Dear Readers,
Benito Mussolini entered the world on July 29, 1883 in the village of Dovia (near Predappio, province of Forlì) in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy. He made his world exit on April 28, 1945.
Mussolini’s body riddled with bullets was strung up by the heels after being caught by Italian partisans trying to sneak out of Italy disguised as a retreating German soldier. Unfortunately, his young mistress, Claretta Petacci, in a misguided attempt to “stand by her man,” chose to be with him and the pair was executed by the partisans who had found them near Lake Como. (Two days later Hitler killed himself in a bunker, with his mistress, Eva Braun by his side, in Berlin.)
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Benito Mussolini’s father, Alessandro, was a blacksmith and later an innkeeper. A generous and compassionate man, Alessandro was an early follower of the socialist cause and bitterly antagonistic to Church and monarchy.
Mussolini’s mother, Rosa Maltoni, came from better circumstances than her husband and was an elementary school teacher. She was a sensitive, religious woman who was determined to raise her children above the precarious lower-middle class existence she shared with her husband. Benito Mussolini was named after Benito Juarez, the Mexican revolutionary who had led the revolt against Emperor Maximilian and his wife Carlotta.
At 18 Benito became a school teacher and also wrote part-time for a socialist newspaper. In 1915, after a common law relationship, he married in a civil ceremony his wife Rachele, who had given birth (in 1910) to their first child Edda. At age 29, Mussolini had become editor of Avanti, the Italian Socialist Party newspaper and circulation tripled under his editorship. However, the World War changed him from an internationalist to an uncompromising advocate of intervention and led to his expulsion from the Socialist Party.
To spread his own views on patriotism, he founded Il Popolo d’Italia, 1914. Called into service, he went to the front as a private in the Bersaglieri corps, rose to a corporal, and then was seriously wounded by the explosion of a trench mortar. After being hospitalized he returned to Milan and organized a group of ex-service men into the first Fascist unit, invoking nationalist fervor against the growing strength of socialism and communism.
Excellently organized in military order the Fascists grew in political strength; they became a party of opposition, and in October 1922, inspired by the challenging oratory of their leader, a large group began the “March on Rome.” The cabinet, intimidated, resigned, and the King requested Mussolini to form a government. The Fascist state came into being, superimposed upon the constitutional monarchy, and vested with all political power. Mussolini believed in the power of the Fascist press.
A booklet, Ten Years of Italian Progress by ENIT (Ente Nazionale Industrie Turistiche) was printed for distribution at the Chicago Century of Progress World’s Fair, when Italo Balbo arrived on Saturday July 15, 1933. Chicago land Fra Noi columnist, Mario Avignone remembers, “We welcomed and greeted General Italo Balbo and his twenty four silver winged Italian seaplanes as they landed on Lake Michigan, close to the Navy Pier.
Thousands of people crowded along the shores of Lake Michigan to see the 24 Italian planes escorted by 40 U.S. airplanes (the First Pursuit Squadron) from the Selfrige, Michigan Air Base. What a beautiful and historic event it was to see Italo Balbo and his 24 seaplanes that had flown nearly 7,000 miles from Orbetello, Italy.” I was not in attendance; however, I do have a copy of the 1933 booklet “Ten Years of Italian Progress” (since Mussolini’s Fascist Party took over).
A few excerpts: “Everything that Fascist Italy has accomplished since 1922 would require a volume of many pages, but those of special interest to American tourists have been included. Sport is encouraged as much as possible by the Fascist Government and it is no exaggeration to say that few countries have done so much in such a short space of time and with such zeal. The Mussolini Stadium in Rome and the National Academy for Physical Training built in recent years, are certainly among the most important in Europe.
Airlines have not many years of history behind them as they were created at only a comparatively recent date, but they have made considerable progress and their future is an assured one. Italian airlines in 1926 amounted to only 2578 miles. Ten years later, it now approximates three million miles and the number of passengers carried has risen ten fold. Road Board authorized surface dressing has been applied to 5.600 miles of roads, nearly three hundred road maintenance stations have been built, almost half a million trees have been planted, and thousands of sign-posts have been set up.
