The story you are about to read is the story of a friendship. It’s not about politics, and it’s not about ‘he also did good things’, as nostalgics of fascism say in Italy. It’s the tale of two men, Benito Mussolini and Pietro Nenni, born in the central Italian region of Romagna, a seemingly placid land that raised a fascist dictator and a socialist leader.

The two grew up in towns 20 kilometers apart, and probably met in 1910, when Mussolini was 27 years old and Nenni 19. The future leader of fascism was at the time a socialist, while Nenni – who would later become the longest-serving secretary of the Italian Socialist Party – was a republican.

Although from different parties, they fought the same political battles, and in 1911 they became neighbors in the town of Forlì, in Romagna. They knew each other and argued about politics, sometimes coming to blows. They were not friends yet but respected each other. ‘They were bound by their passionate temperament’, said Paolo Mattera, professor of History at the University of Roma Tre. ‘Traditional politicians were lecturers. Nenni and Mussolini were tribunes.’ Most importantly, they shared a hatred for the monarchy and the clergy, and in 1911 they were jailed together for one year after protesting the Italian Kingdom’s war in Libya. They played cards and checkers, and they sang ‘The International’ together. They became friends, and for a period also shared the same cell. Their wives also bonded during visiting hours, and once Mussolini’s daughter, Edda, peed on Nenni’s pants while Nenni was holding her. Their families became close to the point that Edda began calling Nenni ‘uncle’.

In their 2015 book, Mussolini e Nenni. Amici e Nemici [Mussolini and Nenni. Friends and Enemies], Alberto Mazzuca and Luciano Foglietta lay out the most recent account of their relationship. (The book was essential for this article, and any quotes not explicitly attributed to others are taken from it.) Around the beginning of World War I, the two friends wrote of each other:

At that time, this is what Nenni thought of his friend:

Mussolini indeed did understand that, but it was certainly not the revolution Nenni hoped for. Initially though, he didn’t realize this, so much so that in 1919 he joined one of the first fascist groups in Bologna for a few weeks.

‘Nenni wasn’t sure where to go’, said Mattera. ‘He believed fascism could still have a revolutionary edge, and joined his old friend’s political groups. But he immediately realized the fascists were anti- proletarian, and realized he had taken the wrong path.’

Mussolini’s nationalist positions would soon morph into fascism, while Nenni became a socialist. At the time, ‘[Nenni] was heavy-handed: “Mussolini is exceeding the limits of any honest and decent controversy; he is the sole monopolizer of patriotism.” […] Nenni touched on the subject of friendship again: “We are bound to Mussolini by a long-standing friendship and by an affection that resists even his unruly shouting, and we do not deny his merits. But he should return to reason; abandon, if he can, the vocabulary of insults.”’

Their political differences became insurmountable. The last time they spoke to each other was in January of 1922, walking on Cannes’s Croisette, nine months before the fascist March on Rome.

It is Nenni, however, who tells us […] about his meeting with Mussolini […]: “The two night owls were talking about their country. Fate was placing them face to face for the last time on equal terms. An old friendship, a common origin, many battles fought together” […] One a former republican turned socialist, the other a former socialist turned fascist, or rather, the leader of the fascists.

According to some sources, on that occasion Mussolini asked Nenni to join him in his political venture, but Nenni refused.

Without realizing it, the two have made it to dawn, a wall of incomprehension has fallen between them, they find themselves at a crossroads with opposing positions. Nenni comments: “Now there’s nothing more to say.”

After Mussolini became the ‘Duce’ in 1922, Nenni fought him and the regime in speeches and articles, to the point that he and his family started being persecuted by the Blackshirts. In 1926, his house in Milan was raided and Nenni decided the time had come to go into exile in France with his family. He would stay there until World War II, campaigning with other anti-fascist exiles against his old friend and against the spread of fascism through Europe. Mussolini despised these subversive fuoriusciti (exiles), considering them enemies of the state.

At the end of 1942, Germany occupied Vichy France and started arresting the anti-fascists hiding there. Mussolini did not want to stand by and watch. ‘Fascism wanted to send them to prison, to confinement, to judge them, to arrest them’, said Antonio Tedesco, director of the Pietro Nenni Foundation and one of the leading experts on the socialist leader. ‘De facto, it saved many well-known anti-fascists from execution or deportation to Germany. But it did it because they were prisoners considered enemies of the Italian regime.’

Rome didn’t have its own police in the area of France where Nenni and other Italian exiles lived, and asked Berlin to arrest and extradite them. A different treatment was reserved for one of Nenni’s daughters, Vittoria. She was also arrested, but she was instead sent to Auschwitz, where she died (Nenni had confirmation of her death only after the war). Too proud to ask Mussolini for help, Nenni would spend the rest of his life suffering from guilt, wondering if he could have saved her if he had requested the Duce to intercede with Hitler.

On 8 February 1943, the Gestapo came for Nenni and informed him that he had been arrested ‘on Mussolini’s orders to be handed over to Mussolini’. But he wasn’t sent to Italy; instead he was dragged on a long journey around Europe in the hands of the Nazis. In fact, as Tedesco explained, the Italian government was not even informed that the arrest had been carried out.

Nenni was sent to a prison in occupied Paris, ‘convinced that sooner or later he would be executed by a firing squad’. He wasn’t, and for the rest of his life he would suspect it was Mussolini – the old friend and cellmate, the fellow countryman from Romagna turned enemy – who had intervened to save his life. From his Paris jail, Nenni managed to communicate with his daughter Eva, who lived in the French capital, and asked her to contact the Italian embassy.

‘Nenni explicitly asked his daughter to hurry: “Please write to Rome to get them to intervene…”’ Tedesco said, mentioning a note he found in the vast Nenni archive stored at the Foundation. ‘He was terrified, like everyone else, of ending up in Germany or Poland. So it was his daughter, Eva, who went to the consulate and informed the Italian government of her father’s arrest.’

On March 13, Nenni left Paris. ‘The news was confirmed to me at the consulate, which immediately wrote to Rome to ask where Dad was’, Eva wrote to a friend, indicating that Rome acted to know about Nenni’s fate and itinerary. On April 5, after 23 days moving from cell to cell across Germany, he arrived at the Italian border on the Brenner Pass. He had not set foot in his homeland for 16 years.

No one knows for sure what happened between the imprisonment in Paris and his arrival in Italy. ‘The grey area, in the mist, is the moment in which Nenni is taken away from the German police and passed to the Italian police’, said Mattera. Was Nenni at a certain point on his way to a concentration camp? Or to a firing squad? And if yes, did Mussolini intervene to save him?

Two plausible hypotheses arise’, said Tedesco. ‘[The historian] Giuseppe Tamburrano argues that it’s plausible that the Germans wanted to keep him, because they realized he was a big shot and therefore a sort of card in their hand against Mussolini.’ It’s also possible, according to Tedesco, simply that bureaucratic errors delayed his arrival in Italy.

‘What we can say for sure is that Mussolini saved him indirectly’, he said. ‘But I think Mussolini didn’t save him on purpose.’ Mattera is more careful to reach a conclusion about the Duce’s role in Nenni’s safe return home, saying that ‘there is no definitive proof’. On their hand, Mazzuca and Foglietta write about ‘a series of testimonies confirming Mussolini’s intervention to save his friend of youth from the hands of the Germans and bring him back to Italy alive.’

What we certainly know is that on more than one occasion, Mussolini proudly declared that Nenni owed him his life.