One of Benito Mussolini’s secret bunkers, discovered in Rome’s central Palazzo Venezia, will be opened to the public this fall, reports La Stampa. City superintendent Anna Imponente and architect Carlo Serafini originally unearthed the bunker in early 2011 when engineers were carrying out work on the foundations of the famous Italian palazzo. On discovering a small wooden trap door, they descended a narrow flight of brick stairs that led them to the bunker. There had been no official records of the hideout, which had been abandoned during construction.
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“When we saw the reinforced concrete, we realized what it was,” Serafini told La Stampa. “Mussolini never stayed there but without a doubt he would have gone down to inspect the progress of the work.” The bunker is 50 feet below ground, so deep that it also revealed some buried Roman ruins. However, the rough concrete walls and holes in the wall for electric wiring show that the hideout was never finished. Serafini also believes the bunker was designed for two people, most likely Mussolini and his mistress, Claretta Petacci.
The bunker was built at the end of 1942 when Mussolini began to worry that the Royal Air Force (RAF) was planning an assassination attempt on the Italian leader and an attack on his headquarters. He was right – in July 1943 Air Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris proposed a plan to simultaneously bomb the Palazzo Venezia and the Villa Torlonia where Mussolini’s family lived, Christopher Duggan told the Daily Telegraph. However, Winston Churchill and the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, rejected the plan, believing it would fail. They also worried that British bombers could cause real damage to the nearby ancient ruins including the Roman Forum and the Colosseum.
The bunker has two escape routes, one to the gardens of San Marco and another that goes to the Altare della Patria where there was another bunker. But Mussolini never got the chance to find out how safe the bunker was. He was imprisoned in July 1942 after Allied troops landed in Sicily. Following the German occupation he was reinstalled as the leader of a new Italian government, but fled to Switzerland when the Allies arrived in northern Italy. He was captured by Italian partisans in 1945, and shot.