Il Duce and His Women

by Roberto Olla

  Edvige believed her brother was ready to marry the girls he desired; he seemed to want it so convincingly that all of them, more or less, fell for it. Then he’d immediately be attracted to another, leaving the first to cry and complain in an atmosphere of tragedy. But his period of military service was a lot less romantic than Edvige paints it; she didn’t know his remarks to Claretta Petacci on 4th March 1938: “I have a vague memory of falling in love when I was about twenty – like a poet, with pure longing. It was when I started my military service that my instincts were aroused. I used to go to a brothel where the women were experienced and rather dirty; they initiated me into the mysteries and vices of sex. From then on I’ve always regarded the women I’ve had like those in the brothel: there just for my carnal pleasure.”7

  While he was on leave because of the bereavement, Mussolini received a letter from a friend urging him to try and recruit his fellow soldiers to the revolutionary cause. He wrote a measured reply in return explaining why he wouldn’t do this: he was going through a difficult period, with many moral and material worries, and needed tranquillity and silence. But he also showed his adroitness – he knew the friend would show his letter to his fellow socialists – by justifying his attitude politically: he agreed entirely with the fundamental principles and ideas in his friend’s letter, but the plan of action seemed to him too vague; besides, radicalism was still weak among soldiers and officers. In any case, just so that all should know, he was ready to use his rifle whenever the Italian people rose up in rebellion. A letter to his commanding officer is completely different. In the letter to his socialist friend, while refusing his request to proselytize among the soldiers, he still leaves his options open for future political activity. In the other he reveals an unexpected nationalism in order to ingratiate himself with the officer. He writes that the heroes who had built Italy and the blood they had shed for the dignity of the nation must be commemorated; their blood held the nation together and in the name of their sacrifice Italians must stand firm, their bodies in massed ranks, against the barbarians of the north. Italians must show no cowardice in defending their heritage against those who wished once more to reduce their country to a mere “geographical expression”. Such words coming from him would have astonished any militant Internationalist, first and foremost his own father Alessandro. Mussolini’s opportunism and self-contradiction begin to emerge, as well as his capacity for rapid tactical U-turns. Yet it is probably also true that his mother’s death had indeed instilled in him a need for tranquillity and reflection during which he began to see military life in a different light. In his autobiography in English, he described what he’d got out of his period of military service:

  It was my opportunity to show serenity of spirit and strength of character. […] I found an affectionate regard for the mass, for the whole, made up of individuals, for its manoeuvres and the tactics, the practice of defence and attack. […] I learnt in that way how important it is for an officer to have a deep knowledge of military matters and to develop a fine sensitiveness to the ranks, and to appreciate in the masses of our men our stern Latin sense of discipline and to be susceptible to its enchantments. I can say that in every regard I was an excellent soldier.8

  There is certainly cynical opportunism in the way Mussolini ingratiates himself with his commanding officer, yet it is true that his military service brought out a new aspect of him, different from the socialist agitator. It is an important period in his life which should not be dismissed as irrelevant. In the autobiography in English, published when he had already become Duce, Mussolini attributed to himself in hindsight a new sensibility towards the ferment taking place as masses of young men from all over Italy served their time in the army. According to this account written over twenty years later, military service showed him those masses organized according to military discipline – which was to become a fundamental feature of the stage-setting of the Fascist regime. As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, the Italian army was changing. Mass conscription, officers who came from all over the country, men from a wide variety of backgrounds and professions in civilian life, different languages and dialects heard in the dormitories: the old Piedmontese army was disappearing, the kingdom of Italy was building modern armed forces to undertake new types of war. Shepherds from Sardinia and the Abruzzi, agricultural labourers from Apulia and Romagna, factory workers from Genoa and Milan – all were beginning to learn to see themselves as members of one nation. Wearing the same uniform, they found a way of living together during their military service and discovered appreciatively that they could communicate with each other; they returned to their homes with this new experience of life. It was an attempt to “make Italians”, that sense of belonging to a single nation which the Risorgimento had not been able to create. One manifestation of the transformation that was taking place was the reaction to the earthquake in Messina and Reggio Calabria which occurred two years after Mussolini’s military service, in 1908, the greatest natural disaster to befall Italy in the twentieth century. The new Italian army was called in to help: the soldiers were sent to dig people out from the ruins, to ward off jackals and wolves, to assist the survivors. With the eyes of the world’s press on them, Italians had to show they existed as a nation, as a single people. The newspapers wrote of “a nation in mourning” and those who had died in the earthquake were commemorated as Italians. All over the country there were queues to leave money for the survivors in urns wrapped in the Italian flag. A collective wave of grief ran through the entire nation for the first time, as John Dickie has written, and the army and the navy played a central role in the events. The writer Edoardo Scarfoglio was sent by Il Mattino newspaper of Naples to report; he wrote on 9th January 1909: “We should see the catastrophe as the episode of a war which could have broken out yesterday or could break out tomorrow – and we should allow ourselves to be perturbed by this thought.” When that war did arrive, in the development of his political career Mussolini would be able to call on this experience of military service to understand the unextinguished force of nationalism as well as the social and political potential of those militarized masses, of all the men who had entered the army.

