Not much has stayed secret about the tumultuous private life of Benito Mussolini. That is apart from the true nature of his relationship with the woman who was to be Italy's last queen, Marie-José of Belgium.
Mussolini's mistress, Claretta Petacci, claimed in her diary that in 1937 the then princess and wife of the heir to the throne tried and failed to seduce the dictator at a beach resort near Rome. But Marie-José may have been more successful than her rival suspected, if evidence that emerged on Wednesday is to be believed. In a letter reproduced by the weekly magazine Oggi, Mussolini's son Romano quotes his mother as saying that there was a "brief period of intimate romantic relations between my father and the then princess of Piedmont".
The daughter of the Belgian king, Albert I, Marie-José was born in 1906. While still a child, it was decided that she should marry into the Italian royal family and in 1930 she wed Umberto of Savoy, the only son of King Victor Emmanuel. By her own subsequent account, the marriage was not a happy one, and she separated from her husband after the Italian monarchy was abolished by referendum in 1946. She lived for most of the rest of her life in Switzerland where she died in 2001. In contrast to the Savoy family, Marie-José had little time for fascism and during the Second World War made a failed attempt to broker a peace treaty with the United States.