Il Duce and His Women

by Roberto Olla

  Mussolini himself left the Grand Hotel and moved to an apartment in the Palazzo Tittoni in Via Rasella, the street whose subsequent notoriety in the history of Rome and of Italy was due not to the fact that Mussolini had lived there, but because in March 1943 it was the scene of a Partisan attack on a troop of German soldiers which led to the savage Nazi reprisal in the massacre of hundreds of Italian civilians at the Fosse Ardeatine.

  Mussolini had ordered party officials to find private houses to live in because he realized that staying in hotels was hardly conducive to the image of stability and normality that Fascism wanted to communicate to Italians. Margherita Sarfatti had found the apartment in Via Rasella and had suggested to Mussolini that he take it. At the same time, she occupied herself with his appearance and the way he dressed. Mussolini had not added to the minimal wardrobe he had brought with him when he caught the train from Milan in the wake of the March on Rome; since then he’d been too busy to bother about such matters, and his clothes were frequently creased or crumpled. His family had stayed – or rather, had been left – in Milan and were not around to provide for his daily needs. There was Cirillo, who now also had to take on the duties of a personal valet, but he could only manage to do so much. At the Grand Hotel they were ready to fulfil their guests’ slightest requests – especially if the guest in question was the most powerful man in Italy – but Mussolini, left to himself, was not even aware of the way he dressed or that anything needed to be done about it. Ensuring a continual supply of women was more important. He boasted to Claretta Petacci that he had had sex with four women every day in an alcove in his hotel suite while he stayed there – countesses, princesses, wives from wealthy bourgeois families, among others – and if they turned out to be sexually inexperienced, that was just too bad. Even if we reduce the figure in Mussolini’s boast to a mere half or even quarter, the traffic in women must have caused some public embarrassment. No doubt the hotel staff, the porters and chambermaids, could be relied on to be discreet – except that the chambermaids themselves were at risk… Margherita Sarfatti realized how dangerous the situation might become and, since she also knew that Mussolini would never make a decision, took one for him: an ordinary apartment and, above all, an experienced housekeeper would solve the problem.

  She soon found a suitable one in Milan. Cesira Carocci was originally from Gubbio in Umbria but had moved to the city to find work as a cloakroom attendant in a big hotel. She came from a peasant family and was a hard worker and a good cook; she kept the house as clean as a pin, had a robust and energetic constitution, was untalkative and discreet, and – last but not least – hadn’t, according to Sarfatti, the slightest whiff of sex appeal about her and therefore presented no risk from that point of view. “It is natural that Margherita should bother about making the daily existence of Mussolini, who at the time was still Prime Minister and not yet the Duce, more comfortable. But as his principal mistress she was well aware of her numerous rivals – and she herself was hardly a model of fidelity – and nothing suited her purposes better than having a reliable informer to follow his every movement.”6

  Sarfatti had no intention of competing with Mussolini’s other mistresses or of trying to stop his other occasional escapades, but she wanted to keep the situation under control so that her own leading position as the favourite, the first lady of the harem, his closest counsellor, was maintained. The ideal solution was to place in his home a reliable person she herself had found. The comings and goings of Mussolini’s mistresses were always frequent and sometimes bordered on the chaotic. Cesira was to observe the goings-on with maximum discretion and duly report back. She herself could certainly not be described as attractive: she was thirty-nine – well past the age after which it was normal at the time to describe women as “old spinsters” – but she was tall and thin, with a clear white complexion; she held herself well and dressed soberly and elegantly; all in all, she was what might be called a “handsome woman”. Her role as “guardian of the threshold” soon made her unpopular with everyone. Mussolini’s mistresses – whose arrivals and departures she organized – spoke ill of her, and various Fascist officials criticized her, often slanderously, when she denied them entry to Mussolini’s private rooms. She was most often attacked as a “procuress”, since it was thought she was responsible for the supply of women for the Duce’s bed. Other scandalmongers wondered what kind of relationship she had with Mussolini. As we have seen, physical attractiveness was not an overridingly important consideration in Mussolini’s choice of women, so it is possible that she serviced his needs in the intervals between other lovers. “She was authoritarian and highly protective of her role. She certainly developed a deep fondness for her difficult and cantankerous master, who returned her affection and gradually came to rely on her.”7

