Mussolini at Lake Como

If your destiny is to be shot dead with your mistress, where better than Lake Como, which, in the words of Shelley, ‘exceeds anything I ever beheld in beauty, with the exception of the Arbutus Islands in Killarney’?

It was in Giulino di Mezzegra, a tiny village in the mountains above the lake, that a handful of communist partisans executed the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and his mistress Claretta Petacci on 28 April 1945. The Duce was 61 and his amante 33 — two years older than his daughter Edda.

The partisans loaded their corpses and those of other Fascist leaders — executed separately down by the lake — on to a lorry and drove the 70 miles to Milan where they dumped them in Piazzale Loreto. A huge crowd soon gathered to defile the corpses, especially those of Mussolini and Petacci, which were later strung upside down from the girders of a petrol station in the square.