History UsefulNotes / BenitoMussolini

* Frequently appeared in the wartime comics of CarlGiles. Giles was saddened to hear of Mussolini's death, as it meant he would no longer be able to mock him, uttering the immortal words: "''I've lost my Musso!''".

* ''TheBeano'' had two main wartime comic strips, ''Addie and Hermie'' (about Hitler and Goering) and ''Musso [[OnceAcceptableTargets the Wop]]'', which used Italian stereotypes cheerfully and mocked the Italian Army for its lack of success in North Africa.
* Joey from {{Friends}} claimed his grandmother was the 6th person to spit on Mussolini's corpse.
* Homer from {{the Simpsons}} non-deliberately mimics Mussolini's way of gesturing during speeches (fittingly held from a balcony during their holiday stay in Italy) during the episode [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Italian_Bob The Italian Bob]]. He actually wanted to mimic DonaldTrump, but it [[GoneHorriblyWrong went horribly wrong]].

* In the pilot episode of Marvel's ''Series/AgentsOfSHIELD'', Agent Coulson refers to ComicBook/{{Loki}} as "the Asgardian Mussolini."

!! Tropes Associated With Benito Mussolini Include:

* YouFailEconomicsForever: Autarchy, or an attempt at self-sufficiency, was actually a terrible idea.
** As was Mussolini's cartelization of the economy, price fixing of the means of production ''and'' consumer goods... lets just say ''everyone'' will find something to disagree with in fascist economics.
* AntiVillain: Compared to his allies. He was pretty much a standard 19th Century and 20th Century European leader in his ideas when you get down to it, aside from also being a dictator.
* AdolfHitlarious: Both Mussolini and Hitler were mercilessly mocked from [[TheThirties the late 1930s]] to the end of UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo.
* AlwaysSomeoneBetter: Mussolini started the whole fascism thing. Then Hitler came along and "improved" it.
* {{Badass}}: In spite of what he did as a politician, he was a veritable badass, a decorated UsefulNotes/WorldWarI veteran in the ''Bersaglieri'' (an Italian corp of assault infantry trained TheSpartanWay), and prone to personally show the RatedMForManly behaviours he expected fascists to engage in (like swimming all the way in the dangerous tides of the Strait of Messina).
** He was also a much better politician than how he's often portrayed and a good propagandist.
* BalconySpeech: He was quite famous for delivering speeches from balconies.
* BeamMeUpScotty: Although he is popularly supposed to have coined the phrase "fascism should more appropriately be termed corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power," this was actually first said by Giovanni Gentile in his ''Doctrine of Fascism'', which Mussolini co-authored.
* ButtMonkey: Called himself "Duce" and had the initials BM. TWO triple entendres. And he brought "Duce" on himself.
** In Italian "duce" just means "leader", and has the same root as "duke" (the Latin word "dux", meaning "leader"). It was only ''after'' Mussolini that it took negative connotations, at least in Italy.
* TheCasanova: Mussolini had for all of his life numerous flirts and lovers. And he was not ashamed to show it, building a womanizer reputation for himself. He believed (perhaps correctly, being in Italy) that his success with women contributes to his perception as a strong leader.
* DayOfTheJackboot: Coming in right after the Soviet October Revolution and well before Hitler. The most iconic symbol of it probably being the March on Rome, a show of force to intimidate the Democratic government and the Constitutional Monarchy into giving him the reins. However, it wasn't really until the Acerbo Law that he fully took over.
* DeadGuyOnDisplay: Along with his mistress.
* EmbarrassingMiddleName: Andrea?
** [[CrossCulturalKerfuffle It means "manly"]].[[note]]Andrea, like Andrew, comes from [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea the greek ''aner'', "man"]][[/note]]. That means it's actually the female use that's embarassing.
*** It's quite [[AndreaBocelli a common name]] for Italian men.
* EvilVsEvil: Mussolini vs. UsefulNotes/TheMafia. In 1924, Mussolini visited Sicily and refused protection by a local Mafia boss, leading the boss to order the townsfolk to boycott Mussolini's speech. Mussolini [[DisproportionateRetribution retaliated]] by sending armies of policemen and ''carabinieri'' into Sicily to round up suspects by the hundreds of thousands, beat and torture said suspects, and hold their families hostage in exchange for surrender and property, resulting in over 1,200 gangsters being imprisoned or exiled. The Sicilian Mafia didn't recover for almost two decades thanks to Mussolini's crackdown, but the American Mafia saw its ranks swell once exiled ''mafiosi'' arrived in the U.S.
* FaceDeathWithDignity:
-->-- Shoot me in the chest!
