June 1940. Mussolini chooses neutrality and doesn’t go to war by Hitler’s side. On 28 April 1945, nine months after the fall of Nazism, a new and terrible conflict breaks out. The Red Army crosses the frontier beyond the River Oder, but, thanks to the intervention of the Italian troops, it is stopped and repelled. It’s the Third World War.

The armies of the western countries spread towards the Russian steppes. The Battalions of Mussolini’s “Blackshirts” are the first to enter Moscow following the victorious battle of Smolensk. The Soviet Union breaks up.

  October 1972.  After half a century of undisputed power, Mussolini, almost ninety years old, is about to celebrate the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Fascist Era. Italy is owner of a huge territory which stretches from Somalia to the steppes of Russia.

  Secret and manifest powers are plotting, however, with the aim of destroying the Empire that Mussolini has modelled on the image of that of Rome. What is the enigmatic treasure given to Duce by Pius XI in 1928? Why does the young king of Italy, Carlo Alberto II, want to take possession of it? For what reason has a mysterious Nazi scientist been after it for almost thirty years? An agent of the OVRA tries to investigate, tribune Romano Tebaldi whom Mussolini has given a dangerous charge.

  Marked by a terrible and painful experience, during the war of Vietnam, where the Italian expedition joins the American army, Tebaldi not only faces the avowed enemies of Fascism but also the evasive presences that move behind the scenes, according to an incomprehensible and seemingly irrational plan, in which he remains involved.

  Shadows of a past, which everyone thought had been extinct for as many as fifteen centuries, suddenly take shape again. What is the unutterable truth which the agent of OVRA will have to finally face? This is the last, alarming secret in this exciting Italian novel with an alternative story.