Rome, April 7th, 1926: The people in the Piazza del Campidoglio burst into frenetic cheers when Benito Mussolini descended the stairs of the Senator's Palace that morning.
The Italian politician has just opened the 7th International Congress of Surgeons.
Suddenly there is a loud bang: a thin, white-haired woman in a black dress, only a few meters away from the "Duce", is clutching a revolver with outstretched arms.
She pulls the trigger again, but this time her gun is jammed.
The grazing shot injured Mussolini's nose and blood runs down his face.
If he hadn't spontaneously turned to the side when students were singing the fascist hymn "Giovinezza", he would probably no longer be alive.
After a moment of shock, bystanders pounce on the assassin, a 49-year-old Irish woman.
The police arrest the woman and take her away before the angry crowd can lynch her.
Violet Gibson could have changed world politics that day.
Four assassinations were carried out on Mussolini in total - but no one came closer to the "Duce" than Gibson.
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Only the nose injured: Mussolini shortly after the attack
Photo: Topical Press Agency / Getty Images
Who was this woman?
And why did she want to kill the Italian dictator?
Forgotten for decades, Ireland now wants to posthumously honor the Mussolini assassin with a plaque as a “committed anti-fascist”.
Noble rebel
Born in Dublin in 1876, Violet Albina Gibson grew up in a sheltered upper class family.
Her father, the conservative politician Edward Gibson, served as Irish Lord Chancellor and was raised to the nobility.
At the age of 18 Violet came to the court of the British Queen Victoria as a debutante.
She wanted to break out of these illustrious circles and converted to Catholicism at the age of 26 - an affront to her Protestant family.
The British journalist Frances Stonor Saunders describes in her book "The Woman Who Shot Mussolini" how Gibson was drawn to religious mysticism and socialist ideals.
Soon people began to wonder about their state of mind.
In 1916 she retired to a Jesuit house in London.
Gibson has been described as quick-tempered and apparently prone to violent outbursts.
At the same time she saw herself as a chosen one of God.
In Kensington she was seen walking the streets with a kitchen knife in hand.
She once left her Bible open at the point in the Old Testament about the God-commanded sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham.
When Violet Gibson traveled to Italy in late 1925, her best friend Enid feared she might murder someone there - possibly even the Pope.
But first Gibson, who was staying with her maid in a Roman monastery, tried to extinguish her own life.
"Crazy Foreigner"
After attempting suicide, Gibson was twice admitted to a psychiatric clinic - after the failed attempt on Mussolini, Gibson was taken to the Le Mantellate women's prison in Rome.
Since she remained silent about the allegations, the investigation made slow progress.
For the line-loyal Italian press, she was above all the "crazy foreigner": an eccentric old maid from Ireland and a mentally ill individual perpetrator who did not want to live up to the ideal of a fascist wife and mother.
However, Epifanio Pennetta, chief of the Roman criminal investigation department, suspected that Gibson might have had accomplices.
Could she have been involved in a major political plot?
After all, Mussolini had had numerous enemies since his "March on Rome" in 1922 at the head of the Italian government.
About half a year before Gibson's act, the police had barely been able to prevent the Socialist MP Tito Zaniboni from shooting the "Duce" from a hotel window.
"I suffer for a just cause"
The investigations into the Gibson case ran in all directions, hundreds of witnesses were interrogated - mostly without success: the Irish woman had hardly left any traces during her stay in Rome.
However, her prison diary provides information about possible motives: "You can kill me, but I will not talk," Gibson noted on May 2, 1926.
“I suffer for a just cause. (...) Zaniboni and his friends are worthy of me. We will find followers and admirers in Italy and overthrow the tyrant. I love Italy, and I am showing great proof of my love by sacrificing myself and going to prison and asylum for the country, for its freedom. "
In the 2010 documentary "L'enigma di Violet Gibson" (The Riddle of Violet Gibson), the author Lucio Trevisan expresses the thesis that police chief Pennetta actually thought the Irish woman was a simulator.
