Later on, Fascist Italy could also be considered as a " constitutional monarchy " of a kind, in the sense that there was a king as the titular head of state while actual power was held by Benito Mussolini under a constitution.

Clara Petacci ( born Claretta Petacci ; 28 February 1912 – 28 April 1945 ) was the mistress of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who was twenty-eight years her senior.

On 27 April 1945, when a convoy of escaping Italian Social Republic members, including Mussolini, was captured by Communist partisans, it is said that Petacci was offered the opportunity to go unmolested.

* Clara Petacci's brother, Marcello Petacci, was captured with Mussolini and Petacci.

The most notable member of this group was Julius Evola, who went on to become a preeminent occult scholar of the 20th century, as well as a right-wing philosopher and aide to Mussolini.

Mussolini had no hesitation in attributing the attack to the German dictator: the news reached him at Cesena, where he was examining the plans for a psychiatric hospital.

This was the greatest moment of friction between Fascism and National Socialism and Mussolini himself came down several times to reaffirm the differences in the field.

The decision to move to America and become American citizens was primarily a result of the Manifesto of Race promulgated by the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini in order to bring Italian Fascism ideologically closer to German Nazism.

" However Mussolini clarified that fascism's position on the political spectrum was not a serious issue to fascists and stated that:

" Mussolini claimed that Italian Fascism's economic system of corporatism could be identified as state capitalism which he claimed was state socialism " turned on its head ", which in either case involved " the bureaucratisation of the economic activities of the nation.

On 3 January 1925, Mussolini addressed the Fascist-dominated Italian parliament and declared that he was personally responsible for what happened, but he insisted that he had done nothing wrong.

From 1925 to 1929, Fascism steadily became entrenched in power: opposition deputies were denied access to parliament, censorship was introduced, and a December 1925 decree made Mussolini solely responsible to the King.

One early admirer of the Italian Fascists was Adolf Hitler, who, less than a month after the March, had begun to model himself and the Nazi Party upon Mussolini and the Fascists.

Mussolini was aware that Italy did not have the military capacity to carry out a long war with France or the United Kingdom and waited until France was on the verge of imminent collapse and surrender from German invasion before declaring war on France and the United Kingdom on 10 June 1940, on the assumption that the war would be short-lived following France's collapse.

By 1943, after Italy faced multiple military failures, complete reliance and subordination of Italy to Germany, and Allied invasion of Italy, and corresponding international humiliation, Mussolini was removed as head of government and arrested by the order of King Victor Emmanuel III who proceeded to dismantle the Fascist state and declared Italy's switching of allegiance to the Allied side.

Mussolini was rescued from arrest by German forces and led the German client state, the Italian Social Republic from 1943 to 1945.

On 28 April 1945, Mussolini was captured and executed by Italian communist partisans.

In 1934, Mussolini declared that employment of women was a " major aspect of the thorny problem of unemployment " and that for women, working was " incompatible with childbearing ".

Mussolini went on to say that the solution to unemployment for men was the " exodus of women from the work force ".

Mussolini also mobilized a part of the Italian army on the Austrian border and threatened Hitler with war in the event of a German invasion of Austria to thwart the putsch.

In 1939, Hitler and Mussolini agreed to give the German-speaking population of South Tyrol a choice ( the South Tyrol Option Agreement ): they could emigrate to neighbouring Germany ( including annexed Austria ) or stay in Italy and accept their complete Italianisation.

It has been speculated that Hitler used the Spanish Civil War issue to distract Mussolini from Hitler's own designs on and plans for union ( Anschluss ) with Austria.

The authoritarian Catholic, anti-Nazi Vaterländische Front government of autonomous Austria had been in alliance with Mussolini, and in 1934 the assassination of Austria's authoritarian president Engelbert Dollfuss had already successfully invoked Italian military assistance in case of a German invasion.

On January 6, 1936, Mussolini told German ambassador Ulrich von Hassell that he would not object to Germany taking Austria as a satellite state so long as it maintained independence.

One of the reasons for the failure of the putsch was Italian intervention: Mussolini assembled an army corps of four divisions on the Austrian border and threatened Hitler with a war with Italy in the event of a German invasion of Austria as originally planned, should the coup have been more successful.

However, when Mussolini sought to end Italy's own increasing international isolation by forming an alliance with Hitler in 1938, Austria was left alone to face increasing German pressure.

Fascist Italy had good relations with Austria under Dollfuss and Mussolini suspected German involvement and promised the Austrofascist regime military support if Germany were to invade, as the Nazis had claims on Italian-administered Tyrol.

