Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was born July 29, 1883. He was executed on April 28, 1945. Mussolini was born in the central Italian town of Predappio, in the then-province of Forlì (from 1992 called province of Forlì-Cesena). His father, Alessandro, was a blacksmith and his mother, Rosa Maltoni, was a school teacher. Alessandro Mussolini was an enthusiast socialist of the anarchic wing and an atheist. He bestowed the first name "Benito" upon his son after Mexican president Benito Juarez and the middle name "Andrea" after the founder of the short-lived Italian "Revolutionary Socialist Party of Romagna", Andrea Conti. Benito's mother, however, was a religious Catholic woman and had the child baptized.

Benito Mussolini had a troubled education: he was expelled from a Salesian-run religious middle school in Faenza when he stabbed an older classmate with a knife. After that, he enrolled in a public and secular Teachers' School for Boys in Forlimpopoli (even there, he was poorly behaved and involved in fistfights). He graduated in 1901 with an elementary teacher's license, but was jobless. In order to avoid mandatory military service, he fled to Switzerland where he lived by his wits. He never attended any kind of university, as his school didn't grant the necessary diploma to do so.

Mussolini had been introduced to socialism by his father, and got closer and closer to the Socialist Party in his teen years, until he eventually subscribed in 1900.

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