[2] A volunteer for the Second Italo-Ethiopian War and an admirer of Benito Mussolini's dictatorship, Montanelli had a change of heart in 1943, and joined the liberal resistance group Giustizia e Libertà but was discovered and arrested along with his wife by Nazi authorities in 1944.

[6][7] Both the Italian centre-left and centre-right tried to reclaim his figure; the former, which overlooked his conservatism and anti-communism, emphasized his anti-Berlusconist militancy while the latter, after having portrayed him as a useful idiot of the post-communist left, underplayed his opposition to Berlusconi.

[citation needed] Montanelli began his journalistic career by writing for the fascist newspaper Il Selvaggio ("The Savage"), then directed by Mino Maccari, and in 1932 for the Universale, a magazine published only once fortnightly and that offered no pay.

Montanelli admitted that in those days he saw in fascism the hope of a movement that could potentially create an Italian national conscience that would have resolved the social and economic differences between the north and the south.

It was in 1934, in Paris, that Montanelli began to write for the crime pages of the daily newspaper Paris-Soir, then as a foreign correspondent in Norway, where he fished for cod for a bit, and later in Canada, where he ended up working on a farm in Alberta.

During the interview, surrounded by American art depicting pastoral and frontier subjects, Ford began to reverentially talk about the Founding Fathers of the United States.

While stationed in east Africa, Montanelli bought and married a 12-year-old Bilen child to act as his sex slave, a common practice of Italian soldiers in Abyssinia.

[citation needed] On his return from Abyssinia, Montanelli became a foreign correspondent in Spain for the daily newspaper Il Messaggero, where he experienced the Spanish Civil War on the side of Francisco Franco's Nationalist troops.

In fact, the only casualty he noted but never reported was a single death in the Alpini regiment caused by a mule kick that threw the trooper down into a dry river bed.

In this period, Aldo Borelli, the then director of the Corriere della Sera, asked Montanelli to engage in a collaboration as a foreign correspondent; he could not be employed as a journalist because this had been forbidden by the fascist regime.

[citation needed] Throughout the Winter War that ensued, Montanelli wrote hotly pro-Finnish articles both from the front and from bomb-stricken Helsinki, writing about the almost mythical enterprises of the battle of Tolvajärvi, and of men like captain Pajakka who, with 200 Sámi, successfully confronted 40,000 Russians in the region of Petsamo.

Back in Italy, Montanelli's stories had been followed with great enthusiasm by the public but not so enthusiastic was the response of the fascist leaders who were committed to an alliance with the Soviet Union.

When the Winter War was over and the non-aggression pact was signed between the Soviet Union and Finland, Montanelli was personally thanked by the elusive Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim himself for writing in favour of the Finnish cause.

Here, he recounted to have written little: "I remained at that front various months, writing almost nothing, a small reason was because I fell ill with typhus and a huge one because I refused to push as a glorious military campaign the quaking pummeling that we caught down there.

"[15] An article published on 12 September 1940 issue of Panorama was considered defeatist by the censors of Minculpop (Ministry of Popular Culture), who in turn ordered the closure of the periodical.

After the war, Montanelli dedicated a book to this incident, Il generale Della Rovere (1959), which later turned into a Golden Lion-winning movie directed by Roberto Rossellini and starring Vittorio De Sica.

Inspired by Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey, the story begins on 17 September 1944 when a Val d'Ossola priest buries three unknown corpses and commemorates them with three anonymous crosses.

This is well illustrated in his book La stecca nel coro, which translates as "The False Note in the Chorus" with the meaning of "Going Against the Current", and that is a list of leading articles he composed between 1974 and 1994.

[citation needed] After the war, Montanelli resumed his career at the Corriere della Sera, famously authoring deeply sympathetic articles from Hungary during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

[citation needed] After breaking with the Corriere della Sera, which he perceived as having moved too much to the left,[9] Montanelli founded and directed a new conservative daily, il Giornale nuovo, from 1973 to 1994, together with Enzo Bettiza.

[20] In what supporters of Montanelli saw as a petty instance of insult to injury,[21] the Corriere della Sera dedicated an article to the incident omitting his name from the title ("Milan ... journalist kneecapped"),[22] for which the paper's editor Piero Ottone received criticism.

In the end, protesting his independence, he founded a new daily, for which he resurrected the name La Voce ("The Voice"), which had belonged to a renowned newspaper run by Giuseppe Prezzolini.

[citation needed] Defunct Montanelli had been nicknamed "The Prince of Journalism" by his own colleagues while he was still alive, gaining large esteem and consent even from liberals and political left-oriented journalists; Enzo Biagi, Giorgio Bocca, Aldo Grasso, Gianfrancesco Zincone, and many others considered him a master of the profession and his objectivity and attention to history as a model to teach and replicate.

"[30] He left for posterity a number of first-person reportages and interviews with important historical figures, including Charles de Gaulle, Benito Mussolini, Pope John XXII, and Winston Churchill.

"[39][40] In March 2019, the feminist group Non Una Di Meno poured pink paint on the statue erected in honour of Montanelli, who had bought an Eritrean child as a wife.

[42][43][44] The activist group Rete Studenti Milano labelled Montanelli "a colonialist who made slavery an important part of his political activity" and said he "cannot and should not be celebrated in the public square".

[34] This was also done to highlight the fact that, when aged 24 and working in Italian Ethiopia (former Abyssinia), he married a young girl, by buying her from her family, as was customary among locals, and in his interviews affectionately referred to her as "a little docile animal".

[46] In a 1969 episode of the talk show L'ora della verità (The Hour of the Truth), Montanelli told host Gianni Bisiach of his child bride: "I think I chose well.

While working at the fascist magazine Civiltà Fascista, Montanelli wrote many articles expressing racist ideas, declaring the superiority of the white race, and supporting colonialist ideals.

[60] About his child bride, Montanelli stated: "I struggled a lot to overcome her smell, due to the goat tallow with which her hair was soaked, and even more to establish a sexual relationship with her because she had been infibulated at birth, which, in addition to putting up an almost insurmountable barrier to my wishes (it took the mother's brutal intervention to demolish it), rendered her completely insensitive.