** Then they shot him [[DeathByIrony in the head]].
* GenerationXerox: Not with Mussolini himself, but it turns out that his granddaughter Alessandra, who's a self-proclaimed fascist (even though she's a member of the [[{{Irony}} "People of Freedom" Party]][[note]]Founded by Silvio Berlusconi, who has Mussolini's bombast without his authoritarian policies[[/note]]), is apparently following in the Duce's footsteps. Let the fact that there's still a Mussolini around in Italian politics sink in.
** She is far from having something that resembles a position of power. She is marginalized as a fanatic and while she sits in the Italian parliament and was part of the majority coalition under Berlusconi, she is far from being influential. By the way, she was on a ''Magazine/{{Playboy}}'' cover in the seventies (her mother was Creator/SophiaLoren's sister, and apparently the looks run in the family).
* GermansLoveDavidHasselhoff: Mussolini was never especially popular in Italy, but was surprisingly (initially) admired abroad. Not only by fellow fascists like Hitler and Franco, but many British and American politicians, journalists and intellectuals viewed the Duce's outwardly efficient, well-organized regime as a potential role model. Then came [[MoralEventHorizon the invasion of Ethiopia]]…
* GetItOverWith: When Mussolini was executed by local communist partisans, his [[FamousLastWords/RealLife last words]] were "Shoot me in the chest!"
** Then they hanged him from his feet instead (and did the same to his girlfriend).
* GreenEyedMonster: He was jealous of Germany's military strength and in an effort to keep up with Hitler made some stupid mistakes. He poured more resources, weapons and troops into the Spanish Civil War than the Germans ignoring the fact that the Germans were more industrialized, had more resources and more money to give. He invaded Albania (which was already basically under Italian control), in order to keep up with Germany after it took Austria and Czechoslovakia. Taking Albania pushed the French and British further toward supporting the Balkan states. Then he jumped into the war before the Italian military was ready when it looked like Germany was going to win, thus building anticipation for a British surrender. [[NiceJobFixingItVillain Except that the British didn't surrender...]]
* HeAlsoDid: Mussolini played a central role in the founding of UsefulNotes/VaticanCity, resolving the "Roman Question" which had persisted since the fall of the PapalStates.
* HistoricalVillainUpgrade: Mussolini was an egotistical, dictatorial imperialist who allied himself with genocidal maniacs and a vicious military junta but he often gets lumped in with Hitler as an anti-Semite. In reality, he was by the standards of the time rather moderate when it comes to race and early on in his career denied the existence of pure races when eugenics was all the rage. He also is believed to have taken part in the Holocaust, but while he put in place anti-Semitic laws under pressure from Germany, he didn't actually try to enforce them or send Jews to gas chambers. Jews in Nazi occupied Europe would actually try to escape to Italian occupied Europe and it got so bad that Goebbels complained that Mussolini didn't understand the Jewish question. It wasn't until Italy became a German puppet state that Jews in Italy were sent to camps.
* {{Irony}}: Mussolini wanted to restore the RomanEmpire in all its power and glory. He didn't get that, but he ''did'' get an appropriately ancient Roman punishment for failure: he was executed alongside his mistress, and [[KickTheSonOfABitch their bodies were strung up to be abused by an angry mob]].
* KneelBeforeZod: What a lot of his propaganda said. [[LargeHam OBEY!]]
** It's either that or "SI!" (Yes! in Italian). [[http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/europe/images/62xc3.jpg The headquarters of the National Fascist Party had a giant stone face of Mussolini looking down amidst a sea of "SI"]].
** The complete motto of the Fascists was ''Credere! Obbedire! Combattere!'' ("Believe! Obey! Fight!")
* LargeHam: Played with: for foreign standards (and especially those of English-speaking countries), he's quite extreme, but for Italian standards he's ''average''.
* LanternJawOfJustice: An evil example.
* LazyBum: For all his big talk about grandiosely restoring The Roman Empire, he barely did anything and was dependent on Hitler for WWII, only invading Ethiopia and the Balkans and not getting anywhere after that.
* TheLoad: In the course of trying to bail him out of his difficulties Germany ended up sending tons of material to the Mediterranean where they were vulnerable to Allied logistic advantages. This culminated in the defeat of El Alamein and the surrender of hundreds of thousands of troops at Tunisia.
** TheMillstone: Mussolini's campaign to invade Greece, which turned into a complete disaster and then forced the Germans to intervene and help him. This specific incident played a role in delaying Hitler's planned invasion of the Soviet Union (which in effect, bought the Soviets valuable time), which has prompted a number of historians to conclude that Mussolini's incompetence in Greece [[NiceJobFixingItVillain may have inadvertently contributed to the Allied forces' eventual victory in the war]].
* MadeOfIron: During WorldWarI, the bomb thrower he was using misfired and literally blew up on his face. Put him in an hospital, but didn't leave any lasting damage, or even a scar.
