The upbringing of her children from her marriage to Albert was also withdrawn from her; the guardianship passed to Queen Elisabeth of Prussia. Soon after the birth of their son, she traveled with Johannes van Rossum through Europe and the Orient (Egypt, Palestine, Syria) before finally settling in Rome in 1851 at the Villa Celimontana, which she had bought and where she brought her son to live with her and van Rossum. With her decision to raise her illegitimate child herself and not, as is customary in the aristocracy, to silently give it into the hands of someone else as a "misstep", she once again attracted the disapproval of the royal families. Marianne and van Rossum never married but simply lived together, although a morganatic marriage would have been possible after the death of van Rossum's wife Catharina Wilhelmina Keijzer in 1861.
