Il Duce and His Women

by Roberto Olla

  Chapter 13

  In Bed with the Leader

  Still short of his fortieth birthday, Mussolini was now prime minister: he felt young, full of energy and drive. Other politicians described him as plebeian, violent, vindictive, coarse and histrionic, but he ignored them so they would realize their criticisms fell on deaf ears. He wished to give Italy at least the illusion of the peaceful existence which, a long time ago, he had been the first to sense the country yearned for, and he wanted to reap the political benefits of being the person who gave the country the order and calm it needed. He was the head of an anti-democratic party within what was still a liberal democracy. He was responsible to the Sovereign as the guarantor of the country’s institutions. He led a large coalition in which his own party was in a minority, and at the same time he was faced with an internal opposition made up of diehard Fascists. One successful stratagem was to absorb the Associazione Nazionalista Italiana (Italian Nationalist Association), thereby widening, in one swift blow, his own party’s constituency to serve as a counterweight to the more intransigent ras.

  He also succeeded in dividing various local parties and absorbing the parts which split away. One example was the Partito Sardo d’Azione (Sardinian Party of Action), which had been founded by former combatants after 1918 and was led by the parliamentary deputy Emilio Lussu. At first the Fascists and the “Sardisti” collaborated in the general election. As violence in the country increased before and after the March on Rome, the Sardisti started to take up anti-Fascist positions, and the relationship between the two parties grew increasingly tense. Using the man he had appointed as prefect to the city of Cagliari, Asclepio Gandolfo, Mussolini manoeuvred for a merger between the Sardisti and the Fascist supporters on the island which would lead to a reconstituted local Fascist Party, possibly led by Lussu. The merger foundered on the aspirations of the Sardisti towards Sardinian autonomy. Mussolini changed tactics and started to focus instead on separate factions within the Sardisti who were more open to the idea of collaboration with the Fascists (a tactic he also adopted towards the Republicans and other parties). Emilio Lussu describes the appeal made by the prefect Gandolfo to these local leaders in the villages:

  “I appeal to all those who oppose the Fascists, especially those who fought in the war. You are against the Fascists mainly because the Fascists in your village are scoundrels. Well, you’re right and I’m going to send them all to prison.” There was a round of applause. “Look on me as your father, not your enemy. I am your general,” he said, turning to the veterans among them, “not your prefect. You say that political liberties are under threat! Very well, join the Fascists and defend those liberties. You can take control of the situation. I’ll hand over the Fascists to you and you can do what you want with them. The true Fascists will be you. […] Are you democrats? You think I’m not a democrat? You support Sardinian autonomy and a republic? Well, go ahead, no one’s stopping you. Fascism is like a mosaic – all the different colours and all the different details contribute to the splendour of the whole.” Several of his listeners couldn’t resist the idea of immediate revenge on their enemies. In Pirri, a village near to Cagliari, one of the leaders of the opposition had been beaten up by the Fascists and forced to drink castor oil. He introduced himself to Gandolfo, joined the Fascist Party, and the very same day had the leader of the local Fascist squad given a public beating in the village square. […] In this way, slowly but surely, the Fascism of the early days was buried. The Fascists who came afterwards burned the newspaper their predecessors had produced and then proceeded to take over the offices.1