* MemeticBadass: In a strange way, as he made Italian trains run on time. It seems strange... But Italian trains are ''always late''
* MillionMookMarch: Mussolini expanded his forces far beyond the ability of his NCO[=/=]s to train them. [[FridgeLogic What's military efficiency compared with a good parade?]]
* ModernMajorGeneral
* MoreDakka: {{Averted}}, ''Insufficient'' Dakka pretty much defined the entire Italian war effort nearly as much as the Japanese, and Italian automatic weapons were either unreliable and/or ineffective (their machine guns, some of which have earned an entry in the ReliablyUnreliableGuns page) or were in insufficient numbers (their submachine guns, and in particular the Mod. 38, were reliable, rugged and cheap, but started being produced in adequate numbers only with the German occupation. And, to make things worse, the Germans tended to take most of the production of the Mod. 38, the one produced in the largest numbers).
* TheNapoleon: He was quite short and was very self-conscious about it. His jaw often juts out fowards in portraits in attempt to compensate for his height. Since Napoleon was not very short, Mussolini might be a better example of this trope among real life dictators.
* NiceHat: His fez, that he would wear almost always (including the page picture). Bonus point for the fez being proof he served in World War I as a Bersagliere, Italy's elite infantry.
* NiceJobFixingItVillain: Mussolini was aware that Italy's military wouldn't be ready for a general war until 1943 at the very least so when he joined the Axis, Hitler agreed that he wouldn't go to war until then. [[ILied He lied.]] Had Mussolini waited until 1943, the weaknesses of the Axis nations (lack of resources and the [[AwakeningTheSleepingGiant sleeping giants they were bound to face]]), would have become apparent to him. Italy would have kept its colonies (including the Libyan oil fields), would have been one of the only industrialized nations undamaged by the war and they would have likely kept their seat on the Security Council when the League of Nations was replaced with the United Nations. Oops.
* OnlySaneMan: Ironically, for all his bombast, he may have had the best sense of the way Europe was going in 1930s among Italian fascist politicians. Most of his advisors either wanted to resist Hitler by force or join him eagerly. Mussolini, however, was GenreSavvy enough to know that none of the fascist propaganda was true and Italy had nothing to wage war with, either against or alongside Germany. When the war began, his first reaction was to demand as absolutely necessary an absurdly long list of materials from Hitler that he knew Germany could not spare--the list was described as "long enough to kill a bull, if a bull could read"--so that he'd have an excuse to stay out of war. Then he waited until the war seemed essentially over, with the French on the verge of defeat and the British having been driven without weapons across the English Channel, and joined the side that seemed to have won. It turned out that Italy was even less prepared for war than he had thought and the war was far from nearly over. Oops!
** Asked by his foreign minister (and son-in-law) Count Ciano as to why he was declaring war when he did, Mussolini said he is not interested in fighting, but for Italy to have suffered just enough casualties to have a seat at the postwar negotiation table on the winning side.
*** Ironically, Italy did wind up joining with the winning side after World War II after all[[note]]as a NATO ally of the United States and Britain, and, well, West Germany, too[[/note]], just not the way Mussolini expected.
* [[OvershadowedByAwesome Overshadowed By Awful]]: Unsurprisingly gets this due to his close proximity to Hitler. Count how many times he gets referred to as a *protege* of Hitler or that he was following in Hitler footsteps when often times he was the TropeMaker of what it's referring to.
* PetTheDog: Ended slavery in Ethiopia and virtually eliminated the mafia in Italy.
* RatedMForManly: He would walk around doing manly things for kicks. He'd swim in dangerous waters to prove he could. During WorldWarI being a ''Bersagliere'' wasn't enough, so he started using a Bettica bomb-thrower (a device made to clean barbed wire by [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin throwing bombs at it]] from close range) while knowing it could explode in his face, and when it did he was annoyed he had to be pulled from the front and missed the last part of the war instead of being happy he [[MadeOfIron survived a bomb going off on his face]].
