Mussolini’s uniform heads for auction block

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This article was published 17/09/2011 (5162 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

ROCHESTER, N.Y. — A U.S. army corporal stationed in Italy during the waning days of the Second World War acquired a suitcase of war booty, sent it home and stowed it in his bedroom closet in upstate New York for 65 years. In it: Il Duce’s clothing.

The brown leather suitcase was purported to have been taken from Benito Mussolini when the Fascist dictator and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, were captured and executed by partisans in April 1945 as they tried to flee northern Italy along with retreating German forces.

The family of Paul Moriconi, a Rochester doctor who died last year at 87, said he acquired the suitcase from his supervisor, Col. Charles Poletti, a regional commissioner for the Allied military government in Italy who had served briefly as New York’s governor in 1942.

The ensemble — a grey gabardine military tunic, matching riding pants, a khaki Italian military shirt and a rust-coloured woolen dress — is being auctioned in Dallas on Sunday by Greg Martin Auctions/Heritage Auctions, which estimates it could fetch $10,000 to $15,000.

Martin, a specialist in antique arms, armour and historic memorabilia who sold a globe that once belonged to Adolf Hitler for $100,000 at a 2007 auction in San Francisco, said “the provenance of this material is impeccable.”

The uniform carries no identifying marks linking it to Mussolini. The jacket had no medals attached, and a tuxedo stripe running up the side of the trousers had been removed. But the tale of how the items came into Moriconi’s possession was recounted in a formal letter Poletti sent on request to his former personal secretary in 2001.

Poletti, who died a year later, said members of the partisan resistance movement presented him the suitcase and its contents at his office in Milan in late April 1945. He instructed his secretary, he added, “to dispose of these articles as he saw fit.”

Moriconi, a son of Italian immigrants and a Rochester native, mailed the suitcase to his mother. Once in the 1950s, he hammed it up for relatives by donning the uniform at a Halloween party, but he typically had to be persuaded to show off the clothes to friends.

“If we were having a dinner party, it was usually me who coaxed him,” said his widow, Regina. “He was the type of fellow who never wanted to draw attention to himself.

“He realized the great value the uniform held historically,” she said. “I think he felt more fortunate than proud or tickled that he was in a position that he could own these things.”

 

— The Associated Press