Il Duce and His Women

by Roberto Olla

  It would be hard to find teachers who had not in their time confiscated knives and blades from among the desks of their worst pupils, those singled out for black marks from their first day at school. These were not unusual incidents in Italian schools. More than fifty per cent of the population was illiterate. The school-leaving age was fixed by law at nine years, in other words, the end of the second year of primary school, one of the lowest in Europe, but even so it was difficult to enforce it. Textile, paper-making and tobacco factories continued to employ children aged eight or even younger, paying them less than half what an adult worker earned. In the countryside the carabinieri had to go round to families to try to persuade them to send their children to school, and so in the process deprive themselves of a valuable extra source of labour. Each year saw a slight increase in the number of children who arrived in makeshift classrooms, like the one run by Mussolini’s mother. In a language – Italian – with which few of them were familiar, these boys and girls started to learn about a culture which didn’t always fit with the habits and traditions they knew at home, where they would return at the end of the school day.

  It was therefore normal that lads from families of smallholders or farmers, even very young ones, knew how to handle a knife. But it wasn’t normal at all that a lad like this would use one to wound a classmate. The very harsh reaction of the institution merely mirrored the violence endemic among children. On the day – 24th June 1893 – Mussolini first used a knife to stab his classmate’s hand a schoolmaster had appeared as soon as he heard the shouting. Discipline in the institution – the College of San Francesco di Sales in Faenza – was normally severe, but on this occasion they devised an extraordinary punishment with the aim of instilling fear into the guilty boy and leaving a permanent mark. The priest dragged him away and shut him in a small room: “Tonight you’ll sleep with the guard dogs. A boy who tries to kill his classmates isn’t fit to associate with them.”2 When he was left out in the yard at night, he found the ferocious dogs were kept untied; he managed to climb over a gate just in time to shake off – as he tells the story – a dog who had bitten him in the seat of his trousers.

  The second episode involving a knife – on 14th January 1894 – also produced shouts which attracted attention and brought the principal of the boarding school in Forlimpopoli running up. He found one boy writhing in pain with a blade stuck in his bottom while the other was standing stock still. The college – this time a non-religious one – decided it would be better not to have a boy among its students who was so quick to attack a fellow pupil with a knife, and their decision was final. They may have tried to soften the impact of the verdict by phrasing it differently, but for Mussolini it meant only one thing: expulsion.

  Little is known about the circumstances of the third incident when Mussolini wielded a knife: what he casually calls in his first autobiography “rows” must really have been fights in which the couple came to blows. He picked up a knife, used it against a woman, and on this occasion no one was around to punish him. He even recalls with satisfaction selling the knife for enough money to live on in Switzerland. Mussolini himself gives us a glimpse of what his relationships with women were like when he recounts, without misgiving or regret, an episode which took place in the period he was looking for work as a primary-school teacher. He had his eye on a woman: he wrote her first name in his prison notebook, but just put the initial of her surname: Virginia B. (as if she would be difficult to identify in the small town of Varano where the incident happened).

  She was a generous girl. One fine day, when everyone else in Varano had gone to San Cassiano to listen to some pompous sermon from a friar, I led her up some stairs, pushed her into a corner behind a door and had her on the spot. When she got up she was distressed and crying and started to insult me. I had “stained her honour” she said – I’d like to know what kind of honour that was. In any case Virginia didn’t sulk for long. Our affair lasted three months – let’s just say it was more a meeting of bodies than of souls. She came from a poor family, but her skin was wonderfully white and delicate.3

  What occurred was rape by any standards, today’s or indeed those of the time (1901). How many men then indulged in sexual violence of this kind is hard to say, but it was not at all unusual to hear men boasting of such behaviour, as if it was only to be expected of any self-respecting male.

