Treasure Blog: Mussolini's Bugout Bag

Up in Webster, NY:

History has paid scant attention to the personal effects Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and Claretta Petacci may have been carrying when they were captured by partisans while trying to escape to Switzerland amid a convoy of retreating German troops in April 1945.

The answer may have been stowed away in a bedroom closet in the home of a doctor here for the better part of 65 years, enjoying a much more dignified fate than that of its previous owners.

It was there that Paul Moriconi kept a brown leather suitcase containing a gray gabardine military tunic and matching riding pants, a khaki Italian military shirt and a woolen red dress that were claimed to have been a change of clothes in the possession of Mussolini and Petacci when they were captured.

Moriconi, who practiced medicine in Rochester, N.Y., for decades and died last year, acquired the suitcase when he was an Army corporal stationed in Italy in the waning days of World War II.

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