ALTHOUGH he was one of Italy’s leading jazz musicians, playing the piano at an international level in a mainstream style, it is probable that Romano Mussolini owed some of his fame to also being the third son of the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

Although he seldom talked about his upbringing until his later years, he had fond memories of family life at the recently reopened Villa Torlonia in Rome, where, as a boy, he lunched daily in the ornate neoclassical mansion with his father, his brothers, Vittorio and Bruno, and his sisters, Edda and Anna Maria.

As the only survivor of his generation of the family he published a memoir Il Duce, My Father in 2004. The book was an attempt to throw his weight behind recent revisionist historians in their efforts to reassess Mussolini’s reputation and rehabilitate him in Italian culture.

Romano’s views — that his father was not as ruthless or totalitarian as Hitler, and that the dictator had expected to be put on trial in the United States — together with an interview with the newspaper Il Giornale in which he said that anti- Semitic attitudes “were not in the Italians’ or my father’s nature”, did not go down well with those whose families were tortured or killed during Il Duce’s regime.

Such revisionism did not go unopposed, however. Professor Emilio Gentile, the leading expert on Italian fascism — “Mussolini,” he said, “was a dictator who destroyed freedom, who destroyed parliamentary government and was a great megalomaniac” — was at the forefront of the movement to refute Romano’s attempts to cast his father’s life in a more positive light.

Born in 1927 in Forlì in the Po valley, Romano Mussolini enjoyed a privileged childhood, until the early years of the Second World War. In 1943 he began experimenting with playing jazz on the piano, and was a largely self-taught musician.

After his father and his mistress, Carla Petacci, were shot while trying to escape to Switzerland in April 1945, Romano assumed a low profile, and after the war he launched his professional career as a pianist under the pseudonym “Romano Full”. By the mid-1950s, however, he had established a considerable national reputation under his own name, playing and recording with the trumpeter Nunzio Rotondo.

He led his own trio from the late 1950s onwards, the Romano Mussolini All Stars, and in 1959 supported a number of international guests, notably the Swedish baritone saxophonist Lars Gullin, the singer Helen Merrill and the American trumpeter Chet Baker, on visits to Italy. Baker was notorious for his drug dependency, and Mussolini remembered him as “dangerous to be around”, because of constant investigations by narcotics police. On the other hand, the pianist claimed not to remember the laid-back trumpeter’s first words to him, delivered in the hip tones of the ultra-cool jazzman: “Gee, it’s a drag about your old man.” They worked together at the Santa Tecla club in Milan, where, according to Baker’s biographer, James Gavin, “audiences flocked to see the younger Mussolini and a famous junkie on one stage”.

In 1963, leading his own band once more, Mussolini won the Italian critics’ album of the year prize for Jazz at Studio 7. At the same time, his style began to move from the cool West Coast modern jazz favoured by Gullin and Baker to more romantic fare, and by the following decade he was recording moody albums such as Mirage and Soft and Swing, leavened by his occasional high-octane jam sessions with the expatriate US clarinettist Tony Scott, who had settled in Rome.

By the 1980s, although his natural style on record had now developed further into one that drew heavily on Oscar Peterson’s playing, Mussolini began to play an even more traditional repertoire in public, recording with the guitarist Lino Patruno in his touring tribute to Louis Armstrong, as well as playing a very similar repertoire with the Austrian trumpeter Oscar Klein.

He was a favourite at Italian festivals throughout the 1990s and recently appeared as a guest at Europe’s biggest traditional jazz festival at Ascona in Switzerland with Patruno.

However, his name was more widely known in recent years for his controversial writings on his father, and through the high-profile right-wing political career of his daughter, Alessandra, a member of the Alternativa Sociale party, a parliamentary deputy for Naples and an MEP. Her mother was Mussolini’s first wife, Maria Scicolone, the sister of the actress Sophia Loren. He had a second daughter, Elisabetta with Scicolone, and a third, Rachele, by his second wife, the actress Carla Puccini. All three daughters survive him.

Romano Mussolini, jazz pianist and bandleader, and youngest son of Benito Mussolini, was born on September 26, 1927. He died on February 3, 2006, aged 78.