Marie José of Belgium Claretta Petacci, claimed in her diary that in 1937 the then princess and wife of the heir to the throne tried and failed to seduce the dictator at a beach resort near Rome. However, Mussolini's son, Romano, claims that the princess and dictator entered into a sexual relationship. In 1943, the Crown Princess involved herself in vain attempts to arrange a separate peace treaty between Italy and the United States; her interlocutor from the Vatican was Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, a senior diplomat who later became Pope Paul VI. Her attempts were not sponsored by the king and Umberto was
Dictator novel The dictator novel came back into fashion in the 1970s, towards the end of the Boom. As Sharon Keefe Ugalde remarks, "the 1970s mark a new stage in the evolution of the Latin American dictator novel, characterized by at least two developments: a change in the perspective from which the dictator is viewed and a new focus on the nature of language." By this she means that the dictator novels of the 1970s, such as "The Autumn of the Patriarch" or "I, the Supreme", offer the reader a more intimate view of their subject: "the dictator becomes protagonist" and the