Benito Mussolini was born to a poor family in Predappio, a town in northeastern Italy. His father was a blacksmith who wrote part-time as a socialist journalist, and his mother was a staunchly Catholic schoolteacher. As an adult, Benito Mussolini would have two wives and many mistresses. He had one child with his first wife, Ida Dalser, but would eventually abandon them and seek to hide them from the public eye. He would have five children—three boys and two girls—by another wife, Rachele Guidi. It was alongside his longtime mistress, Clara Petacci, that he died, however. The two were executed in 1943 by Italian partisans as they tried to escape to Switzerland, and their bodies were hung upside down in Milan.
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