  When we look at his early years, Mussolini does not stand out as different from the common run of men at the time. In his childhood and youth there’s no dramatic family situation involving strange sexual practices or incestuous leanings. We find nothing like Hitler’s perverse attachment to his niece Geli Raubal. In the Führer’s case it’s possible to talk of dysfunctional family relations; his birth is surrounded by mysteries, his authoritarian grandfather kept his grandmother in a state of sexual servitude, there’s a bigamous half-brother, a blackmailing nephew, a mistress – Eva Braun – forced to perform abnormal sexual practices and kept half-concealed between the mountain hideaway of Berchtesgaden and a villa in Munich. Several witnesses testify to the uncontrollable fits of rage which affected Hitler from his youth onwards, the series of failures which led him “to abandon his school full of implacable loathing”.4 What we know instead of Mussolini’s childhood shows him to have been like any other boy growing up in that part of the country, with a violent streak which was “normal” in that society and at that time. He didn’t speak until he was three, which caused his family considerable concern. However, they could afford to pay for him to be examined several times by specialists in Forlì. One of these visits to the doctor contributed a useful piece towards the subsequent myth of Mussolini. He had been accompanied by his grandmother Marianna, who recalled “the doctor, perhaps impressed by the energy of the truculent boy, saying to her, ‘Don’t worry, he’ll speak all right – in fact, I think he might end up speaking too much.’ The grandmother reported the doctor’s words to the family, who remembered them shortly afterwards when, at the age of three, Benito started to talk in an improvised language made up of Italian and dialect words, full of grammatical oddities and nonce words.”5

  Pitched battles in the fields with stones being thrown, hunting after lizards and other small creatures, clambering nimbly up trees to steal some fruit, stealing cages with hunting birds, hazardous escapes from authority, grazed knees: the daily escapades in Mussolini’s early childhood were like those of all his companions. His sister Edvige too liked this kind of life in the open, racing along the riverbanks or trapping small birds. It’s true Mussolini quickly became the leader of a gang, but there were lots of gangs and each had its own leader.

  Another person who had an important influence on Mussolini – in addition to his father, mother and grandmother – was his brother Arnaldo. The pattern of their relations established itself while they were still boys and endured during their lifetimes, forming, in adulthood, a kind of political and human symbiosis. Arnaldo’s calm and reflective character, inclined to mediate, was a useful counterbalance to Benito’s frenetic political activity, first as a socialist and then later when he became a Fascist. “Arnaldo’s temperament was clear right from the start. He was infinitely more patient and good-natured than I was. When I played with the other boys we always ended up fighting, but Arnaldo, as far as I recall, never did. He was gentle and thoughtful. He would restrain me, give me advice and help, and then make sure I was all right by taking me to see Father so I avoided a scolding.”6

  Benito’s school years left lasting marks on him. There’s nothing remarkable to record before he’s nine years old: he was educated first by his mother and then by a primary-school teacher in Predappio. In September 1892, however, he was sent away to the boarding school run by the Salesian brothers. This represented a small victory for his mother: she had grown increasingly worried by his running wild through the fields. Perhaps under the influence of a notoriously bigoted friend of hers, Palmira Zoli, she was confident that the quality of the education provided by the Church
would be better. So the reluctant little boy was sent off to Faenza, accompanied by his father: the image became one of the family’s shared memories.

  An education at the San Francesco di Sales institution was not free. His mother Rosa asked for financial support, a grant to help the family pay the fees, but she was turned down. Her son was enrolled in the third or lowest-paying category of students, at a monthly rate of thirty lire, a lot out of the Mussolini family budget and indeed that of most families, yet for the Salesians this category was reserved only for boys from the poorest backgrounds. “In recognition of the equality preached in the Gospels, the Salesians divided the pupils in the college into three groups who sat at different tables in the school refectory: for the nobility, for the middle ranks and for the common people. The first group paid sixty lire a month, the second forty-five, and the bottom class thirty. So I sat at the commoners’ table, which was also the most crowded.”7

  The food the boys ate was different according to the tables they sat at. At the commoners’ table the bread was often stale and the meals were always meagre and often uneatable. They had to be eaten in strict silence while they listened to one of the older students reading from the Bollettino salesiano, the official journal of the Salesian order. The division of the boys into three categories permeated their daily lives: “I always ate at the bottom of the table among the poorest classmates. I could have learnt to put up with having to eat mouldy bread, full of weevils; what I found – and still find – intolerable was the same division in the classrooms.”8

