Il Duce and His Women Read online

  IL DUCE

  AND HIS WOMEN

  ALMA BOOKS LTD

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  243–253 Lower Mortlake Road

  Richmond

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  Il Duce and His Women first published by Alma Books Limited in 2011

  Copyright © Roberto Olla, 2011

  Printed in Great Britain by CPI Mackays

  ISBN (HARDBACK): 978-1-84688-135-0

  ISBN (TRADE PAPERBACK): 978-1-84688-146-6

  EPUB eISBN: 978-1-84688-202-9

  MOBI eISBN: 978-1-84688-203-6

  All the material in this volume is reprinted with permission, presumed to be in the public domain or reproduced under the terms of fair usage. Every effort has been made to ascertain and acknowledge the copyright status of all the material cited, but should there have been any unwitting oversight on our part, we would be happy to rectify the error in subsequent printings.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: The Blacksmith’s Strength

  Chapter 2: Three Knives

  Chapter 3: Youth and Dances

  Chapter 4: Exiles in Switzerland

  Chapter 5: Teacher, Soldier and Journalist

  Chapter 6: The Two Racheles and Prison

  Chapter 7: Banquets and Drawing Rooms

  Chapter 8: Scent of a Woman

  Chapter 9: More Weapons, More Mistresses

  Chapter 10: A Corpse in the Naviglio Canal

  Chapter 11: A Military Encampment

  Chapter 12: A Woman’s Influence

  Chapter 13: In Bed with the Leader

  Chapter 14: The Art of Power

  Chapter 15: Beyond Good and Evil

  Chapter 16: The Brand of Fascism

  Chapter 17: Home Is Where the Heart Is

  Appendices

  Appendix 1: Mussolini and the Crowd

  Appendix 2: Key Figures

  Notes and References

  Index

  IL DUCE

  AND HIS WOMEN

  Introduction

  Sex and politics, sex and power, sex and violence: this book is about sex, and readers should know this before they begin to turn its pages and learn about the private life of Benito Mussolini, the man who invented Fascism and became a model for other twentieth-century dictators. Obviously it is possible to write about sex in many different ways; normally it is best to treat the subject with tact, to find words which mediate the reality and an approach which doesn’t weigh the narrative down. In the present case, however, where sources have been cited directly, thus giving a direct contact with the historical truth, tact and elegance have occasionally had to be sacrificed. The sex which is the subject of this book was at the centre of the myth of Mussolini: all the rest turned on this, like a wheel round a hub. His image as a man of power, the supreme man of power, drew directly on the idea of sexual potency as a symbol of eternal youth, physical and political. Many rumours about Mussolini’s potency circulated among women – whispered no doubt, accompanied by blushes – during his twenty-year dictatorship, and in the same way anecdotes, tinged with envy, were bandied about among men. In the taverns and bars no doubt such tales, in frank and frequently off-putting detail, abounded. Such material has been deliberately ignored by academic historians. But this is the nub of the issue in this book, since it deals directly with such accounts. The recent publication of new documents relating to the Duce’s principal mistresses and lovers has made it possible to focus on the sexual dimension – in all its reality – which lay at the heart of the cult of Mussolini. And although efforts have been made to tone down some of the more vulgar and violent features found in these accounts, in citing the documents directly such aspects inevitably come to the fore. What kind of sex am I referring to? One example – one quotation – can illustrate this better than lengthy explanations. Mussolini’s remarks to his last mistress, his favourite, Clarice Petacci, known as Claretta, show – with uneuphemistic directness – the way he displayed his sexual potency: “You should be scared of my lovemaking, it’s like a cyclone, it uproots everything in its path. You should tremble. If I could have done, today I’d have entered you on a horse.”1

  What kind of source material has Clarice Petacci provided? She enjoyed keeping her diary, she enjoyed writing in it for the sake of writing, and rereading what she had written to while away the hours of waiting between a telephone call and the next meeting. She wrote quickly, putting down all that she recalled – Mussolini’s outbursts of anger, the sensations and emotions she felt, remarks he made: “I’m an animal, I’m made like that, I resist and then I fall. It’s like screwing a whore, as if I’d gone with a whore.”2 Clarice-Claretta makes small mistakes in spelling, she gets certain names wrong – Roosevelt’s for example – or words which are unfamiliar to her like “pederast”. She transcribed all she could as quickly as she could, and the errors she makes in her speed are, in one sense, evidence of her real wish to write down in her diary as faithfully as possible everything she heard and experienced. “Thus she was recounting as accurately as possible – and as much as she was able to – what Mussolini said to her, even when some of the names he mentioned were unknown to her. She was certainly not stupid; leaving aside the question of sex, one might say that in a manner of speaking she was exactly the right person for the job. She was good at listening and remembering what she heard. Sometimes she intervened with a comment of her own.”3

