Flutterby™! : Mussolini provided Vatican funds

Not really news: The Guardian: How the Vatican built a secret property empire using Mussolini's millions. The most surprising bit of this? That half a billion pounds based off of whatever Mussolini used back in 1929 to buy his legitimacy matters in the scale of international Catholic church finances:

The Mussolini money was dramatically important to the Vatican's finances. John Pollard, a Cambridge historian, says in Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy: "The papacy was now financially secure. It would never be poor again."

But who's profiting off the real estate is worth thinking about a little bit when you're downtown in some monstrously touristy location looking at the designer jewelry.