The furies of Venice
Fabiano Massimi
After the death of Hitler's niece Geli Raubal in the novel The Angel of Munich and, with The Demons of Berlin, the Reichstag fire of 1933 instrumentalized by Hitler to make his last dash for power, a new piece in the great narrative project of reconstruction of the terrible years of the Nazi-Fascist period born from the pen of Fabiano Massimi.
Mussolini and Hitler meet for the first time in a Piazza San Marco packed with black shirts, deployed by the Duce to impress the future ally. Also in the crowd are former police commissioner Sigfried Sauer and his colleague Mutti, who have reached Venice to join the anti-fascist resistance and deal a blow to the diplomatic machine in action. The hope is to create an incident that will prevent an alliance between Italy and Germany, seen as a viaticum toward a new war. While trying to locate the weak link in the German delegation, however, Sauer and Mutti stumble upon a mystery of a far different magnitude: in the night, in great secrecy, Mussolini leaves the palace in which he is housed alone and goes by speedboat into the Lagoon. The two investigators manage to follow him as far offshore as San Clemente, where they see him dock at a pier and then enter, escorted by a man in a white coat, the island's main building. An hour later, the Duce returns to the speedboat and crosses the Lagoon again to return to his quarters, visibly shaken. Over the next few days, Sauer and Mutti decide to investigate the events of that night and thus discover rumors about a mysterious woman housed in the island's asylum, named Ida Dalser, who claims to be none other than Benito Mussolini's first wife, and only legitimate one.