While Hitler gets all the attention, Mussolini was one of the chief villains of World War 2. His very name conjures images of fear and violence.
However, you've NEVER seen
Mussolini like this! Keep reading to discover things that will forever change how you see this dictator.
1
Nobel Peace Prize nominees included Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini -u/an_astrophysicist
2
Benito Mussolini signed Vatican City into existence. The 1929 Lateran Treaty ended the dispute between the Italian government & the Catholic Church, which allowed the Vatican to exist as its own sovereign state and compensated the church $92 million (> $1 billion today) for the Papal states. -u/lopezjessy
3
Benito Mussolini had a pet lion -u/TheTravelier
4
Benito Mussolini wrote a romance novel: The Cardinal's Mistress -u/Awesomeuser90
5
Hitler, Mussolini, and Himmler once all flew on Hitler's plane, and during that flight, Mussolini sat in the cockpit and briefly took the controls for about an hour. After the flight, Mussolini directed his staff to tell people that he had flown Hitler home from the front. -u/roraima_is_very_tall
6
That Mussolini's Fascist Revolutionary Party tried to "out-socialist the socialists" in Italy's 1919 elections & the socialists received 40 times as many votes. Mussolini lost so badly that he received zero votes in his home town & the socialists held a mock funeral procession for his career. -u/Dhididnfbndk
7
Mussolini believed pasta was the reason for many problems in the Italian society and pushed for rice-based food like risotto. He had support from artists of Italian Futurism, who claimed that pasta made people weak and lazy. -u/Altairve
8
The corpses of Mussolini and his mistress were beaten and urinated upon and finally left to hang upside down, for public display, from a rusty beam outside a petrol station -u/Wagamaga
9
After the Nazi assassination of Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, Fascist Italian dictator Mussolini mobilized the Italian army on the Austrian border and threatened Hitler with open war if German troops crossed into Austria. -u/verostein
10
Benito Mussolini was highly superstitious and anti-clerical. After he learned about the "curse of the Pharaohs," he ordered the immediate removal of an Egyptian mummy from Palazzo Chigi in Rome which he had accepted as a gift. He also shocked audiences several times by daring to be struck dead. -u/KimCureAll
11
Maserati worked hard and failed to construct a V16 town car for Benito Mussolini before Ferry Porsche of Volkswagen built one for Adolf Hitler -u/rosesandtherest
12
Mussolini was so jealous of Germany's gains in Europe, he warned Belgium and the Netherlands about the oncoming German invasion -u/VLenin2291
13
In 1932, Mussolini described antisemitism as a "German vice" and stated that "There was 'no Jewish Question' in Italy and could not be one in a country with a healthy system of government." -u/JoeFalchetto
14
Mel Brooks initially titled 'The Producers' as 'Springtime for Hitler', named after the fictitious musical that drove the plot. Universal expressed an interest, but wanted it to be changed to 'Springtime for Mussolini', as 'Mussolini's nicer'. -u/AbathaCrispy
15
Mussolini’s granddaughter is a right-wing politician in Italy. -u/mr_oberts
16
Mussolini's great-grandson is a soccer player who plays on the right wing at Lazio -u/elbenji
17
Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini had his first wife (married 1914) imprisoned and their son, Benito Albino Mussolini, forcibly interned in an asylum in Mombello, Province of Milan, where he was murdered on 26 August 1942 after repeated coma-inducing injections, at 26. -u/Looking_At_The_Past
18
From 1917 to 1918 British Intelligence paid an Italian journalist the modern equivalent of £6,000 (US$ 8,290) per week to keep up the pro-war campaigning. The cash got him a start in politics, and was also allegedly lavished on his many mistresses. The journalist was 34-year-old Benito Mussolini -u/Brutal_Deluxe_
19
Rachele Mussolini had five children with the Italian dicatator, some of them living to old age in the 1990s. After the war, Rachele Mussolini ran a restaurant in her native village of Predappio, where she served pasta dishes -u/van_datascience
20
Mussolini ordered the execution of his son-in law -deleted user
21
Raffaele Bendandi was an Italian clockmaker who could predict earthquakes, such as the 1915 Avezzano earthquake which killed 30,000, using a self taught method that wasn't backed by science. Mussolini made Bendandi a Knight but banned his public predictions in 1928 because it harmed tourism. -u/TheTriviaPage
22
After the Italian government arrested Mussolini following the fall of Rome, Hitler sent a squadron of gliders to rescue him from a mountaintop castle. The operation was a success, without a shot being fired. -u/mike_pants
23
Milhouse from the Simpsons was named after U.S president Richard Milhous Nixon. The name was the most "unfortunate name Matt Groening could think of for a child". Later in the series, it was also revealed that Milhouse's middle name was Mussolini -u/jvst_joshin
24
One of Emperor Caligula’s floating/pleasure palaces was built and anchored on Lake Nemi. Sunk later in the first century, it was recovered in a feat of engineering sponsored by Benito Mussolini in the 1930s, but destroyed during a German retreat in 1944. -u/BronxLens
25
Mussolini did not participate in the March on Rome. Mussolini appointed leaders of the march and took pictures with them but went to Milan, only arriving in Rome a day later after the march had succeeded. -u/jamescookenotthatone
