Word: benito
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Last Week. For Benito Mussolini his seven last days as Duce started somewhere in northern Italy. He met for the 14th time with Führer Adolf Hitler. No one knew for certain what transpired between the two men. Where past meetings had been flamboyant, this one was subdued...
...quiet moment now, Benito Mussolini's mind flashed back, what highlights might it dwell on? There were many: Varano di Costa, an old hamlet on a hill in northern Italy, where he was born 60 years ago; his schoolteacher mother and blacksmith father; the black columns of Popolo d'ltalia, "my most cherished child"; the day in Milan when he needlessly barricaded his newspaper shop while his comrades elsewhere marched on Rome and waited until he arrived by railroad sleeper; the following day when, in black shirt and hip pistol, he stood before Vittorio Emanuele and said...
...Benito Mussolini it had been a Latin pageant: the refurbishing of old Roman monuments and the building of new ones; marshland drained and colonies settled; a corporative state and the Balilla; adventure in Corfu, Ethiopia, Spain, Albania, Greece and Egypt; the dream of Mare Nostrum and the grandest of Mediterranean empires...
...that glory the ashes were already thick. The dead face of more than one rival might flood by in Benito Mussolini's remembrance: Giacomo Matteotti, the murdered Socialist who defied castor oil and clubs; Italo Balbo, cut down when he grew too popular in the Fascist State. Then there was the dead face of his son, Bruno, a casualty of the war the father had glorified. Then the dead faces of those hundreds of thousands of men lost with the empire in Africa, the dead and fear-racked faces of millions of civilians fleeing their bombed homes...
...Rest Is Silence. Benito Mussolini had studded his gaudy years with gaudy phrases...