  The so-called commoners were allowed to take baths, but only in summer – in this way less hot water was used and costs were reduced. Heating was non-existent in 1893: once the last warm days of autumn had gone the boys had to face severe winters. One of the effects of the biting cold on them was chilblains, an unfamiliar affliction nowadays with the changes in lifestyle and nutrition. When they appeared on the hands they were unsightly and painful. Some couldn’t draw because their split skin stained the pages with pus. Some had chilblains on their ears, which swelled up and seemed to grow in size every day. The sufferers were mocked by the other children, who would run after them braying like donkeys. But chilblains on the feet were even a greater problem: the skin would break, and the fact these pupils were not allowed to take a bath only exacerbated their condition. The wounds became infected and the feet, full of blood and pus, started to fester. Some of the boys had heard of an old remedy which consisted in urinating on the wounds; those who were brave enough to try it only demonstrated its inefficacy.

  Despite the severity of the winter, Alessandro Mussolini decided to go to Faenza to check how his son was progressing in that school run by all those priests. He saw him approaching with a limp. He listened to Benito’s faltering explanations and then told him to take off his shoes. A disaster: a kind of mush covered the swollen feet. Denied once again the permission to take a hot bath, Benito had tried to get round the prohibition by washing his feet in cold water – ice-cold water, since that’s what came out of the tap. As a result his chilblains got even worse and he could hardly walk. Alessandro had enough money to pay for his son to see a doctor urgently. He complained vigorously to the Salesian fathers before returning to Predappio, insisting furiously that the advice the doctor had given was followed: the feet were to be washed in hot water and a medicinal powder applied to dry the skin. The priests saw him off and then, in agitated whispers, discussed the situation. They had allowed into their school the son of someone who was a rabble-rouser, a revolutionary: this was the real problem. Chilblains weren’t the problem, they came and went, along with the seasons, the prescribed powder was useless, everyone knew that, only the return of the spring would dry out chilblains, and then a bit of pain never did anyone any harm – and none of the other parents had ever complained. Not a word of protest from any of them except for this socialist ruffian, a man who was plotting to overthrow the King, his country, even God. No, there was only one way to tackle the problem: they had to stay watchful.

  So the priests started to keep the blacksmith’s son under observation, just like the police had done with his father. Once, during a school walk, the nine-year-old Benito wandered off from the group. He was capable of doing it deliberately just to escape the suffocating discipline, but on this occasion it was just by chance he strayed off, not even realizing he’d done so until he was caught and beaten. And that wasn’t the end of it, because his teacher immediately filed a report on the boy’s “attempted escape”. “I was given the punishment of three months in the corner, in other words I had to stand still and silent in a corner of the playground while I watched the other boys at their games.”9 Every day for three months, from 11.30 to midday, immobile and silent in a corner, watching the others play.

  Education among the Salesians followed a set sequence which over the years had proved efficacious. One of the highlights was the preparation for the boys’ first Communion. The prescribed spiritual exercises included prayer, reflection, meditation and lots of sermons, not always very subtle: on one occasion the pupils were taken to hear a brother who explained, with his finger pointing to heaven, how a boy from Turin had been struck dead on the altar because he had dared to approach the Eucharist in a state of mortal sin. All the boys were shocked: the authority of the priest preaching in front of the altar was bolstered by his insertion of numerous circumstantial details. On a much later occasion, when he was an adult and a fiercely committed socialist living in Switzerland, Mussolini remembered that menacingly raised finger when he publicly challenged another priest, as if he was trying to get his own back on the memory. But at the time he too was frightened. He took to observing draconian fasts and was tormented by doubts as to what he should do in case – a terrible eventuality according to the priest – the host stuck to his palate, since it was a mortal sin to push it down your throat with your finger.