  While in this way Mussolini’s men brought entire towns and villages over to Fascism, including the local opposition, he himself had to confront the Vatican. Taking both his opponents and his own supporters by surprise, he described his deep religious feelings and declared his readiness to establish friendly relations between the Italian state and the Holy See. One concrete sign of this new openness towards the Church was the decree passed by the Grand Council on 15th February 1923 which declared Fascism to be incompatible with Freemasonry. Mussolini was riding an old hobby horse, which he’d wheeled out when he was still a left-wing revolutionary, especially in the National Socialist Congress in Ancona, and now found could come in useful again in his dealings with the Vatican. As we’ve seen, Mussolini’s attitude to Freemasonry was ambivalent and changeable. He’d obtained the support of various lodges for the March on Rome, while prominent members of the party were Freemasons: Italo Balbo – one of the four men who organized the March – and the future ministers Costanzo Ciano and Giuseppe Bottai belonged to the Piazza del Gesù Lodge, the obedience which had split away in 1908, while the party’s future secretary Achille Starace, Roberto Farinacci and the war hero Luigi Rizzo were members of the Palazzo Giustiniani Lodge. A month before the decree issued by the Grand Council, in January 1923, Mussolini himself had agreed to become, for no apparent reason, an Honorary Grand Master. However, Cesare Rossi, his closest associate at the time, shows no surprise in his account: “One Sunday afternoon I bumped into Palermi (the Grand Master of the Gran Loggia d’Italia della Massoneria di Piazza del Gesù) who’s just come out of a meeting with the Duce. He was elated. In his hand, in a case, he was holding a document written on parchment, which he took out and unrolled in front of me. It was a message of homage from all the various Masonic lodges ratifying Mussolini’s eligibility to join. At the bottom, in Mussolini’s handwriting, there was his signature with the usual formula of ‘I hereby accept and confirm’. I felt more scepticism than surprise. In fact, I thought to myself: ‘Palermi, you’re a poor fool if you think Mussolini will pay any attention to your parchment scroll…’”2 And indeed, less than two months later, Palermi’s scroll might as well have been written on scrap paper. Palermi had been used and thrown away like a squeezed lemon; the subsequent persecution he had to endure drove him to attempt suicide.

  These kinds of volte-face, typical of Mussolini’s character and political tactics, paved the way for the opening of secret negotiations with the Vatican in 1923 in an effort to resolve the so-called “Roman Question”, which had proved so treacherous for all previous Italian governments, ever since the Bersaglieri troops had entered through the breach in the Porta Pia gate in September 1870 and the Eternal City had become the capital of the newly unified country.

  According to De Felice’s reconstruction of the events, a first meeting took place between Mussolini and Cardinal Gasparri on either 19th or 20th January 1923, barely three months after the March on Rome. The negotiations which followed were perhaps the most difficult and demanding which Mussolini had to face during his twenty years in power. On the opposite side of the table were no longer the worn-out leaders of spent political forces, but a centuries-old organization capable of fielding men of outstanding preparation and ability. The Vatican appointed Father Pietro Tacchi Venturi as the chief mediator responsible for relations with Mussolini during the secret talks. The priest had become Mussolini’s spiritual advisor and, as a shrewd tactician, started off by asking the new Italian government to adopt some specific measures, as a token of their good intentions, which could then be shown to the Pope; such as, for example, handing over the assessment of suitability – and therefore in effect the selection – of teachers of religious instruction in the country’s state schools to local bishops; or abolishing the special tax which Church seminaries had hitherto had to pay on their assets. But Mussolini too was not going to be outflanked. The Fascist press started publishing articles threatening violent attacks on Catholics, even reprisals against all the churches in Rome; such atmosphere of unrest enabled Mussolini to step in in the role of the peacemaker who could restore order. He realized that the negotiations with the Vatican would be long-drawn-out and would require a whole series of manoeuvres in order to align the two sides, including the involvement of his own family.

  The first step took place on a visit to Milan in the spring of 1923; it was a private visit, but Mussolini a
lso had an eye on its public effects. Together with his brother Arnaldo, he arranged for his three children – Edda, Vittorio and Bruno – to be baptized at a ceremony which took place in his apartment. Arnaldo and the journalist Manlio Morgagni were the godfathers, while Don Colombo Bondanini, a priest who was a brother-in-law of Arnaldo’s and therefore known to the family, presided. There was also a secondary political purpose for Mussolini in establishing good relations with the Vatican and making the first moves towards what would eventually become the wide-ranging and historic agreement known as the Lateran Pacts: it would weaken the anti-Fascist stance taken by the Catholic People’s Party and so precipitate it into a crisis which would leave it politically powerless. Whenever anyone mentioned the name of Don Sturzo in Mussolini’s presence, he would stiffen indignantly and pour scorn on the priest turned politician. Don Sturzo was forced to resign in the summer of 1923. The Vatican marginalized him by sending him to the monastery of Monte Cassino, from where he chose to go into voluntary exile, at first in London and then the United States.

