On 7 April 1926 an Irish woman, 49-year-old aristocrat Violet Gibson, stepped out from a crowd in Rome and fired a shot at one of the 20th century’s most infamous dictators. One bullet grazed the nose of Benito Mussolini.
The death of Mussolini deeply affected Hitler. Mussolini had been an early teacher, an ally, and a fellow fascist. And his own people had slaughtered him during his attempt to escape. Hitler decided not to risk the same fate.
Actual invasion, of Sicily in July 1943 and the Italian mainland in September. The former led to Mussolini’s overthrow and imprisonment; the latter to the surrender of Italy, even though German troops soon occupied the entire country and carried on the fight against the Allies from Italian soil
As World War II wound down, Benito Mussolini scrambled, unsuccessfully, to outrun his enemies. After they captured and killed him, his body was subjected to a strange journey that lasted for more than a decade.
By April 25, 1945, Mussolini’s dream of re-creating the Roman Empire, much like the crumbling Roman Forum itself, lay in ruins. With the Allied forces closing in from the south and anti-fascist partisans rising up to seize city after city in northern Italy, Mussolini’s power base was quickly evaporating.
The 61-year-old Italian dictator who sought to become a modern-day Julius Caesar had first risen to power more than two decades earlier when he became prime minister in 1922. “Il Duce” allied himself with fellow fascist Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany in World War II, but his outdated Italian military was badly outclassed. By July 1943, the Allied invasion of Sicily and bombing of Rome caused the Italian high command and King Victor Emmanuel III to remove Mussolini from power and place him under house arrest.
“In September 1943, Nazi paratroopers staged a daring commando raid that rescued Mussolini from the Apennine Mountain ski resort where he was being detained. Hitler installed Mussolini as the figurehead of the Social Republic of Italy (known informally as the Republic of Salo), a Nazi puppet state in German-occupied northern Italy.
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