The marriage certificate of Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini has been put up for auction on eBay .
An antique shop in this northern Italian city wants at least 7,000 euros for the 1915 civil-wedding document by which the 32-year-old Mussolini, then a Socialist agitator, married 35-year-old Rachele Guidi .
The certificate, which has been kept under glass by a Piacenza count for the last 50 years, was said to be in "pristine" condition .
Mussolini and his wife's signatures are "perfectly legible," the antique shop said .
An eBay spokesman said there was "no reason to doubt the document's authenticity" .
He said the successful bidder could have it examined by an expert and return it if it was not authenticated. The document went on eBay early Monday. By mid-afternoon there had been no takers. Rachele Guidi, who came from a peasant family, had already been Mussolini's companion for five years when they married and had given him a daughter, Edda - whose husband he would later have shot as a sign of ruthlessness to Hitler. Mussolini, the unbaptised son of a blacksmith who named him Benito after a Mexican revolutionary, lived in poor conditions with his 'Donna Rachele' until his meteoric rise through the Socialist Party ranks and formation of the Fascist Party .
He eventually married her in church in 1925, three years after he swept to power .
By then she had given him four other children including Romano, a successful jazz player who died earlier this year, father of well-known rightist MP Alessandra Mussolini .
Rachele Mussolini secretly put up with her husband's numerous mistresses and was publicly portrayed as the model Fascist housewife and mother. She remained loyal to Mussolini until the end, and was arrested in 1945 by Italian partisans in Switzerland, shortly after her husband was shot by partisans along with his most famous mistress, Clara Petacci .
Turned over to the Americans as a harmless matron, Rachele Mussolini was released after several months. In later life she ran a restaurant and received a government pension until her death in 1979. (photo: Rachele Mussolini in 1948)