* TheRival: Gabriele D'Annunzio, author, poet, war hero and right wing demagogue. Though Mussolini initially regarded D'Annunzio as an ideological mentor (especially for his 1919 takeover of Fiume), the two men never trusted each other and Mussolini regarded the writer as a potential competitor. It's rumored that Mussolini engineered D'Annunzio's near-death in August 1922, where D'Annunzio fell (or was pushed) from a hotel window. D'Annunzio survived, but no longer played an active role in Italian politics.
** Another rival of Mussolini was the aviator Italo Balbo, whom Mussolini described as "the only man who could have killed me." Balbo and Mussolini were violently at odds over Italy's foreign policy during 1930s: Balbo considered an alliance with Germany a dangerous trap and bitterly opposed Nazi anti-semitism, to the point of publicly inviting his Jewish fascist colleagues to a state dinner in honor of Hitler. Balbo was killed, however, when his plane was shot down by FriendlyFire over Libya within days of Italy's entry into UsefulNotes/WorldWarII.
* ShirtlessScene: Believing it was a sign of a strong and virile Roman man, Mussolini was frequently photographed with his shirt off, showing off his StoutStrength, posing with rifles or diving into the sea.
* ShoutOut: He was named after Benito Juarez, one of the most revered presidents of Mexico's history (the Italian form of his name would be "Benedetto").
* TheSocialDarwinist: The ultimate real-world definition of the trope.
* {{Squick}}: Look up how he and [[DarkMistress his mistress]] died. Seriously, it's bad.
* StoutStrength: He was short and apparently fat, but was only made of muscles, and would show it off every single time he could get away with it.
* TakeThat: Mussolini's book, ''The Cardinal's Mistress''[[note]]That or ''Literature/AtlasShrugged''[[/note]] was the subject of DorothyParker's famous quip, "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."
* UnnecessarilyLargeInterior: Mussolini had his visitors cross an excessively large hall to meet him, as a psychological intimidation tactic.
** Which was later stolen by Hitler, and from ''there'' parodied in ''TheGreatDictator''.
* VillainousBreakdown: Unlike Hitler, who went to his grave not regretting any of his actions and blaming everyone else for his failures, Mussolini went to his grave a broken man, his dreams of empire shattered and regret for his darker actions.
* WarIsGlorious: He loved war. In fact, Mussolini modeled fascism after the discipline and unity of the military. He viewed the besieged trenches of World War 1 as a perfect microcosm of his ideal Italy.
** He even said that "War is to a man what maternity is to a woman". Mussolini's utopian society would always be at war.
** Mussolini was actually a bit of subversion of this trope. He talked a lot of the glories of war, but he was not eager to enter a war where his enemies would be able to fight back on equal terms (to be fair, even in cases where he thought the would-be-enemies were cakewalk, things did not go well). He entered UsefulNotes/WorldWarII only when he thought Hitler had basically won, after all.
* WeAreStrugglingTogether: Despite their similar ideologies, Mussolini always had a fractious relationship with Hitler. In 1935 he threatened to intervene during the Nazis' first attempt to occupy Austria, and signed the Stresa Front with Britain and France to block further Nazi aggression. It wasn't until the Spanish Civil War that Il Duce and Der Fuhrer found themselves on the same side. Even during the war, Mussolini and Hitler distrusted each other so much that they often didn't make the other privy to major military operations (Mussolini didn't tell Hitler about his plans to invade Greece, for example).
** In some sense, this applies to Mussolini's relationship with both Hitler and the Western Allies. In mid 1930s, as noted above, Mussolini was fearful of Hitler and wanted to join Britain and France against Germany, provided that his colonial interests were respected, especially in Ethiopia. But when Italy invaded Ethiopia, Britain and France imposed economic sanctions on Italy through the League of Nations and signed a pact with Nazi Germany recognizing its remilitarization (specifically, the navy), which convinced Mussolini that the Western Allies could not be trusted and that in case of conflict, Italy would be left holding the bag against Germany by itself.
* YeGoodeOldeDays: Mussolini wanted to make his regime a grandiose revival of TheRomanEmpire... and yet did next to nothing in WWII. It is hard to tell whether the Romans would have been amused or insulted. That said, as ruthless as the Romans were, they would've been put off by his incompetence.
* YesMan: While Mussolini ''initially'' appointed competent and free-thinking individuals to important government positions, he eventually bought into his own hype so much that he would only tolerate the spineless yes-men, and quickly surrounded himself with them. Needless to say, this was to have [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo disastrous consequences]].
** After Italy surrendered in 1943, Mussolini ''de facto'' became Hitler's yes-man.

