Junio Valerio Scipione Ghezzo Marcantonio Maria Borghese (6 June 1906 – 26 August 1974), nicknamed The Black Prince, was an Italian Navy commander during the regime of Benito Mussolini's National Fascist Party and a prominent hardline neo-fascist politician in post-war Italy.

In 1970, he took part in the planning of a neo-fascist coup, dubbed the Golpe Borghese, that was called off after the press discovered it; he subsequently fled to Spain and spent the last years of his life there.

During the Italian intervention in the Spanish Civil War, he was in command of the submarine Iride, where he allegedly lost two seamen after his unit was depth-charged by the British destroyer HMS Havock.

Assembled by Prince Junio Valerio Borghese at the beginning of the war, these "frogmen" were trained to fight undercover and underwater with small submarines and assault boats armed with a variety of torpedoes—pioneering tactics that remain a standard for Special Forces around the world today.

Known as "slow speed torpedoes" (siluri a lenta corsa, or SLC), and nicknamed "pigs" (maiali) for their poor maneuverability, these were small underwater assault vehicles with a crew of two.

In the October raid, Borghese took Sciré deep into Gibraltar Bay, making a difficult submerged passage in order to release the SLC as close to the target as possible.

In April 1945 when the US command discovered that the British had granted permission to Marshal Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, and his Communist troops, to occupy northeastern Italy from Venice to the east, Borghese moved the bulk of the X Flottiglia from the Ligurian and Piedmontese area to the Veneto.

With his record as a war hero and his support of Fascism, he became a figurehead for pro-fascist, anti-communist groups in the immediate post-war period, acquiring the nickname Black Prince.

Borghese wrote a supportive introduction, affirming his political ideology of an idealistic neo-fascist new aristocracy meritocratically based purely on character, to far right revolutionary-conservative theorist Julius Evola's book Men Among the Ruins [1].

Following a last minute aborted coup d'état plot which fizzled out on the night of 8 December 1970 (the Feast of the Immaculate Conception), referred to as the Golpe Borghese, he was forced to cross the border to avoid arrest and interrogation.

He was born as Junio Valerio Scipione Ghezzo Marcantonio Maria of the Borghese princes in Rome, in one of the most important families of the Roman nobility, of ancient Sienese origins, with 4 cardinals, a pope and Napoleon Bonaparte's sister, Paolina, among his ancestors.

As a consequence of the fact that his father was a diplomat (with the rank of plenipotentiary minister), Junio Valerio spent the first years of his life travelling between Italy and the main foreign capitals, staying in China, Egypt, Spain, France and Great Britain.