Mussolini, Romano. My Father, Il Duce: A Memoir by Mussolini’s Son. Carlsbad, CA: Kales Press (Distributed by W. W. Norton), 2006.

Masthead Logo The Fordham Undergraduate Research Journal Volume 1 | Issue 1 Article 6 December 2013 Mussolini, Romano. My Father, Il Duce: A Memoir by Mussolini’s Son. Carlsbad, CA: Kales Press (Distributed by W. W. Norton), 2006. Sarah Sullivan FCRH '12 Fordham University, Follow this and additional works at: https://fordham.bepress.com/furj Part of the European History Commons, and the European Languages and Societies Commons Recommended Citation Sullivan, Sarah FCRH '12 (2013) "Mussolini, Romano. My Father, Il Duce: A Memoir by Mussolini’s Son. Carlsbad, CA: Kales Press (Distributed by W. W. Norton), 2006.," The Fordham Undergraduate Research Journal: Vol. 1 : Iss. 1 , Article 6. Available at: https://fordham.bepress.com/furj/vol1/iss1/6 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalResearch@Fordham. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Fordham Undergraduate Research Journal by an authorized editor of DigitalResearch@Fordham. For more information, please contact . Mussolini, Romano. My Father, Il Duce: A Memoir by Mussolini’s Son. Carlsbad, CA: Kales Press (Distributed by W. W. Norton), 2006. Cover Page Footnote Sarah Sullivan, FCRH 2012, is from the Bronx, New York. She is a history and Medieval studies major with an Irish studies minor. She is the winner of Fordham University’s Institute of Irish Studies Language Scholarship and the Research Assistant of Dr. Rigogne in the history department. After graduation, Sarah plans to pursue history in graduate school. This article is available in The Fordham Undergraduate Research Journal: https://fordham.bepress.com/furj/vol1/iss1/6 FURJ | Volume 1 | Spring 2011 R e v ie w s Sullivan: Review: My Father, Il Duce www.fordham.edu/fcrh/furj Mussolini, Romano. My Father, Il Duce: A Memoir by Mussolini’s Son. Carlsbad, CA: Kales Press (distributed by W. W. Norton), 2006. Sarah Sullivan, FCRH ’12 HISTORY “I felt that we Mussolinis were a family at the mercy of the winds in a wretched Italy overwhelmed by war.”1 Written by the son of 20th-century dictator Benito Mussolini, this story is of a son’s unreserved, blind love for his father—even if his father had been a fascist monster responsible for the slaughter of millions— makes for a complicated and conflicted memoir, which quickly became a bestseller in Italy. My Father, Il Duce begins with an introductory essay by Alexander Stille, which can be considered a bold move on the part of the publisher. This essay encourages both readers and historians to research beyond the scope of the memoir and confirms that which deviates from corroborated facts. “While Romano’s narration of historical facts, including those of which he was a first- or a second-hand witness, is highly suspect and often flat-out wrong, the feelings of filial affection and love are real and entirely comprehensible.”2 Although this is a fair statement, instead of being an apologist for fascism and for his father, Romano makes the conscious decision to avoid most of his father’s crimes against Italians, Ethiopians, Albanians and others. Romano does not acknowledge, in the entire one hundred and sixty-three-page book, the events designed by his father that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands. It is only when such destruction is directed at the Italian people—as the Allies were bombing the cities—does he mention “the bombing of the big cities that numbered in the thousands.”3 The only crimes of his father that Romano does acknowledge are the ones of infidelity against his mother. Only in the context of his familial relations does Romano, faced with the demands of loyalty to his mother, slacken his otherwise-unflinching support for his father. As the title would suggest, Romano is more effective in documenting his relationship with his father and the events that occurred in his direct purview than accurate historical events themselves. Even if that were 117 Published by DigitalResearch@Fordham, 2011 the case, the memories he offers in My Father, Il Duce emerge as self-deceptive and perilously disingenuous. Sixty years after his father’s death, Romano still holds true to his father’s ideals and dreams, as if we were a living testament to the power and strength of Mussolini’s cult of personality over the Italians of his day. Even as Romano sees Il Duce as a kind, sensitive, ambitious and self-sacrificing patriarch, it is precisely the role of the paterfamilias on which many tenets of fascism were built. He writes that his father “seemed to live more for others than for himself ”; no one would have appreciated this statement more than the dedicated sheep of Mussolini’s flock.4 In addition to the biased nostalgia that influences Romano’s memories, he was raised under the powerful notion of an identità italica; many followers were blind to Mussolini’s murderous mayhem because they felt that a dream would be realized in him. There was never more hope for a truly unified and redeemed Italy than under the fascist regime of Mussolini. The images that the text offers as textual support present an absurd, inconsistent image of Mussolini, yet one that is not entirely unlike a family album.5 The images depict one man’s father at work and at play: the playful but firm father carrying his young son on his shoulders on one page and, on the next, Benito delivering a speech in his fascist splendor at a family picnic in the countryside. He is also depicted in photographs with Adolf Hitler, Galeazzo Ciano, and Neville Chamberlain; with his rescuers from the Gran Sasso; and as a corpse with other dead bodies before being hung in the Piazzale Loreto Milan. In choosing these specific photographs, Romano combines both family history and Italian and world history, which leads the reader to believe that he 1 Though his account is flawed in terms of his ceaseless support and blind love for his father, Romano Mussolini is most dangerously misleading when he condescendingly interweaves real historical events with familial ones. When detailing the courtship of his sister to Galeazzo Ciano, he asserts, “Edda and Galeazzo’s meeting came about because he was the son of Admiral Costanzo Ciano, one of my father’s supporters who was very close to him during the crisis following Giacomo Matteotti’s assassination.”6 This paints the picture in which Mussolini was greatly distressed by the assassination and its effect on the nation, whereas the truth of the situation is that he himself was a suspected conspirator in the death. In the introduction, Stille points out this incongruity and criticizes Romano for offering absurd commentary without citing any official or reliable documents, as is the case again with the analysis of Ida Dalser. He discusses Ida Dalser—the woman with whom Il Duce had an affair and fathered an illegitimate son and who was later committed to a mental institution by Mussolini—and insists, “I never spoke to him about it, but I know that he wasn’t insensitive to her suffering.”7 Sti (...truncated)