ITALY: Love letters written to Benito Mussolini by his mistress just as the Italian dictator allied himself with Adolf Hitler have vanished, Italy's national archive said yesterday.
Claretta Petacci's years of letters to her lover have been shrouded in secrecy for decades, with the state denying historians any access. Now the entire correspondence from the year 1937 is missing.
"This material was classified super-sensitive because its content was very personal," said Mr Maurizio Fallace, head of the central state archive.
Under Italian law, such material has to be released after 70 years, which meant Petacci's letters from the 1930s were starting to come to light.
Mr Fallace was delving into boxes of the letters to start preparing them for public consultation when he found that the 1937 correspondence had gone.
"I simply have no idea what happened to them. I dearly hope we will be able to locate them," he said.
Petacci was shot dead with Mussolini by Italian resistance fighters in April 1945.