For auction: Il Duce's last suitcase of clothes
ROCHESTER, N.Y. — An Army corporal stationed in Italy in the waning days of World War II acquired a suitcase of war booty, sent it home and stowed it in his bedroom closet in upstate New York for 65 years. In it: Il Duce’s duds.
The brown leather suitcase was purported to have been taken from Benito Mussolini when the Fascist dictator and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, were captured and executed by partisans in April 1945 as they tried to flee northern Italy along with retreating German forces.
The family of Paul Moriconi, a Rochester doctor who died last year at 87, said he acquired the suitcase from his supervisor, Col. Charles Poletti, a regional commissioner for the Allied military government in Italy who had served briefly as New York’s governor in 1942.
The ensemble — a gray gabardine military tunic, matching riding pants, a khaki Italian military shirt and a rust-colored woolen dress — is being auctioned in Dallas on Sunday by Greg Martin Auctions/Heritage Auctions, which estimates it could fetch $10,000 to $15,000.
Poletti, who died a year later, said members of the partisan resistance movement presented him the suitcase and its contents at his office in Milan in late April 1945. He instructed his secretary, he added, “to dispose of these articles as he saw fit.”
Moriconi, a son of Italian immigrants and a Rochester native, mailed the suitcase to his mother. Once in the 1950s, he hammed it up for relatives by donning the uniform at a Halloween party, but he typically had to be persuaded to show off the clothes to friends.
“If we were having a dinner party, it was usually me who coaxed him,” said his widow, Regina. “He was the type of fellow who never wanted to draw attention to himself.
