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
The Mistress of the Copper Mountain the house was a bad omen. The Mistress became a popular character in the Soviet Union. The folklorists of the Ural State University, who collected tales near Sysert after Pavel Bazhov's death, noted they "have not met a single person who did not hear about the Mistress", but they mostly knew about her from Bazhov's "skazy" and referred to them: "Read some Bazhov, he wrote it down". Few story-tellers heard of her from oral tradition. During Soviet times critics commonly described this character as the protector of the working class from the oppressors. Maya Nikulina argued that the Mistress is