ROME -- Edda Mussolini Ciano, 85, the daughter and widow of two of Italy's World War II fascist leaders, died of cardiac arrest April 8 at a hospital here after an operation to remove a kidney abscess. She had lung and kidney ailments.
She was one of the first Italian women to wear trousers and drive a car. But she is best remembered for an episode in which her father refused to stop the execution of her husband, Galeazzo Ciano, the "playboy count" and Italian foreign minister.
The count had held a variety of 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, 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 Ciano guilty of treason and ordered him executed.
Mussolini turned a deaf ear to his daughter's emotional pleas for a pardon, and the count was shot by a firing squad in 1944.
Mrs. Ciano had helped smuggle her husband's diaries and documents on Italian-German relations to Switzerland in the vain hope of swapping them with the Germans for her husband's life.
Her direct appeal to Hitler, whom she admired from an early age, also failed.
After the execution, Mrs. Ciano, a determined fascist who was one of her father's closest advisers in the 1930s, disavowed him and the family name.
"I prefer to be the wife of a victim of fascism than the daughter of Il Duce," she said at the time.
"You are no longer my father for me. I renounce the name Mussolini," she wrote to her father.
Benito Mussolini was himself killed by a partisan firing squad in April 1945 in the final days of World War II. After the war, Mrs. Ciano settled quietly in Rome.
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 father.
She is said never to have reconciled with her mother, Rachele, Mussolini's widow, who died 15 years ago.
Her mother blamed Mrs. Ciano's husband for being responsible for the fall of Benito Mussolini.
Alessandra Mussolini, the wartime dictator's granddaughter who is a member of Parliament for the right-wing National Alliance, told Reuters:
"My aunt was born a woman but lived like a man.
"Not only did she stand up to her father over the man she loved; she stood up to Il Duce, which is something altogether different."
Mrs. Ciano was born in the Mussolini family's home province of Forli in central Italy. She married Galeazzo Ciano in 1930. Survivors include two children and two brothers.
