Il Duce and His Women

by Roberto Olla

  While the King refused to intervene in the course of political events in the country, he was more disposed to do so when it was a question of Mussolini’s personal interests. Whenever the two men had a disagreement, the King did not fail to follow up with some conciliatory gesture designed to appease his head of government. The problems the Duce was having in organizing a tranquil trip to the seaside came to the King’s notice, and he saw the situation as a good opportunity to make a placatory gesture which might sweeten Mussolini’s mood. “The King came to hear about Mussolini’s increasing enthusiasm for the seaside and, since he was always eager to satisfy his whims, decided to put at his disposal the private beach of Tor Paterno, part of the vast royal estate at Castel Porziano.”19 The estate, still reserved today for the private use of presidents of the Republic, consists of a large wooded tract of land, enclosed on its inland side by a wall thirty kilometres in length, and with fourteen kilometres of coastline. Boratto, together with some employees from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, built a wooden beach hut, consisting of three rooms. Beach huts on stilts near to the shore were common in Italian resorts at the time, and Mussolini used his for the same activities as any other Italian holidaymaker – to change into his swimming costume, to take his meals, to go to the toilet and take a shower. In addition, it was a place where he could entertain the women who had permission to enter the estate and visit him. The room which was intended to be a study he also used as a sitting room. Here, finally, he found freedom from the public gaze and solitude inside a well-protected refuge. A small straw hut accommodated Boratto, who controlled the comings and goings of visitors during the day using two telephones, one for normal use and one with a direct connection to the Ministry for Internal Affairs. The guards at the entrance to the estate called him every time a car arrived which was on the list of authorized visitors, thus enabling Boratto to make sure Mussolini only ever had one mistress in the beach hut at any one time. One of Boratto’s duties was driving the motorboat for excursions out to sea, one of Margherita Sarfatti’s favourite pastimes. “The first woman who visited Castel Porziano to alleviate the Duce’s solitude was ‘S.’ She arrived punctually at midday. They swam together and then, at one o’clock, ate lunch. Immediately afterwards they sunbathed. They spent most of the afternoon reading the books which ‘S.’ had brought with her or the newspapers and magazines which had been sent from Rome.”20 When Mussolini and Boratto were at the beach, two lunches would always arrive at midday for them, but the chauffeur often had to give up his meal to whichever mistress was visiting on the day. To have asked for three might have aroused suspicions. At times the situation started to get out of hand. Margherita Sarfatti took to bringing her daughter, who had by now turned eighteen, with her. The three of them would swim together. Then the daughter started coming by herself. She only needed to lift her little finger to get Mussolini to give her whatever she wanted. One morning she persuaded him to take the motorboat to the port of Anzio. Boratto objected that it was too far, but the Duce insisted and Boratto had to steer the craft. As they were returning, the engine cut out three miles from the coast. The petrol had run out. No one back at Castel Porziano was aware of the problem, because the staff on the estate had strict orders never to disturb Mussolini while he was there. It’s easy to panic in such a situation, but Mussolini gave a show of amused unconcern while Boratto kept thinking he couldn’t swim and the girl looked around to see if she could come up with an idea. “We tried to row back to the shore, but we couldn’t move the motorboat an inch. In the meantime, a light northerly wind was blowing us farther out to sea. […] We were getting cold (because we only had bathing costumes on) and seeing it was pointless to wait further, the young lady, who was a good swimmer (whereas the male members of crew certainly weren’t) dived into the water to reach the shore. It was thanks to her that, towards ten at night, we were towed back.”21

  After this misadventure, Boratto asked to be excused from the duty of driving the motorboat again, a request which was granted – a stroke of good luck for him because over the next few years Mussolini took to spending much of the summer in Castel Porziano, from early May to the lingering warmth of early autumn, with many trips in the motorboat, with or without one of his numerous mistresses.

