The flowing blond locks and the rippling muscles are unchanged.
Fabio is still the “King of Romance” – the hard-bodied cover boy of soft-core romance novels back in the swinging ’80s and ’90s.
But on the cusp of turning 65, he is breaking his lifelong public silence on politics because, he believes, he must warn about “the dark state of the Union” and the rising tide of antisemitism.
It is the aftermath of the October 7 Hama massacres in Israel that have prompted him to speak out forcefully — and particularly to criticize the Hollywood machine for failing to be a voice against antisemitism.
Speaking exclusively to The Post, he reveals his family’s own connections to the evils of Nazi Germany and says that he fears the US, of which he became a citizen in 2016, is dangerously weak under President Biden.
“I am SO pissed about what’s going on in America today!” he said, calling Biden, “THE worst president by far in the history of the United States.”
Fabio told The Post that he watched the October 7 attack unfold on Israeli television, watching live via satellite at his California home with an Israeli friend.
“I saw live right away what was going on,” Fabio says. “It was unbelievable and shocking and horrific. I was furious because I thought, ‘Here we go again… here we go again.’
“They NEVER, EVER want peace. They want all Jews dead. They want to eradicate Israel.
“These were innocent people being slaughtered on Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest,” noted Fabio, of the worst mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust.
“Hamas kills babies, they use human shields, and they murdered Americans, took hostages, and raped women. What are the Jewish people supposed to do?
“If Canada or Mexico would do something like that to the United States. You know what the United States would do. My God, we’d nuke them!”
He called his long-term manager, Eric Ashenberg, who is Jewish and has relatives in Israel.
But Ashenberg’s phone was turned off, and Fabio left a message. Luckily, Ashenberg told The Post, his Israeli family was safe from Hamas.
But now his brother’s two grandchildren and his niece’s three sons have been called up for service.
For Fabio, the Hamas terror attack brought back chilling thoughts of what the Nazis had done to his maternal grandfather, Enrico Carnicelli.
Carnicelli, a Catholic, was outspoken about life under the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini during World War Two, and then after his fall, about Nazi occupiers.
“My grandparents and my mom were living in Milan under the fascists, and the Nazis were there — they were everywhere,” Fabio recounts.
“During that time in Italy with the fascists and Hitler, you couldn’t speak against the party, and my grandfather was a very outspoken person.
“One night when my mom, my grandfather, and my grandmother were having dinner, the Nazis came in and they beat the living crap out of my grandfather and they took him away in front of my mom and his wife.”
According to Fabio, his family only knew that “my grandfather was put on a train by the Nazis – and, of course, he never came back, and my mom had never, ever forgotten. She was totally paralyzed by what happened.”
Enrico was in his mid-30s. His wife, Innes Carnicelli, Fabio’s grandmother, a housewife, was devastated.
Fabio was born in March 1959, long after World War II, but the long shadow of evil haunted his childhood.
His grandmother, who died when he was 13, would tell the family that her husband had been taken to Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp, where six million Jews were exterminated.
Although impossible to confirm where his grandfather ultimately died, his murder at the hands of the Nazis has given Fabio a lifelong feeling of solidarity with the Jewish people — and an awareness of the deep effects the October 7 attack will have on those affected.
Enrico’s only child, Fabio’s mother, Flora Carnicelli, thrived after the war, winning the Miss Milan beauty contest, but rarely spoke of her father “because it was too emotional.
“You couldn’t even say the words ‘fascism’ and ‘Nazi,’ in front of my mom. She would go berserk. She was traumatized for the rest of her life. My God, when she was 80 years old, she was still crying and wigging out.”
“The Jewish people have been the sacrificial lambs for five thousand years,” asserts Fabio, who’s studied the history. “They’ve been killed and persecuted. No people in the world went through such a massacre (the Holocaust) like the Jewish people.”
Fabio’s mother died in 2018 when she was in her 90s.
She had suffered from “severe” Alzheimer’s for almost a decade.
His father, Saura Lanzoni, died in his mid-90s, five years ago.
Saura Lanzoni was a successful Milanese businessman and mechanical engineer who owned a firm, Flowlink, that made industrial conveyor systems for other factories.
Saura and Flora had three children, Fabio being the middle one.
His older brother, Walter, would run the family business with their father.
He was once described in a newspaper profile as Fabio’s opposite — “short and bald.” (Now retired in Italy, he claims he’s not bald, but had always shaved his head.)
Fabio’s younger sister, Cristina, tragically died of ovarian cancer in 2013.
Fabio had brought her from her home in Italy to Houston for treatment and stayed with her at her bedside until she passed.
In Italy, Fabio had graduated from high school and later served in the Italian army where mandatory service was required, and trained as a parachute commando.
It was when the 6-foot-3 hunk arrived in America in 1980 at 21 and almost immediately walked into a top modeling job for the GAP clothing chain, then he hit it big as a romance novel model making as much as $150,000 per cover that his life changed.
“You can achieve anything here,” he declares; success made Fabio a multimillionaire, and his father’s predictions that he would return with his tail between his legs never came true.
Having turned romance covers into a Hollywood career — including roles in “Zoolander,” “Dude, Where’s My Car?” and TV’s “America’s Next Top Model” — he’s sore that other Hollywood stars have not been willing to speak out in force.
However, he believes that it is the country’s political leadership that is at the heart of its problems.
Fabio says he’s “steaming mad” about Biden, whose presidency is “destroying the country, who spends our money like a drunken sailor, and who’s going to get us into a major war. Because of Biden, the world sees that we are now at the weakest point in US history.”
He’s enraged about the southern border, and believes that among the illegal border crossers are “terrorists planning more attacks.”
“It’s like the Trojan horse story, and I guarantee we’re going to be next. Israel is the little devil and America’s the big devil,” he said.
Fabio hates to say it, but he believes the country’s future “is very dark because we have a president who doesn’t know what planet he’s on.
“I compare him to Nero, who fiddled while Rome burned. It’s the same with Biden.
“This guy has no clue what’s going on.”