Benito Mussolini with his family, 1930 [1000 x 641]

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1. Lavrentio2LaVendetta

   From left to right:

   • Rachele Guidi, Mussolini’s wife. She was born in 1890 in Predappio, a small town in Emilia-Romagna (the same town where Mussolini was born); the last of five sisters, she came from a poor peasant family. She attended elementary school and had Rosa Maltoni, Mussolini’s mother, among her teachers; at age eight she lost her father, after which the impoverished family moved to nearby Forlì, where Rachele worked as a maid in wealthy people’s homes. In 1905 Rosa Maltoni died, and Alessandro Mussolini, Benito’s father, opened an inn in Forlì together with Anna Lombardi, Rachele’s mother (the two had already been lovers for some time, many years before, before marrying their respective husband and wife: one could say that the destinies of Rachele and Benito had been tied even before their birth). In 1907 Benito, at the time a young Socialist activist, went to live with his father in Forlì, and thus met Rachele (to be fair, this was the second time they met: the first time had been when Rachele was a schoolgirl and Benito little more than a teenager, serving as a temporary substitute teacher at her school); the two immediately fell in love, but their parents opposed their relationship. They relented when Benito summoned them, drew a revolver and threatened to shoot first Rachele and then himself if they would not consent to their marriage. In 1910 the couple went to live together in a small apartment in Forlì, and in the same year their first daughter, Edda, was born; they only married in 1915, however, and exclusively with a civil ceremony. Two sons, Vittorio and Bruno, were born in 1916 and 1918, respectively; in 1925 Rachele and Mussolini, whom had by then become the prime minister of Italy, were married again, this time with a religious ceremony. They had another son, Romano, in 1927, and a daughter, Anna Maria, in 1929. During the Fascist period, Rachele did not participate much in public life; in line with her peasant origins and mindset, she ran the house and raised her children, seldom participating in public cerimonies and showing little interest politics. She was a woman of strong character, even more authoritarian than her husband: her daughter Edda called her “the real dictator in the family”. Despite Benito cheating on her with a legion of mistresses, of whom Ida Dalser (who gave him a son in 1915; some sources claim that he even married her in 1914, but this remains unclear due to the lack of documents, which may have been destroyed) and Claretta Petacci are just the most famous, she always remained fiercely loyal to him. When her son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano (Edda’s husband), in 1944, was sentenced to death for having voted against Mussolini during the meeting of the Grand Council of Fascism on 25 July 1943 (which had resulted in Mussolini being deposed and arrested), she was among those who recommended that he should be granted no leniency. During the period of the Italian Social Republic, Rachele’s well-justified jealousy became more evident, as she created her own “intelligence network” to keep track of her husband’s movements, and came into open conflict with Claretta Petacci, which she insulted, and tried to assault phisically at a meeting she had arranged. Rachele last saw her husband on 17 April 1945, when he left Lake Garda for Milan; she last spoke with him, on the telephone, on 26 April, when he sent her towards the Swiss border along with their youngest children, Romano and Anna Maria, and an escort of soldiers from the Black Brigades. The Swiss frontier police refused to let them enter Switzerland, and Rachele and the children were thus arrested by partisans near Como on 29 April and handed over to the Allies. After being briefly imprisoned in Como, Milan, Montecatini, and Terni, they were then confined on Ischia, an island near Naples, for four years. In 1949 Rachele moved to Rome, and in 1957 she returned to Forlì, where she buried her husband (Mussolini’s corpse, initially buried in Milan, had been stolen in 1946 by some neofascists, then hidden in a monastery, then found by the police, and hidden again in another monastery, this time by the Italian government; the remains were returned to the family in 1956) and later opened a restaurant. Rachele Guidi died in Forlì in 1979, aged eighty-nine.
   • Anna Maria Mussolini, the youngest of Mussolini’s children. She was born in Forlì in 1929 and suffered from health problems since a young age: at age seven she came down with a serious form of polio, which left her with permanent physical problems; she lived a privileged childhood in Villa Torlonia, Mussolini’s state residence in Rome, but in July 1943 (after Mussolini’s removal from power) she was detained in the Rocca delle Caminate, a castle near Predappio that had been Mussolini’s summer residence for many years, along with her mother and her brother Romano. They were freed by the Germans after their occupation of Italy following the Armistice of Cassibile. In 1945 she followed her mother in the escape attempt towards Switzerland and subsequent imprisonment and then confinement on Ischia. In the 1950s she worked for some time as a radio show host at RAI (Italy’s national public broadcasting company), under an assumed name, presenting Rotocalco Musicale, a radio show in which she interviewed musicians, artists and other celebrities; but she had to quit this job when her actual identity was made public. In 1960 she married TV host Giuseppe Negri, by whom she had two daughters, Silvia (born in 1961) and Edda (born in 1963). Her health, meanwhile, steadily worsened: in 1966 she had to undergo surgery for breast cancer, and two years later she fell ill with chicken pox, followed by endocarditis, and at the same time cancer came back. As a result of this, she died on 25 April 1968 (a rather eerie coincidence…), aged thirty-eight.
   • Romano Mussolini, the fourth child. He was born in Forlì in 1927, and his story from birth to 1945 is not much different from that of his younger sister, except health problems. After the war he became a jazz pianist, under the assumed name of Romano Full (he had already started playing the piano as a child: sometimes he played with his father, who was an amateur violinist), becoming part of a quintet that performed in Naples and its surroundings. In the late 1950s he stopped using pseudonyms and formed his own band, the “Romano Mussolini All Stars”, performing both in Italy and abroad during the following decades. He also composed movie soundtracks and painted. In 1962 he married Maria Scicolone, sister of actress Sophia Loren: they had two daughters, Elisabetta and Alessandra (the latter, born in 1962, would go on to become a far-right politician, perhaps best known outside Italy for her Twitter altercation with Jim Carrey some months ago). In 1976 the couple divorced, and Mussolini married actress Carla Maria Puccini, who gave him another daughter, Rachele (who has also become also a far-right politician). Romano did not talk much about his father in public until his later years, when he published (2004) a book entitled Il duce, mio padre (“The duce, my father”) and created a museum about him in Villa Carpena, Mussolini’s old residence in Forlì. The last surviving child of Benito Mussolini, Romano died in 2006 at age seventy-eight.
   • Well, Benito Mussolini, of course. I don’t think I need to tell you who he was, what he is famous for, or how he ended.

2. doctorstrange00

   “… and together they have very ugly kids” – Rodney