Benito, meanwhile, having returned from Switzerland, moved after a couple of years to Forlì, to his father's place, and there he met Rachele again; for them it was the classic love at first sight.

[2][3] However, the families disagreed about their relationship, and so in 1909 Benito summoned his father and Rachele's mother and, wielding a revolver, told them that if they did not consent to their marriage, he would kill her and himself.

Many sources agree that Rachel had a stern and authoritarian temperament, sometimes even more so than her husband: she was, for example, opposed to any act of clemency towards her son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano during the Verona trial and worsened, because of this, her relations with her daughter Edda, who called her “the real dictator of the house.”[6] Moreover, in the last months of 1943 she would go every night for two hours to talk with Guido Buffarini Guidi, minister of the interior of the Italian Social Republic, asking him for more severity in order to restore internal order.

She remained loyal to Mussolini until the end but, on 28 April 1945, was not with him when he and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, were captured and executed by Italian partisans.

Although she tried to flee from Italy after World War II, she was arrested in April 1945 in Como, close to Switzerland, by Italian partisans.