  There was a rectangular entrance hall, then a long corridor which led to the large drawing room, after which there was the bathroom and the dining room with two antique cabinets, where Cesira had laid a frugal supper, according to his instructions. When Mussolini returned from the opening of the Novecento exhibition on 27th March 1923, the new apartment and the new routine of living in it were still unfamiliar to him, but his housekeeper, silent and efficient, seemed perfect for the job. It is highly improbable that Mussolini gave any further thought to Novecento, the project that so absorbed his mistress. There was nothing in it which he could exploit to achieve his pressing political goals – such as weakening the People’s Party or wooing dissident factions in other parties over to the Fascists. Since coming to power he had managed to destabilize the entire party spectrum in parliament. This was what politics was really about, this was what he had to do. Now he turned his attention to changing the electoral system: a new one was needed, capable of guaranteeing him a solid majority, thus freeing him from the need to make alliances with other parties. The speed and freedom with which he acted left other political leaders standing. He trusted no one and kept everything under his personal control, with the result that he spent each day reading or skimming dozens of newspapers and piles of documents of various kinds – reports, memoranda, letters – as well as receiving large numbers of visitors, from ministers, leading party officials and city prefects to a queue of petitioners.

  Much of this work in the normal course of affairs would have been delegated to senior civil servants and their respective staffs; he preferred to tackle it himself. Each day was tiring and, in the end, for a head of government, essentially unproductive. Mussolini placed a lot of trust in his instincts: in effect his intuitions had served him well in his career so far. By merely skimming a newspaper article or official report he was able to grasp its political implications and possible consequences. In his increasingly solitary eminence as dictator, in the attitude of distrust, bordering on contempt, he showed towards his close associates, and with his lack of friends, apart from his brother Arnaldo, Mussolini wanted to control even administrative minutiae, as though he were the mayor of some small village. He described himself as the nation’s ox – or, in a letter to D’Annunzio, as its mule – overburdened with all the tasks that others failed to perform. He complained if the problems of an aqueduct or a nursery school kept him from more important questions of foreign policy, but nevertheless continued to insist he took personal control over everything. He was always short of time but spent hours on end reading hundreds of official reports on all aspects of national life and writing comments in the margins of newspaper articles. In his own hand he wrote communiqués, denials, articles, memoranda as well as résumés of official audiences or events that he had attended for publication in various newspapers, and he always checked that they all duly appeared.

  In her biography Dux, Sarfatti presents an idealized portrait of all this frenetic activity. “How do you manage to do so much?” she asks him (using the Fascist preferred polite form of address “voi”), to which he replies, in words she has doubtless embellished:

  You’re right, it’s as if a thousand different problems, a
ll of them urgent, are continually hammering away to get in my head. I sometimes think my brain will literally burst. But now I’ve got all Italy in my head, like a great map of the country with all the places where there are problems marked on it: here a road, there a railway line, a bridge, a forestry plantation, docks and marsh drainage; the transport links between the suburbs and a mainline station in Milan, housing in Rome, the water supply in Apulia, residential development in Calabria and Messina, a motorway network in Sicily, the fight against malaria in Sardinia.8

  At the top of the list of the Fascist regime’s achievements can always be found the reclamation of the marshes and the creation of new towns to encourage the mining and agricultural industries, followed by various public works such as railways and railway stations, town squares, canals. The failures and the aborted projects are never mentioned. After a visit to Sicily Mussolini confided in Sarfatti: “I can’t sleep for thinking of those disgraceful shacks which, fifteen years on from the earthquake, are still housing the victims! I’ll burn them down one by one as I put up new houses.”9 The survivors of the earthquake in Reggio Calabria and Messina in 1908 were still living in wooden huts provided by international aid. It should be added that no democratically elected government managed to solve the problem either, although over the course of the decades various families rebuilt their houses relying on their own initiative and the money sent from relatives working overseas; even today, more than a century after the earthquake, some of the original huts are still standing and are occupied by new generations of the poor.