  One day an unexpected visitor arrived and asked the guards if she could be received by Mussolini. It was up to Boratto to decide whether he should give the message to Mussolini or not. Once he knew the identity of the visitor, he made his way over to the beach hut with a sense of foreboding. Mussolini didn’t like to be disturbed. He’d once shouted at the head of his press office, Lando Ferretti, because he had dared to disturb him by calling him on the telephone while he was sunbathing naked on the beach. Ferretti wanted to speak to him urgently about a news item in the Vatican newspaper the Osservatore romano, which reported the publication of Pius XI’s anti-Fascist encyclical; the Pope’s views would soon be making headlines all over the world, and Ferretti didn’t know how to respond. Mussolini told him to go to hell, adding that while the Pope might have gone mad, he, Mussolini, most certainly hadn’t.

  Boratto arrived at the hut. Mussolini was annoyed, but he too, once he’d been told who the visitor was, couldn’t deny her request. The visitor in question was Maria José of Savoy. She was well known for her anti-Fascist views, and it is difficult to understand why she’d come to Castel Porziano to sunbathe and go swimming right next to Mussolini, even if the estate did belong to her husband’s family. Belgian by birth, extremely cultivated, brought up to become the Queen of Italy, Maria José’s attitude to her own body was perhaps more Nordic in spirit, less prurient and more relaxed, than Mussolini’s Mediterranean and working-class view. Such a contrast is the only explanation for the way Mussolini described the incident to Petacci. Once she got to the beach Maria José put her swimsuit on, a two-piece, daring for the time. “You know, I’m not impotent, but that woman next to me, almost naked, brushing her thighs, her legs against me, who moved about revealing everything… she hadn’t the slightest effect on me. I remained completely indifferent, distant, my senses were sleeping. Nothing, I tell you, nothing, my cock didn’t even raise its head a little, nothing. On the contrary it hid away. The more she moved and revealed, the further it shrank. [Petacci:] ‘It must be republican.’ He laughs: Yes, that’s right, I just felt it wanted to go to sleep. I couldn’t succeed in feeling any physical attraction for her. But at times she was provoking. I even saw her pubic hair, when she crossed her legs. And then it was hot under the sun… It’s exciting to have a naked woman so near, who kept touching my legs. On our own in a beach hut, I mean I’m not made of wood. And yet I was wood. I wasn’t a man but a politician – nothing, I tell you nothing. Not a hair moved. I wonder what she was thinking? That I’m impotent? […] Any other woman who arrived and was naked like that, I’d have taken her. But with her I couldn’t, I didn’t feel a thing, not a thing. How can you explain that? And yet she’s not ugly, she’s got a nice body, nicely shaped, slim. Her face is a bit plain, and she’s got such big feet – you should see them. And that frizzy blond hair, I don’t like that. But even with a woman uglier than she was – and she wasn’t ugly – I’d have had her. Yet with her I didn’t. Why ever not?”22

  Petacci wrote her entries just after her meetings or telephone conversations with Mussolini, and she wrote them rapidly while her memory of his words was still fresh in her mind. Punctuation is the first casualty of her haste, and errors of grammar and syntax are frequent, but the speed with which she wrote also shows that she was concerned to get down as accurate a transcription as possible. If we look at the gist of the episode just quoted, we find the princess Maria José being subjected to Mussolini’s close examination as he watches every move she makes in her swimming costume, quick to notice every portion of flesh she bares, using the reactions of his “cock” to measure the closeness of their bodies. However, the passage taken as a whole also suggests that the princess had decided to check out for herself the truth of Mu
ssolini’s reputation. The future “Queen of May” returned to Castel Porziano several times after this visit, bringing a lady in waiting with whom Boratto struck up a friendship: “I was very glad to spend time with the lady in waiting. She often offered me cigarettes with the unusual brand name ‘Me ne frego’ [‘I don’t give a damn’, a Fascist motto] which were sent especially from Egypt for the princess. After a few months the Duce ordered me to find some pretext to turn her away whenever she next arrived.”23

