execution was distinctive and meaningful: They were made to sit down in chairs, and then tied to those chairs; then they would be shot in the back. This was supposed to be a humiliating way to die, fit for traitors. Before the bullets flew, Ciano swiveled in his chair to face the shooters. This was a fairly brave death. And Edda was very brave, in her efforts to save her husband, herself, and their children. Indeed, she showed physical courage, on the road and on the run. Eventually, she escaped into Switzerland (where the children had already been spirited).
For a time, she hated her father, and her family more generally. She wrote to Mussolini, “You are no longer my father for me. I renounce the name Mussolini.” It must be said, the dictator took it hard, too. Some people contend that he never recovered from the drama of Galeazzo and Edda. Vittorio writes that Mussolini was “the truest and most tormented victim of the whole tragedy.” This is the Mussolini-family style—operatic, hyperbolic, and self-pitying—but there must be some truth in the statement.
After the war, Edda served a detention on the island of Lipari, off Sicily. In 2009, a book came out detailing an affair she had in those days: Edda Ciano and the Communist: The Unspeakable Passion of the Duce’s Daughter. It was made into a movie.
Edda lived out her life in Rome. In a sense, she was a woman without a country, at least for some years. The anti-Fascists hated her, of course, because she had been a true-believing and spectacular Fascist. But some of the Fascists hated her, too, because she was the wife of a “traitor,” and a collaborator with him. Eventually, she reconciled with her family. You can see photos where she has her hand tenderly on her mother’s shoulder. But there was always some ambivalence in her thinking.
Not until 1974 did she write her memoirs, or speak them to a chronicler. They came out in English under a classically relativistic title: “My Truth.” One of the reasons she did not speak out earlier, she says, is that such speaking “would only have served to trample even more on the memory of Mussolini.” Addressing the key question of whether she blamed her father for her husband’s death, she says this: “Although he was not directly involved at the beginning, he did follow a policy of noninterference, either because of a lack of courage or that sort of fatalistic attitude that makes us say, when faced with a given situation, ‘Very well, so be it! The wheels have begun to turn, we shall see what comes of it all.’ Therefore, he was partially responsible for what happened.” Mainly, however, she makes excuse after excuse for her adored father.
As for Galeazzo Ciano, she says he did not betray Mussolini. No, in voting as he did on the Grand Council, he had been “misled into making an error of judgment.” The widow insists not only that Ciano was no traitor, but that “my father knew it too.” She calls her father and her husband “the only beings whom I loved and admired with all my heart, and whom I still love today.” Edda died in 1995, age 84.
Before moving on to Mussolini and Rachele’s second child, Vittorio, I will relate something light. Call it gallows humor. The story is told that Winston Churchill was talking to his son-in-law Vic Oliver—an entertainer who had married the Churchills’ daughter Sarah. The prime minister didn’t like him in the least. Trying to make innocent conversation, Oliver asked him what figure in the war he admired most. Churchill answered, “Mussolini.” Astonished, Oliver asked why. Said Churchill (again, according to legend), “Because he had the courage to have his son-in-law shot.” (In reality, Ciano was almost certainly a better man than Mussolini, although that is not much to brag about.)
Vittorio Mussolini was born in 1916, six years after Edda, a year after their parents’ civil ceremony. Before World War II, when he was still a very young man, he made a name in the movies. Before that, he was a pilot—like Galeazzo, and like the second Mussolini son, Bruno. Vittorio flew in the Ethiopian war, and in the Spanish Civil War (for Franco and the Nationalists, of course), and in the world war.
He actually appeared on the cover of Time magazine, in October 1935, four years before Edda. But he and Bruno were merely adornments, flanking their dictator father, who had just invaded Ethiopia. They are wearing their military finest, looking stern and imperial. Vittorio looks maybe a little less stern and imperial than his father and younger brother—he looks pudgier (historians and chroniclers always nag him about his weight) and slightly awkward.
In 1936, he wrote a book about his Ethiopian experience, Voli sulle Ambe, which is to say, “Flights over the Ethiopian Highlands.” The book begins excitedly, with Mussolini’s Blackshirts darkening—blackening—the bridges of a ship. They are about to sail away to war, and a crowd is hailing them. The air is festive, already triumphal. The Blackshirts sing a chorus, full-throated: “Sing, sing, don’t get weary, to Abyssinia we want to go!” The book is replete with happy photos of African children, obviously delighted to be under Italian rule, and heroic Italian pilots, posing in front of their propellers.
It was the film world that Vittorio most relished. The third Mussolini son, Romano, writes, “My father was interested in the Italian cinema and considered it an extraordinary means for spreading propaganda. My brother Vittorio, who was a great fan and connoisseur of movies, had many long conversations with my father about directors and actors and kept him abreast of all the important developments.” In a paper on Italian attitudes toward America, Umberto Eco, the novelist and scholar, writes, “Vittorio belonged to a group of young Turks fascinated by cinema as an art, an industry, a way of life. Vittorio was not content with being the son of the Boss, though this would have been enough to guarantee him the favors of many actresses: He wanted to be the pioneer of the Americanization of Italian cinema.”
Vittorio did a good deal of writing about film, and edited a journal called Cinema. As Eco says, he “criticized the European cinematographic tradition and asserted that the Italian public identified emotionally only with the archetypes of American cinema. . . . He genuinely loved and admired Mary Pickford and Tom Mix, just as his father admired Julius Caesar and Trajan. For him American films were the people’s literature.”
In 1937, Vittorio’s father sent him to Hollywood, where he struck a deal with Hal Roach, the famed producer. Roach was probably most famous for Laurel & Hardy, the comedy team, and “Our Gang,” a.k.a. “the Little Rascals.” He and Vittorio formed a company called “R.A.M.,” which stood for “Roach and Mussolini.” They were to make movies out of grand operas, beginning with Rigoletto. Today, you can go on the Internet and find a film of Vittorio being introduced to the Little Rascals. Darla sits in his lap. Buckwheat shakes his hand. Alfalfa and Spanky express their enthusiastic interest in making movies with him. This all seems rather surreal, with the world war just around the corner.
Immediately, Roach took some heat for collaborating with Vittorio Mussolini, and, by extension, the dictator. He defiantly told a reporter, “Benito Mussolini is the only square politician I’ve ever seen” (“square” meaning honest, straightforward). But the pressure mounted, and Roach quickly went back on the deal, buying Vittorio out.
In the next few years, Vittorio wrote some movie treatments and did some producing. He used a pseudonym, Tito Silvio Mursino, an anagram of his actual name. Among his collaborators was Roberto Rossellini, who would go on to great fame as a director. During the war, they made war movies, including Un pilota ritorna, or “A Pilot Returns” (1942).
Vittorio had a role in the war, in addition to his flying and movie-making: He served as a liaison between Italy and Germany, rather as Edda did, before her husband’s downfall. Vittorio writes of shuttling between the two countries. And he says, “It was known that Hitler and the other German leaders liked me and held me in some regard.” In the end, he was on the run, like other Mussolinis. He writes, “In the war it had been possible to do one’s duty because of the thought that one was fighting for one’s country” and might die with honor. Now, however, “there was only fear left, that boundless, cold, useless fear of dying without much hope of resisting with arms or words.” And if he died, it would not be “at the hands of a foreigner,
