Il Duce and His Women

by Roberto Olla

  Effectively Mussolini never succeeded in being seen as a man of culture among the other attainments which formed part of his public image; the idea that he was a man of letters, a novelist, a dramatist, had no basis in actual fact. But at least his efforts to appear so were real: as a letter to the philosopher Giovanni Gentile shows, he was assiduous in using his free time for self-improvement: “Dear Gentile, I must tell you that I’ve spent these solitary days on the beach at Castel Porziano reading your book La filosofia dell’arte from beginning to end with great interest.”6

  On 16th September 1929 Mussolini moved the main seat of government from Palazzo Chigi to Palazzo Venezia. By then he had already left the apartment in Via Rasella and moved to take up residence in Villa Torlonia, where, in November 1929, after many years of living separately, he was joined by his wife and children. In the new and spacious setting of Villa Torlonia he had the rooms organized in such a way that he was able to lead his life independently of his family. “Although he was fond of his family, of his wife (who basically remained a good housewife who almost always kept her distance from affairs of state) and his children (especially his two daughters Edda, who was the most intelligent and whose character most closely resembled his own, and Anna Maria, particularly after she was struck down by paralysis at the age of seven and almost died), he spent very little time at home and lived a completely separate life from them when he was there.”7

  The housewifely Rachele didn’t know that their new residence had been found thanks to the offices of Margherita Sarfatti, who had spoken to the villa’s owner, Prince Torlonia. The rent that the Duce was charged – one lira – was purely symbolic; the Prince also allowed his staff and their families to use various houses and apartments in the grounds of the villa. The buxom and resplendent Romilda Ruspi was one of the young wives who lived in the villa’s grounds – almost as if she were served up on a silver platter for Mussolini’s pleasure. His relationship with her showed no sign of ending; to avoid scandal she had to separate from her husband and move to an elegant apartment in the nearby Via Po.

  The comings and goings of various women to Mussolini’s living quarters once again threatened to get out of hand, as Boratto testifies: “Quite frequently, while ‘R.’ [Romilda Ruspi] was being entertained in Villa Torlonia, I would see ‘S.’ [Margherita Sarfatti] arrive unexpectedly at the staff entrance, since she had private access to the villa’s grounds. Sudden secret exits and jealous rows would follow. Rumour had it that Ruspi gave birth to a baby boy during her affair with Mussolini, but I cannot confirm this.”8

  The exits and entrances of R. and of S. in the villa were also observed by the twenty-three-year-old Claretta Petacci, whose family in 1935 moved to a villa in Via Spallanzani, which bordered the villa Torlonia. She had caught Mussolini’s attention three years earlier when he was driving his sports car; he had driven past her several times to make sure she had noticed him. She began to be invited to Palazzo Venezia. Now, in the new family home, she could keep a watchful eye on her hero’s movements. She would get up early in the morning to see him riding his horse among the trees in the park surrounding the villa, and every now and then he would look up at the mischievous face framed by ringlets which was smiling down at him from a high window. When she became his official mistress, she already knew everything about Ruspi and her seductive arts and tormented Mussolini in the effort to get him to drop such a determined rival. Ruspi put up a stout resistance; she had three children and claimed the Duce was the father of the third, so securing an agreement from him to pay financial support for the boy’s upbringing. As late as 1938 Petacci managed to surprise Mussolini just after he had had oral sex with Ruspi: “I insist he tells me the truth; I tell him what happened. He’s taken aback and looks amazed, he betrays himself. He goes on denying it, but in the end confirms it by confessing: ‘She took a handkerchief and placed it between her legs and then showed it to me, covered in blood. Yes, I confess gestures like these are repugnant – she was coarse. It put me off, so in the end nothing happened.’ […] [Petacci:] ‘No that’s not true, she gave you a blow job.’ – ‘OK, yes, she gave me a blow job, there, now I’ve told you.’”9

  A short distance away from Villa Torlonia, on Via Nomentana, was the stylish villa built in art-nouveau style where another of Mussolini’s long-term mistresses lived, Alice De Fonseca Pallottelli. “Twice a month Mussolini would unfailingly pay a visit to the elegant villa on Via Nomentana where the lady of the house, Signora ‘P.’ would be expecting him. She was blonde and slim, but no longer in her first youth; she had a seven-year-old daughter. She always made sure the gate to the villa was open for him, probably because she’d been telephoned in advance to expect him. She lived alone; I never saw any domestic staff.”10

