Galeazzo Ciano

• 1. Introduction

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  Galeazzo Ciano voted to overthrow his own father-in-law on the 24th of July 1943, and paid for it with his life six months later. He was born Gian Galeazzo Ciano on the 18th of March 1903 in Livorno, Italy, the son of an admiral and fascist founding member named Costanzo Ciano. By his early thirties he was Italy's Foreign Minister, tipped by many as the man who would one day succeed Benito Mussolini. By forty he was tied to a chair and shot by a firing squad. What brought a man so close to absolute power to that courtyard in Verona? And what did he leave behind that historians and a Serbian proverb still reach for today?

• 2. A Father's Shadow

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  Costanzo Ciano, nicknamed Ganascia, meaning 'The Jaw', was not a man who left much to chance. A World War I naval hero, he was rewarded with the aristocratic title of Count by King Victor Emmanuel III, and he used that status to build private wealth alongside public prestige. He would use his influence to depress the stock of a company, buy a controlling interest while the price was low, and then profit as the value rebounded. Beyond that financial engineering, he owned a newspaper, farmland in Tuscany, and other properties worth huge sums of money. Costanzo was also a founding member of the National Fascist Party and helped reorganize the Italian merchant navy in the 1920s. His son Galeazzo grew up inside that world of glamour, political access, and loose ethical lines, and he maintained that high-profile lifestyle almost until the end of his life. Both father and son marched with Mussolini to Rome in 1922, planting Galeazzo firmly inside the inner circle before he had built a career of his own.

• 3. Diplomat, Son-in-Law, Heir

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  After studying Philosophy of Law at the University of Rome, Galeazzo Ciano worked briefly as a journalist before choosing diplomacy. He served as an attache in Rio de Janeiro and later in Beijing, where, according to Mrs. Milton E. Miles, he met Wallis Simpson in the 1920s. That account, which was never substantiated, alleged an affair and its consequences. What is documented is that on the 24th of April 1930, at twenty-seven years old, Ciano married Edda Mussolini, the Duce's daughter, and the couple soon left for China, where he served at the Italian Legation in Beijing and later as Italian consul in Shanghai. The marriage made him a near-member of the ruling family, and it shaped every appointment that followed. On his return to Italy in 1935, Mussolini named him minister of press and propaganda. That same year he volunteered as a bomber squadron commander in the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, received two silver medals of valour, and reached the rank of captain. His future political adversary Alessandro Pavolini served in the same squadron, as a lieutenant. When Ciano returned from Ethiopia in 1936, his homecoming was loudly celebrated, and Mussolini appointed him Foreign Minister, the second most visible position in the Italian state.

• 4. The Diary and Its Doubts

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  Shortly after becoming Foreign Minister in 1936, Ciano began keeping a diary, and he maintained it until his dismissal from that post in 1943. Its pages recorded meetings with Mussolini, Hitler, the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreign ambassadors, and other figures at the centre of wartime Europe. In 1937 the diary registered his alleged involvement in planning the murder of the brothers Carlo and Nello Rosselli, two anti-fascist exiles killed in the French spa town of Bagnoles-de-l'Orne on the 9th of June that year. That same year Ciano was named an Honorary Citizen of Tirana, Albania, before Italy's formal annexation of the country in 1939. The diary also captured his private misgivings about the war. When Mussolini declared war on France in 1940, Ciano wrote: "I am sad, very sad. The adventure begins. May God help Italy!" He privately warned neutral Belgium of the impending German campaign in France, leaking what he knew before the attack. His comments about Mussolini grew increasingly derogatory from 1941 onward, and he was surprised when those remarks were reported back to the Duce. Friends urged moderation; he ignored them. Two smaller slights compounded the damage. He was excluded from a planned meeting between Mussolini and Franco, and he was reprimanded for a rowdy celebration of an aviator in Bari. He wrote to Mussolini that the Duce had "opened a wound in him which can never be closed." These were not the words of a man who understood the fragility of his own position.

• 5. The Vote That Sealed His Fate

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  By late 1942, the Axis war was unravelling. Defeats in North Africa, setbacks on the Eastern Front, and an Anglo-American assault on Sicily pushed Ciano to actively seek Italy's exit from the conflict. Mussolini silenced him by removing him as Foreign Minister, along with the rest of the cabinet, on the 5th of February 1943. Ciano was offered the ambassadorship to the Holy See and presented his credentials to Pope Pius XII on the 1st of March 1943, remaining in Rome and watched closely by Mussolini. Then came the 24th of July 1943. Mussolini summoned the Grand Council of Fascism to its first meeting since 1939, prompted by the Allied invasion of Sicily. At that session, Mussolini announced that the Germans were considering evacuating the south of Italy. Dino Grandi responded with a blistering attack, putting before the Council a resolution that would restore King Victor Emmanuel III's full constitutional powers. The motion passed by 19 votes to 8. Ciano voted in favour. Mussolini did not expect the resolution to carry real force and arrived for work the following morning as usual. That afternoon the king summoned him to Villa Savoia and dismissed him. Mussolini was arrested as he left the building. Mussolini's replacement as head of government was Pietro Badoglio, a general who had served in both World Wars.

• 6. Flight, Betrayal, Execution

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  The new Italian government dismissed Ciano from his ambassador's post and placed him and Edda under home arrest. Fearing prosecution, the couple secretly sought German help. On the 27th of August 1943, they fled their villa covertly with their three children and were evacuated on a German military plane from Ciampino airport to Munich. They applied to be transferred to neutral Spain to wait out the war. The Germans refused. Furious at Ciano's vote against Mussolini, they handed him over to Mussolini's new government, the Italian Social Republic, formed on the 23rd of September 1943. Under German and Fascist pressure, Mussolini agreed that Ciano was a traitor. A trial at Verona found him guilty. On the 11th of January 1944, Ciano was executed by firing squad alongside four others who had also voted for Mussolini's ousting: Emilio De Bono, Luciano Gottardi, Giovanni Marinelli, and Carlo Pareschi. As an additional humiliation, the condemned men were tied to chairs before they were shot. Edda had tried to negotiate his release by offering his papers to the Germans. Gestapo agents helped her confidant Emilio Pucci, then a lieutenant in the Italian Air Force, recover some of those documents from Rome. When Hitler vetoed the exchange, Edda hid the bulk of the papers at a clinic in Ramiola, near Medesano. On the 9th of January 1944, just two days before her husband's execution, Pucci helped Edda escape across the border to Switzerland, carrying five diaries covering the war years, which she buried beneath a rose garden.

• 7. What the Diaries Left Behind

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  Ciano's diaries covering 1939 to 1943 were first published in English in London in 1946, edited by Malcolm Muggeridge. A complete English version followed in 2002. At the Nuremberg Trials, the diaries were used by the prosecution against Hitler's Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. William Shirer drew on them when writing his 1960 book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The four-hour HBO documentary-drama Mussolini and I, released in 1985, featured Anthony Hopkins in the role of Ciano. An earlier film, The Verona Trial, made in 1962 by Carlo Lizzani, had Frank Wolff play the part. Ciano's son Fabrizio, who was born in Shanghai on the 1st of October 1931 and died in San Jose, Costa Rica, on the 8th of April 2008, wrote a personal memoir with the title Quando il nonno fece fucilare papa, which translates as When Grandpa Had Daddy Shot. In Serbia, a proverb took Ciano's name: "Living like Count Ciano" describes a flamboyant and luxurious life. The phrase encodes something the official record cannot quite capture: the spectacle of a man who spent his life at the extreme edge of power and comfort, and whose diaries now serve as one of the primary windows into how that world actually worked from the inside.