Il Duce and His Women

by Roberto Olla

  Once he had returned to Rome, he summoned Cesare Mori, one of the more energetic prefects, and the same man who had had no hesitation in suppressing the Fascist squads in the period leading up to the March on Rome. Perhaps it was precisely this unquestioning loyalty to the state which led Mussolini to choose him, since he was now the state and he could therefore be confident that Mori would be ready to serve him. Shortly after the meeting Mori was sent to Sicily with full powers to stamp out the Mafia. And he used those powers: he put whole towns under a state of military siege and used torture whenever he thought it was needed, which was often. For the Mafia, it was the worst time in their history. Picciotti, capidecina and godfathers were arrested, beaten up, tortured, executed; their families were persecuted and the survivors forced to flee abroad.

  “Calati, juncu, ca passa a china”, so says a Sicilian proverb well-known to the Mafia: “bend over, reed, and let the tide pass you by”. Like the reeds, the Mafia bent over as the full tide of Fascism swept over their heads and waited for it to pass; while waiting they had time to reflect on the superior conveniences of dealing with a democracy and all its apparatus of laws rather than with a brutal dictatorship.

  The troubles with the ulcer were over for the time being; the Matteotti crisis had been resolved; Mussolini persuaded a reluctant Rachele to undergo a religious wedding. Neither was a believer, but it was a necessary step to take in the long and tortuous secret negotiations to reach an agreement with the Vatican. The ceremony took place in private, at Easter 1925, in the family apartment in Via Mario Pagano in Milan. According to Boratto, the wedding made no difference to Mussolini’s habits: his visits to Milan remained few and far between and always followed the same pattern: a brief drive in the car with his wife and children so they could be seen in public, followed by the evening spent in Margherita Sarfatti’s house. During the summer Mussolini wanted to enjoy his two main enthusiasms: women and the sea. “I soon came to realize that Mussolini, when he came to power, had at heart not only the concerns, if we can call them that, of the Italian population as a whole, but also those of a large number of women who needed satisfying.”1

  Margherita Sarfatti moved to Rome – a fortunate change for her. Sometimes Mussolini would take her to dinner at the Casina Valadier, or on a tour of the city’s monuments, when they almost always stopped for a long time to gaze at St Peter’s Square, while Boratto waited with the car just beyond Bernini’s colonnade. On some evenings Mussolini would hurriedly enter Sarfatti’s apartment block by the service entrance, while Boratto looked on amused and curious. A few seconds later a furtive figure would leave quickly by the main entrance: the new secretary of the Fascist Party, Augusto Turati. Boratto would often pass the time waiting for Mussolini to reappear by chatting with Sarfatti’s chambermaid. She once told him that her mistress was losing some of her physical attractions for the still comparatively young head of government. When Boratto asked her why in that case she thought the Duce still called on her, she replied: “He remains attached to the mother because he’s in love with the daughter, who’s also crazy about him.”2

  The chambermaid had clearly not understood that Mussolini’s interests were aroused by any woman who came within close range of him – whose mother, wife or daughter she was, how old she was, what her social background was like, even whether she was good-looking or not hardly mattered to him. In the space of a mere hour, a war widow had managed to see him, had expressed her fervent gratitude in the manner he could appreciate, and, shortly after leaving his office, obtained the pension she had originally come to see him about – bureaucratic efficiency indeed. But what the chambermaid and the chauffeur couldn’t have known as they gossiped was that Mussolini’s friendship with Sarfatti was already in decline on a political and intellectual level even before their physical relations had started to wane. With five editions over the space of a few months and its adoption as a school text, Dux was bringing in a fortune for its publisher Arnoldo Mondadori. Mussolini and his mistress had made a friendly arrangement to take equal shares in the very large royalties on the book, which also brought in foreign currency from its sales abroad. Yet, despite this, the events of 1925 and 1926 gradually spelt the end for Sarfatti. The first Italian edition of the book had been delayed because Mussolini had lost – or rather deliberately wasted – time by annotating the text with irrelevant comments and withholding his permission to publish. This was an early sign of a growing displeasure on Mussolini’s part – which at the time, however, few people succeeded in seeing, so much did Sarfatti’s star seem to be at its zenith.

