An Afternoon with the Maharaja of Indore

For the Cini family — Umberto, Silvia, Leonardo and Matilde — India was never just a list of monuments. It was a journey through living history.

They stood before the Taj Mahal at dawn, wandered the pink streets of Jaipur, felt the quiet of Orchha’s riverbank temples, and studied the intricate carvings of Khajuraho. Each place left its mark. Yet the moment that stayed with them longest was the one least expected: an afternoon at Ahilya Fort in Maheshwar.

There, overlooking the sacred Narmada, they were welcomed by Maharaja Richard Holkar of Indore. No ceremony, no distance — simply a conversation at a table under the bougainvillea, the river below, the old fort walls around them. He spoke of the place not as a palace to be shown, but as a home that still breathed. In that easy exchange they felt the rare privilege of being received not as guests of a hotel, but as visitors in a living royal house.

They left Maheshwar carrying something quieter and deeper than photographs: the memory of a genuine meeting, and the sense that, for a short while, they had been allowed to sit inside India’s continuing story rather than merely observe it from outside