The Mann family may have experienced the color black quite a lot during their 1926 summer vacation in Italy, a "color" predominantly used by Benito Mussolini's nationalist and fascist party. Mussolini, raised in a devout Catholic family, was a long-time socialist who even met with Vladimir Lenin while in exile in Switzerland. Already before the beginning of the first world-war, Mussolini rejected socialism since it failed to recognise the superiority of the nation, as he stated it in 1914. In 1918 he called for men "ruthless and energetic enough to make a clean sweep" to strengthen the Italian nation and finally, on March 23, 1919, Mussolini founded the Italian Combat Fascists in Milan, a paramilitary group of 200 members.

Mussolini chose the term Fascist Party consciously and deliberately after reading Plato, Nietzsche and Sorel. Unlike today, the word fascist was relatively insignificant at the time around Thomas Mann's Italy vacation in 1926, when Adolf Hitler was in an aristocratic Bavarian prison along with his type-writing friend Rudolph Hess, following their first failed Munich coup attempt from 1923. In Italy, not far and on the other side of the Alps, Mussolini required the most extreme obedience from his fascist party members in order to prevent even the slightest ideas of an entirely new political idea from Europe's north reaching his party folks South of the Alps. The replacement of the German empire in Berlin, where ordinary sailors had revolted in Mussolini's Fascist Party founding year 1919 to depose the German Kaiser and establish a new republic through councils, was to be prevented at all costs from possibly reaching also the Italian king - or even the Vatican in Rome.

Mussolini did not have to look far to see the visible sign of extreme spiritual obedience. Catholic priests and many monks have long worn black habits - the favorite color of kings, by the way. And the fasces, a bundle of wooden sticks dating back to the last Roman Republic worn by a class of politicians vested with extreme legal powers, was to become next to black uniforms an ideal symbol for Mussolini's terror nationalists. The German term "Lebensraum" was also originally crafted in Italy, when its soldiers were ordered by the king to wage war against various Mediterranean nations, especially in North Africa. The idea was that Italy needed more "spazio vitale", or living space, because Italians were supposedly "suffering from overpopulation". Decades later, a strange group of initially Swiss intellectuals in the Club of Rome resembled this idea in their 1972 apocalyptic scenario of a global population of over 6 billion people. To support Italy's imperialist doctrine in North Africa back in the 1920s, another strange idea was created and celebrated early on in Italy: the idea that a so-called "superior race" had the right to take "spazio vitale" from inferior races. According to Mussolini, blacks belonged to such an "inferior race".

Strangely, the political career of Italy's current prime minister Giorgia Meloni shows a number of weird resemblances with what Benito Mussolini thought at the beginning of his career as a socialist journalist. In 1992, Giorgia Meloni joined the 'Youth Front', the neo-fascist youth arm of Italy's socialist(!) movement MSI - founded one year after the end of the second world war in 1946 by Italian pro-fascists. The MSI movement was legally transformed in 1995 not into another socialist, but into a conservative(!) Alleanza Nazionale (AN) political party. Meloni became the national student leader of AN's Azione Studentesca in mid 1990, rising to become the head of Alleanza Nazionale's youth organisation in the early 2000s. She became Minister for Youth under Berlusconi.

Just like Mussolini in his youth, Giorgia Meloni is - or at least was - also a devout Catholic. She believes in "God", her country and her family. Her own father Francesco(!) Meloni left his Italian wife when little Giorgia was about one year old - he moved to the Canary Islands. The Canary Islands are part of Spain, and the Spanish dictator Franco was exiled exactly there after the Socialists had won the elections in Madrid at around the same time that Thomas Mann was on holiday in La Spezia in 1926 - events that led to a brutal civil war in Spain in the 1930s. Franco's legion of murderers was air lifted in 1936 from Northern Africa to the shores of Spain by Hitler's infamous Legion Condor airplanes, and also through the help of Mussolini, by the way.

Father Meloni left Italy much later in 1978 of course, but was years after sentenced to nine years in prison for drug trafficking. Francesco Meloni was captured in 1995 with a whopping 1,500 kilograms of Marihuana on his sailing boat "Cool Star" under French flag, just before entering the ports of Menorca. Quite a long sentence, even under a crumbling Franco regime in Spain. Meloni's father wrote a last letter to his daughter Giorgia in 2006. Giorgia Meloni's mother is equally interesting. A native from Sicily, Anna Paratore was, or potentially still is, entangled in a real estate scandal of black proportions, very few had noticed.


In May 2023, LaRepubblica took a closer look at the real estate history of Francesco Meloni's ex-wife Anna Paratore, revealing a number of inconsistencies. According to LaRepubblica, an official document from the Madrid Chamber of Commerce entitled Tomo 16455, sec 8, libro 0, hoja M-279979 states that father Franceso Meloni was on the board of directors of a company with the even more telling name Nofumomas SL still in 2004, alongside a certain Raffaele Matano. At the same time, Giorgia's mother was a shareholder in several other companies of exactly this business partner Mr. Matano of her ex-husband, such as Lazio Consulting SRL, formerly based in Panama, which later became a certain Gruppo Immobiliare Romano SRL. Although Giorgia Meloni stated in her autobiography "Io Sono Giorgia" that in her youth her mother's apartment, where Giorgia lived with her sister, was allegedly destroyed by fire, there are apparently no precise witnesses. On the contrary, the apartment was bought for 47 million and sold just four years later for 160 million with a nice profit. Anna Paratore was also “lucky” enough to sell shares in a company called Raffaello Eventi Srl originally worth 2,000 euros for a whopping 48,000 euros in 2012.


Thomas Mann did take a very close look at the happenings when he was back with his family to Munich from his 1926 Italy vacation. Only a few years later, he was left with no other choice than to escape the Nazis in Europe: he emigrated to California, fearing that the magician would be showing up at his house in Munich as well.