Antonio Gardoni had petrol thrown in his face when he opened the door of the home he shares in Verona with his husband after being woken up in the middle of the night by noise from outside. The assailants slashed the tyres of the couple’s car and daubed a swastika on the wall alongside the message: “We’ll put you all in the gas chambers”.

Gardoni escaped serious injury but is looking on with trepidation as Verona, better known around the world as the “city of love”, plays host to a lineup of anti-LGBT, anti-feminist and anti-abortion activists whose self-declared goal is to restore the “natural family order”.

The 13th international conference of the World Congress of Families (WCF) began on Friday in the prestigious Gran Guardia Palace. The WCF is a US coalition that promotes the values of the Christian right. Its three-day conference in Verona is funded by the local authority and has the backing of the far-right League, a partner in Italy’s coalition government, and is expected to attract Italian neo-fascist groups.

Protests against the event are being held across the city over the next few days, with 30,000 people expected to march on Saturday. A petition opposing the conference has gathered almost 150,000 signatures so far.

Signalling tensions over the event, the Guardian and a number of other media were denied entry, despite having applied for accreditation, and were told it was because of limited space.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Piazza Bra, Verona, with the Roman amphitheatre that a former League mayor said was open to gay people – ‘but also lions’. Photograph: Alamy

The Gran Guardia overlooks Piazza Bra, where Gardoni and his husband, Angelo Amato, were slapped and spat at as they walked hand-in-hand a few weeks before the attack at their home last summer. The palace also overlooks the Arena, a Roman amphitheatre that Verona’s former League mayor, Flavio Tosi, once declared was open to gay people – “but also lions”.

“I’m disgusted that the congress is happening here,” Gardoni said. “Verona ought to be the city of love, and is one of the most beautiful cities in Italy, but this will devalue it. They’re not here to talk about families, but hate against women, gays, immigrants.” He added: “It’s being attended by characters who we shouldn’t even be discussing in Italy.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest People attend a Gay Pride march in Rome last year. Photograph: Fabio Frustaci/EPA

Those personalities include Brian Brown, the WCF president who fought against same-sex marriage in the US; Theresa Okafor, a Nigerian activist who likened gay people to the Boko Haram terrorist group; Lucy Akello, a Ugandan politician who helped pass an anti-gay law that sets life imprisonment as the maximum penalty for homosexuality in Uganda; and Alexey Komov, the Russian representative of WCF who allegedly has close ties to the League.

Opening the conference, Brown said: “We are here today to defend, promote, protect and lift up something so basic, true and beautiful: the family – a man, a woman, a child.”

Giuseppe Zenti, the bishop of Verona, said: “Marriage between a man and woman is an essential mission,” while same-sex relationships are “a choice”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Matteo Salvini, the League leader and Italy’s deputy prime minister, is scheduled to address the conference on Saturday. Photograph: Antonio Vece/EPA

Verona has always been a staunchly Catholic city resistant towards LGBT and women’s rights, with far-right groups influencing local politics. In October, the local council, led by the mayor, Federico Sboarina, a rightwing independent, declared Verona a “pro-life” city and introduced a motion to fund anti-abortion groups.

“Verona has traditionally been a laboratory for the extreme right and the new mayor has done a series of things to make the city hospitable to the congress,” said Giulia Siviero, a local journalist and spokesperson for the feminist alliance Non Una di Meno.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Members of the feminist alliance Non Una di Meno dress as handmaidens during a protest in Rome this month. Photograph: Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty Images

What is new is that Verona’s politics have been elevated to national level by the League. Matteo Salvini, the party’s leader and Italy’s deputy prime minister, is scheduled to speak at the conference on Saturday, as is Marco Bussetti, the education minister, and Lorenzo Fontana, who was Verona’s deputy mayor before being appointed minister for families.

Salvini said in October he was proud Verona was hosting the WCF, adding: “This is the kind of Europe we like.” The wording on a publicity banner outside the palace appears to mirror this sentiment, alluding to aim of the conference: bringing about a “wind of change” in Europe via a “global pro-family movement”. Many suspect the timing of the event is to coincide with the build-up to European parliament elections in May.

“I’m more worried about the national situation as there are a lot of things that remind me of what happened in the 1920s and 1930s,” said Luigi Turri, the head of the Verona branch of Arcigay, Italy’s largest LGBT rights association. “Everyone says ‘It cannot happen, we have learned’, but from what I see, we haven’t learned.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Italy’s co-deputy prime minister, Luigi Di Maio, has lambasted the World Congress of Families as ‘medieval’. Photograph: Andrew Medichini/AP

But the event has been another point of contention with Salvini’s coalition partner, the Five Star Movement (M5S), with the party’s leader and co-deputy prime minister, Luigi Di Maio, lambasting it as “medieval”. Di Maio and other M5S members will instead attend a counter-event in Rome on Saturday. The Italian prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, has also distanced himself.

Among the themes to be discussed over the next few days are “the beauty of marriage”, “children’s rights”, “growth and demographic decline” and “women’s dignity and health”. Italian anti-abortion campaigners have often blamed the country’s dwindling birth rate on abortion, arguing that if Italians had more children then immigrants would not need to be “imported”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest People take part in Women March against Violence as part of this year’s International Women’s Day in Milan. Photograph: Marco Bertorello/AFP/Getty Images

The League’s support of the event has also been condemned by MPs from the centre-left Democratic party (PD), with Alessia Rotta saying the government’s goal ought to be “radically changing the culture” in a country with one of the highest rates of femicide in Europe and that has serious problems with sexism and homophobia.

PD politicians, including the party’s new leader, Nicola Zingaretti, are expected to join the Verona protest march on Saturday.