who seized power in italy in 1922?
Benito Mussolini
entailment
 From mid @-@ April Mussolini based himself in Milan , and he and his government took up residence in the city 's Prefecture . At the end of the month , the partisan leadership , the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale Alta Italia ( CLNAI ) , declared a general uprising in the main northern cities as the German forces retreated . With the CLNAI 's assumption of control in Milan and the German army in northern Italy about to surrender , Mussolini fled the city on 25 April and attempted to escape north to Switzerland . 

contradiction
 The debate over the proposed national constitution became moot when news of Italian troop movements in Tyrol and near the Venetian border reached Vienna in April 1866 . The Austrian government ordered partial mobilization in the southern regions ; the Italians responded by ordering full mobilization . Despite calls for rational thought and action , Italy , Prussia , and Austria continued to rush toward armed conflict . On 1 May , Wilhelm gave von Moltke command over the Prussian armed forces , and the next day he began full @-@ scale mobilization . 

neutral
 On the evening of Mussolini 's capture , Sandro Pertini , the Socialist partisan leader in northern Italy , announced on Radio Milano : 

entailment
 Mussolini had ruled Italy as its fascist leader since 1922 ( and as dictator with the title Il Duce from 1925 ) and had taken the country into World War II on the side of Nazi Germany in June 1940 . Following the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943 , Mussolini was deposed and put under arrest ; Italy then switched sides and joined the Allies . Later that year , he was rescued from prison in the Gran Sasso raid by German special forces and Hitler installed him as leader of the Italian Social Republic , a German puppet state set up in northern Italy and based at the town of Salò near Lake Garda . By 1944 , the " Salò Republic " , as it came to be called , was threatened not only by the Allies advancing from the south but also internally by Italian anti @-@ fascist partisans , in a brutal conflict that was to become known as the Italian civil war . 

contradiction
 On 25 April 1945 , known as festa della liberazione , the government of Benito Mussolini fell . The Italian Social Republic had existed for slightly more than one and a half years . 
