It is not easy to find the village in the hills where a small boy once vowed to his mother: "One day I will make the earth tremble." The boy went on to create a great deal of nasty disturbance on the world stage, but no special signs direct the tourist to the house of his birth nor to his crypt in the village cemetery. Official Italy - and most certainly the province of Emilia-Romagna, always a stronghold of Italian Communism - do not wish to be associated in any way with Benito Mussolini.
To find the village of Predappio you must leave the autostrada from Bologna to Rimini at the small market town of Forli and seek out the narrow road that twists up through the vineyards and cherry orchards with distant glimpses of the Adriatic Sea to the east and the mountains of Tuscany to the south. It was here that Mussolini was born in July 1883.
His father, Alessandro, was the village blacksmith and a socialist agitator who insisted on giving his children the names of revolutionary heroes. The new baby was called after Benito Juarez, the austere Mexican leader of the rebellion against the rule of Archduke Maximilian of Austria. Inside the blacksmith's house, just off the main street, can be seen the iron beds made by Alessandro for his growing family. A handsome middle-aged woman in a long black, leather coat offers a free guided tour of the house.
Reputation as bully
Benito, a burly child, was sent to the local school and quickly gained a reputation as a bully. At nine he was transferred to a boarding school a few miles away at Faenza run by the Salesian Fathers. He didn't last long.
His wife Rachele, who had to endure his voracious womanising throughout their marriage, always loyally claimed he was expelled because he objected to the Salesians' seating arrangements in the dining hall: the top table was reserved for the sons of the local nobility at 60 lire, another for the middle classes at 45 lire and yet another for the lower orders, including Mussolini, at 30 lire. Less partial reports say he was expelled for stabbing a schoolmate.
The young Mussolini became a rabid socialist. He was secretary of the party in Forli and founded and edited its weekly paper. He toured the surrounding countryside preaching the gospel of red revolution, but seems to have made as many female conquests as he did political converts. Throughout his career he attracted many women. "He treated them roughly, as he had the peasant girls of Forli, sometimes taking them without preliminary explanations on the hard floor of his study or standing them up against a wall," writes Luigi Barzini in his book The Italians.
Rachele Guidi, daughter of his father's mistress, went to live with Benito in Forli in 1910. She bore him five children, but they did not get formally married. The Socialist Party of the day expelled any member who indulged in the bourgeois practice of contracting a civil or religious marriage. (They eventually went through a religious ceremony in Milan in 1925 when Mussolini was the Fascist dictator of Italy and wanted to curry favour with Pope Pius XI).
Popular journalist
Today there are no visible reminders in Forli of the Mussolinis' stay. They moved to Milan in late 1912 and Benito was soon appointed editor of L'Avanti, the daily journal of the Italian Socialist Party. "He was the best popular journalist of his day in Italy," according to Luigi Barzini. In two years he increased the circulation of L'Avanti from 50,000 to more than 200,000. But the road to fascism and absolute power was soon to open.
Expelled by the Socialists for advocating, contrary to party policy, Italian intervention on the Allied side in the first World War, he started his own newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia (The People of Italy), changed his political colours from red to black and founded the Fascist Party in 1919. By October 1922 he was Il Duce, the premier-dictator of Italy. The rest is history: totalitarian, one-party state, conquest of Ethiopia, troops to help Franco in the Spanish Civil War, alliance with Nazi Germany in the second World War. The small boy from the small village in Emilia-Romagna was making the earth tremble.
He and Rachele returned frequently to Predappio, in the quiet hills above Forli, away from the bustle of Rome and the turbulence of war. She was well aware of his affairs. "My husband's liaisons were my own problem," she wrote stoically after his death. "I admit that three women caused me great unhappiness: Ida Dalser, Margherita Sarfatti and Clara Petacci." She could, in truth, have added, "to name but a few".
Brutal end
It was with his last mistress, Clara Petacci, that Mussolini's life came to a brutal end. He attempted to escape with her to Switzerland in the final days of the second World War. They were captured by Italian partisans near Lake Como, huddled in a German truck, and summarily shot on April 28th, 1945. Their bodies were taken to Milan, the city of so many of Mussolini's triumphs, and hung ignominiously feet high from a garage roof. Twelve years later the remains of Il Duce were finally returned to Predappio to rest in the family vault in the cemetery adjoining the ancient church of San Cassiano.
Again, no signs direct the traveller to the cemetery, but in the small car park an elderly man standing beside a three-wheeled mini van proffers Fascist leaflets. The family crypt stands at the top end of the cemetery without special markings, just the carved name, "Mussolini". It is large and entered by descending steps. Here the dictator lies, as he wished, among his forbears and his siblings. The stern faces of his parents, Alessandro and Rosa, stare down from photographs above their tombs. In the side chapel where Mussolini lies, a black shirt and plumed hat hang on the wall. A book of condolences is filled with messages of endearment for the departed leader. Except for the few trappings it could be the crypt of a family anywhere in Italy.
Outside, the old man with the mini-van gives directions to a shop in the village which sells mementoes of Il Duce and fascism - posters, flags, key-rings, badges and, inevitably, black shirts. A black end to a black chapter in the village in the hills.