Experts are examining 1930s diaries that might be those of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, but sceptics included a British historian who said he doubted they would be useful to history.

Senator Marcello Dell'Utri said expert examination was continuing.

"About their authenticity, I can't say anything but they have all the ring of being true," he said.

Mussolini granddaughter Alessandra Mussolini, a right-wing politician, said she had no doubts about their authenticity and predicted the journals would help to interpret her grandfather more objectively.

According to Dell'Utri, diaries spanning 1935-1939, to roughly the time the Second World War began, were held by the children of an Italian partisan who was among the resistance fighters who captured Mussolini in spring 1945.Dennis Mack Smith, a British historian who has written extensively about Italy, including a biography of Mussolini, said a farmer showed him the journals some 20 years ago. "I spent the whole night" looking at them and read the entries for 1937, Smith said. "They looked to me as genuine as I can imagine" but the writings contained "nothing seriously new that the world needed to know".

Smith said the farmer wanted a lot of money for them but he turned them down.

While it was "very plausible" the diaries were written by Mussolini, the entries had "nothing to do with politics, with his psychology", Smith said. "These things are not worth paying money for."

The entries were mainly about mundane events, Smith said, along the lines of "I went down to see my children".

Italian historians were either cautiously curious or downright sceptical. "So many of these Mussolini diaries have come out and almost all of them turned out to be false," said Giovanni Sabbatucci.-AP