Trivia

Rachele Mussolini bore five children by Benito Mussolini. Rachele and Benito Mussolini had two daughters, Edda (1910-1995) and Anna Maria (1929-1968), and three sons Vittorio (1916-1997), Bruno (1918-1941), and Romano (1927-2006). Romano went onto become a respected jazz musician, married Sophia Loren's sister Maria and was the father of Alessandra Mussolini, the actor, singer and politician. In her later life, Rachele Mussolini ran a restaurant in her native village of Predappio. She eventually received a pension from the Italian Republic in 1975. It turned out that Mussolini had not received a salary from the state and so she could not receive a pension.

Mussolini's relationship with Hitler was a complex one. It started with admiration and emulation on the part of Hitler, and ended with Hitler having the whip hand over Mussolini, and reinstalling him. However, Hitler did make a major concession to him - the South Tyrol. While Hitler aggressively tried to unite German speaking populations across Europe, South Tyrol was omitted because it was controlled by Mussolini, in spite of his Italicisation campaigns there. Hitler was also horrified when he heard that Mussolini and his mistress had been lynched, and feared that angry disloyal Germans might try and do the same to him and Eva Braun, so chose the route of suicide.

Claretta Petacci (28 February 1912 - 28 April 1945), the mistress of Mussolini was killed during Mussolini's execution by Italian partisans, allegedly throwing herself on him in a vain attempt to protect him from the bullets.

Rachele Guidi was not Mussolini's first wife. He had been previously married to Ida Dalser, a German speaker from South Tyrol. Mussolini had the records of this marriage destroyed, except one document which was overlooked concerning alimony. When Mussolini was refused work on the basis of his fervent socialist political activity, Ida Dalser financed him with the revenues of her beautician job. Ironically when Hitler turned Italy into a puppet state during the middle of the war, he seized South Tyrol from Mussolini. Before that South Tyrol was one of the few German speaking lands, along with Switzerland that Hitler made no attempt to invade. Dalser is not mentioned in this series.

Mussolini himself was not personally very anti-Jewish until he came under German pressure, and he even had a Jewish personal secretary for a while. His sister Edvige claims he was "indifferent" to Jews, and the early Italian Fascist movement had Jewish members and was not directed against them. As German pressure mounted, Mussolini instituted anti-Jewish laws, but again these were not as stringent as in German controlled territories. When Hitler reinstalled Mussolini in the Italian Social Republic, however, anti-Jewish actions went into full swing and a number of Italian Jews were taken away and murdered, sometimes by German troops. Mussolini's anti-Jewish activities seem to have been more directed by cynical diplomatic ends than deep personal hatred, as found among the National Socialists. The incident depicted in the series of Scott's Mussolini objecting to his daughter Edda dating a Jew is historical, however: she mentions it in her 1975 autobiography ghostwritten by Albert Zarca.