ITALY'S DICTATOR

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXII, Issue 4641, 18 May 1938, Page 2

ITALY'S DICTATOR

A DAY IN LIFE OF MUSSOLINI. Mussolini's private residence is the Villa Torlonia, just outside the gates of Rome. The villa really consists of four separate buildings. And Mussolini lives with his wife, his son Bruno, and the two younger children, Romano and Anna Maria, in the smallest of them. His two married children, Vittorio and Edda, live near by. A butler is the only servant usually in evidence, but at a least half a dozen secret service men constantly prowl in the extensive private grounds. Mussolini is said to be very different in his home life from the man the public know. Visitors are surprised to see that at close quarters his hair is now grey. Before the public he is grim and forbidding. He holds his face perpetually like a mask. He throws his head back with a leonine toss. He stands with his hands on his hips. His jaw juts out. He makes gestures like a sledge-hammer. At home his expression is affable. The grimness falls from his face like a mask. He gives the impression of a sensitive man, even of one who is sometimes a little nervous.

Anyone who comes near him in private for the first time gets a distinct impression that the iron jaw and the frown are the on-duty effort of a sensitive man to face the world. At the Villa Torlonia, Mussolini often rides a horse in the morning. The animal is brought for him from a cavalry barracks. He travels to the office alone in his car, which has a special kind of glass through which he can see and yet not be seen.

His two young children, Romano and Anna Maria also go off in a car—to an ordinary State school open to all. A secret service man takes them and brings them back. They are perhaps the only children of a Prime Minister in Europe to go to the same school as working class children. Mussolini always comes home to lunch and follows the habit of lying down afterwards. If he goes to the office again afterwards, which is not always he stays until fairly late in the evening.

Mussolini sometimes goes to the cinema with his wife and younger children in the evening.