Il Duce and His Women

by Roberto Olla

  The second stabbing incident led to his expulsion. Mussolini decided to prepare for the school-leaving certificate privately by studying on his own. On 27th January 1901 Giuseppe Verdi died: his funeral in Milan was a great public occasion and drew people from all over the country, with Arturo Toscanini memorably conducting a vast choir during the service. The newspapers were full of the event and every city and town in Italy organized meetings and ceremonies to commemorate the passing of the great composer, among which, as a brief paragraph in the Socialist Party daily Avanti! on 1st February informs us, a speech in memory of Verdi from the party comrade and student Benito Mussolini had been given the previous day. So a young revolutionary came to public attention.

  The future dictator’s childhood then was no different from that of his contemporaries in that part of Italy. What happened to him in the Salesian boarding school happened to others in similar institutions all over the country: in Piedmont, in Sardinia, in Veneto there are innumerable accounts left by generations of students of the inflexible and brutal methods used to educate the boys in their charge and stifle their growing sexuality. Many recall experiences which school discipline failed to suppress, as in Mussolini’s comments on the abdication of Edward VIII, transcribed by his mistress Clara Petacci in 1938: “He’s well known for his addiction to alcohol. His other vice hardly matters in England, almost all Englishmen are like that. In English schools the teachers even get paid to allow it… You find it in Italy, too, though certainly not to the same extent as in England… I remember a fair-haired boy in my boarding school, his name was Dall’Olio, he was pale and thin. All the boys had him, he went from one to another. He tried to come on to me until he realized his mistake. Every night I used to see him going from one boy’s bed to another.”12

  The single most remarkable feature of Mussolini’s school years is the gradual emergence in him of the revolutionary socialist ideas he had learnt from his father. There’s no sense of his being an outsider, a misfit, nothing like this to explain how he later became a dictator. In Angelica Balabanoff’s book entitled Il traditore Mussolini (Mussolini the Traitor) there’s an essay by Maria Giudice, a prominent woman in the Italian Socialist Party. Giudice was the daughter of one of Garibaldi’s followers and had been imprisoned on various occasions for her political views and opposition to Fascism. She was born in 1880 and was therefore only slightly older than Mussolini himself. In her essay Giudice mentions her activities as a lecturer all over Europe at the end of the Second World War, with her insistent message that no country, no people was immune from Fascism. She reminded her audiences of the years when Fascism reigned supreme in Italy: “At the time there were many in other countries who deceived themselves – whether because they were naive, or ignorant, or over-confident, or because they just didn’t want to be bothered – that it could never happen in their countries, they would never have a Mussolini. They didn’t understand that once the conditions are right a Mussolini will emerge.”13 As the nineteenth century drew to a close, Italy too had no Mussolini, but he would emerge – from among the revolutionaries, the Internationalists, the socialists.

  Chapter 3

  Youth and Dances

  On 26th July 1943 the police called at the Roman villa – La Camilluccia – of Mussolini’s best-known, most powerful mistress, Claretta Petacci: she was not at home. The officer in charge, Lieutenant Colonel Giovanni Frignani ordered his men to search the house and later drew up a detailed report. Twenty-four hours earlier, Frignani had arrested Mussolini as he left Villa Savoia after a brief audience with the King, during which the former had been stripped of his role as head of the government – the inevitable outcome of the coup d’état launched the previous night at a meeting of the Gran Consiglio del Fascismo (Grand Council of Fascism) which had voted their leader down. It was also Frignani who some months earlier had discovered hints of Hitler’s secret plans to invade Italy and had gone to Mussolini to warn him, to no avail. Frignani later paid with his life: he was arrested by the Nazis, tortured in front of his wife in the prison cells of the Gestapo headquarters in Via Tasso, and finally, on 24th March 1944, killed in the massacre at the Fosse Ardeatine.

  In those terrible days at the end of July 1943 Frignani had been given an extremely sensitive and dangerous mission. He knew all about the important role Claretta Petacci had played in the events which marked the end of the regime. Cesare Rossi knew Mussolini well and had been one of his leading collaborators until he was removed in the murky aftermath of the murder of the socialist deputy Matteotti. His considered view was that the sixty-year-old dictator was in terrible physical condition. Mussolini had turned sixty in prison, four days after his fall from power and his arrest. He was ageing rapidly. As a politician he had encouraged the cult of youth, had turned the song called ‘Giovinezza’ (‘Youth’) into the anthem of the Fascist movement; now, in the regime’s final crisis, youth seemed more than ever fleeting and remote.