Shipping companies have amalgamated into one called the “Italia”, which owns the largest vessels. Thus it has been possible to convert the New York-Genoa route (which is considerably larger than the northern route) into one of the fastest crossings between America and Europe. In fact, the trip lasts only six and half days and the boats call at ports that rank among the most important shipping, land and air centers, such as Gibraltar, Nice, Genoa and Naples. The largest of these vessels, which is also one of the largest that has been built since the war, is the “Rex”.
Another large vessel on the Genoa-New York route is the “Conte di Savoia”. She is the only one of the large transatlantic liners that is absolutely steady as she is fitted with an extremely modern Sperry stabilizer that ensures perfect stability even in rough weather. The Coordinated Land Reclamation Project is one of the great accomplishments of the Fascist Government.
Whole districts, which had been abandoned for centuries to malaria and squalor, have been redeemed for ever by exceptionally imposing methods. By draining marshy land, banking up torrents and making new canals, vast stretches of ground have been rendered fit for cultivation and have been immediately farmed: whilst in place of the unhealthy marshes new houses have sprung up with remarkable rapidity, and even entire new towns. Among the latter mention should be made of Mussolinia in Sardinia and Littoria in the Pontine Marshes, not far from Rome.”
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No doubt about it, Benito Mussolini did much good for Italy; however, as the old timers used to say “tradito dall’Inghilterra” he got in with “male compagnie” (Hitler) and it all led to “una brutta fine”.
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Romano Mussolini (1927-2006) the last surviving son of the “Duce” may be more familiar to younger readers, not because Romano was the son of the late Italian dictator, but due to the fact that he was a remarkable jazz pianist. He never embraced politics while he was growing up, to the chagrin of the Duce who frankly disliked the son’s musical preference: American popular jazz.
As a teenager he would play in front of his father the music he loved. His father, on the other hand, tried to play classical music on the violin. Romano Mussolini, the Italian jazz pianist whose fame as the youngest child of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was ultimately rivaled by his musical renown, was born in 1927 in Carpena di Forlì, in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy. Romano was the third and youngest son of Benito Mussolini and Rachele Guidi, who also had two daughters. Amid the censorship under Italian fascism, it was Romano’s older brother Vittorio who introduced him to film and music.
After the war Romano took refuge in the Napoli area where he began to play jazz music with a small band, under an alias. Eventually he returned to Rome and in the 1950s and 60s was in the vanguard of Italian jazz with his group the Romano Mussolini All Stars.
He often played with American greats like Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and Chet Baker, when they toured Italy. When Romano Mussolini died at age 79, February 3, 2006, his first wife Anna Maria Scicolone was at his bedside, as well as his daughter Alessandra, the well known political power house and a star in her own right. There was also the true celebrity in the family, his sister-in-law Sofia Loren (born Scicolone). His second marriage was to actress Carla Maria Puccini.
She survives him, along with two daughters from his first marriage, Alessandra and Elisabetta, and a daughter with Ms. Puccini, Rachele. Several in Romano’s family met tragic deaths. His brother Bruno, a fighter pilot, was shot down and killed during WWII. His brother-in-law, married to his sister Edda, Count Galeazzo Ciano, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs, was executed by a firing squad for betraying the Duce, by voting to depose him at the Supreme Fascist Council.
His father, Benito, was executed by the Italian partisans after capturing him trying to escape to Germany dressed as a simple soldier. This happened when the Fascist “Republic of Salò” collapsed. Romano was 17 when he last saw his father in April 1945, eleven days before he was executed by members of the Italian resistance.
Despite his own scrupulous avoidance of politics, politicians from Italy’s right wing parties lauded the Mussolini family name and helped launch his daughter Alessandra’s political career. In 2004 Romano broke a self-imposed silence about his father and his legacy with the publication of his memoir, “Il Duce, My Father,” in which he fondly recalled his father as a sensitive and caring man. His sister Edda Mussolini Ciano, in her book published in 1976 “My Truth” seemed to agree.
Edda wrote that her father at home was a softie and that the “real dictator” was her mother Rachele. “My mother on the other hand, was the real dictator of the family, although her strong character was belied by her ingenuous exterior, delicate features, blue eyes, and blond hair.”
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