italy's last king, to set foot in the country legally for the first time since he left at age 9.

Vittorio Emanuele, who lives in Geneva along with his 31-year-old son, Emanuele Filiberto, a handsome stockbroker who's a favourite of Europe's royalty-mad gossip magazines, could both be back in Italy within weeks.

But the decision to correct what many feel was a spiteful footnote of Italy's postwar period has also angered defenders of the Italian republic and exposed a nasty family battle within Italy's pro-monarchist movement.

Yesterday, Vittorio Emanuele's third cousin, the Duke Amadeo of Aosta, called a news conference to publicize his new book, A Proposal for Italy, in which he makes pretty clear that he thinks he would be the best man for the job.

"If the Italian people asked me and if my cousin gave up his claim to the throne, I would be ready to assume my dynastic responsibilities," the book reads. "I have been raised for this, but I don't simply want to represent the monarchy. I want to serve my country."

The duke, a 59-year-old businessman and vineyard owner -- his wine carries his aristocratic title -- insisted at the news conference that he has no "special ambition" to be king and welcomes his cousin's imminent return from Switzerland.

But the duke also lashed out at Vittorio Emanuele for a letter in which he pledged allegiance to the republic.

"He had no obligation to do this," the duke said, conceding that he too vowed loyalty to the republic when he joined the Italian navy as a young man.

Lending full support to the duke's putative claim is the 70,000-strong Italian Monarchist Union, which dumped Vittorio Emanuele after he decided last year to dissolve the Council of Senators of the Savoy Kingdom, an advisory group that had somehow survived even though the Savoys lost their kingdom in 1946.

"I don't want to use the word 'betray,' but we had serious doubts about Vittorio Emanuele," said Sergio Boschiero, the union's national secretary, as he sat in the group's boardroom beneath a menacing portrait of Umberto II, Vittorio Emanuele's father, in an Italian military uniform. Umberto was king for a month in 1946 before Italians voted for a republic, a referendum monarchists still consider to have been fraudulent. Umberto died in exile in 1983.

Mr. Boschiero says he recognizes that his group's difference of opinion with the exiled prince is "byzantine" and that "the dispute over who becomes heir is useless" while there is no real prospect of Italy becoming a monarchy again.

"Nobody in Italy really gives a damn about this," said Claudio Lodici, a political scientist at the American University in Rome. The monarchists "come from another world. They're like aliens."

Mr. Lodici said Italy's royalty got what it deserved at the end of the war, a direct result of its shameful support of Mussolini and fascism.

"Whereas Britain had royals who remained in London when the Nazis were air-raiding the city, these people let a dictator go to war in alliance with Nazi Germany, and when it turned ugly, they hit the road and beat it," Mr. Lodici said.

Vittorio Emanuele hasn't helped his own case through a series of well-publicized gaffes, including his assertion that Mussolini's anti-Jewish racial laws, approved by his grandfather as king, had "not been all that bad."

The prince's reputation also wasn't helped when he was charged with manslaughter after he was accused of firing a rifle from his yacht and killing a German tourist in 1978. He was later acquitted by a French court.

His son, Emanuele Filiberto, Prince of Venice, says he can't wait to set foot in Italy, although critics say his Italian language skills are poor. With his blond good looks and celebrity-length stubble, he is a regular on the jet-set scene.

Meanwhile, while most Italians simply ignore the Savoy fuss, Stefano Covello is taking action. As a leader of Italy's Mazzini Association -- named after a hero of the fight for a united republican Italy in the 19th century -- he is trying to collect 500,000 signatures to force a national referendum to decide on the return of the exiled royals.

"Italians don't want them back. Italy is a country that likes everybody to be equal," Mr. Covello said. "They don't like the nobility and many nobles got their titles during the Fascist era."

The prospects of getting enough signatures by the Oct. 15 cutoff date don't look good, since Italian law insists that each signature must be officially notarized.