However, this realization put him in a quandary: If it had been found that Gibson was in his right mind, it would have severely disrupted the then good relations between Italy and Great Britain.
"We will find supporters and admirers in Italy and overthrow the tyrant."
Violet Gibson
By telegram, the British King George V expressed his relief that nothing bad had happened to Mussolini.
Assistance expressed to him next to Pope Pius XI.
also the presidents of Germany, France and the United States.
Investigators feel in the dark
To solve the case, Italian police targeted Liberal Catholics and anti-fascists living abroad.
A hot lead seemed to lead to Paris: An imprisoned anarchist declared that Violet Gibson's brother William was in contact with anti-fascist circles in France.
None of these suspicions could be substantiated, although Gibson broke her silence for a short time: During an interrogation, she accused the nobleman Giovanni Colonna di Cesarò of having instigated the assassination attempt and even handed over the weapon to her.
The fascist regime could have gotten rid of an uncomfortable political opponent in Colonna di Cesarò, but did not find any solid evidence in this case either.
Mussolini's version of a mentally ill assassin came in handy: it helped to rebut the hypothesis of an organized anti-fascist movement.
Because Gibson was not the only person who tried to kill the "Duce" in 1926
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Anteo Zamboni: The boy who allegedly shot Mussolini
Photo: mauritius images / Alamy
On September 11th, the anarchist Gino Lucetti hurled an explosive device at Mussolini's car in Rome.
And on October 31 - the very day Gibson was transferred from prison to a psychiatric hospital in Rome - Mussolini survived another attempted assassination: someone had fired a shot at the dictator while he was driving through Bologna in an open car .
Immediately after the attack, the fascist "black shirts" lynched the 15-year-old messenger boy Anteo Zamboni, son of an anarchist family.
But the truth never came out.
Even assumptions that the crime was actually the work of opponents of the »Duce« in its own ranks were not confirmed by the police investigations.
"I just hope that you have a heart"
According to the Italian historian Nicola Tranfaglia, the successive assassinations were beneficial to Mussolini: they enabled the "Duce" to expand his state apparatus of repression.
The opposition in the country was systematically eliminated through the repressive "Leggi fascistissime".
The newly created "Special Court for the Protection of the State" declared Violet Gibson to be mentally insane.
She was deported to her homeland on May 13, 1927;
Immediately upon arrival she was examined by British doctors and locked in a psychiatric hospital in Northampton until the end of her life in 1956.
To regain her freedom, Gibson wrote to Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1940, and seven years later to Princess Elizabeth of Windsor, now Queen.
"I just hope you have a heart," Gibson pleaded with the princess.
But this and numerous other letters did not reach their recipients - because they were never sent.
Late rehabilitation
In contrast to other anti-fascist resistance fighters, Violet Gibson fell into oblivion: the eccentric, psychologically unstable assassin was not suited to be a heroine, neither in Ireland nor in Italy.
“Her name disappears, she becomes the 'foreigner' who carried out an assassination attempt on Mussolini.
The hand of the stranger is never the hand of a friend, «says the Italian historian Rosanna De Longis in the TV documentary» L'enigma di Violet Gibson «.
The public has only recently become aware of Gibson Schicksal: The book by Stonor Saunders, published in 2010, served as a template for a radio feature and the documentary "Violet Gibson, The Irish Woman Who Shot Mussolini", made in 2020 by Irish director Barrie Dowdall.
65 years after Gibson's death, her hometown now wants to rehabilitate the Mussolini assassin: the city council of Dublin decided in February 2021 to put up a plaque for her.
"It is time to put Violet Gibson into the limelight and to give her a rightful place in the history of Irish women and in the history of the Irish nation and people," said independent councilor Mannix Flynn, initiator of the plaque .
It is to be built at 12 Merrion Square - the location of Gibson's childhood home.