At the age of 96, Princess Sveva Romanov has died - one of the last living links to the world of the Russian imperial family before the revolution. With her departs a whole era - a generation of aristocrats born between two worlds, who remembered the old order only from the stories of their elders.

Born Countess Sveva della Gherardesca in Tuscany, she came from an Italian noble family whose lineage reaches back to the tenth century - so old that the name of her ancestors is mentioned even in Dante. She spent her childhood on the family estate in Tuscany, where her father raised livestock and made wine, and she was educated privately, at home.

Fate turned her toward Russia in 1950, at a party in Rome. There she met Prince Nicholas Romanovich Romanov, great-great-grandson of Tsar Nicholas I. The two married in January 1952 at the Church of the Archangel Michael in Cannes. The marriage produced three daughters - Natalia, Elizaveta and Tatiana - and they split their life between Switzerland in winter and Italy for the rest of the year.

Her family described her as a true princess and one of the last representatives of her generation. That's not just a sentimental phrase - with the deaths of people like Sveva, the link to pre-revolutionary Russia becomes more and more a matter of archives and less of living memory.

Stories like this don't sound foreign in the Balkans. Here too, the history of old families, royal lineages and empires that have vanished lives on in stories that slowly fade with each generation. The question is who will remember them when even the last people who were there are gone.