* YeGoodeOldeDays : Mussolini wanted to make his regime a grandiose revival of TheRomanEmpire... and yet did next to nothing in WWII. It is hard to tell whether the Romans would have been amused or insulted. That said, as ruthless as the Romans were, they would've been put off by his incompetence.

* YeGoodeOldeDays : Mussolini wanted to make his regime a grandiose revival of TheRomanEmpire...and yet did next to nothing in WWII. It is hard to tell whether the Romans would have been amused or insulted. That said, as ruthless as the Romans were, they would've been put off by his incompetence.

** [[PunctuatedForEmphasis "We...Are...Warriors!"]]

* NiceJobFixingItVillain: Mussolini was aware that Italy's military wouldn't be ready for a general war until 1943 at the very least so when he joined the Axis, Hitler agreed that he wouldn't go to war until then. [[ILied He lied.]] Had Mussolini waited until 1943, the weaknesses of the Axis nations (lack of resources and the [[AwakeningTheSleepingGiant sleeping giants they were bound to face]]), would have become apparent to him. Italy would have kept it's colonies (including the Libyan oil fields), would have been one of the only industrialized nations undamaged by the war and they would have likely kept their seat on the Security Council when the League of Nations was replaced with the United Nations. Oops.

* Appears as the BigBad in the Gaddafi-era Libyan propaganda film ''Lion of the Desert'' (based on the story of the suppression of Omar Mukhtar's anticolonial revolt in Italian Libya in the late 1920s and early 1930s), portrayed by Creator/RodSteiger, with the position of The Dragon filled by the ruthless General Rodolfo Graziani, plated by Oliver Reed.

* In ''ThePrideOfLife'', Othello's superbeasts are named for European dictators, including "Mussol" for Mussolini.

Mussolini was [[YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness deposed]] by King Victor Emmanuel III following a de facto vote of no confidence in the Grand Council of Fascism on 25 July 1943. In September [[HeelFaceTurn the Italians joined the Allies and declared war on Germany]]. The Germans responded by invading Italy and forcing Mussolini, by now wanting to retire, to form a Nazi state called the Italian Social Republic. He was caught while fleeing to Switzerland and executed by the [[LaResistance Italian resistance]] in 1945. They shot him in the gut first, [[NoKillLikeOverkill dragged him into the nearby city of Milan and then hung upside-down at a gas station while crowds of angry Italians spat and threw things (trash, bricks, other unpleasant things) at his body]].

* HistoricalVillainUpgrade: Mussolini was an egotistical, dictatorial imperialist who allied himself with genocidal maniacs and a vicious military junta but he often gets lumped in with Hitler as an anti-Semite. In reality, he was by the standards of the time rather progressive and early on in his career denied the existence of pure races when eugenics was all the rage. He also is believed to have taken part in the Holocaust, but while he put in place anti-Semitic laws under pressure from Germany, he didn't actually try to enforce them or send Jews to gas chambers. Jews in Nazi occupied Europe would actually try to escape to Italian occupied Europe and it got so bad that Goebbels complained that Mussolini didn't understand the Jewish question. It wasn't until Italy became a German puppet state that Jews in Italy were sent to camps.

* AntiVillain: Compared to his allies. He was pretty much a standard 19th Century and 20th Century tin-pot dictator, who got caught up in things ''way'' above his pay grade.

* EvilVsEvil: Mussolini vs. UsefulNotes/TheMafia. In 1924, Mussolini visited Sicily and refused accept protection by a local Mafia boss, leading the boss to order the townsfolk to boycott Mussolini's speech. Mussolini [[DisproportionateRetribution retaliated]] by sending armies of policemen and ''carabinieri'' into Sicily to round up suspects by the hundreds of thousands, beat and torture said suspects, and hold their families hostage in exchange for surrender and property, resulting in over 1,200 gangsters being imprisoned or exiled. The Sicilian Mafia didn't recover for almost two decades thanks to Mussolini's crackdown, but the American Mafia saw its ranks swell once exiled ''mafiosi'' arrived in the U.S.

