He had a party behind him, of course, the Fascists, and he could call on squads of tough guys in blackshirt uniform Camicie Nere to beat down his opponents. A detailed structure of fascist rule existed on paper, with a Grand Council to which the government was supposed to report and a Chamber of Deputies which made law, but in fact Italy was Mussolini's personal playground, and his own power nearly absolute. News photos regularly showed him in a position of command, riding on horseback, flying an airplane, or driving a high-performance race car.
He would strip to the waist to address farmers in the hot sun or pose wrestling with a lion cub. Stories circulated in Italy to reinforce the image. The Duce, it was said, could recite cantos of Dante from memory. He worked all night in his office and the office lights were cleverly left on so that Italians could imagine him hard at work at am. American razor blades, it was said, were inadequate to cut his tough beard.
It was even forbidden to publish a picture of him smiling or to print the word DUCE in anything but uppercase letters. Yes, there were achievements of a sort.
In February he signed a Concordat with the Vatican, the Lateran Treaty, which brought to an end the hostility between the Church and the Italian government that dated back to , when the Italian state had seized the Papal States.
The stagnant economy received a great deal of attention, with a number of well-publicized public works projects to create jobs, including a huge effort to drain the Pontine Marshes outside of Rome.
The economy was based on a system he called corporatism: Italian economic life was organized into 22 corporations, representing all industries in a major area of production, like agriculture or metallurgy, from raw materials through production to distribution. Containing both labor and management, their task was to negotiate labor settlements. If they couldn't, they submitted to binding government arbitration.
Order was restored to Italian economic life, and old days of strikes and factory occupations were ended. But of course, almost all of this was mythological--unreal! The abolition of unions and the loss of the strike weapon were devastating blows to Italian labor, from which management clearly benefited. At the same time, the corporative structure allowed the Mussolini regime to direct the nation's economic life and make decisions about production and distribution that were normally in the hands of the industrialists.
In death, Mussolini seemed a little man. He wore a Fascist Militia uniform — grey breeches with a narrow black stripe, a green-grey tunic and muddy black riding boots. A bullet had pierced his skull over the left eye and emerged at the back, leaving a hole from which the brains dripped. Mistress Petacci, 25 -year-old daughter of an ambitious Roman family, wore a white silk blouse.
In her breast were two bullet holes ringed by dark circles of dried blood. By Benjamin Soloway. April 28, , PM. Argument Giorgio Ghiglione. Argument Anna Momigliano. Report Michele Barbero. November 11, , PM. Blame Brussels. Daoud had ruled On April 28, , Ferruccio Lamborghini, the founder of the company that bears his name and is known for stylish, high-performance cars, is born in Italy. After World War II, Lamborghini founded a business making tractors from reconfigured surplus military machines, near Live TV.
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