  So Clarice-Claretta was far from being a “silly goose of a girl” like some of the giddy-headed mistresses powerful men tend to seek out. She had had a decent education, had studied music and drawing, and came from a solid and prosperous middle-class background. Her father, Francesco Saverio Petacci, was a leading medical doctor who had held the highly prestigious position of “Archiatra Pontificio”, Pope Pius XI’s personal physician. Despite the spelling mistakes and occasional omissions of a subject or verb, her style manages to be both restrained and vivid. Despite her efforts to record them faithfully, when she felt she couldn’t reproduce the deliberately obscene and excessive aspects of Mussolini’s talk, she tried to put matters as delicately as possible, as if the readability of the diary and the pleasure a reader – including herself as a rereader – might take in it mattered to her: “His face is tense, his eyes are burning. I am sitting on the floor; quite suddenly he slides off his armchair onto me, curved over me. I can feel his body strain to unleash itself. I pull him close and kiss him. We make love with a kind of fury; he cries out like a wounded animal. Then he falls exhausted onto the bed; even in repose he looks strong.”4

  There is a story that one day in the 1920s Mussolini decided to drive his sports car himself, putting his usual chauffeur in the passenger seat, and had to stop at a level crossing to wait for a train to pass through. While waiting he opened the door, took off his driving goggles and got out to have a look round. Some women were also waiting to cross and watched him. “He looks like the Duce,” one of them said to general amusement. Mussolini saw them and immediately struck a familiar pose, with hands on hips, chin raised and chest pushed out. One of the young women who was bolder than the others stepped forward and said to him: “Do you know you look a lot like the Duce?” “What would you say if I told you I am the Duce?�
� replied Mussolini. The woman retorted: “Come off it – he’s much better looking.” This is the kind of story or anecdote which frequently crops up in the following pages, according to the situations described, just as they circulated among Italians who lived during the Fascist regime and were told to later generations. The stories are not in the book as part of an attempt to fictionalize the historical account; they represent an aspect or element of the myth of Mussolini the Duce which needs to be acknowledged and examined. He himself liked to be kept informed of the stories and rumours that circulated about him, even the anti-Fascist ones so long as they centred on him and his personality. They must have been common in the daily life of the Italians living under the regime: uncles or other relatives could feel safe in passing on to their families the latest anecdote they’d heard, or friends chatting in the coffee bar or taking a weekend stroll together could swap stories about their leader’s private life. There was always someone who’d heard something from someone else, someone who’d actually set eyes on him, even if only from a distance: Mussolini’s closely shaved “Roman” head, which fascinated women; Mussolini’s jutting square jaw; Mussolini with his cat, on his horse, playing his violin, fondling his pet lion, driving his Torpedo, in swimming trunks, with his blazing eyes and powerful naked torso, with a look of gritty determination at the wheel of his racing car or an air of daring at the controls of his plane. Whoever had seen the Duce close up – and lots of people had – had a story to tell those who hadn’t been so lucky. All these voices, all these people with their stories, created a huge wave of popular consensus, filling in, like some kind of putty, the cracks and gaps in the vast mosaic of the regime’s propaganda, helping to lend three-dimensionality to the myth: Mussolini the sportsman, Mussolini the aviator, Mussolini the writer, the musician, the dancer, the warrior and even, if need be, Mussolini the peasant. Anti-Fascism too at a popular level thrived on stories and anecdotes, to be told in secret only to trusted friends, otherwise one risked ending up in forced internment or in prison. A booklet – by a pseudonymous “Calipso” – was published in Rome in the immediate wake of the city’s liberation in 1944 with the title Vita segreta di Mussolini (Mussolini’s Secret Life); it is made up entirely of such stories in a kind of anthology designed to dismantle his myth and reveal his narrow-minded pettiness, coarseness, vulgarity and violence. These stories had circulated widely during the years of the regime, cropping up in very different contexts – political news, social gossip, wartime reports – and provided the booklet’s author with ample source material.

  Mussolini was not handsome, he wasn’t slim or tall, his demeanour wasn’t elegant – in short, he had none of the physical characteristics which normally attract the attention of the public. And yet, despite this, a vast number of Italians formed a kind of psychological symbiosis with the image of his body: women desired it and men admired it. There’s a fascinating insight – all the more fascinating because it’s an intuition, jotted down just as it occurred, rather than elaborated in a finished work – in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last book, which he didn’t live to complete: Petrolio. The book was going to be an exploration of Fascism and the Partisan Resistance, a kind of “novel made up of novels” which would present a panorama of Italy’s history up to more recent events. Pasolini’s murder in 1975 means we do not know how the project would have developed, but among the drafts of the two thousand pages he was planning, we find this passage: “There are things – even highly abstract or spiritual matters – which are only experienced through the body. When they are experienced through other bodies they are different. What our fathers experienced with their bodies can no longer be lived through ours. We can try to reconstruct their experience, to imagine and interpret it – in other words, we write history. But history is so absorbing a study (more than any other branch of knowledge) precisely because what is most important in it is irremediably lost to us.”5

