Marie José of Belgium Claretta Petacci, claimed in her diary that in 1937 the then princess and wife of the heir to the throne tried and failed to seduce the dictator at a beach resort near Rome. However, Mussolini's son, Romano, claims that the princess and dictator entered into a sexual relationship. In 1943, the Crown Princess involved herself in vain attempts to arrange a separate peace treaty between Italy and the United States; her interlocutor from the Vatican was Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, a senior diplomat who later became Pope Paul VI. Her attempts were not sponsored by the king and Umberto was
Walter Audisio but Audisio always claimed that he was the one who shot and killed the dictator and his mistress, Claretta Petacci. After the war Audisio continued working with the communist movement, and in 1948, was elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies for Alessandria with the Italian Communist Party as part of the Popular Democratic Front. He supported the party until 1963, when he entered the Italian Senate. In 1968 he left to work for Italian gasoline company Eni. He died five years later in 1973 of a heart attack. His memoirs, titled "In nome del popolo italiano", were published two