ROME (Reuters) - Love letters written to Benito Mussolini by his mistress just as the Italian dictator allied himself with Hitler have mysteriously vanished, Italy's national archive said on Tuesday.Claretta Petacci's years of letters to her lover have been shrouded in secrecy for decades, with the state denying historians any access. Now the entire correspondence from the year 1937 has gone missing.
"This material was classified super-sensitive because its content was very personal," said Maurizio Fallace, head of the central state archive in Rome.
Under Italian law, such material has to be released 70 years after it was written, meaning that Petacci's letters from the 1930s are starting to come to light.
The year 1937 is of intense interest to historians as it was then that Mussolini sealed Italy's alliance with Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany and ultra-nationalist Japan.
Fallace was delving into boxes of Petacci's letters to start preparing them for public consultation when he found that the 1937 letters had gone.
"I simply have no idea what happened to them. I dearly hope we will be able to locate them," he told Reuters.
Police are investigating the disappearance.
Petacci was shot dead together with Mussolini by Italian resistance fighters in April 1945.
She had entrusted her letters to friends before trying to flee to Switzerland with her lover, but the state confiscated them in 1950 and they have been collecting dust ever since.
The Interior Ministry has always rejected requests to see the letters, stoking curiosity about their content.
Petacci was the married Mussolini's publicly acknowledged mistress for more than a decade, although he had affairs with a string of other women.
