Many fathers cast a long shadow, but surely Romano Mussolini had it especially bad. It would be hard to make your way as a German novelist named Hitler in 1956, but that is roughly the burden that Romano had to deal with, being one of Benito Mussolini’s sons and yet desirous of becoming—which he did—a successful jazz pianist. Romano does not appear to have been an especially great jazz pianist, exactly, but he was certainly good enough to impress a lot of the right people, including Ella Fitzgerald, Chet Baker, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Lionel Hampton, all of whom he toured with. His skills were very respected.
Romano was born in November 1927, making him twelve in 1940 and seventeen when his father and his father’s mistress, Claretta Petacci, were executed in northern Italy in the final days of World War II. In Mussolini’s Italy, jazz music, associated with the American “Negro,” was banned as “degenerate music,” but apparently Il Duce had a weakness for the music, which his son also loved from an early age. According to Romano’s memoir According to My Father, Il Duce: A Memoir by Mussolini’s Son, “Some will be surprised to learn that my father was also a fan of jazz. I was only four years old when I heard the music for the first time. It was in 1931, at Villa Carpena, when my brother Vittorio brought the first 78 rpm records to our house and later introduced me to the majestic interpretations of Duke Ellington and other jazz greats.”
After World War II, Romano Mussolini played under a stage name for a while (“Romano Full”) before reverting back to his original name. He toured up and down Italy for years with his band, the Romano Mussolini All Stars. His closest associate among the American jazz greats was with Chet Baker, who fretted over how to handle his first meeting with the dictator’s son—much to his chagrin, Baker reportedly ended up sticking out his hand and blurting out, “Sorry to hear about your Dad!”
On the 1963 album At the Santa Tecla by Romano Mussolini and his Orchestra, the band essays the Mussolini original “Blues at Santa Tecla” as well as Rodgers and Hart’s “My Funny Valentine,” Fats Waller’s “Honeysuckle Rose,” Dizzy Gillespie’s “Ow,” and Miles Davis’s “Lover Man.”
In a decision apparently undertaken in order to someday make him a more attractive subject for Dangerous Minds, he co-scored the 1968 horror noir Satanik, which if the poster art is any indication is almost certainly amazing.
Skimming his memoir suggests that Romano clearly respected and admired his father, all while staying staunchly apolitical and condemning “his father’s anti-Semitic policies and much of the Fascist platform,” as Todd S. Jenkins put it. Romano’s love of African-American musical rhythms demonstrate his egalitarian bona fides, but still, there are signs, in what eventually became Berlusconi’s Italy, that the repudiation of Mussolini’s policies is still, well, far from complete. In The English is Coming!: How One Language is Sweeping the World, Leslie Dunton-Downer reports that “jazz and fascism were intertwined at Romano Mussolini’s funeral in 2006. The event reportedly opened with George Gershwin’s ‘Summertime,’ and following ‘fascist slogans and salutes,’ concluded with the American gospel ‘When the Saints Go Marching In.’” Hmmm.
He also painted clowns.
In 1974 the Romano Mussolini Trio released Mirage, which remains much admired to this day. The full album can be heard below; the opening title track features Romano killing it on a Fender Rhodes electric piano.
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Mussolini’s Fascist Party’s headquarters… less than subtle