  Rosa Maltoni came from Predappio, full of pride, to see her son’s first Communion in the Salesian school chapel. Before Communion Benito went to confession: “I told the priest everything: the sins I’d committed, the sins I hadn’t committed but had thought about, and the sins I had neither committed nor thought about. Melius erat abundare quam deficere – better to have too much than too little.”10

  The course of school life offered the teachers many opportunities to influence their pupils’ development. Once, in the spring term, a terrible event happened: a boy by the name of Achille Paganelli, one of Benito’s classmates, suddenly died. The news was announced briefly in the morning assembly; the astonished pupils were left to reflect by themselves on the mystery of death. There was a large crowd of mourners at the funeral, the whole school, in the different classes each with their teacher, gathered outside the church. When Paganelli’s parents arrived, the crowd opened up, like a sudden rift, to let them through; as they walked through, the couple kept looking for the faces of their son’s classmates and when they recognized one of them they stopped as if they couldn’t move on. The young Benito was struck by the father’s terrible groans: “They seemed hardly human, more like inarticulate moaning, as if his grief had suffocated his ability to weep.”11

  Mussolini’s religious education came to an abrupt end with the stabbing incident in June 1893. By the autumn he’d been transferred to the Regia Scuola Normale in Forlimpopoli, where the headmaster was Valfredo Carducci, the brother of the famous poet Giosuè Carducci; it was under the protection of powerful Masonic lodges in the region and took boys from the increasing number of local families who supported the socialist cause. Now that he was free from the Salesians’ discipline, their constant checks and punishments, Benito Andrea Amilcare started to turn himself into the young revolutionary, the experienced socialist his father had dreamt he would become. Now he could try out some of the phrases he had heard in his father’s forge on his new classmates: “the international proletariat”, “social revolt”, “the fight against capitalism”. One of the teachers decided to alert the carabinieri as a preca
ution. There’s a story – half-chronicle, half-legend – of the time Mussolini persuaded a group of his classmates to go along to a political meeting held by Salvatore Barzilai, a professor of criminology from Trieste, a member of parliament who would go on to have a successful political career, ending up as a cabinet minister and then a senator in 1920. But for Mussolini and his school companions when they went along to hear him, the austere-looking gentleman was a revolutionary republican. Barzilai stopped speaking when he saw them enter the room, and then announced to the audience how pleased he was by the sight; just by daring to enter the room where the meeting was being held they’d shown how courageous they were. They would become, he declared, the young men who would fight to make Trieste part of Italy and so complete the nation’s unification. The audience’s applause made his companions group themselves round Mussolini who, as the story – or legend – goes, calmly proceeded to take notes in a small exercise book. As soon as Barzilai had finished his speech, a hand shot up and someone asked to speak: it was Mussolini. One of his classmates, Rino Alessi, recalled how the local mayor, who was seated next to Barzilai on the platform, tried to prevent the youngster from speaking. “No one can deny me my freedom of speech!” shouted Benito, with the ferocious determination he had seen in some of his father’s socialist friends. He had to defend what was his right. Barzilai held out his hand, inviting him to step up, and Mussolini approached, shook hands with him and began to speak. While he’d been taking notes, he’d rapidly sketched out in his mind what he would say. The heroes and revolutionaries of the Risorgimento had been betrayed, he began. Italy’s middle class thought only about themselves, not about the good of their country and the nation as a whole. But, he went on to say, also the left had lost the faith of the Italian people. It seems improbable that the young Mussolini would have criticized in these terms and at that time the revolutionary left of which his father was one of the leaders; Alessi’s account, like so many others, must have been influenced by hindsight, by later events, subsequent sympathies and rivalries. Mussolini continued to hold forth: party politics were useless, barricades, violence, even assassination was necessary to bring down the monarchy and establish the republic. His words enflamed the audience from Romagna and they roared their approval. Mussolini and his schoolmates left the hall in triumph, almost disdaining to notice Barzilai and the mayor. But the school was worried: even though it was a lay institution and the headmaster was the brother of the poet Carducci, it found such revolutionary fervour from the son of the blacksmith from Predappio disturbing. The young extremist refused to heed his father’s calm advice to show – at least – some moderation in his attitudes.