  Mussolini’s power over others was absolute; over himself he had only one option: he had to find some substance which would enable him to exploit his declining physical forces as best he could. Cesare Rossi’s attention was caught by a detail in the report drawn up by Frignani’s officers when they searched the Camilluccia villa: “Together with bundles of love letters from ‘Ben’ – in which Clara’s lover expressed unexpected heights of pathos and which are interesting also from a literary point of view – many tubes of Hormovir pills were found. Claretta’s father – a renowned and enterprising doctor – had taken it upon himself to find a way of increasing the virility of his daughter’s exceptional lover. This discovery reveals one unsuspected cause of Mussolini’s – and Italy’s – tragedy.”1 When Rossi was jotting this down he was being held in the Regina Coeli prison in Rome, waiting to find out what the Allies and the parties forming the new Italian government would decide to do with him: the fact that he had fallen out of favour with Mussolini twenty years earlier was seen as no guarantee of his reliability. “Hormovir” is probably a spelling mistake for an aphrodisiac pill called Hormovin, a German product manufactured in a laboratory in the Ruhr, which must have met the dictator’s requirements, as Rossi describes them, perfectly.2 It was a cocktail of substances: muira puama, yohimbine hydrochloride and pure lecithin – almost as powerful and efficacious as its modern successor Viagra. Muira puama (Ptychopetalum olacoides) came from the Amazon forests, extracted from the bark and, especially, the roots of a shrub which could grow to a height of five metres and which the natives of the region called “strong wood” (muira). The peoples of the Amazon forest used its properties to regain or reinforce their virility, sometimes with an infusion they then applied directly to their genitals. It was a nerve tonic, therefore, a natural aphrodisiac which could help with maintaining an erection and problems generally with one’s sexual performance. The German laboratory cleverly combined the muira puama with yohimbine hydrochloride, which could produce an erection within an hour of taking the substance. A side effect was that it was antidiuretic and could lead to raised blood pressure. The mixture was reinforced by the addition of lecithin, still popular today in supermarkets and health-food shops: active in combating free radicals and cell oxidation, it can also reduce cholesterol and some of the effects of ageing, and helps to increase mental alertness and memory retention. The German laboratory made pills from the three ingredients; the full effect was reached after you took them for three weeks. A sixty-year-old man in the 1940s was very different from a sixty-year-old today: then, in most cases, you were considered elderly. On the verge of sixty, Mussolini needed to exploit what was left of his physical potential to the full, and the aphrodisiac tablets found in his mistress’s villa enabled him to do this. A network of power, of string-pulling and business deals, had grown up round Claretta Petacci and her family: “The Duce had created a secret account for Claretta, officially to enable her to carry out ‘charitable activities’, but the money in it circulated without any form of control or auditing. Buffarini Guidi acted a
s the middle man for the supply of funds; he shrewdly realized how powerful the Petacci clan had become. Claretta and her close friends intervened actively in Mussolini’s political affairs: they proposed names, favoured their own chosen candidates, obtained protection and favours.”3