  Margherita Sarfatti’s influence also lay behind Mussolini’s attempts to establish a rapprochement between Fascism and the Catholic Church. She believed that religion must be part of the Fascist state; by including the Church the regime would be able to assume its rightful role as the interpreter and restorer of Roman and Christian civilizations.

  For Sarfatti the ideological construction of the state, the new ‘City of the Future’ (not to be confused with the new Jerusalem of either the Church or socialism) had to incorporate as a central element its Judaeo-Christian roots. The ‘City of the Future’ embodied the political religion of the state, seen in a messianic/Roman perspective. Sarfatti saw the raison d’être of the modern state (modern in so far as it embodied a political religion) as residing not only in its religious vocation but above all in the myth of Rome, which included the Judaeo-Christian roots. For this reason it was necessary for the state to avail itself of the Catholic religion, since it could not call itself a universalist state without it. 3

  Mussolini had little time to devote to the theoretical development of Fascist ideology, immersed as he was in the frenetic business of government and the need to read endless documents, keep an eye on the anti-Fascist opposition – as well as those who opposed him within his own party – and maintain sexual relations, however cursorily, with dozens of women. For a long time it was as if he delegated this task to Sarfatti, except whenever he saw the potential political uses of her theorizing and appropriated large parts of it. The shallowness of Mussolini’s involvement with the ideological lucubrations of his mistress were revealed when she founded the movement “Novecento” (“Twentieth Century”), which included some of the best-known artists of the time and formed an important part of her overall plan for the development of a distinctively Fascist culture. Sarfatti hoped – for the moment at least – that thanks to the movement she would come to play a leading role in the cultural politics of the new regime. On the occasion of Novecento’s first exhibition, not only did Mussolini give the event his formal support, but, persuaded by Sarfatti, he agreed to give a speech at its inauguration on 27th March 1923. The evening was supposed to confirm Sarfatti’s role as the undisputed arbiter of the new Fascist culture, but in the event it only revealed Mussolini’s superficiality and almost total lack of interest in her project. Mussolini’s improvised remarks were faithfully transcribed in the next morning’s issue of Il Popolo d’Italia, which didn’t appear to notice that they didn’t really hang together: “There is no doubt that 1900 marks a watershed in the history of modern Italy. We only need to think of the bleak unhappy days of the African campaign, before Italy lay buried under the sand on which so much valorous and generous Italian blood had been spilt. 1900 is also an important date in Italian politics.”

  It’s easy to picture Margherita Sarfatti’s frozen mask of a face as well as the embarrassed silence of the artists and intellectuals who were present at what was supposed to be a significant cultural event. No doubt she managed to excuse her lover on the grounds that he had perhaps just arrived, completely unprepared, from some tryst with a woman or an angry argument with some obtuse official, but the other guests, all those who were part of the Novecento group, wouldn’t have been able to reason away their amazement and disappointment quite so easily. “Mussolini’s speech showed not a trace of understanding Sarfatti’s project, as is shown by the banal and comical sentence: ‘1900 is also an important date in Italian politics’ – as if twentieth-century art were confined to 1900 or the turn of the century. […] One might wish that this episode had planted some misgivings in Sarfatti’s mind about the intellectual subtlety of her leader’s thought processes. As it is, she already knew his limits, but probably overestimated her ability to change him.”4

  After fulfilling his agreement, no doubt extracted under pressure, to speak at the opening of the exhibition, Mussolini showed no more interest in his mistress’s new movement. The Fascist hierarchy took note of his lack of involvement and started to distance itself from her, as it waited for the right moment to strike and destroy her. Not one of the gerarchi understood what she was trying to do. On the contrary, they all hated her, above all for her closeness to Mussolini, which meant she knew many secrets and could in turn exercise influence over him.