  Il Duce and His Women concludes with the invasion and conquest of Ethiopia in 1936 and Mussolini’s official visit to Germany in 1937 amid acclaiming crowds orchestrated by the Nazi propaganda machine. There are two reasons for ending the volume at this point. The first is that the visit to Germany represents the critical turning point in Mussolini’s political development, what Renzo De Felice has described in his biography as the moment of decisive change. Other historians have acknowledged De Felice’s thesis, including George L. Mosse who, in a letter to De Felice written on 25th August 1981, said: “Your theory that Mussolini changed course after the war in Ethiopia is highly convincing and well documented. It seems to me that after this change Hitler and Mussolini were closer ideologically speaking, at least as far as certain aspects are concerned.”6 Needing to choose a point at which to conclude the present volume, therefore, the defining rapprochement between Hitler and Mussolini seemed the most appropriate one. The second reason for interrupting the story in 1937 is that not all the sources on the following period in Mussolini’s private life have yet been made available to researchers. These are the years which saw the development of his intense relationship with Claretta Petacci up to the day of their deaths when they were both shot in Giulino di Mezzegra, or in the house belonging to the De Maria family, or perhaps somewhere else entirely in the area north of Lake Como, depending on which reconstructed version of the facts one chooses to believe.

  Faced with a dictator who is shot with his mistress at the end of the cruellest war humanity has ever experienced, it must be obvious that a detailed historical study of Mussolini’s private life and of the influence which it had over his public existence and political career is needed. Proper historical research has been impeded by the inaccessibility of the relevant written sources, leaving the field free for chance compilations of the few documents and first-hand reports which have from time to time come to light and which avid publishers of all kinds have seized on, much to De Felice’s scorn: “Nowadays the people who killed Mussolini are everywhere in the papers and magazines and books, offering their bargain-basement wares of absurd eyewitness accounts and revelations.”7 De Felice himself was not allowed access to the Petacci papers held in the national archives in Rome. As a result, this period of history has been for too long the happy hunting ground for non-professional historians – enthusiastic amateurs, journalists, collectors, seekers of memorabilia and dealers. The recent publication, in 2010, of some of the letters exchanged between Mussolini and his mistress at the time of the Repubblica Sociale Italiana (Italian Social Republic), the so-called Repubblica di Salò (Republic of Salò) (1943–45), only shows how urgently a proper critical edition of all the papers in the Petacci archive is needed. Just from these letters a surprising and hitherto unsuspected portrait begins to emerge of someone who played a significant role in the events of the time: not merely Mussolini’s leading mistress, intent on defending her territory against rival claimants, the old flames like Romilda Ruspi, Alice De Fonseca Pallottelli and Angela Curti, but a young woman who gradually takes on the role of political counsellor, the leader of a faction. With shrewd ability she moved behind the scenes in a power struggle between Mussolini and Hitler, between the former’s residual authority and the control which was imposed by the latter through his various plenipotentiaries. The sexual relationship between Petacci the favourite mistress and the dictator now in terminal decline remains fundamental, but the letters show us how she gradually advanced to the front of the stage, in the process becoming perhaps the one person in whom Mussolini could confide his real thoughts and intentions. She never stopped writing, using everything which came to hand – diaries, address books, scraps of paper, the back of letters, even toilet paper when she was held in prison between the fall of the regime on 25th July 1943 and the freeing of Mussolini on 12th September. And she was also careful to keep everything, despite Mussolini’s advice, repeated in many of his letters, to “tear it all up – I urge you to destroy every scrap. If you don’t you’re running a risk which could turn out to be fatal for you.”8

  Only a
full and close study of all the sources which have hitherto been kept back would enable historians to revise their image of Petacci and the role she played, beyond the gossip column or the historical romance, as a thinking and active political protagonist. Frivolous Claretta is gradually superseded by a determined Clara, the first lady in the regime’s final days, intent on steering a defeated Mussolini into a post-war future, one in which, whatever shape it might take, he would be around to use his skills as a public speaker, as a journalist and as a politician. Much of this final period from 1937 onwards will need to be reassessed in the light of the new sources which are gradually becoming available before one can begin to look again at the dictator’s private life. One example which stands out is Petacci’s role in the decision to execute Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law, who finally sided with other leading Fascists against him. She doesn’t let up her pressure on Mussolini to go ahead with the execution and thus take her revenge – a violent and tragic one – on his favourite daughter, Edda, Ciano’s wife: “She’s forfeited her right to plead family ties. It’s easy to play the penitent now their attempt to get rid of her father has failed. When you’ve betrayed your own family once, you’ll do it again – it’s useless for her to pretend otherwise.”9 This new version of Clara even advises Mussolini on how to handle his political relations with Hitler, telling him to show proper gratitude to the German dictator for rescuing him from captivity but at the same time not to concede an inch for fear of finding himself completely subjugated to the Nazis. When in March 1944 a general strike was declared throughout the factories of northern Italy – not so much as a challenge to the regime, now in its death throes, as to the ferocious Nazi occupation – Clara analyses the situation lucidly in a letter to Mussolini: “Individual cells are working to undermine… it’s obvious it’s all being coordinated – the whole purpose of the strike is political. But the mass of the workers are striking for more immediate reasons […] and it’s this aspect – which might be called the struggle to live – that the movement’s leaders are using as a cover for their own tactics.”10