  Mussolini frequently travelled throughout the country, stopping in places and taking rapid notes of the local problems, reassuring the inhabitants that he would deal with them, and then moving on to the next appointment. He always carried a notebook and pencil with him. If, as he drove along, he saw something that was out of order or didn’t work properly, was broken or dirty, he immediately noted it down. His chauffeur writes that people feared Mussolini’s notebooks as a kind of “black book”. The local officials who were supposed to be responsible for the faults he had noticed – for the most part they were completely unaware he’d driven through their towns and villages – would promptly receive a personal reprimand from the head of the government himself. Potholes, trees blown over in the wind, weathered road signs which had become illegible, housing constructions left half-finished… every trip Mussolini took round Italy was a potential nightmare for the civil engineers responsible for the maintenance of the roads or the councillors of some small town or the civil servants in the Ministry of Public Works.

  On his travels Mussolini liked to be recognized by people, and therefore often used an open sports car to get about. In sun or rain or harsher weather, there would always be a small crowd at every crossroads to applaud him on his way. Drivers in those days often had to wait a long time at level crossings for trains to pass through, and Mussolini was no exception; he would use the delay to get out of the car and talk to any people who were around. “On one occasion the mayor of a village in Sicily came up to the car. ‘We do not ask you for anything. You will probably never pass this way again, so please take this opportunity to get out and walk on our land.’ Another man, a local small landowner, wearing a magistrate’s ceremonial stole over his Sunday-best suit, approached him. ‘This morning at dawn my two brothers who died in the war appeared to me in a dream and told me, “Get up to go and meet the leader, kneel in front of him and tell him that we give him our blessing, we the silent dead, and we thank him for saving the country for which we died.”’ Taking his hat off, he kneeled on the main road, while around him women burst into tears and stretched their arms out imploringly.”10

  Such extreme, quasi-religious exaltation of the figure of Mussolini explains in part why his myth disintegrated so rapidly after his fall in July 1943. In the space of a few hours crowds started to smash statues and burn portraits of him, and rip away Fascist emblems from buildings – an inevitable reaction to the years in which Mussolini had been cloaked in a kind of religious aura – the omniscient, omnipotent and almost omnipresent Duce. Sarfatti, one of the few intellectuals who hoped to invest the figure of the Fascist dictator with real cultural significance, had foretold the danger: “This miracle-hungry state of mind can feed the legend and even create the longed-for miraculous event, but the insidious menace of disappointment lies beneath. The stature of a man can also be measured by the myth, the self-image he projects, as by the devotion he inspires in others, but there must always be a fear that the sheer accumulation of the excessive hopes which are placed in him will end by pulling him down.”11

  In addition to his frenetic activity as head of the government, managing director and mayor of the village called Italy, Mussolini also had to fit in his assignations with his numerous mistresses, even though these encounters often took no more than a few minutes, sometimes without even bothering to lie down, with Mussolini still wearing his boots. He also had to find time to write letters to the various women so they could be kept “warm” in case of future need; Angela Curti’s daughter comments on one her mother received: “Mussolini had already moved to Rome, and a letter he wrote to my mother must date from that period. She read it to me from time to time, and one sentence in it struck me: ‘I like being in Rome, but I’m weighed down with work here.’ And he went on to say that he didn’t know when or how he could return to Milan.”12

