ANDdda she was the daughter of MussoliniGaleazzo Cyan he was the regime’s Chief of Communications. Their love story (and of Italy), between the end of the 1920s and 1944, is told in the docu-film Those two – Edda and Galeazzo Ciano by Wilma Labate airing tonight at 9.20pm on Rai 3.
The approach is theatrical and archival. In fact, the director mixes the images of the time of the two protagonists, of Mussolini and of Italy at war from the Luce Archive to the interpretations of Edda and Galeazzo from Silvia D’Amico and Simone Liberati inside the Cinecittà studios. Black and white and the reality of the past add up to the colors of the reconstructed sets and the words recited by the actors, taken from the diaries and public speeches of Galeazzo Ciano and from the autobiographies of Edda Mussolini.
Those two – Edda and Galeazzo Ciano: the plot
Wilma Labate starts from the shooting of Galeazzo occurred in January of 1944 in Verona, to then go back to 1928, and introduce us to the protagonists of his film which tells a piece of Italy through the words and gaze of a couple who have often been in the spotlight of the twentieth century and which was crushed by a much greater power than what they thought they had.
Galeazzo he belonged to a bourgeois family as opposed to the proletarian Eddahad a deep sense of family, honor and duty. Edda he adored Benito: «He often defended me from my mother’s beatings», recounts his daughter through Silvia D’Amico. Galeazzo met him at a party in 1929 and in April of 1930 they got married. They chose Capri for their honeymoon, but the «first night I panicked. I barricaded myself in the bathroom», Edda reveals.
Silvia D’Amico and Simone Liberati. (Rai)
The trip to China, the meeting with Hitler from the Duce’s less warm voice
The story follows the chronological path. The archive images mix with the steps of the memories of Edda and Galeazzo recited by Silvia D’Amico And Simone Liberati. After the wedding the two for three years lived in Chinait was an extraordinary experience for a woman of the time, but Galeazzo dated other women, ed Edda was jealous. Then they returned to Rome, to Villa Torlonia, and Galeazzo became the Duce’s dauphin and the person in charge of regime communication. In 1936 he was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs and met Hitler.
Simone Liberati and Silvia D’Amico. (Rai)
«Hitler he had self-confidence, he was a educated and lovable mana deep sense of humormustache alla Charlot which harmonized with his physiognomy, he had a pleasant deep voice, but less warm than my father’s», Edda describes him. Galeazzo instead he was convinced “that if Italy had allied itself with Germany it would have lost out”.
Edda’s love for Ciano to the end
Hitler invades Poland, Ciano suggests neutrality to Mussolinibut excessive extension of that position would have resulted in a dishonor. Edda instead wanted to go to war, «a war I had longed for with all my heart» he revealed. When her father decided to take the field, her daughter left for Turin to become a nurse.
In July 1943 the Allies landed in Sicily, it was the end of Fascism. Ciano had been removed from the Foreign Ministry, and is considered one of the architects of the end (in 1943 he signed the motion of no confidence against Mussolini, in the session of the Grand Council). He is imprisoned in Verona and shot there. Edda remained close to her husband until the last day, they wrote letters and begged her father’s help and blackmailed him: in fact, she threatened to publish her husband’s diaries in which he revealed his contempt for Hitler and Germany. It was all in vain.
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