FOREWORD The Villa Carpena was the Mussolini family home. An ochre stuccoed square house, it stands behind iron gates, with two immense bronze eagles, their wings outstretched, outside Forlì in Emilia Romagna, in northern Italy, not far from the hamlet of Predappio where Mussolini was born and grew up. Rachele, the Duce's wife, lived in the villa until her death in 1979. It is now a museum, with something of a used- car lot about its surroundings, since over the years the family possessions have been discovered and brought back: rusty cars and bicycles, the tractor which Mussolini took pride in driving during his occasional holidays from Rome, even a small aeroplane he once piloted. The neglected garden is laid out with paths, marked by lines of small white stones, each bearing the name of one of Mussolini's senior Fascists, and in- between stand life- sized statues in the classical style. There is a stone cottage, built on a miniature scale, in which his children played; the benches on which Mussolini and Rachele sat; the gravestones of the many dogs and cats owned by the family. The gift shop sells Mussolini memorabilia: mugs, plates, aprons, knives and even teapots engraved with Fascist insignia; busts of the Duce in a hundred different heroic poses; replicas of the caps and hats worn by him; books and framed pictures; knives. In the niche by the front door stands the statue of a Roman matron, clutching to herself a sheaf of corn, but otherwise naked. A pair of peacocks was introduced some years ago and their many descendants, some of them pure white, utter their raucous and eerie cries from somewhere behind the trees. But it is the villa itself that is the true shrine to a cult that has now endured for almost a century. When Rachele was allowed to return here in the 1950s, she devoted herself to retrieving the many possessions looted from the house in the closing months of the war. Placing a chair by the gates, she sat and waited; sheepish neighbours appeared with a plate, a sewing machine, a cup. Mussolini's motorbike stands in the narrow hall, by the side of the primitive switchboard on which his aides fielded his calls. In his small dark study there are his caps, medals, trophies, pens, ink-stands. In Rachele's modest kitchen, restored to its state during the years she rolled the pasta by hand on the travertine table, gleam rows of copper pots on the walls. Everything is dark, pokey, covered in a thick layer of dust, with very little light coming from the small- paned windows. On the first floor are the bedrooms, each door marked with the name of a Mussolini child. On the bed in Mussolini and Rachele's room lies one of his many khaki uniforms, complete with fez and dagger, laid out as if waiting for his return. Edda, his eldest and favourite child, had her room at the front, overlooking the courtyard. Her bed has a white cotton cover, and on the pillow lies a doll in a frilly dress, with a worn ceramic face. The 1930s art deco cupboard contains some of the dresses, with their bold patterns, big shoulders and pinched waists, that she wore as an adult when her clothes were the models for chic Fascist women. On the dressing table are little trinkets and bric-a-brac that might have come from village fairs. On every wall of this musty, chilly house, in every room, corridor and staircase, hung closely one to the next, are photographs: the family at banquets, in the streets, playing sports, on bicycles, on horseback and in fast cars; the older boys bold in their pilots' uniforms, the girls demure in their print dresses. Rachele shoots pigeons. The Mussolinis smile, frown, look serious, laugh; they get married, go to parties, raise their arms in the Fascist salute. The portrait of Edda in her early twenties gives her a handsome, stern, quizzical look.The Villa Carpena is not the only place of pilgrimage for those interested in Mussolini and his family. In nearby Predappio, trans-formed from a poor, remote, agricultural hamlet into a thriving tourist centre, Mussolini's mother Rosa's schoolroom is also a museum, and visitors can inspect the dingy rooms of the Casa Natale in which the Duce was born. Nearby, in the cemetery of San Cassiano, is the family crypt. On 28 October every year Italians nostalgic for the Fascist past come here to remember and celebrate the anniversary of the birth of Fascism, before processing with flags and banners down Predappio's main street. The gift shop in the village, which sells many of the same things as the Villa Carpena, does good business; alongside the busts and the knives are copies of Mein Kampf and Nazi insignia. None of this is illegal in modern Italy, where these pilgrimage sites have come to be seen as an integral part of the country's cultural and political heritage. Many thousands of people make their way to Predappio every year, some from as far away as Japan and Australia, others brought by coach from all over Italy. This year, 2022, 28 October is the 100th anniversary of the March on Rome. A century on, it is not easy, in Italy, to forget the Fascist years. Mussolini devoted much time and many resources to engraving Fascist ideology on the landscape, stamping his new era of nationalism and a return to the grandeur of ancient Rome on to buildings, sports arenas, offices and even entire towns. Ridding the country of these monumental, intimidating buildings made of limestone, travertine and marble, with their flat surfaces and sharp lines, was considered impractical in the wake of the Second World War, when the Allied Control Commission recommended the removal of only the more 'unaesthetic' buildings