Mussolini drove his wife to attempted suicide, considered"abandoning" Hitler and thought that if captured by the Allies he would be put on trial in Madison Square Garden, according to his youngest son.

The revelations emerge from Il Duce, My Father, a memoir by Romano Mussolini, 77, the last of the dictator's five children still living.

Signor Mussolini, a respected jazz musician who rarely speaks publicly about his father, said that he had decided to break his silence to record his memories before it was too late.

Benito Mussolini, who ruled Italy for 20 years, was shot dead in April 1945 with his mistress, Clara Petacci, while trying to flee to Switzerland as the remnants of Fascism crumbled.

Nearly 60 years later there are moves to rehabilitate him in Italy, with historians arguing that he was not as ruthless or totalitarian as other dictators.

Romano Mussolini -whose daughter, Alessandra, is a far-right deputy for Naples - said that the revisionists were right to say that Italian Fascism was unlike Nazism or communism.

The 1938 anti-Semitic race laws were"not in the Italians' nature, nor in my father's," he told Il Giornale."We had many Jewish friends. My elder brother, Vittorio, protested violently." In the book, Signor Mussolini judges his father's record"as both man and politician" to have been"90 per cent positive". He says that the"enthusiasm, almost hysteria" shown by Italians for Il Duce was sincere.

When Il Duce was deposed in July 1943, as the Allies advanced, Signor Mussolini writes, his father could have"pressed a button to have the conspirators murdered, as Hitler or Stalin would certainly have done". Instead, he had avoided a bloodbath by obeying a summons from King Victor Emmanuel III, even though he knew he would be arrested.

Mussolini was freed later by German commandos from the Abruzzo mountaintop hotel where he was imprisoned, and set up his last, short-lived Fascist regime, the Republic of Salo, on Lake Garda, under Nazi control.

Signor Mussolini recalls last seeing his father at the family villa on Lake Garda 11 days before his death, and reveals that it was during the final days at the lake that his mother, Donna Rachele, faced the fact that her husband had a serious relationship with Clara Petacci. She had"tried to ignore the affair", even though she was well aware that Mussolini was a womaniser.

Donna Rachele told her sons that although Il Duce had his"defects", he was a good father and husband who had never spent a night way from home and"always fulfilled his conjugal duties", Signor Mussolini says. He found an anonymous letter revealing that Petacci was visiting his father every afternoon, but he threw it away. The two women had a showdown and his mother locked herself in the bathroom and swallowed bleach. She was saved when a maid broke in and called the doctor.

Signor Mussolini recalls that various"bizarre" plans were later devised for his father's escape as Allied victory approached, including a faked car accident.

Signor Mussolini said that Il Duce had always assumed that the Allies would try him if captured, and had even imagined himself on trial in Madison Square Garden,"with people looking at me as if I was a caged wild beast".

His father had considered"abandoning Hitler to his fate" after the United States entered the war, and regarded the German decision to invade the Soviet Union as a"fatal mistake". But he had felt bound to honour his pact with Nazi Germany.