  Dux was translated into nineteen languages and became a worldwide bestseller. Perhaps what most disturbed Mussolini in the book was how strongly it conveyed a sense of Sarfatti’s qualities and personality. She did nothing to disguise the influence which she exercised over so powerful a man. When she brought out Mussolini’s sexual attractiveness, she emphasized at the same time her own sexuality. Cunning, violence, sex, a self-made man who’d built himself up from nothing and the rich and cultivated woman who’d become part of his life: it was a fantastic formula for success, especially as nothing was done to discourage readers from rounding off the picture by imagining the biographer in the arms of her subject. Sarfatti felt that she had created this legend; the politician as artist was her invention – the politician who used power as though it were the supreme art form, the artist who worked with a living material, difficult, shifting, delicate: human beings. “She secretly felt superior to him because she was responsible for what he had become. She was elated and flattered when he took once again to playing her serenades on the violin over the telephone. Her dreams became more and more grandiose. At times she felt like Mussolini’s muse and, posing in her robes, saw herself going down in history as the woman who started the second Italian Renaissance. […] She felt she was the dictatrix of Italian culture.”3

  Margherita Sarfatti was a powerful woman but, under Mussolini’s dictatorship, her power proved to be as unsubstantial as a dream. In reality the Duce grew increasingly dissatisfied with her biography of him. He told Petacci that it was the greatest mistake of his life. The transcription of Petacci’s diaries in Mauro Suttora’s edition published in 2009 contains some omissions, and the edition as a whole suggests there was a certain haste to get the volume into the bookshops in the well-founded expectation it would become a bestseller. No doubt cutting entire days and, here and there, individual lines from the diary was done to shorten a very long book, but often the omissions are a matter of a few words in the middle of a sentence. While Petacci’s thoughts are not misrepresented and the contents of her diary are on the whole respected, given that a historical document is being published, a full transcription of the passages which relate directly to politics would have been more useful. Mussolini’s comments on Sarfatti relate to his anti-Semitic policies; for this reason it is better when citing them to quote from Giorgio Fabre’s critical essay on the subject, which transcribes them fully from Petacci’s pages, where she probably wrote them down shortly after the conversation in which they occurred took place. “That woman was the biggest mistake I’ve ever made. To have allowed her to write a book on me – it’s beyond comprehension – I don’t know how I could have linked my name to the name of that woman for ever. It’ll go down in history not only as my biography, but as something else.”4

  In an attempt to compensate, in 1928 Mussolini agreed to the publication of another biography of him in the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post. The proposal reached him through the offices of R.W. Child, a former American ambassador to Italy. He got his brother Arnaldo to write it, revised it himself and entrusted the translation to Child. The new biography was also serialized in various European newspapers and was published as a book in a popular edition which sold 100,000 copies; however, Mussolini remained dissatisfied and undecided about the book, blocking the Italian version and even prohibiting the distribution of the English edition within Italy. He was unconvinced that either of the biographies
– the one written by his intellectual mistress or the one by his journalist brother – were adapted to a regime which now needed with some urgency to develop a popular-nationalist political culture to accompany its wholesale institutional reorganization. It was certainly necessary to eliminate any image of him as coarse and ignorant, but Sarfatti didn’t help here. There were other methods he could adopt, such as using the Grand Council to clarify the regime’s attitudes to art and the intelligentsia. Decrees were duly issued which proclaimed the need to support the partnership of Fascism and culture. Thanks in part to the collaboration of celebrated figures such as the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, the regime had organized a congress of leading intellectuals in Bologna in 1925. It was a deliberate occupation of the territory over which Sarfatti, as the self-proclaimed high priestess of Fascist art, had up until then held sway almost alone. She spoke at the congress, but made very little impression. Following the congress, the Istituto Nazionale di Cultura Fascista (National Institute of Fascist Culture) was set up, with Gentile as its president. Shortly afterwards another institution was founded: the Reale Accademia d’Italia (Royal Academy of Italy). A guild or corporation for the intellectual professions had already been established in 1924, which within four years had been transformed into the Confederazione Nazionale dei Sindacati Fascisti dei Professionisti e degli Artisti (National Confederation of Fascist Unions of Professionals and Artists). Sarfatti was excluded from all these developments, and the spaces where she could be present increasingly restricted.