and the destruction of the busts and statues of the dictator. They were more interested in putting their energies into limiting the powers of the Communist Party; in any case, the inter- party Christian Democrat bloc that took over the government included among its members many former Fascists. In the years since then, Fascist architecture has come to be regarded as an attractive form of modernism. In 2015, the fashion house Fendi moved its global headquarters into what had been the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana at EUR, the overbearing Fascist sub-urb that lies between Rome and Ostia. Its gleaming white arches and rows of life- sized naked marble statues sparkle. During the nineteen months of the Mussolini Salò republic on Lake Garda, between Mussolini's fall and Italy's surrender to the Allies in October 1943 and the liberation of Italy in April 1945, Mussolini and his family lived in the late- nineteenth century Villa Feltrinelli, a pink turreted and crenellated house on the edge of the lake. Claretta Petacci, his last mistress, occupied the pretty Villa Fiordaliso not far away among the olive and lemon groves. Having preserved their Venetian glass, mosaic floors and burnt- sienna walls, these villas are now five- star hotels, and Mussolini's and Claretta's bedrooms are said to be booked up for many years in advance. The cult that surrounded and sustained Mussolini during his years of power has lingered on in these places. His words and images continue to resonate with people unhappy with the instability of the sixty- six governments - which have lasted on average 1.4 years each - that have ruled Italy since the war. And, aside from Mussolini himself, no one is better remembered than his elder daughter Edda, who was twelve when he came to power, married his Foreign Minister, Galeazzo Ciano, and, all through the 1930s and into the war, took her reluctant mother's place as the image of what a true Fascist girl and woman ought to be. It was, as it turns out, a deceptive one. I went in search of Edda. I found her in newsreels, in the photo magazine stories so beloved of Italians, in archives and libraries, in memoirs and autobiographies, including her own and those of most of the members of the Mussolini clan. One day, I followed in her footsteps to a seventeenth- century coaching inn at Cantale, on the border between Italy and Switzerland. It is called the Madonnina, and Garibaldi is said to have changed horses here as he left for exile after being sentenced to death for his part in the uprising in Piemonte. On the first floor, down a dark corridor, I saw a sign that I was not expecting: the Edda Ciano suite. Inside were the rooms Edda occupied on the night of 9 January 1944, as she fled from the Nazis who were on their way to arrest her. The large bedroom and adjoining salotto have been left as they were then, with their Egyptian- style art deco furniture: the bed has posts in pale mahogany and the walls are painted blue and deep red. Towards the back of the room stands an immense iron bath. Edda's suite is much in demand. It costs twice the price of the inn's other rooms. Edda was not just Mussolini's favourite child and Fascism's most exotic star. She was the most like her father, with her staring, hypnotic eyes, and she was also eccentric, clever and mercurial. Her will, like his, was of steel. She came to prominence at the age of nineteen and for the thirteen years that she stood at the forefront of the dictatorship, she was at times her father's closest confidante and only friend. But the misogynist culture she grew up in, and which became more pronounced with every Fascist year, was something she was never prepared to accept. Power intrigued her, but she played with it, as she did most things, erratically, with little understanding of her own strength. All dictators leave myths in their wake. What made Mussolini different was that even before he came to power he was laying down and fostering his own cult, and that once he became dictator the cult came to obsess Italy. How the Duce looked, what he said, wrote, thought and did was known throughout Italy. Edda is not so easy to pin down. The myth that enveloped her father spread to include the whole Mussolini family, and especially the cleverest and most enigmatic of his children. Even during their lifetimes, their words and actions were embellished, distorted, romanticised and often imagined; and they themselves contributed to a sometimes fanciful retelling of events. Unravelling fact from the fiction handed down by successive generations of followers, relations, journalists and historians is a bewildering task, made more so by the myths that swirled about Edda; and it is certain that not every incident or quotation in this book is true. But what follows is as close to the truth as I have been able to get. Edda is intrinsically bound up with her father, and a true representative of what Fascism did - and did not - do to Italians. Sometimes, misfortune struck so quickly that her life seemed to follow the arc of a Greek tragedy. Mussolini and Fascism made Edda what she was: to understand her, you have to understand what Italians call il ventennio Fascista , the twenty years of Fascist rule, when Mussolini's vision and will ruled over every facet of Italian life - sport, education, leisure, health, culture, work - and most of all over Edda, who loved, admired and, for a while, hated him. Excerpted from Mussolini's Daughter: The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe by Caroline Moorehead All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
