On June 14, 1934, Adolf Hitler arrived in Venice for his first face-to-face meeting with Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator he idolized. Mussolini, the senior fascist by a decade, condescended toward the newer German chancellor, reportedly mocking his ideas on race. The meeting produced little concrete agreement but marked the beginning of a relationship that would evolve into the Rome-Berlin Axis.
Adolf Hitler crossed into Italy on June 14, 1934, for his first meeting with Benito Mussolini, the man he had long admired as fascism's founding father. Mussolini had seized power in Rome in 1922, a full decade before Hitler became chancellor, and Il Duce made sure Hitler understood the seniority, greeting him in a lavish military uniform while Hitler arrived in a plain trench coat and fedora, looking, by some accounts, like a minor bureaucrat.
The talks in Venice's Doge's Palace and surrounding villas were awkward. Mussolini privately mocked Hitler's racial theories as nonsense and considered him unstable. The two disagreed sharply over Austria, which Mussolini regarded as within Italy's sphere of influence and which Hitler coveted for unification with Germany.
No formal treaty emerged from the visit, and within days of Hitler's return to Berlin, he launched the Night of the Long Knives, purging rivals within his own party. Yet the Venice meeting was a first step. Within a few years, ideological alignment, mutual isolation from Britain and France, and shared ambitions in war would bind the two dictators into the Pact of Steel and the Axis that plunged the world into war.