Fanfani joined Catholic Action (AC), of which he became a local leader after few years. After attending the scientific lyceum of Arezzo, he graduated in political and economic sciences in 1930 at the Catholic University in Milan, with the thesis Economic Repercussions and Effects of the English Schism. He was the author of a number of important works on economic history dealing with religion and the development of capitalism in the Renaissance and Reformation in Europe. His thesis was published in Italian and then in English as Catholicism, Capitalism and Protestantism in 1935. Under the regime of Benito Mussolini, he joined the National Fascist Party (PNF) supporting the corporatist ideas of the regime promoting collaboration between the classes, which he defended in many articles. "Some day", he once wrote, "the European continent will be organized into a vast supranational area guided by Italy and Germany. Those areas will take authoritarian governments and synchronize their constitutions with Fascist principles." He also wrote for the official magazine of racism in Fascist Italy, The Defence of the Race (Italian: La difesa della razza). In 1938, he was among the 330 that signed the antisemitic Manifesto of Race (Italian: Manifesto della razza) – culminating in laws that stripped the Italian Jews of any position in the government, university or professions which many previous had. Fanfani also became a professor at the School of Fascist Mysticism in Milan. On 22 April 1939, Fanfani married Biancarosa Provasoli, a 25-year-old lady who grew up in a bourgeois family from Milan. The couple had two sons and five daughters, born between 1940 and 1955. During the years he spent in Milan, he knew Giuseppe Dossetti and Giorgio La Pira. They formed a group known as the "little professors" who lived ascetically in monastery cells and walked barefoot. They formed the nucleus of Democratic Initiative, an intensely Catholic but economically reformist wing of the post-war Christian Democratic Party, holding meetings to discuss Catholicism and society. In Milan, Fanfani wrote "Catholicism and Protestantism in the historical development of Capitalism", in which he proposed a bold interpretation of the phenomena of capitalism, with particular reference to the conditioning of the religious factors and fundamentally disagree with the thesis of Max Weber. This work brought him to the forefront among US Catholics. After the surrender of Italy with the Allied armed forces on 8 September 1943, the group disbanded. Until the Liberation