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 Roa Bastos's "I, the Supreme" (1974), and Gabriel García Marquez's "The Autumn of the Patriarch" (1975). He defines the dictator novel as a novel which draws upon the historical record to create fictionalized versions of dictators. In this way, the author is able to use the specific to explain the general, as many dictator novels are centred around the rule of a one particular dictator. Within this group he includes those novelists who took to task authoritarian figures such as Vargas Llosa's "Conversation in the Cathedral" (1969) and Denzil Romero's "La tragedia del Generalísimo" (1984). He even includes Sergio Ramírez's