Mussolini's Oldest Daughter Dies at 85

ROME -- Edda Mussolini Ciano, 85, the tragic daughter of Italy's wartime Fascist dictator whose husband was executed by her father's regime, has died, doctors said.


Ciano had been ill for some time. She died Saturday night of cardiac arrest related to lung and kidney failure in a Rome hospital.


The oldest and favorite of Benito Mussolini's five children, she was an independent-minded woman when females in Italy had few rights. But she is best remembered for an episode in which her father refused to stop the execution of her husband, Galeazzo Ciano.


Galeazzo Ciano, a playboy count, held various top cabinet posts under Mussolini in the 1930s and in the early years of World War II.


In July 1943, he voted against Mussolini at a cabinet meeting that led to the dictator's arrest and the fall of Fascism.


Under orders from Adolf Hitler, occupying German troops freed Mussolini and installed him as head of a puppet regime known as the Social Republic of Salo, based in northern Italy.


The new regime found Galeazzo Ciano guilty of treason and ordered him executed. Mussolini turned a deaf ear to his daughter's emotional pleas for a pardon and Ciano was shot by a firing squad in 1944.


After the execution, Edda, a determined Fascist who was one of her father's closest advisers in the 1930s, disavowed him and the family name. "You are no longer my father for me. I renounce the name Mussolini," she wrote to him.


She broke her public silence on wartime events in a 1975 book, "My Testimony" and several years before her death she attended a public mass in memory of her dictator father.