The "Golpe Borghese" is as insignificant as it is bizarre. It's leader was Junio Valerio Borghese, a retired WWII naval officer who had barely escaped a conviction for war crimes and had breifly been awarded high-level positions within the Fronte Nazionale, Italy's postwar right-wing political party.

The coup attempt was frightfully detailed: the Ministry of Defense and Ministry of the Interior were to be occupied along with the national broadcaster's headquarters, while President Saragat was to be kidnapped and the chief of police Vicari assassinated. However, the conspiracy's following was comically small, limited to an Air Force General, an Army Colonel, and some hundred agents of the park service and a few officers. Successive investigations indicated that some members of the intelligence community might have also been involved, but importantly, the whole of the army as well as the national gendarmerie (the Carabinieri) remained loyal to the government. Maybe the conspirators thought they'd naturally spring to their side (or the majority of them would, at least).

Although the park service agents were able to gain surprising access weapons stores the night of December 7 1970, the authorities soon realized what was going on and staged a massive counteraction mobilizing the whole of the army as well as the national gendarmerie. Borghese himself called off the coup soon after it started. The general Amos Spiazzi, once retired, would appear on a television program in 1981 and describe how that night there was a traffic jam of military vehicles on the highways rushing to defend local prefecture's offices, and go so far as to postulate that Borghese must have been secretly egged on by the government so that they would have a reason to pass authoritarian laws. Spiazzi's thesis is unfounded, no such laws were passed and indeed the press would only get a wind of the story some months later, in March of 1971.

Rome's public prosecutor (the Magistratura, or "Magistrature") opened an investigation, and Borghese subsequently fled to Spain, where he would spend the rest of his days. The case was soon dismissed for lack of evidence, but protests by the press led it to be re-opened in 1977; the verdict was again inconclusive. In 1995, a third investigation postulated that the coup attempt had in fact been orchestrated by businessmen in cahoots with organized crime, the link being Vicari's would-be assassins, who were revealed to be members of the Sicilian mafia specially brought to Rome. However, this too was dismissed. Both investigations coincide with specific periods of Italian history: in 1977, the Italian state was cracking down on extremist terrorism, while in 1995 public prosecutors were on the tail end of a series of investigations revealing illicit ties between business and the ruling Christian Democracy Party as well as the Socialist Party.

The bizarre nature of the coup's end continued to be a major question mark: Borghese supposedly called the whole thing off long before he could have known the state was mobilizing against him, and this led to all a manner of theories to emerge. Most of them are unsubstantiated. One of the most popular ones involve Borghese's associates contacts with Otto Skorzeny, a former SS officer living in Spain. The theory would have it that Skorzeny had been flipped by the CIA, and reassured Borghese that the United States would have supported the coup on the condition that Giulio Andreotti, a prominent filo-American within the Christian Democracy party who had been Minister of Defense in the early 1960s (and would go on to be prime minister in the late 1970s) would be elevated to the office of President. Other theories postulate that the United States did not support the coup precisely because Andreotti was not in the conspirator's plans, and once this was communicated to Borghese, he called the whole thing off.

In the end, no one took the coup attempt very seriously; it was simply too small. The press came to call it, "The Park Service Coup" while US State Department memos called it, "The Pensioners Coup." The Italian security apparatus as well as the American one seem to have been aware of the intentions of the conspirators and had plans in place to stop them, while it's possible that Andreotti himself knew about the coup and looked upon it unfavorably.