The Woman Who Shot Mussolini

From : The Guardian

Photo : http://www.guardian.co.uk/

The Woman Who Shot Mussolini by Frances Stonor Saunders
Lucy Hughes-Hallett on the strange, sad life of Mussolini's would-be assassin.

The Hon Violet Gibson shot two people at point-blank range, herself and Benito Mussolini. Both survived. After the first (attempted-suicidal) shooting, Violet, alive because the bullet had bounced off a rib, lived quietly in a convent in Rome, doing jigsaws with her Irish maid, until the day she set off for the Capitol with a gun in her pocket. After the second shooting Mussolini, alive because he turned his head just as Violet fired, set out for a triumphal visit to Libya with a sticking plaster on his nose. Meanwhile Violet was half-lynched, then dragged, badly battered, into a room containing the colossal marble foot of the Emperor Constantine, there to be revived with brandy before being dispatched to prison. It was the end of her life in the world.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/27/woman-shot-mussolini-stonor-saunders

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