Maria Cristina of Naples and Sicily

Portrait of Princess Maria Cristina as a child (by Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, c. 1790)

Maria Cristina was born on 17 January 1779 at the Caserta Palace in Caserta. She was the sixth child and fourth daughter of King Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies and his wife Maria Carolina of Austria, a daughter of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. She was her mother's favourite child.

Her twin sister Maria Cristina Amelia died of smallpox on 26 February 1783, at the age of four.

Maria Cristina was married on 6 April 1807 in Palermo with Prince Charles Felix of Savoy, who became King of Sardinia when his elder brother Victor Emmanuel I abdicated in 1821. Until her husband became king, she was styled as the Duchess of Genoa.

The royal couple were interested in the arts and artists, and turned the Royal House in Agliè and the Villa Rufinella in Frascati into comfortable residences. During her husband's reign, they lived at the Palazzo Chiablese, where her husband later died in 1831.

In 1825, the queen engaged the archaeologist Marquess Luigi Biondi (1776–1839), whose excavation work uncovered Tusculum, an excavation in which Maria Cristina financed.[2] In 1839 and 1840, the architect and archaeologist Luigi Canina (1795–1856) was engaged by the royal family and excavated the Theatre area of Tusculum.[2] The ancient works of art excavated were sent to the Duke of Savoy's Castle of Agliè in Piedmont.

Charles Felix died in 1831 after a reign of ten years. Maria Cristina lived the rest of her life in Turin, Naples, Agliè and Frascati, and died in Savona, Liguria. She was buried beside her husband in the Hautecombe Abbey, Saint-Pierre-de-Curtille.[2] The couple had no children.