  A letter by Romano Mussolini, the penultimate son of the Duce, has recently emerged and was published on the weekly gossip magazine Oggi at the beginning of September this year, offering a possible new perspective on the ties between Mussolini and Maria José. “At home we have actually often talked about the political and sentimental relationship between Maria José and my father, and I can say in all honesty that Mother was always (even if naturally with some reserve) very explicit about it: between my father and the then Princess of Piedmont there was a short, intimate relationship, which I believe my father later decided to break off.” Romano Mussolini’s letter, dated 1st July 1971, was addressed to the journalist Antonio Terzi, the deputy editor of Corriere della Sera. Terzi decided not to publish the letter at the time (it was discovered by his son in the family archive only this year) and, apparently, never replied to it. Romano Mussolini’s claims are an example of relata refero – he was reporting what he had heard from his mother during conversations at home. Such conversations dealt with both the political and sentimental relationship, therefore they were not centred around the couple’s love affair, but were of a broader nature. Romano Mussolini does not give a date, but we can assume he is talking about the immediate post-war period, when he was old enough to take part in such conversations without his mother being embarrassed to talk about it with him. What Claretta Petacci wrote is also a report of what her lover told her. However, this contradicts the figure of the Duce as it appears throughout her diary: it seems strange that he would not boast about having conquered Her Royal Highness herself. Common sense suggests that Mussolini, rejected or at least rebuffed by such a wilful, learned and intelligent woman, declared her “a bit plain”, with “frizzy blond hair” and such “big feet”. History cannot be written just using common sense: it requires documents and evidence. Elsewhere in his letter, Romano Mussolini wrote to Terzi: “In all good faith I can confirm that I have read some of Maria José’s love letters to my father.” These letters are nowhere to be found, but if they were to emerge one day and be authenticated, then they could be used as a primary source from where to reconstruct the events and the relationship between the Duce and the future queen.

  If we look at everything Mussolini did (or said he did) during the day – the newspapers and reports he read, the documents he had to write, the women he entertained, the official audiences, the telephone calls, the books he read, his travels – it becomes clear that he couldn’t possibly have succeeded in fitting all these activities in. It is extraordinary that he managed to spend so much time at the seaside, even if the beach hut had a study. In the summer he only spent two or three hours a day in his office in Palazzo Venezia. Yet he always seemed to have time to spare and even to waste, such as when he asked Boratto to construct a bowling green where they could play at bowls together (the chauffeur notes that Mussolini was a beginner at the game, but became angry if he started to lose, so Boratto had to let him win every now and then, so Mussolini wouldn’t give up). In the winter, as soon as the first snows fell in the mountains, Mussolini would go off to ski at Monte Terminillo (Boratto again adds the comment that despite having one of the best ski instructors available he never became a proficient skier). Later on, Monte Terminillo became one of the places where he took his favourite mistress Claretta Petacci for their trysts. On one occasion, when Petacci was ill, Boratto, who always knew what was going on, saw her sister Miriam enter the private entrance to Mussolini’s suite in the hotel where he stayed while skiing and sneak out again the following morning. “Petacci and her sister, Miriam, usually stayed in the Hotel delle Nazioni in Rieti. From there they would arrive at about ten in the morning, join the Duce at Campo Forogna and spend the day skiing, having lunch on the slopes. In the evening, if the Duce was staying in the hotel, Claretta would remain in the presidential suite, but on the evenings when she didn’t feel well it was her sister Miriam who stole into Mussolini’s bedroom and then – so the owner of the hotel told me – slipped out the following morning before it was light, so acting as a substitute for her sister in the Duce’s sexual attentions.”24

