ITALY: The Ides of Edda

The view from the villa was superb. But Countess Edda Ciano, nee Mussolini, was not interested. “What I want most of all is that my case be settled one way or the other,” she said. “There is nothing more unbearable than this waiting.”

The widow of Italy’s late Foreign Minister was chafing in internment on Lipari Island, one of her late father’s favorite penitentiaries. When correspondents found her there last week, she pouted and protested: “I had the misfortune to be born in politics . . . but I have never been mixed up in politics.” The Countess eased her light blue slacks, glanced at the bright blue sea. “I was pro-German at the beginning . . . [but] I never worked for the Germans.” She puffed vigorously on an American cigaret. “I want to live the rest of my days on a small island like an ordinary woman.”

Cavaliers & Conquests. Time was, before the dreadful war, when Edda Ciano had been anything but an ordinary woman. Then she was numbered among a rare group of sirens, Italian and German, who wooed Roman society for Hitler and the Axis.

One of this gay crew was Edda’s sister-in-law, lovely, slender Countess Maria Magistrati. Maria had a figure to dream of, even if her taste in brocades was atrocious. True, she had thrown herself away on the obscure Counsellor of the Italian Embassy in Berlin, but her cavaliers were many, her conquests for the union of Naziism and Fascism pleasantly won. Over-dieting finally killed her.

The flaxen-haired, Swedish-born Princess Ann Mari Bismarck and her complacent husband, Prince Otto, had enthralled Rome with their lavish entertainments. Otto had an unlimited allowance from the German Embassy and instructions to let the Princess go her calculated way. Ann Mari’s grande affaire with Ciano’s Chief of Cabinet, ardent Filippo Anfuso, had more than repaid Berlin.

There were several more. Of them all, only Edda was now in the public view. Her interviewers brusquely asked: What had she to complain of? Did not her comfortable detention place her in a special position? Edda flared with her old fire: “I have always been in a special position,” she snapped. “In the end, it will be in a very special position that I will be shot.”

In all probability, she will not be shot.