This amazing and gorgeous historical biography tells the tragic and unknown story of Ida Dasler (Giovanna Mezzogiorno). She falls madly, irrationally in love with a young handsome Socialist Benito Mussolini (Filippo Tami), continuing her affections through his transformation to his new Fascist ideology and selling all her belongings to bankroll his newspaper; they are married and have a child. After the start of WWI, he goes to war and she loses track of him. When she finds him, she discovers that he has married another and rejects both her and their son. She continues to seek him out, to demand he recognize his child, but in his rise to power, he has all the documentation of their relationship destroyed, eventually ordering her institutionalized, with the boy going to a Catholic boarding school. But Ida will not give up without a fight. Master Italian director Marco Bellocchio (Fists in the Pocket) blends newsreel and other archival footage with reenactments, making an epic treatise with emotional power.