Mussolini had laid claims to Kenya, but Hitler planned the dissection of the colony, with the southern part and the capital Nairobi forming a territory of the German Mittelafrika.

At the same time Mussolini also wanted to reassert Italy's interests in the Balkans, threatened by Germany ( he was piqued that Romania, a Balkan state in the supposed Italian influence zone, had accepted German protection for its Ploieşti oil fields in mid-October ) and secure bases from which British eastern Mediterranean outposts could be attacked.

However, propaganda and Nazi ideology prevailed, and following an agreement between Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, the VoMi began planning the Gottschee " resettlement " ( forced expulsion ) from the Italian occupation zone to the Ranner Dreieck or Rann Triangle, a region in Lower Styria between the confluences of the Krka, Sotla, and Sava rivers.

Benito Mussolini in 1919 described fascism as a syncretic movement that would strike " against the backwardness of the right and the destructiveness of the left ".

In the wake of Mussolini ’ s declaration of war against France and England on June 10, 1940, he discovered Kafka ’ s The Metamorphosis, Gogol, John Steinbeck and William Faulkner along with French films by Marcel Carné, René Clair, and Julien Duvivier.

In 1938 the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published on its front page an open letter to Benito Mussolini written by Kaj Munk criticising the persecutions against Jews.

* 1940 – World War II: Axis Powers – Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini meet at the Brenner Pass in the Alps and agree to form an alliance against France and the United Kingdom.

When Mussolini learned of the warnings and the telegrams of sympathy, he took them as a personal affront and had his ambassador to the Vatican file an official protest, charging that Pius XII had taken sides against Italy's ally Germany.

In 1938, the fascist regime led by Benito Mussolini introduced a series of laws instituting an official segregationist policy in the Italian Empire, especially aimed against the Jews.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out in July, Hitler and Mussolini supported the fascist and authoritarian Nationalist forces in their civil war against the Soviet-supported Spanish Republic.

* April 7 – An assassination attempt against Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini fails.

* April 12 – A bomb attack against Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini in Milan kills 17 bystanders.

* March 18 – WWII: Axis powers: Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini meet at Brenner Pass in the Alps and agree to form an alliance against France and the United Kingdom.

* December 23 – WWII: Winston Churchill, in a broadcast address to the people of Italy, blames Benito Mussolini for leading his nation to war against the British, contrary to Italy's historic friendship with them: " One man has arrayed the trustees and inheritors of ancient Rome upon the side of the ferocious pagan barbarians.

Benito Mussolini described Italy's intervention in the war against the Western Allies as the following: " We are going to war against the plutocratic and reactionary democracies of the West who have invariably hindered the progress and often threatened the very existence of the Italian people ...".

The anarchist Michele Schirru was executed after a failed assassination plot against Benito Mussolini.

Italy joined the Axis powers in World War II, falling into a bloody Civil War after a monarchist coup ousted Mussolini in 1943, surrendering to the Allies in 1943 and joining their side, so eventually winning the war against Fascists and Nazi Germany in 1945.

Even Cesare Maria De Vecchi, commander of the Blackshirts, and one of the organisers of the March on Rome, told Mussolini that he would not act against the wishes of the monarch.

The King failed to move against the Mussolini regime's abuses of power ( including, as early as 1924, the assassination of Giacomo Matteotti and other opposition MPs ) and remained silent during the winter of 1925 – 26 when Mussolini dropped all pretense of democracy.

Later, the King's failure, in the face of mounting evidence, to move against the Mussolini regime's abuses of power led to much criticism and had dire future consequences for Italy and for the monarchy itself.

In May 1943 he met the Christian Democrat leader Giuseppe Spataro, who introduced him into anti-Fascist circles in Milan against the Fascist regime of Mussolini.

The people's triumph in Cairo was the first blow against what Benito Mussolini called corporatism, a word that appears in his definition of fascism.

Benito Mussolini said that " fascism is reaction " and that " fascism, which did not fear to call itself reactionary ... has not today any impediment against declaring itself illiberal and anti-liberal.

In February 2006, two months ahead of the general elections of 2006, UDC secretary Lorenzo Cesa and others protested against the inclusion of neo-fascists such as Adriano Tilgher, Roberto Fiore, Alessandra Mussolini, Gaetano Saya and Pino Rauti in the alliance, branding them impresentabili ( unsuitable ).

* Mussolini ’ s War Statement-Declaration of War against USA, December 11, 1941