  With no chambermaids or housekeepers around, poor Boratto had to fill the time while waiting for Mussolini’s tryst with Pallottelli to come to an end by playing games with the daughter in the garden. Mussolini himself admitted to Petacci that he’d realized the children born to Ruspi and Pallottelli were his and was moved when he picked them up in his arms. In particular he thought the little Adù resembled Anna, his and Rachele’s youngest daughter, and this seemed to him a good enough proof. Despite Petacci’s opposition to them, both Ruspi and Pallottelli managed, just, to maintain their positions. Mussolini remarked to his young mistress: “I see Pallottelli once in a blue moon, she’s finished like Sarfatti. The ties with her are like family ones. As for Ruspi – well, your psychology is right – I hold on to her out of a sense of possession. […] But I’ve had enough of her too, there’s nothing to attract me there, she’s flabby, faded. […] It’s just keeping possession of something which is mine. Given that I support her financially, I’d rather she didn’t sleep with other men. In any case, it’s all relative, because it takes a lot of days, a long time to recharge the batteries.”11

  Just two days after she’d joined her husband in the Villa Torlonia, Rachele discovered some photographs of Bianca Ceccato in his pockets. She decided to accept his usual excuses – “My darling, you are the only woman I really love…” – and never suspected that there was another illegitimate child from this relationship. She was busy establishing her presence in her new home, and the first casualty of Rachele’s moving in was not one of his mistresses. In her memoirs she wrote that on arrival in Rome she found her husband entrusted to the care of a housekeeper, one Cesira, and – it was Rachele’s impression – it was she who seemed to be the head of the household. She then discovered that Cesira had been employed on the recommendation of – of all people – Margherita Sarfatti. Poor Cesira – even if she didn’t consider herself in charge of the household, she had grown used to her independence in running the place, in organizing meals and visits, even regulating Mussolini’s sleep. In her own way she had become a power to be reckoned with: many impoverished families used to write to her with demands, asking her to intercede on their behalf to obtain some financial support or a job. As time went by, requests started to arrive from firms in financial difficulties; if she was able to, she passed the letters on to Mussolini, and in this way acted as a privileged channel of access to him. Rachele dug in her heels: she asked Mussolini to dismiss the housekeeper. It is true that he tried to oppose the decision – he recalled the nights he’d spent doubled up in bed with the pain of his ulcer with Cesira always at his side, ready to give him a drink of water or his pills, to provide the tin bowl if he needed to vomit and to clean him up afterwards and wipe his feverish sweat away. But Rachele was adamant, and Cesira was sent back to Gubbio. Mussolini ensured that she received a monthly income of six hundred lire from the account of his newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia, and in 1939, showing he had not forgotten her, increased it to seven hundred lire (a popular song of the time had the refrain “If only I had a thousand lire a month…”). When the war came, the sum wasn’t even enough to put food on the table with; after the war, Cesira’s regular income stopped completely.

  Mussolini soon got over the los
s of his housekeeper; even when he was in Rome and not travelling the country, he spent little time in Villa Torlonia. He slept in a separate room, spent his time reading and briefly seeing his children. In the mornings he would take a short horse ride in the villa’s grounds or play a round of tennis, while in the evenings he and his family would watch films in the small private cinema he’d had installed – Chaplin, Ridolini, Laurel and Hardy and, in advance of their public distribution and ready to order any cuts, the weekly newsreels produced by the Istituto Luce. He was keen on Walt Disney cartoons: “I saw Snow White and the Seven Dwarves – it was marvellous. It was unbelievably beautiful – you should see its colours, the different hues, the drawing! And he’s so brilliant at imagining strange things – plants, flowers, birds… it was really splendid.”12

  When Disney paid a visit to Italy in the 1930s, Mussolini asked for him to be presented; the American turned up at the official audience with the Duce with a gift for his youngest daughter Anna Maria – an automated and life-size puppet of Mickey Mouse. Disney returned to the United States full of enthusiasm for the myth of Mussolini, but only a few years later, during the war, he nevertheless contributed to the propaganda effort by using his artistry to produce a cartoon against him, Der Fuehrer’s Face, which is now regarded as one of the best cartoon films ever made. Lasting just five minutes, it shows Donald Duck having a dream in which Mussolini appears alongside Hitler and Hirohito. It’s a masterpiece of its kind but despite this the Disney company prefers it not to be shown nowadays.

  Mussolini didn’t like receiving visitors at Villa Torlonia, apart from close relatives and other very rare exceptions. As the regime increased its hold on power, the number of Mussolini’s presumed relatives tended to increase in direct proportion, much to the astonishment of Rachele, who had never suspected their families were so extensive. The situation got to the point when in 1939 Mussolini ordered a circular to be sent out from the Ministry of Popular Culture informing all state offices to reject any letter or request or other communication from people claiming to be related to him. He followed this up with a list of those who were deemed officially to be members of his family: his children, his sister Edvige Mancini Mussolini, his nephews Vito and Alfredo Mussolini and Agostino Augusto Moschi, the son of Rosa Guidi, Rachele’s sister. No one else claiming kinship, outside this limited group of names, was to be allowed through.

