Levanto, a small town on the Ligurian coast, serves in the narrative as a family refuge whose familiar landscape contrasts with Benito Mussolini’s increasingly public life. In late August 1923, Rachele Mussolini rented a villa among the vineyards for a weekend with her husband and children. The visit lasted only forty-eight hours, and even there Mussolini’s presence seemed to belong more to public history than to domestic life.

A family place by the sea

Levanto was already part of the family’s shared vocabulary. When the Mussolinis were still poor, they went there on outings; Rachele maintained that Edda had been conceived there. The town’s valley, with its olive groves, pine trees, and vines, thus held memories from before Benito Mussolini became prime minister. Its return as the setting for a family weekend brings an earlier, less powerful life into view without suggesting that the old intimacy can simply be recovered.

The visit also recalls the particular closeness between father and daughter. Edda, then twelve, had long been his favorite. As a child, she accompanied him to the newspaper office on Via Paolo da Cannobio in Bottonuto, where father and daughter could remain until dawn before taking a carriage home to sleep. He taught her to play the violin and never struck or punished her. In Levanto, the roles had partly reversed: Edda now played the violin for him, while still waiting for his return.

The shore as political stage

Mussolini’s mornings in Levanto turned the route from the villa to the sea into a public encounter. He left already wearing his bathing suit, bare-chested, and walked between tourists who commented on his body. His presidential bodyguards had to manage a crowd close enough that his bare chest, thighs, and back muscles were continually exposed to contact. The scene makes bodily proximity part of political display: his authority is described as emanating from the multitudes, and he presents himself to them not only as a speaker but as a visible, physical presence.

That performance had begun earlier in the summer during a tour of Italy. Mussolini appeared in Bologna at Leandro Arpinati’s, returned to his paternal home in Romagna, went to Messina during a sudden eruption of Etna, visited Florence, and spoke in Rome from the balcony of Piazza Venezia to former combatants. He tested call-and-response exchanges modeled on Gabriele D’Annunzio’s practice in Fiume, asking the crowds to answer questions about liberty, victory, the nation, renewed struggle, and who possessed Italy. The seaside crowds in Levanto belonged to the same political theater: even a private weekend could not fully separate the leader from the audience that confirmed his power.

The damaged station and Edda’s fear

When Mussolini arrived by train on August 26, Levanto’s station had been badly damaged in an extraordinary accident. A young pilot had descended to very low altitude to salute his girlfriend and crashed into the station building. Edda had been waiting for her father and persisted in believing that the accident had injured him. Even seeing him arrive unharmed did not entirely persuade her that the crash had not been meant for her.

The episode gives the town’s reunion a private counterpoint to the spectacle of Mussolini’s public body. The crowd could see him alive and present; Edda’s fear outlasted that visible reassurance. In Levanto, the leader’s carefully displayed physical presence did not settle what his daughter imagined had happened to him. The setting therefore holds two versions of his significance at once: a public figure offered to the multitudes, and a father whose return his child had anxiously awaited.