  But this entire system depended on one thing and one thing only: Mussolini’s continuing relationship with his favourite mistress was reliant on his ability to achieve a sufficient number of erections. The Duce began to have problems: Claretta saw this and turned to a doctor who could solve them, who happened to be her father; he was a renowned medical specialist, whose career had been advanced because of his daughter’s relationship. He immediately understood what was at stake and obtained the best treatment available at the time. In Cesare Rossi’s view, if it hadn’t been for the pills Dr Petacci prescribed, Mussolini would have ended up a different man. With Hormovin, like Viagra today, it was possible to regain, effortlessly, as if by magic, one’s sexual potency – and not only sexual, since this enhanced Mussolini’s power – or rather the feeling of being powerful – in all his relationships, with his colleagues and collaborators, with his ministers, party officials and army generals. Any other man might have welcomed Hormovin as a “find”, taken it as a kind of game, in the pursuit of pleasure which, for a while at least, would keep inexorable age at bay. But for the man who invented Fascism, taking those tablets was a political act: they helped to prolong the myth of the Duce beyond its natural limits and as such they are part of the tragedy which befell the country. The myth of Mussolini had many facets: there was the accomplished violinist, the pilot, the journalist, the horseman and the swordsman; he could ski, play tennis, swim and race cars, and excelled in all kinds of sport; he danced well, wrote novels and plays, designed buildings; naked to the waist he helped with the threshing in the fields, played with children, was photographed with flowers and animals. As Gaetano Salvemini has noted, the regime’s control of propaganda was ingenious, even more so than the system created by Hitler and Goebbels in Nazi Germany; every form of communication was exploited, and images and films poured out to reinforce every aspect of the myth. But all these things revolved round or sprang from the idea of Mussolini’s sexuality, the image of him as a great lover. The regime’s system of communication was skilful enough to avoid the problems which might arise with this approach, preserving the tacit rules of agreement with the Vatican and with them the image of the “man of destiny”, as Pius XI had described Mussolini, and the political solution to the so-called “Roman Question”, which the Duce had achieved with the concordat between the Italian state and the Holy See. Thanks to the meticulous organization of his public and private life, Mussolini was able to conduct hundreds of relationships with women, some lasting just a few weeks or months, others more enduring and stable. The women who lived under Fascism – the young, the not-so-young, and even those past middle age – saw in Mussolini a model of male sexuality; they realized that other officials in the party hierarchy merely tried to imitate him but fell far short of the original. Many women tried to approach the leader, sending him letters expressing, not so implicitly, the nature of their interest. There was even a special office in the Palazzo Venezia to deal with this correspondence: the letters would be sorted and sifted, with a selection of women who could go through to the second round and be brought to the attention of Mussolini.

  Since his sexuality was at the centre of his myth, the element that reinforced and held it all together, the entire edifice was a fragile one, liable to collapse as soon as real difficulties arose, when war was declared. Up till then the problems had been avoided with a series of political decisions or glossed over by propaganda; the myth of Mussolini, his ability to connect personally with the Italian people, became the defining feature of the regime. It became a political necessity for Mussolini to eliminate all possible rivals or potential successors in the Fascist movement and to free himself from the constricting duopoly of having to share prestige with the King. As Renzo De Felice puts it: “It is vital to appreciate the general characteristics of the myth of Mussolini and how indispensable it was to the regime as a whole and its principal elements by means of a vast diffusion of propaganda (exploiting for the first time – it shouldn’t be overlooked – all the techniques of modern mass communication, from radio to cinema). Once this is understood, the rational purpose behind the myth can be seen, its significance shared with the other political decisions Mussolini made in this period.”4 De Felice is referring to the years between 1925 and 1929, when the myth was created and started to grow rapidly, and the period when Mussolini took increasing control over all sources of power and all decision-making. Mussolini’s sexuality, with its mixture of truth and legend, survived longer than other components of the myth, sustained for a long time after his death with the production of biographical articles and memoirs.

  The subject of Mussolini’s relationships with women has proved a profitable business for publishers and authors from the end of the Second World War until today. Every piece of evidence and every witness, however uncertain or unreliable, could be put to use. So there’s a story of how little Benito, taken to church in San Cassiano for Mass by his mother, would pinch girls’ legs under the pews, and how, away from the church, he found other opportunities to touch them too. Such episodes can’t be verified, of course, but even admitting that they did occur it’s not unusual behaviour in a boy. His years as a boarder in the harsh college run by the Salesian fathers have inevitably been embroidered with tales of his escapades outside the school in search of girls, but boys’ boarding schools, especially religious ones, all over the world and in every generation have always been full of such secret adventures undertaken in breathless pursuit of the female sex. A wall is never going to stop a young male with raging hormones reaching a girl on the other side of it who is equally enthusiastic. It’s not improbable that the young Mussolini managed to play truant overnight for such a reason, even though, as we’ve seen, such disobedience was especially risky. While unlikely it’s not impossible that on occasion he escaped from the school to go dancing after making a secret assignation with a girl; in Romagna it was easy to find a public dance or an open-air party where men and women cavorted. In the darker corners of the makeshift dance floors the young boy could have found the time and the space to make out with some girl or other unseen by others. There’s a widespread local tradition that he was a passionately enthusiastic dancer.