* RatedMForManly

* LargeHam

* TheNapoleon: He was quite short. His jaw often juts out fowards in portraits in attempt to compensate for his height. Since Napoleon was not very short, Mussolini might be a better example of this trope among real life dictators.

* EvilVsEvil: Mussolini vs. UsefulNotes/TheMafia. In 1924, Mussolini visited Sicily and refused accept protection by a local Mafia boss, leading the boss to order the townsfolk to boycott Mussolini's speech. Mussolini [[DisproportionateRetribution retaliated]] by sending armies of policemen and ''carabinieri'' who rounded up suspects by the hundreds of thousands, beat and tortured said suspects, and held their families hostage in exchange for surrender and property, resulting in over 1,200 gangsters being imprisoned or exiled. Mussolini's damage was so severe that the Sicilian Mafia didn't fully recover until after the war.

* MoreDakka - averted, ''Insufficient'' Dakka pretty much defined the entire Italian war effort nearly as much as the Japanese, and Italian weapons (particularly their machine guns) generally ran the gamut from unreliable to ineffective.

* One episode of ''{{Cheers}}'' had Carla trying to get around a family naming tradition that would have [[UnfortunateImplications unintentionally]] [[NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast forced the name "Benito Mussolini"]] onto her unborn baby.

* EvilVsEvil: Mussolini vs. UsefulNotes/TheMafia. In 1924, Mussolini visited Sicily and refused accept protection by a local Mafia boss, leading the boss to order the townsfolk to boycott Mussolini's speech. Mussolini [[DisproportionateRetribution retaliated]] by sending armies of policemen and ''carabinieri'' who rounded up suspects by the hundreds of thousands, beat and tortured said suspects, and held their families hostage in exchange for surrender, resulting in over 1,200 gangsters being imprisoned or exiled. Mussolini's damage was so severe that the Sicilian Mafia didn't fully recover until after the war.

* EvilVsEvil: Mussolini vs. TheMafia. In 1924, Mussolini visited Sicily and refused accept protection by a local Mafia boss, leading the boss to humiliate Mussolini by instructing the townsfolk to boycott his speech. Mussolini [[DisproportionateRetribution retaliated]] by sending armies of policemen and ''carabinieri'' who rounded up suspects by the hundreds of thousands, beat and tortured said suspects, and held their families hostage in exchange for surrender, which resulted in over 1,200 gangsters being imprisoned or exiled. Mussolini's damage was so severe that the Sicilian Mafia didn't fully recover until after the war.

* EvilVsEvil: Mussolini vs. TheMafia. In 1924, Mussolini visited Sicily and refused accept protection by a local Mafia boss, leading the boss to humiliate Mussolini by instructing the townsfolk to boycott his speech. Mussolini [[DisproportionateRetribution retaliated]] by sending armies of policemen and ''carabinieri'' to round up suspects by the hundreds of thousands, hold their families hostage in exchange for surrender, and numerous beatings and acts of torture, which resulted in over 1,200 gangsters being imprisoned or exiled. Mussolini's damage was so severe that the Sicilian Mafia didn't fully recover until after the war.

* EvilVsEvil: Mussolini vs. TheMafia. In 1924, Mussolini visited Sicily and refused accept protection by a local Mafia boss, leading the boss to humiliate Mussolini by instructing the townsfolk to boycott his speech. Mussolini [[DispropotionateRetribution retaliated]] by sending armies of policemen and ''carabinieri'' to round up suspects by the hundreds of thousands, hold their families hostage in exchange for surrender, and numerous beatings and acts of torture, which resulted in over 1,200 gangsters being imprisoned or exiled. Mussolini's damage was so severe that the Sicilian Mafia didn't fully recover until after the war.

* EvilVsEvil: Mussolini vs. TheMafia. In 1924, Mussolini visited Sicily and refused accept protection by a local Mafia boss, leading the boss to humiliate Mussolini by instructing the townsfolk to boycott his speech. Mussolini retaliated by sending armies of policemen ''carabinieri'' to round up suspects by the hundreds of thousands, hold their families hostage in exchange for surrender, and numerous beatings and acts of torture, which resulted in over 1,200 gangsters being imprisoned or exiled. Mussolini's damage was so severe that the Sicilian Mafia didn't fully recover until after the war.

*** It's quite [[AndreaBocelli a common name]] for Italian men.