  Given that he was not going to go back to Milan, Bianca Ceccato, his former secretary in the offices of Il Popolo d’Italia, decided to join him in Rome. Immediately on her arrival Mussolini invited her to supper in his new apartment in Via Rasella. Moving from the dining room to the bedroom, however, now meant getting into his housekeeper’s good books. Bianca Ceccato soon managed this; on occasions she brought along her little son who charmed Cesira, or gave her small presents which flattered her sense of her own importance. She even became a trusted confidante of the dour Umbrian: “The recollections of Bianca Veneziana (the pseudonym used by Bianca Ceccato) seem accurate. They confirm that if Cesira Carocci maintained privileged access to Mussolini for Sarfatti, she did the same for the young woman from Milan, which demonstrates that however great her loyalty was to the former, she was more devoted to her new employer. Bianca describes herself, naturally enough, as being a frequent visitor to the apartment in Via Rasella.”13

  It is not possible that Cesira Carocci concealed the increasing number of women visitors to Mussolini’s apartment from Sarfatti. She would have had to own up if Sarfatti had interrogated her, but in any case she had no reason to act against the interests of the woman who had found her the job and was in some sense her protector. It is more probable that Sarfatti was unconcerned by the arrival of Bianca Ceccato or any of the others who made their way into Mussolini’s bedroom. She felt confident that her physical appeal would continue to entice Mussolini whenever she wanted. The depth and complexity of her relationship with him – qualities that the writing of her own biography of him has served to confirm – was itself a reassurance to her. She was focused on his political activities in the attempt to see a consistency or overall significance in them (and where she couldn’t, to paste over the cracks by inventing).

  Mussolini’s rapid and overwhelming advance to power concentrated above all on control of the press. The newspapers which supported him sang his praises, while the more moderate titles feared and tolerated him; the opposition press, however, was the object of constant pressure, threats and raids. In December 1923 a wealthy Fascist supporter bought up the building which housed the editorial offices of Avanti!, together with the printing works where the paper was produced. He intended, in a gesture – a kind of present – he thought would please Mussolini, to force them to move out, but Mussolini refused the offer and stopped him from going ahead with the idea. He knew how the world of the media worked and had no wish to create heroic martyrs for the opposition and potential problems for his political plans. But he also knew from his own experience as an editor how newspapers b
egin, flourish, and decline, and he made sure the sources of the Socialist Party daily’s financial backing began to dry up.

  Using all the means at his disposal – violence, blackmail, threats, undercover agreements – with the utter cynicism so characteristic of his political strategy, Mussolini won a significant victory in parliament: the new so-called Acerbo law on electoral reform was passed on 21st July 1923 by 223 votes to 123. The new electoral system would guarantee the party with the largest share of the vote – assuming that share represented a minimum of twenty-five per cent – two thirds of parliamentary seats, a secure and solid majority. The news was “celebrated” by the Fascist squads with an outbreak of violence largely aimed at the constituency offices of the People’s Party and Catholic clubs and associations; its culmination was the murder of the priest Giovanni Minzoni in Agrigento in Sicily. Three days after the murder, an international incident gave Mussolini an opportunity to play the strong national leader. On 27th August an Italian military unit that was carrying out checks on the Greek-Albanian border on behalf of the League of Nations was the victim of an ambush in which its commander, Enrico Tellini, and three other soldiers died. Mussolini accused Greece of carrying out the ambush and demanded that a formal apology be sent within twenty-four hours, and that they hold a ceremonial funeral for the victims, including a formal act of homage to the Italian flag, an inquiry into the incident resulting in the death penalty for the guilty and the payment of compensation amounting to fifty million lire. The Greek government denied all responsibility for the incident. Mussolini moved with characteristic speed, leaving no time for reflection, and on 31st August bombed and occupied Corfu. It took a month of Italian and Greek diplomatic negotiations to resolve the situation, with a general secretary from the Italian Foreign Ministry, Salvatore Contarini, a man who spent his career sorting out other people’s messes, making a special effort to achieve a solution. Public servants like Contarini did their utmost to protect state institutions and were often used by Mussolini in preference to Fascists who were known to be incompetent. Mussolini agreed to withdraw from Corfu only on 27th September, when he was certain he had extracted the maximum benefits from the crisis in terms of domestic politics.