  In March 1923 Mussolini was still living in an apartment in the Grand Hotel; the security escort which had been assigned to him was something of a hindrance to his sexual escapades. No sooner did he leave his suite than he would find himself surrounded by a kind of itinerant circus: in the entrance halls, in rooms, alongside the Royal Guards there loitered “squadristi” bristling with knives and provincial ras who would confront strangers with pointless pugnaciousness, gentlemen of fortune in search of a post, and fanatical female admirers prepared to do anything to see him. He could no longer draw a curtain of discretion over the comings and goings of his various mistresses by having them use the staircase reserved for the hotel staff. To her increasing annoyance, even the refined Margherita Sarfatti had to climb noiselessly up and down the service stairs. Something was changing in the privileged relationship she had constructed with Mussolini, and she was beginning to wonder what she might do about it.

  Mussolini’s rapid and sensational political success had led to new sexual opportunities for him: he could now indulge in as many relationships as he wanted. Obviously, with the pressures of his new job, he could only spare a few minutes for such diversions, but this only encouraged his preference for rapid sex at any hour of the day or night. He called on the services of one of his mistresses at seven in the morning. He was still attracted to Sarfatti and enjoyed his relationship with her, both physically and intellectually, but it was a relationship which demanded time, time he no longer had to spare. As the months passed by, he began to realize that even when he did have free time he didn’t necessarily want to spend all of it with her. He appreciated her advice and enjoyed the relaxing physical and psychological intimacy she gave to him, but he felt he was changing, that he had less need of her. Now it was enough that she came to see him, as she continued to do, regularly and obstinately; he less and less wanted to seek her out. Then he found he didn’t mind if they didn’t manage to meet for several days but only spoke on the telephone. Then a very significant change took place: Margherita Sarfatti could no longer go and see him when she wanted. Even she, now, had to wait in line to be received by him. However, on the increasingly rare occasions when he wanted to see her and she wasn’t immediately available, he lost his temper and bombarded her with abuse. She remained his confidante, the only person he could ask for advice without feeling weak or ridiculous, but he wanted absolute control over her. Even so, the intervals between their meetings lengthened, and in the meantime he voraciously pursued other sexual adventures.

  One night his loyal factotum Cirillo, who’d been the office boy at Il Popolo d’Italia but had changed jobs with Mussolini’s advancement, found that his master was not in his room.
He raised the alarm; the police arrived immediately. They discovered that the head of the Italian government had slipped out of a side door of the hotel onto Via Cernaia and, under cover of darkness, had walked on foot and alone to the Hotel Continentale, where one of his mistresses who had just arrived by train had taken a room. No one dared to disturb him; instead several policemen had to dress as hotel staff and in that disguise stand guard outside his room. Some weeks later, Mussolini again disappeared for an entire day, and on this occasion no one, not even the police, found out where he had gone. Rumours abounded among Mussolini’s staff that a mysterious hotel waiter, a shady type, had managed somehow to make contact with Mussolini and take him off for an assignment in a luxury apartment with an elegant woman who was waiting to give him irresistible pleasures. It was a bad failing on the part of the security services surrounding the head of government. Investigations showed that the said “waiter” was not in fact on the staff of the hotel and was an ex-convict, but it proved impossible to find out how he had managed not only to infiltrate the hotel but above all to attract Mussolini’s attention to the point that he was able to persuade him to undertake the escapade. The security services made sure the man disappeared. Shortly afterwards, however, in March 1923, “to the great disappointment of the cosmopolitan clientele of the Grand Hotel, who, each time Mussolini entered or left the hotel would crowd into the foyer to watch him and ask him absurd questions, he decided that all the party gerarchi should leave the hotels and pensions in the city where they had been staying and take up lodgings in private houses”.5