  “Has distinguished himself for ability, enthusiasm and good conduct”: this was the report on Mussolini – unexpected for a revolutionary and anti-militarist – when he finished his military service on 4th September 1906. On returning home, he sent off, with new self-confidence, numerous applications for supply-teaching posts all over the country. The local council of Tolmezzo, in the province of Udine, replied; it was run by the Italian Socialist Party, and his father’s name still had a cachet. The soldier commended for his conduct slipped back into the role of an undisciplined, anarchic subversive. The suddenness of the transformation is striking: enthusiasm and self-discipline vanish, to be replaced by disordered revelry with regular bouts of drunkenness in the company of his friend the local cobbler. He often spent the night stretched out senseless on the ground. The biographers Duilio Susmel and Giorgio Pini write that he fell ill at this time with gonorrhoea or – in barracks slang – “scolo” (“the clap”). Together with the syphilis which Angelica Balabanoff claims he told her he had contracted, he was clearly paying a price for his exploration of the mysteries of sex, in fetid brothels or more fragrant ambiences as the case may have been. But it doesn’t appear his illness was serious enough to stop his sexual activity for long. In her book Balabanoff takes her revenge – or attempts to – for the years she spent in her tormented relationship with Mussolini when he continually ran after women in the name of free love. She recounts an episode from his time in Bellinzona:

  One day, at a loose end – the early trains had all gone and there wasn’t another one I could catch till later – I was alone in the office. I felt tired and was leafing through newspapers. Suddenly Mussolini burst in. He was distraught, almost wild, with his eyes bursting out of his head. “Tell me,” he declared, “tell me why women don’t fall in love with me.�
� I looked at him in amazement, but also somewhat amused as well as puzzled. It was a bit awkward to know how to reply to him. But in any case he didn’t wait for an answer; with his eyes staring even more madly, he went on: “Am I so ugly?” I could easily think of an evasive reply to that and did: “Well, as far as being ugly is concerned, there’s Turati who’s much, much uglier than you, and yet lots of women have always fallen for him.” […] “So how come I never find anyone, like all the others find someone?” There was in his eyes a kind of hunger, very different and much more desperate than the hunger which drove him to the Lugano-Paradiso restaurant. “How should I know?” I didn’t have the courage nor, I confess, the wish and the heartlessness to tell him the truth. For it was true, no girl fell in love with Mussolini. He was that rare sort of man – at least when he was young and penniless – who was just incapable of being attractive to women – indeed he almost repelled them.”9

  The local branch of the Socialist Party in Tolmezzo had been certain the candidate they had chosen to be the village schoolmaster was the respectable son of a prominent leader; instead they found themselves having to deal with someone who seemed as devoid of good qualities as he was dedicated to vice, who was embarrassing, unkempt and almost never came to their meetings. Among the rare occasions on which he took part in events organized by the Socialist Party in Tolmezzo, the anniversary to mark the three-hundredth anniversary of the death of Giordano Bruno stands out: Mussolini’s speech so excited the anticlerical passions of the audience that they trooped out of the hall to go and protest in front of the local priest’s house. It was while he was in Tolmezzo that he realized he was not cut out to be a schoolteacher; his period there merely served as an outlet for the energies he had had to repress while doing his military service.

