Benito Mussolini was born to a poor family in Predappio, a town in northeastern Italy. His father was a blacksmith who wrote part-time as a socialist journalist, and his mother was a staunchly Catholic schoolteacher. As an adult, Benito Mussolini would have two wives and many mistresses.
Benito Mussolini was born to a poor family in Predappio, a town in northeastern Italy. His father was a blacksmith who wrote part-time as a socialist journalist, and his mother was a staunchly Catholic schoolteacher. As an adult, Benito Mussolini would have two wives and many mistresses. He had one child with his first wife, Ida Dalser, but would eventually abandon them and seek to hide them from the public eye. He would have five children—three boys and two girls—by another wife, Rachele Guidi. It was alongside his longtime mistress, Clara Petacci, that he died, however. The two were executed in 1943 by Italian partisans as they tried to escape to Switzerland, and their bodies were hung upside down in Milan.
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Mussolini gradually dismantled the institutions of democratic government and in 1925 made himself dictator, taking the title 'Il Duce'. He set about attempting to re-establish Italy as a great European power. The regime was held together by strong state control and Mussolini's cult of personality.
Like Hitler's Germany, fascist Italy adopted anti-Semitic laws banning marriages between Christian and Jewish Italians, restricting Jews' right to own property, and removing Jews from positions in government, education, and banking. One of Mussolini's goals was to create an Italian empire in North Africa.
The Fascist government that came to power with Benito Mussolini in 1922 sought to increase the size of the Italian empire and to satisfy the claims of Italian irredentists. During World War II, Italy hesitated but then joined with Germany in 1940.
By 1939, Fascist Italy attained the highest rate of state ownership of an economy in the world other than the Soviet Union, where the Italian state "controlled over four-fifths of Italy's shipping and shipbuilding, three-quarters of its pig iron production and almost half that of steel".