I see stories like this
and the first thing that comes to mind is…
isn’t Italy a republic? Some reporter sure did not do their homework. By that standard, I’m the Duchess of Bohemia and I dare you to prove otherwise.
AFAIK in Italy it is not illegal to call yourself by some noble title, though of course anyone may do it.
Seems this is a real thing. They even have their own webpage:
And a Wiki entry which is pretty detailed:
And the US State Department apparently recognizes them:
I’ll buy the House of Bourbon may have some records, but my point is that, in Italy, anyone may claim some noble title and that it means squat. I don’t mean claiming that your family name is Bourbon when it is not, though.
I think most people are going to recognize a difference between somebody inventing a noble title and somebody who is the heir to an actual historical title which no longer holds power.
Sure. Historically, that has been often dangerous, with former title-holders being exiled or even liquidated.
I wonder if claiming a title is seen as being in good taste in Italy or in France? No idea.
Well, Maria Carolina can verifiably trace her line back to the last King of Two Sicilies (deposed in 1861).
Technically the current pretender to Bohemia would be Karl von Habsburg. So prove you’re him and I’ll recognize your claim 
. Though in point of fact there hasn’t specifically been a duke of Bohemia for many centuries, it was formally elevated to kingdom status by a Holy Roman Emperor ages ago as a political gesture.
In Italy these titles are just self-assumed honorifics (via a set of arbitrary and sometimes disputed internal rules) acknowledged by society at large because of the lingering prestige of dynasty. On the one hand they’re meaningless, on the other they linger because they carry social weight. Someone like Alois here is the real deal - a legal prince by the laws of his country. Maria Carolina is not, but everyone calls her that nonetheless through the power of stodgy tradition and celebrity. I’m sure if the Italian papers just called her Maria Carolina, people would be writing in to complain saying ‘don’t you mean princess Maria Carolina?’
I was at an event once where some count was telling an anecdote involving order of precedence… but apparently he was Polish, and the other guy was German!
Someone may care about this stuff, but I am not sure it is society at large…
There are lots of noble families that no longer rule in any sense the country that they once did, but they still are known by those titles:
As we see in the USA today, there are a lot of people who hunger to kowtow to a dynasty. Or at least thrill to following news about one. You or I may not see the attraction, but some non-trivial fraction of humanity does.
Historical royalty will be with us into the indefinite future. It’s taking longer than we thought. A lot longer.
This family’s dispossession long predates that. They were exiled by Garibaldi before the Kingdom of Italy was founded.
Even 165 years after they were booted out, they’re still bickering over who the real head of the family is. Maria Carolina’s father is one of the two claimants, but the other guy has the backing of the Spanish royal family, to which he is closely related.
Yeah, it’s much that much different than being a Kennedy.
I’ve met an Italian Count. He still had a castle, so that was cool.
Noble titles are legally meaningless, which is not the same as saying it’s illegal to use them.
Speaking of the Habsburgs, mentioned above in connection with Bohemia, apparently in Austria-Hungary it is still illegal to claim any kind of noble, royal, or imperial title, even unofficially. So in Italy you can get away with calling yourself a princess, but in Austria proclaiming yourself an archduke could, in principle, get you deported.
Better than being assassinated I suppose. 
I get the impression that the less it matters in practical reality (in terms of legal status or wealth), the more likely it is that there will be disputing claimants to nothing in particular (e.g., France , Russia and no end of German principalities). Though FWIW the Spanish Bourbons are not totally unchallenged , either.
Yeah, in most countries with actual legal nobility (not sure what the actual term is), you can get in trouble by claiming a title, etc…
Elsewhere like Italy, you can do it all you like. I can run around calling myself the Prince of Texas, and it’s every bit as valid and silly as these people running around calling themselves Princesses. I mean, they are in the sense of they would have been actual princesses by descent, but in every practical sense, it’s meaningless.
Peerage. You still see them in some of the European constitutional monarchies. The UK and Spain are probably the most regulated and elaborate of these.
But it can vary a fair bit. Denmark for example is a constitutional monarchy that has a full-on government-acknowledged peerage. Norway by contrast is a constitutional monarchy which hasn’t had a peerage outside of the royal family since the 19th century. They passed a law abolishing non-royal hereditary titles in 1821 that grandfathered in existing nobles but only for the current generation and their immediate children. Once the second generation died out that was it, the titles were dissolved.
Footnote: in the UK you can call yourself anything you like as long as you aren’t using it to actually defraud anyone.