  Under the name “Vero Eretico” (“A True Heretic”) he wrote an entire issue of the local anticlerical newspaper Lo staffile (The Whip), much to the consternation of many families whose children he taught every day in school. He was also immediately on the lookout for women who might fall into his net. “I discovered that Virginia Salvolini was living in Osoppo and Paolina Danti was in Resia, so I got in touch with them again. We exchanged many letters.”10 If his drunkenness and general indiscipline had shocked the local community when he first arrived, it was one of his relationships which really disconcerted them and caused embarrassment for the Socialist Party-controlled council: “During the carnival holiday I had a fling with one Graziosa Bocca, whom I then left for the woman who ran the local inn, Luigia P., a woman in her thirties and still attractive despite many adventures in the past. We saw each other frequently from April through to August. Her husband didn’t like it, of course, but the poor wretch didn’t know what to do about it.”11 At first her husband demanded an explanation from this intrusive schoolteacher – who also happened to be a lodger in his inn. Mussolini’s replies were evasive and he also caught his wife on many occasions going into or coming out of the lodger’s room: rows ensued and rumours started to circulate in Tolmezzo. Luigia’s cuckolded husband grew more and more unhappy with her increasingly brazen relationship and began to attack Mussolini physically, resulting in a fight between them in which the younger and stronger of the two – Mussolini – won. He and Luigia continued to have sex together. Accounts of her from those who knew her describe her as good-looking, blonde, with a strong sensual physique. Her full name was Luigia Pajetta Nigris, but she was usually called Gigia. A son was born in 1907 from her affair with Mussolini: Candido Nigris. Mussolini denied the boy was his and refused to acknowledge his existence; he carried on his dissolute way of life, drinking and blaspheming. Thirty years later, when he was beginning to feel old, tired and much less confident in his ability to perform sexually, but also wanted to put his relationship with the young Claretta Petacci on a firm footing, he told her, no doubt hoping to impress her:

  I must admit I now regret wasting my energies on all the women I slept with. How many of them there were! Too many. I wasted time and energy on women who were probably not worth the trouble. I should just have had a single woman I loved and dedicated all that side of my life to her. Perhaps in that case I’d never have known you, but now that I do, the idea of all those other women just disgusts me. They were all like prostitutes – they gave themselves to me like prostitutes and I had them. I don’t really remember a single one of them, or only trivial things. […] In Tolmezzo all the women went crazy for me. I had one who was called Graziosa [Bocca] and another whose name I can’t remember but who was really jealous…12

  Mussolini had the clarity of mind to try to take stock of his situation and his behaviour. He guessed that it would be pointless to apply for a renewal of his teaching post; the council in Tolmezzo would never have agreed. When Margherita Sarfatti started work on her biography of Mussolini – Dux – she realized it would be difficult to write about this period in his life: his behaviour had been so wayward and scandalous that a truthful account would have opened up a large black hole in the radiant image of the man she was trying to fabricate. So she set to work to transform the facts, turning his time in Tolmezzo into a positive interlude, showing Mussolini’s genius and unconventionality. The anarchic, undisciplined schoolteacher was turned into a figure “the locals would not forget in a hurry”; his nightly bouts of drinking and all the disturbances they caused became “practical jokes, like dressing up in sheets as ghosts in the old castle to frighten those who were still about late in the evening or wandering round the local graveyard crying out in a sepulchral voice ‘At last, O my tomb, I embrace you!’ and then sinking down to sleep the night away there.”13