  Her evening strolls with Mussolini became less frequent, and it was harder for her to gain official access to him in Palazzo Venezia. She tried to accompany him when he went on holiday, but with increasing difficulty. At some risk, she had even followed him to the Adriatic seaside resorts he frequented with his family. And it was not only his family who got in the way on these occasions; if he crossed the beach, he was mobbed by all the holidaymakers, who were eager to get close to him in such an unusual setting. If he swam in the sea or hired a pedalo, he would be surrounded in the water by hundreds of people.

  He enjoyed his popularity, but it also spoilt the restful holidays he’d planned, especially when the police had to take special measures to protect him. In such circumstances it was hard for Margherita Sarfatti to share Mussolini’s passion for the sea. When he went to the beach at Nettuno, near Rome, it was the same: the eyes of the crowd would follow him around; as he entered the water, so did all the others, trying to swim closer and closer to him. The problem of protecting Mussolini on holiday was finally solved by assigning two police officers who were expert swimmers to stay in the water with him whenever he entered it.

  One summer Mussolini suddenly ordered Boratto to prepare the car to leave straight away for Carpena, just south of Forlì, where Rachele and the family were holidaying. Boratto realized that this wasn’t the usual seaside jaunt. He crossed the Apennines without stopping, with an unspeaking Mussolini by his side. They had got as far as Predappio, a short distance away from Carpena, just before midnight, when something happened. Boratto learnt about it later from one of his usual conversations with a gossipy chambermaid: “She confided in me that a few minutes before our arrival, a mysterious telephone call had warned Rachele that her husband was on his way to the villa, so giving a certain ‘V.’ the time to leave the house and avoid an unpleasant encounter.”5

  Rachele is usually seen as a humble woman from peasant stock, but she had a strong character and on this occasion had decided to get her own back on her husband’s infidelities. Mussolini had found, out and the news had caused his ulcer to flare up again. He had found out in the middle of a violent argument with Bianca Ceccato, who had aroused his jealous suspicions. Not knowing quite how to defend herself, she had retorted that it was all very well for him to be jealous with her when he should be paying rather more attention to what his own wife was up to.

  Italy was now a country full of informers. The regime had enlisted even the porters in apartment blocks. Mussolini easily found out what had been going on. He no longer loved Rachele, but his dignity, his pride and above all his myth was at stake. He identified the man who had been carrying on with his wife: a certain Corrado Valori. “You don’t have a man sleeping in your house without a reason. The excuse was that he was running the household, looking after the kids. And he was always with my wife. There was a lot of evidence for what was going on, though obviously she always denied it, but then why was he always with her and why did he sleep in the house? Why did he spend the night in Villa Carpena when his own house was only three kilometres off and he had a car? She said he stayed over because it was raining. But it wasn’t as if he had to drive thirty kilometres, it was just three. […] I’d heard some rumours, but I didn’t believe them. Then, once I entered her bedroom by chance and found perfumes, cosmetics, dyes, lots of refined things that she’d never bothered about before because she was just an ordinary rough peasant woman.”6

