What we offer here in pictorial form is a very truncated account of a quite extraordinary meeting. Certainly it was for us as interviewers at the beginning of our careers. At that time, we had been seconded to the Office of War Reparations, whose task it was to gather testimony for the prosecution of war crimes by Italian officials and officers. Committees like this were being established all over Europe under the London Agreement. In this case, it was a fairly cautious operation, with a rather imprecise brief. We knew this was going to be a difficult and messy business. Nevertheless, we began in earnest, interviewing many people.

As chance would have it, we were directed to interview the mother of the dictator himself. For several days we argued about how to do this. Clearly this was going to be a strange inclusion in our case material. Rosa M had not of course had any operational involvement in the Fascist government, nor any official authority. The committee wanted to get a more accurate profile of the dictator's family background, perhaps to better understand his motivations. One of us argued for a departure from the strict structured interview format, and suggested a more narrative approach.

This in fact proved to be a useful technique. When we met Rosa M, by demeanour a proud woman, she was nevertheless in a state of shock Throughout she spoke not to us, but into the distance. She spoke that is, from within a dream. At times we were touched by her sorrow and also by her minute remembrances. But it was as if she were talking about someone else entirely. Perhaps it is no surprise that her love and devotion to her son remained strong. And that she herself still held to shards of his vision. What was striking however was that, in her own image of him, his persona as Il Duce had supplanted any detailed or grounded sense of him as a boy. So that her memory of his boyhood, for example, seemed strained and incomplete. It was explained to us by experts in psychological matters that trauma often had this effect.

This would have remained an interesting but hardly remarkable encounter had it not been for some news we received about nine months after we filed the report. We were informed by the head of the committee that Rosa Mussolini had in fact died in 1905 of tuberculosis. It turned out that the woman we had interviewed was Marissa Umbrezza from Torino, no relation to the dictator, and a mother of three boys who had been killed in the North African campaign. Moreover, and this was perhaps most intriguing, there had been 17 other cases of Rosa Mussolini impersonators reported by other field staff. Apparently our Office's lack of coordination had prevented an earlier detection of this anomaly.

In hindsight, what we experienced in that interview room was perhaps a small fragment of a larger phenomena. We knew how people had taken up arms in his name, as father figure of the nation. But we had not expected how deeply this identification operated, so that some women had loved him like a son. Fantasies have many faces.