  His pupils in the school remembered him as “the Tyrant” but in Sarfatti’s account his whole class adored him despite his glaring looks, his shouts and the way he would thump his desk in anger. Their parents had protested and formally accused him of blasphemy, but Sarfatti dismisses them as “prudes” and says the headmaster paid no attention to them, because he had ascertained that it did not involve real blasphemy: “While it may be true that the schoolteacher Signor Benito Mussolini’s language is somewhat excessive on occasion, he never takes God’s name in vain but only Buddha’s or Muhammad’s.”14

  Sarfatti swiftly glosses over Mussolini’s sexual excesses and the scandal they caused: “The young girls of the region came to appreciate him; they are known for their beauty and kindness; towards Mussolini they were especially kind.”15 And if their kindness led them to become rather more involved with the young thrusting schoolteacher than they should have done, then, never mind, they could boast in later years that they’d had the country’s Fascist leader in their bed and perhaps provided sons for the new Italian race. There’s a maliciously veiled phrase which refers clearly to the son – Candido – Luigia Nigris gave birth to during her affair with Mussolini: “In those regions of Friuli today, there is a young man, coming up to his twentieth birthday, who doesn’t look like a typical native of those parts.”16 Sarfatti had a long-lasting relationship with Mussolini and must have heard directly from him all the details of that period of his life: “In the midst of all his wild joking and revelry, the scholar and politician in him found the time to study and to work with seriousness, without giving himself airs. He took lessons in Latin and Greek from a local clergyman, the erudite Monsignor Condotti; he gave lectures and organized political meetings.”17 As far as his public speaking abilities are concerned, we know that Mussolini had learnt his skills from his earliest years at the knee of one of the acknowledged orators of the time: his own father, who had taught him how to use words, pauses and gestures to arouse the public, win over the hecklers, wound one’s opponents. Having been brought up in such a school, public speaking came easily and successfully to him. Balabanoff, however, is dismissive of his abilities – but she is intent on preventing any close analysis of their relationship, on concealing its underlying aspect, as well as on destroying any idea that Mussolini’s political origins lay in the world of socialism; she writes:

 
At that time – it was one of the fruits of the freedom of speech which had been achieved – there were agricultural and factory workers who were capable of speaking well and forcefully in public. […] Mussolini was one of them: whenever he spoke to a crowd about their poverty and their rights to justice, he was always warmly applauded, like many others. But because he lacked confidence and also liked to show off, he used to imitate – as he also does in his writing – non-Italians, using short detached phrases. His listeners didn’t realize he was imitating or paraphrasing others; they thought him genuinely original.18

  Dismissed by the school in Tolmezzo, his departure accompanied by hearty sighs of relief from the local Socialist Party, Mussolini returned to Dovia, where he found his father no longer the people’s leader of Romagna legend. The stories of his former deeds still circulated, but the man himself had lost his vigour after a spell in prison and the death of his wife. Perhaps he was already pondering a change of life, of giving up the blacksmith’s trade and opening an inn, but the decision to change course must have seemed daunting for a man who was tired and disappointed. His son decided to try other possibilities of employment and started taking French lessons from a Miss Mercuri in Forlì. She must have been a good teacher and Mussolini must have applied himself, because in November 1907 he passed the exam to become a secondary-school teacher of French. He sent off a flood of applications and waited several months before getting a reply. While waiting he didn’t lose any time in his private life: “Between September and October I got to know and had an affair (not a very deep one) with Signorina Giovannina P. from Fiumana.”19 But the fling can’t have satisfied him, since as soon as the opportunity arose he returned to Tolmezzo and the scene of his passionate affair with the innkeeper (and the fights with her husband): “I arrived about ten in the evening, wrapped up in a heavy cloak and with a fur hat pulled down over my eyes, and knocked at the door of the trattoria ‘della Scala’. Luigia came to open: she looked me in the eyes and recognized me. She seemed quite overcome with surprise. We went up the familiar stairs and into the small room where I used to take my meals […] and her husband? He was asleep. I took my fill of her. We spent some delicious hours together.”20