In March I was in Verona, Italy’s ‘city of love’. I was queuing for what proved to be a delicious espresso and brioche in a magnificent hall overlooking a Roman amphitheatre. And I was chatting to a leading far-right bureaucrat.

If it were not for the politics of my new fascist friend, it would have been a perfect holidaymaking moment. But I was at work: reporting undercover on a big annual jamboree for far-right politicians, conservative Catholics and evangelical Christians called the World Congress of Families.

This week, the far right hopes to win its biggest victory in Europe since the 1930s. Many of the politicians I met in Verona are seeking to surf a wave of discontent into the European Parliament, where they can work together to roll back hard-won rights for women, LGBTIQ people, migrants and minorities.

For far-right politicians who claim to represent the working class against metropolitan elites, they sure had a taste for the good life. The World Congress of Families didn’t happen for free. It brought ultra-conservatives from across the planet together to plot their assault on rights, and to share their passion for the “Bible, borders and Brexit”, as one speaker put it. They must have all spent a fortune on flights, conference tickets, comfortable city-centre hotels – not to mention delicious Italian food.

So who paid for all this? In part, I already knew: my openDemocracy colleagues and I had shown how American Christian conservatives have flooded Europe with at least $50 million over the past decade. But when we started looking at some of the sponsors, I discovered I was at the most conservative (teetotal) cheese and wine party in the world.

One sponsor, its logo printed on conference materials, was Villa Sandi: one of Italy’s leading prosecco producers. Now why would a business devoted to something as pleasant as inexpensive fizzy white wine want to promote itself to the kind of people I was meeting at the World Congress of Families?

After all, my chatty acquaintance in the coffee queue turned out to be Guillaume Pradoura – an adviser to Nicolas Bay, general secretary of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and co-president of the nationalist group in the European Parliament.

He wasn’t out of place in Verona. Back at the Congress the next day, I had a chat with a Trump fundraiser about data extraction for European election campaigning, and asked Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, friend of Steve Bannon and pope-emeritus Benedict XVI, about Bannon’s planned training camps for far-right ‘culture warriors’.