The OVRA, unofficially known as the Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism (Italian: Opera Vigilanza Repressione Antifascismo),[1][2] was the secret police of the Kingdom of Italy during the reign of King Victor Emmanuel III.

[4][5][nb 1] In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Mussolini by the young Anteo Zamboni, in Bologna on 31 October 1926, a swath of repressive legislation was swiftly enacted by the Italian government.

It is believed that about 6,000 of the people arrested by the OVRA, mainly communists and members of the Giustizia e Libertà,[9] were either tried by the Tribunale Speciale or sent into exile on remote Mediterranean islands.

A major duty for the OVRA was spying on Pope Pius XI, as the Roman Catholic Church was an extremely powerful institution in Italian life that the fascist regime never controlled, instead having a partnership with.

[12] Another homosexual cleric was Monsignor Ricardo Sanz de Samper, the Prefect of the Pope's Household and papal majordomo, whose fondness for sex with young boys became so open that even Pius was forced to dismiss him in 1928.

[13] Another long OVRA file was on the Jesuit Father Pietro Tacchi Venturi, the Pope's emissary to Mussolini, who often had "illicit" relations with young men and had been wounded in a lover's quarrel, which he tried to pass off as an anti-fascist assassination attempt.

[16] During World War II, the OVRA was used by Mussolini to control resistance groups in the Balkans (Josip Broz Tito's National Liberation Army especially) prior to the 1943 armistice of Cassibile and withdrawal.

In 1943, with the Allied invasion of Italy starting the Italian campaign, the OVRA began to recruit double agents to infiltrate the British Special Operations Executives; these efforts failed to stop Mussolini's ouster.

Later, a division of the PS named Servizio Informazioni Speciali (Special Informations Service, better known as SIS) was set up by the new Minister of Interior, the Italian Socialist Party member Giuseppe Romita, as a result of a new reorganization of the Police offices, with the task of taking over the management of the CPC and investigating politically motivated crimes and other felonies related to that particular time (such as black marketeering, etc.