Death of Benito Mussolini Milan, where he had been based, and tried to escape to the Swiss border. He and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, were captured on 27 April by local partisans near the village of Dongo on Lake Como. Mussolini and Petacci were shot the following afternoon, two days before Adolf Hitler's suicide. The bodies of Mussolini and Petacci were taken to Milan and left in a suburban square, the Piazzale Loreto, for a large angry crowd to insult and physically abuse. They were then hung upside down from a metal girder above a service station on the square. The bodies were beaten,
Dictator novel Although some dictator novels centre on one historical dictator (albeit in fictional guise), they do not analyze the economics, politics, and rule of the régime as might a history book. The dictator novel genre includes "I, the Supreme" (1974), by Augusto Roa Bastos, about Dr. Francia of Paraguay, and "The Feast of the Goat" (2000), by Mario Vargas Llosa, about Rafael Leónidas Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. Alternatively, the novelist might create a fictional dictator to achieve the same narrative end, as in "Reasons of State" (1974), by Alejo Carpentier, in which the dictator is a composite man assembled from