  The so-called “red balls” organized by the socialists as well as the public dances held by working men’s associations began to emerge, in a belated recognition that the enthusiasm for dancing was a way of involving the working classes in social occasions which could also be used for political ends. Organizing dances was acceptable because they were seen as a pretext for fundraising for the political cause. […] As the working men and women took their places on the dance floor, they were always accompanied by the speech of some local or national leader, making the point that the social festivity was also an opportunity for political involvement.5

  Such public dances and evenings spent in dance halls were not without political overtones; indeed, they became a political issue in themselves. The socialists organized endless dances for working men and women, while the Catholics saw such dances as seedbeds of vice: in their view such occasions were a concealed way of encouraging the “free love” favoured by the socialist Internationalists. “The moralists of the time were horrified by the thought of bodily contact while dancing. They saw it as inevitably encouraging sexual desire. In opposition to such ‘transgressive yearnings’ a mass movement was started in order to protect the conventional moral standards of the day. Dancing was a fever, a contagion affecting young men and women who, languishing in its grip, started to taste passion and lust.”6 In waltzes and polkas, tangos and mazurkas, it was not only hands that touched; physical contact grew bolder, more impetuous, on the verge of a full embrace, the moving and turning together in time to the music led to a state of stupefa
ction. Dancing grew to be an irresistible attraction which contributed rapidly to the popularity of socialist meetings; the importance of public dances in the development of Italian political life from the late nineteenth century onwards should not be underestimated. Rémi Hess’s analysis of the phenomenon uses a quotation from the surrealist poet Ramón Gómez de la Serna:

  When couples embrace while dancing, the woman’s breasts feel more than ever alive, grow warm once again with their first yearnings, the friction of bodies once more has the innocence and grace which many, alas, have lost in their intimate contacts. The breasts point the way to the public dance, although it is her legs which carry her there in a hurry… The emotion felt in dancing is the sweetest emotion felt by the breasts; only then are they fully aware of their own desire and the desire of others, they swell with subtle tremors.7

  Dancing, with all the power of sexuality enclosed in its winding movements, ready to explode, became the site of social and political conflict. An Italian priest, Father Berardi, realized how pointless it was to try to fight the phenomenon head-on on this terrain: there was an irresistible fascination with public dancing, and the socialists exploited it to the full. Berardi sought instead a way of containing and controlling it, by emphasizing the development of technique. It was technique, and the formal requirements of technique, which would help to curb the expression of passion. The priest had heard many accounts in the confessional of the sexual longings caused by dancing and thought he’d found a way to prevent them. He summed up his approach in Latin in 1897 thus: “Qui saltat attendere debet ad bene saltat”, or, “who wants to dance should learn to dance well”. According to Berardi, a concentration on technique would bring the sexual passions aroused in dancing under control: “Fatigatio, tripudium, saltatio, agitatio, distractio, defatigatio, etc., malitiæ et libidini auditum præcludunt, aut illam cito evanescere faciunt – in other words, the wish for enjoyment, the energy of the dance itself and the subsequent tiredness obstruct the passions and help to calm them. The technical skill involved in dancing too could diminish them, since if the technique of dancing was not perfectly mastered you had to be especially attentive.”8 The Church realized there was nothing it could do to stop public dancing, and one piece of advice handed out in the confessionals to young girls who wanted to go dancing was to wear a white rose at the waist, which they were to make sure remained intact and undamaged at the end of the evening. But they were fighting a lost battle: dancing became a mass entertainment. The passion for it must have affected Mussolini in his youth, like all the rest; when the band struck up, it was as if a door opened on a magically accessible realm of sexual enchantment. His sexual prowess lay concealed like an iceberg under his virile bluster and display; people would whisper about it with amazement; his sexuality was at the centre of his myth and therefore at the centre of his politics. In this sense the expression “political animal” is peculiarly appropriate for him. Just as his sexuality was the last aspect of his myth to disappear, so it was the first to emerge, encouraged by Mussolini himself, who talked quite openly about it, even boasting of his virility and stamina.