[2] Moreover, he claimed in the newspaper Corriere della Sera, these Mussolini diaries were with a lawyer at Bellinzona, in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland.
He said further that the diaries had been found in a suitcase the dictator was carrying when he was caught by partisans in Dongo, at Lake Como, while he was fleeing to Switzerland in April 1945.
Later in February two Italian historians, Emilio Gentile and Roberto Travaglini, independently discovered that these diaries had indeed been forged.
Then-Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who is a close friend to Dell'Utri, also claimed that they are authentic and went so far to quote them in a 2010 OSCE meeting in Paris.
[4] Several elements close to Berlusconi, such as editor Elisabetta Sgarbi or the right-wing newspaper Libero (which distributed copies of the books to its readers in 2011), have also tried to defend the authenticity of the diaries, despite scholarly agreement that they are a forgery.