  Rachele may well have been simple and comparatively uneducated, but she had a peasant shrewdness; she had succeeded in forestalling Mussolini’s midnight irruption, proving that she had her own network of informers. Whether or not Corrado Valori was her occasional lover, Rachele managed always to behave with an almost austere dignity, uninterested in status and worldly success, reserved and devoted to her children. Mussolini, on the other hand, in the verbal ramblings which Claretta Petacci transcribed, talked in the most intimate detail about his relations with his wife, telling his mistress how the love he’d felt for her twenty years before had become nothing more than a kind of conjugal duty: “She’s completely indifferent whenever I sleep with her, about seven or eight times a year. I think she no longer feels anything with me, or almost nothing. All sexual desire is finished, unless in her it’s finished as far as I’m concerned. […] It’s true I’ve treated her badly, very badly. I’ve had illegitimate children, mistresses, I blame myself a lot and think very badly of myself. But there are excuses for the way I’ve behaved. Basically, a man like me, with the opportunities I’ve had, the kind of life I’ve led… How could I have stayed on the straight and narrow? All men are unfaithful to their wives, even barbers’ assistants. All of them, for no reason and with no excuse. But I’ve got excuses.”7

  Mussolini now lived constantly surrounded by plain-clothes policemen. He used to spend his birthday in Predappio together with his family, and the village would regularly organize a public dance in his honour. “What sluts!…” Rachele would murmur to herself as she saw the women queuing up to dance with her husband. She didn’t know the jokes which were circulating secretly among people. Her husband ended up by dancing with policemen dressed as village housewives, the athletes at sports festivals who thronged around him were policemen, the sunbathers who applauded him as he walked along the beach were policemen. The rough miners who accompanied him down the mine with their lamps and the group of burly car workers he was photographed with, a comrade among comrades, were also policemen. A special team of police agents known as the “Presidenziale” also accompanied him wherever he went, with the support of the local police in the places he visited. Paolo Monelli tells a story which occurred at Acireale, in Sicily, which he claims to have heard from someone who had actually witnessed the episode. “Surrounded by a celebrating crowd of villagers in picturesque costume, Mussolini grew suspicious of one of them and angrily accused him of being one of the ‘Presidenziale’ men. The man nervously stammered out a denial, at which Mussolini calmed down and smiled at him, pleased to find he’d been mistaken. But, thus encouraged, the man continued and, swallowing hard, told him: ‘I’m on duty from the Acireale police force.’”8

  The suffocating security which surrounded Mussolini, however, helped to prevent various attempts on his life. The first incident was the discovery of a plot organized by the former opposition deputy Tito Zaniboni on 4th November 1925, who was arrested in a hotel room in the centre of Rome, which he had booked under a false name.

  The door of the room op
ened, and there was the honourable Zaniboni posing as a certain Major Silvestrini. He was taken aback by the visit of the police agents, but composed himself and asked them what they wanted. But one of the police officers, Belloni, pushed his way into the room, followed by the others; two of them held Zaniboni down, while the others went straight to the window, next to which there was a panel from the shutters which had been taken down. Behind the shutter a gun had been concealed with its barrel leaning against one of the slats. It was a powerful rifle, made in Austria, with a telescopic sight – the kind used by snipers in wartime. The barrel, as I was saying, was leaning against a slat of the shutter and was turned in the direction of the balcony of the Palazzo Chigi. Besides the rifle, the honourable Zaniboni had three leather suitcases and a box of the kind used to carry military kit in the room.9

  Mussolini was adroit in using the press to project the views he wanted: the newspapers wrote that the opposition was finished, because it was no longer using political means but assassination instead. Those who opposed Fascism therefore were trying to take the country into a period of violence, conflict and bloodshed. Mussolini was not overly concerned by Zaniboni’s plot. It was advantageous to him in political terms, and the personal danger to himself had been minimal, given that the police had been keeping the former deputy under surveillance and had been able to stop him while he was still in his hotel room. In subsequent attempts on his life, the level of risk increased, but Mussolini still succeeded in using them to create an atmosphere of tension in the country which only encouraged a strengthening of the dictatorship. With a clever journalistic sleight of hand he convinced the Italian people that it was all right to give up certain freedoms, since the attempts on his life meant that national security was also under threat.