  Boratto’s story might seem outlandish, like one of those false notes that threaten to undermine an entire piece of evidence, but other external testimonies would seem to confirm its truth. Petacci immediately noticed that her sister was no longer the childlike Mimi who accompanied Mussolini on their strolls through the woods: “We walk along quite fast, until we slow down near a grassy ditch. A nightingale is singing in the middle of a grove of trees and we listen to it entranced. Mimi catches up with us and he stops to talk and looks at her in a different way, like a man, as he’s never done before. I am slightly puzzled. In fact, as we continue our walk, he behaves like a man who thinks he’s attractive, who wants something, and other things I won’t write here. His smile is artful. Then he thinks I’ve understood and runs away, jumping over ditches.”25

  In his close analysis of Petacci’s diary, Giorgio Fabre has discovered that on a couple of pages there are lines written in someone else’s handwriting. “A comparison with the only known autograph document in the handwriting of Miriam known as Mimi, Petacci’s sister, which I have been able to consult thanks to the staff of the Central State Archive, would seem to confirm that the writing in the diary is indeed Miriam’s. At the time she would have been fourteen or fifteen, and she knew about her sister’s affair with Mussolini. When her writing stops, another hand takes over, which is undoubtedly Claretta’s.”26

  So the two sisters increasingly became accomplices, with Claretta even “lending” her diary to Miriam, and not just to read its intimate descriptions, including some explicit ones of her various sexual activities with Mussolini, but to make her own contribution by writing a few lines in it herself. It is probable that Claretta, like the grand royal mistresses of the past, cynically adapted herself to the new situation: having seen that Mussolini had his eyes on her sister and realizing she could do nothing to stop it, she made Miriam into an ally rather than a rival.

  On 16th March 1928, Mussolini presented his new electoral law, which had been approved by the Grand Council, in parliament. Only fifteen deputies voted against it: any space left for political manoeuvre for what remained of the parliamentary opposition had now been definitively removed. The law stipulated that there should be a single list of four hundred candidates to fill four hundred seats in parliament. The list would be approved by the Grand Council and presented to the electorate in its entirety, who, at the ballot box, could only vote “yes” or “no”. If there was a majority in favour, even by just a single vote, then the entire list was approved. It was a plebiscite rather than an election, and everything was ready for it to go ahead, but Mussolini put it off for another year. His greatest political success to date had still to be achieved.

  There were many forces trying to slow down and, if possible, stop the secret negotiations with the Vatican. Mussolini himself retained his innate anti-clerical convictions but stooped to compromise by getting married with a religious ceremony and having his children baptized, coming out against the use of contraception, ensuring there was a clerical presence in the armed forces and blocking the republication of his early writings. Yet all this was still not enough; with some apprehension, Mussolini realized that he would have to tackle head on the complex and shifting hierarchical politics of the Church. On numerous occasions Catholic clubs, associations and cooperatives had been attacked by Fascist squads. Mussolini’s best tactic was once again to wait and appear to be the great mediator. He had to
prepare Fascism gradually for what he intended to do, so that the last ras could be coaxed into accepting the future concordat, and he had to win over and reassure the King and the House of Savoy. For the Church too there was a great deal at stake, something which was apparent from the very first secret meeting which Mussolini had attended and which, much later, he spoke about in a session of the Grand Council: “The first contact took place one evening in the spring of 1923 in the residence belonging to senator Count Cantucci, a former head of Rome’s Catholic organizations, in Piazza della Pigna. My interlocutor on that occasion? […] No less a personage than the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Gasparri.”27

  The Vatican needed to protect its vast patrimony of buildings in Rome and throughout the country, but it also wanted to defend its role and room for action in Italian society, the moral patrimony of lay Catholic movements and of the education of new generations now and to come. The Pope was adamant about this: the Church would not be excluded. This was highly contentious terrain; Mussolini too was interested in the younger generations, since, alongside the day-to-day political manoeuvring to maintain and increase the regime’s power, he also had a longer-term strategy based on instilling Fascism into the new generations of Italians. These concerns influenced the negotiations. Many Catholics viewed the establishment of relations with the regime with apprehension. A fierce debate broke out in the press about the fundamental issues at stake in seeking to reach an agreement, and all negotiations came to a halt for seven months.