It was named after Junio Valerio Borghese, wartime commander of the Decima Flottiglia MAS and a hero in the eyes of many post-War Italian fascists.

The coup attempt became publicly known when the left-wing journal Paese Sera ran the headline on the evening of 18 March 1971: Subversive plan against the Republic: far-right plot discovered.

Italian journalists have claimed the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reportedly followed the coup, with President Richard Nixon allegedly being personally informed of it.

The failed coup involved hundreds of neo-fascist militants from Stefano Delle Chiaie's National Vanguard, and army dissidents under Lt.

Colonel Amos Spiazzi, helped by 187 members of the Corpo Forestale dello Stato, who were to seize the headquarters of the Italian public television broadcaster RAI.

Spiazzi's Milan-based battalion also planned to occupy Sesto San Giovanni, at that time a workers' town and a stronghold of the Italian Communist Party.

[5] According to the later testimony of Spiazzi, the coup was in fact fictitious: it would have been immediately suppressed by government forces through an emergency plan called Esigenza Triangolo (Triangle Exigency) similar to the 1964 Piano Solo, which would have provided the Christian Democratic (DC) government with an excuse to declare martial law and enact special laws allowing the deployment of thousands of government troops, as well as military and civil police, to seize control of political parties and publishers and undertake mass arrests and deportations, to quell the ongoing social unrest and left-wing protests.

[8] On 18 March 1971, the leftist journal Paese Sera was published with the headline: Subversive plan against the Republic: far-right plot discovered.

[16] At the appeal trial in November 1984, all 46 defendants were acquitted because the "fact did not happen" (il fatto non sussiste) and only existed in "a private meeting between four or five sixty-years-olds".

In 1970, when the Sicilian Mafia Commission was reconstituted, one of the first issues that had to be discussed was an offer by Borghese, who asked for support in return for pardons of convicted mafiosi like Vincenzo Rimi and Luciano Leggio.

[11] Nonetheless, the secret service reported connections with the Nixon administration and NATO units in Malta based on claims made by Orlandini.

The film is peppered with joke references to the fascist period, the post-war neo-fascist Italian Social Movement and the Decima MAS frogmen unit.