In Milan during 1914, the future fascist dictator of Italy, Benito Mussolini, married Ida Dalser, a 34-year-old beautician. Dalser, born 20 August 1880, soon bore him a child, Benito Albino Mussolini, and sold her business to help her husband fund his new newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, ‘The People of Italy’.
The marriage did not last and before the birth of Benito Jr, on 17 December 1915, Mussolini had married Rachele Guidi, his long-term mistress and mother to his first child, Edda, who had been born in 1910.
Mussolini ordered the destruction of the marriage records between him and his first wife, and stopped paying her maintenance, as previously ordered by the courts.
Unsurprisingly, Ida, left penniless, was furious with the way Mussolini had treated her. Following the end of the First World War, she claimed she had proof that in early 1915 Mussolini had taken bribes from the French government to use his influence to commit neutral Italy to declare war against Austria-Hungary. (Italy did indeed declare war against the Central Powers in May 1915). Had this allegation come to light it would have ruined Mussolini’s fledging career.
Forced into drastic action, Mussolini had her abducted. Beaten and forced into a straitjacket, she was declared insane and interned against her will in an asylum. Benito Junior was placed in various boarding schools and, as he grew up, was told that his mother had died. He was ordered to stop referring to Mussolini as his father and had his surname changed to Bernardi.
In 1935, Benito, like his mother, was forcibly incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital. Both remained incarcerated until their deaths – Ida Dasler on 3 December 1937 of a ‘brain haemorrhage’, and Benito killed on 26 August 1942, aged 26, following a series of injections designed to induce a coma.
Meanwhile, despite numerous affairs and dalliances, most notably to Claretta Petacci, Mussolini remained with his second wife, Rachele, throughout his life. They were to have five children.
The story of Mussolini and Dalser was dramatized in the 2009 Italian film Vincere.
Rupert Colley
Mussolini: History In An Hour by Rupert Colley, published by HarperCollins, is available in various digital formats and downloadable audio.
https://www.nypl.org/research/researchcatalog/bib/b18846392
There is a booklet (see the link above) edited by Lorenzo Benadusi and published in December 2010 by the Fondazione Corriere della Sera (as part of the Le carte del Corriere series), titled «Mussolini ha deciso di internarmi col piccino» (“Mussolini has decided to intern me with the little one”). Or rather, The Letters from Ida Dalser to Luigi Albertini 1916-1925.
Benadusi’s book collects the letters that Ida Dalser sent to Luigi Albertini, the highly powerful director of the newspaper Corriere della Sera. Ida hoped that Albertini, by leveraging the influence of his newspaper, could publicly denounce the Duce, his financial debts, his political fraud, and the moral blackmail perpetrated against her son. Albertini, while preserving the letters (which have survived to this day thanks to the archive of the Corriere della Sera Foundation), almost never replied directly to avoid being dragged into a private scandal, occasionally limiting himself to sending her small amounts of financial aid through third parties.
In addition to the issue of bigamy and the firstborn son, Ida Dalser made a explosive public accusation: she repeatedly claimed that Mussolini had received substantial hidden funding (essentially bribes) from the French government in 1914–1915. In 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, Mussolini was a prominent leader of the Italian Socialist Party and was strictly neutralist. Suddenly, he made a radical political U-turn, transforming into a fierce interventionist (favoring neutral Italy’s entry into the war alongside the Entente, meaning France and Great Britain). This shift cost him his expulsion from the newspaper Avanti! and from the party. Immediately after, Mussolini founded his new newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia.
Dalser materially financed the beginning of that adventure by selling her most valuable assets, namely her well-established beauty salon in the heart of Milan. The shop was named “Salone orientale di igiene e bellezza Mademoiselle Ida” (Mademoiselle Ida’s Oriental Salon of Hygiene and Beauty), opened in 1913 after Ida—thanks to a substantial donation given to her by a wealthy Milanese lady for whom she had worked with dedication—had traveled to Paris and graduated there as an aesthetician. The salon was therefore strongly inspired by the modern and elegant models of French beauty parlors.
The Salone orientale di igiene e bellezza Mademoiselle Ida stood in the beating heart of Milan, at Via Alessandro Manzoni 38 (just a few steps from the Teatro alla Scala and Via Montenapoleone). In the book, the letters addressed to Luigi Albertini and the archival documents portray a place that was extraordinarily modern and exclusive. It was not a simple shop, but a true avant-garde beauty clinic for the era, equipped with electrical devices imported from Paris for skincare, facial massages, manicures, and hairdressing for the Milanese high bourgeoisie.
In her letters to Albertini, and even in the desperate memoirs written later, Ida Dalser claims with a mix of wounded pride and deep bitterness the immense sacrifices made to create that business—a highly successful enterprise for the time—whose sales revenues and the subsequent sale of its equipment were used by Ida to finance the debts and the birth of Mussolini’s daily newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia. At the same time, Il Popolo d’Italia received massive secret subsidies passed on by emissaries of the French government (including the secret services and circles linked to French journalism). France desperately needed Italy to enter the war to relieve pressure on the Western Front.
And yes. There’s the movie based on this story: “Vincere” (To Win), released in 2009 and directed by Marco Bellocchio. The film chronicles the tormented love story between Ida Dalser (played by Giovanna Mezzogiorno) and a young Benito Mussolini (played by Filippo Timi), documenting her financial sacrifices to fund the birth of Il Popolo d’Italia, the subsequent erasure of her identity by the fascist regime, and the tragic confinement of both Ida and her son Albino in mental asylums.
P.S. Albino died as a result of yet another administration of insulin, the use of which at the time was heavily employed to “calm” so-called “mental patients”.
(Continued from previous post): There is a profound and bitter paradox surrounding the memory of Ida Dalser and her son, Benito Albino. For nearly a century, Ida’s desperate cries for help—entrusted to hundreds of letters—remained buried in darkness, invisible to the general public. Crucially, the most lucid and dramatic core of these letters was held within the private archives of the Fondazione Corriere della Sera. Yet, the timeline of their rediscovery reveals an uncomfortable truth: mainstream journalism and institutional archives only opened their doors after investigative journalism, television, and cinema had already shattered the silence.
The true breakthrough did not begin in Rome or Milan, but through the decade-long, painstaking research of Trentino journalist Marco Zeni, who first unearthed the local asylum records. His work culminated on January 14, 2005, when the explosive documentary Il segreto di Mussolini (Mussolini’s Secret) aired on national television (Rai 3). It was this very documentary that transfixed director Marco Bellocchio, serving as the raw material and inspiration for his internationally acclaimed film Vincere, released in May 2009.
Only after this unstoppable media wave—moving from a local investigative book to a prime-time television documentary, and finally to a cinematic masterpiece—did the Corriere della Sera finally decide to “open its drawers.” In 2010, a full five years after the television documentary and a year after the film’s success, the Foundation tasked historian Lorenzo Benadusi with publishing the correspondence between Ida and the former editor-in-chief, Luigi Albertini.
This chronological short-circuit shows how deeply Italy struggled to confront the darkest pages of its fascist past. Ida and Benito Albino were condemned twice: first by the regime that decreed their physical destruction, and second by a post-war cultural reluctance that only yielded when the power of moving images forced the printed press to give a mother and her son their original voices back.
Thank you, Barbara, for this. Most illuminating!