First photographs emerge of Mussolini's secret wartime bunker
The first photographs have emerged of a secret concrete bunker constructed by Benito Mussolini who feared being assassinated by the RAF at the height of the Second World War.
Rooms inside the bunker. Photo: Giordano Locchi and vocidiroma.it/La Stampa
By Nick Squires
2:35PM GMT 24 Mar 2013
The 860 square feet bunker, which was built about 50ft beneath Palazzo Venezia, his Rome headquarters, was only rediscovered in 2010, during routine maintenance work.
Now there are plans to open it to the public, possibly in the autumn, to provide an insight into the paranoid[?] last few months of Il Duce's regime.
Mussolini ordered the construction of the bunker at the end of 1942 because he feared that the RAF was planning to launch an audacious raid on his headquarters in an attempt to kill him and knock Italy out of the war.
His fears were well founded – the RAF had indeed drawn up a plan to launch a bombing raid on the palazzo, as well as his private residence in Rome, Villa Torlonia, using the 617 Squadron of Dambusters fame.
Air Marshal Arthur "Bomber" Harris proposed using the squadron's Lancaster bombers to fly over Rome at "rooftop level" and simultaneously drop bombs on Il Duce's headquarters and his family home in an attempt to kill him.
The squadron had used "bouncing bombs" to attack three dams on the Ruhr just three months before.
"The plan was drawn up in July 1943, just after the Allied landings in Sicily," Christopher Duggan, an expert on Mussolini from Reading University, told The Daily Telegraph.
"Harris asked permission to go ahead with it from Winston Churchill. Palazzo Venezia had been Mussolini's headquarters since 1929 and Villa Torlonia was where his family lived."
But Churchill, along with Anthony Eden, his Foreign Secretary, thought that the plan had only a slim chance of success.
They were also worried that the British bombers could inadvertently do tremendous damage to the ancient Roman ruins that lie just a few hundred yards from the palazzo – the Roman Forum, the Colosseum and the Palatine Hill, where emperors built their sumptuous palaces.
The bunker was discovered three years ago when engineers carrying out structural work on the foundations of Palazzo Venezia noticed a small wooden trap door.
It opened out to a narrow flight of brick stairs which in turn led to the bunker, divided into nine rooms by thick concrete walls.
The structure was so deep that it had exposed some Roman remains, which are still visible today.
"When we saw the reinforced concrete, we realised what it was," Carlo Serafini, an architect involved in the discovery, told La Stampa newspaper. "Mussolini never stayed there but without doubt he would have gone down to inspect the progress of the work.
"The structure is still solid, it probably would have withstood a bombardment, although it would have depended on the force of the explosion. It was certainly well hidden."
The rough concrete walls of the bunker and the fact that it has just a dirt floor show that it had not been completed by the time Mussolini was arrested on the orders of Victor Emanuel III, the King of Italy, and sent into internal exile in the Apennine mountains in the summer of 1943.
He was rescued by German airborne troops and installed as the puppet leader of a rump Fascist state in northern Italy but in April 1945 he was caught by Italian partisans and strung up along with his lover in Milan's Piazzale Lotto.
The authorities in Rome hope to clean up the bunker and open it to the public later this year.
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