  After the end of the Second World War, the death of Mussolini and the collapse of the regime, Margherita Sarfatti, in her self-justificatory memoir entitled My Fault, paints a very different picture of Villa Torlonia and the surrounding neighbourhood along Via Nomentana. She writes that the residential villas of the area were surrounded by poorer areas. While the children of the well-off families in the villas were all privately educated, the poor sent theirs to the state schools, also attended by the Mussolini children. In 1933 a medical inspector was carrying out examinations in the state schools, and in the course of them came across a sickly little boy who suffered from a squint. The inspector asked how the parents of the child could send him to school in such a condition, but the staff soon warned him to tone down his comments: the skinny, frightened little lad was none other than Romano Mussolini… The anecdote testifies to Sarfatti’s continuing desire to attack Rachele, who at the time of the memoir, immediately after the end of the war, had withdrawn completely from public life – but it seems hardly believable. In 1933 any school which had among its pupils one of the children of the by now legendary leader of the country would have regarded it as an honour and a privilege, and the idea that a mere provincial medical inspector could have examined Romano Mussolini without knowing who his father was is impossible. Sarfatti’s malice against Rachele is seen in other pages of the memoir, for example, in criticizing the latter’s ability to write properly (according to Sarfatti at least): “ ‘I do wish she wouldn’t keep spelling “baci” [“kisses”] as “bachi”,’ Mussolini would complain to me as he held the long elegant envelopes addressed in her ugly scribble, the fine writing paper suitable for a lady’s bureau spoilt with the clumsy handwriting of the housewife. On the back of the envelope there was the odd scrawl ‘Pedisse Rachele Mussolini’. She never learnt to spell the word ‘spedisce’ [‘sends’ = ‘sender’] correctly, always getting the ss wrong, just as Mussolini himself, with his provincial accent, never managed to pronounce the name of the political movement he had invented right, always saying ‘fassi’ or ‘fassism’ or ‘fassista’.”13

  Journalists were kept away from Villa Torlonia; at most, they were summoned first thing in order to see the Duce at his morning sports activities. Mussolini had early on laid down – and in no uncertain terms – his vision of what journalism was about: on 10th October 1928 he had declared in front of a meeting of seventy of the country’s newspaper editors that “the Italian press is Fascist and should feel pride in fulfilling its duty to fight in a united front under the banners of Fascism”. He regarded all newspapers as party newspapers – belonging to one party, his own; the idea of a free press was merely part of the baggage of the old order of things, which the new regime had replaced. A new ontological conception of what information was for now ruled, summed up in the formula, to be applied consistently in every area of life: “Avoid what is harmful and do what is useful for the regime”. Whenever it was deemed useful, the gates of Villa Torlonia were opened and journalists allowed to enter to exalt the Duce in all his splendour, and when they couldn’t do this, they filled their pages with reports of dog shows, competitions for singing canaries, gymnastic tournaments and fashion parades. There was very little actual news to read, especially news of crime, since this would threaten to cloud the sky that, under Mussolini’s regime, was supposed to be always bright. When it was seen that some journalists were slow to adhere to the new criteria, displaying an unwarranted attachment to their old professional independence of action and opinion, the Ministry for the Press and Propaganda started to send out personal warnings from the Duce criticizing their work, while their more submissive colleagues received personal commendations. Picture the state of mind of a journalist who received a reprimand from the Duce. Journalists were seen as mere “labourers” at the service of the so-called mass culture by means of which Mussolini hoped to mould his new Italians and modify the old ones; they were there merely to echo and amplify the Duce’s extemporized slogans, such as the one he improvised when he emerged onto the balcony of Palazzo Venezia in front of the assembled crowds brandishing a book and a gun in his hands, the new symbols for the education of Fascist youth.

  “The book and the gun” came to be seen alongside the fasces as one of the leading symbols of the regime, exalted by its propaganda, reviled by its opponents – but the motto was in fact merely the result of chance. “There was a crowd of students in Piazza Venezia who were applauding him and urging him to appear on the balcony. Mussolini had no wish to address them, since he couldn’t think of anything he wanted to say. So he went and fetched a gun from off one of the walls and also grabbed a book without looking at it…”14 As he stepped out onto the balcony holding these objects aloft, a roar went up from the crowd; from that moment onwards “the book and the gun” became the leading slogan for Fascist education, the symbol towards which the perfect Fascist youth (“Libro e moschetto / Fascista perfetto”) should aspire. Today the idea seems laughable, but at the time it was an extraordinary phenomenon: the symbols galvanized the younger generation, who transmitted their enthusiasm to their families – peasants, factory and office workers, all sections of society became involved. The maximum levels of public consensus for the regime derived from its penetration of the country’s educational system; the endless lessons of Fascist mythologizing had the effect Mussolini had planned. The influence of the regime’s blanket propaganda was profound on the generation which grew up after the March on Rome. The new means of communication, radio and cinema (through the Luce production company) were powerful transmitters. Even in an area of the country as remote as the Barba
gia in inland Sardinia, about as far from Mussolini’s imperial city of Rome as it was possible to get in the Italy of the time, the children played at being “country housewives”. Racing around among the cherry and almond trees and the great rocks, the tallest girl would reach the outside stairs of the cottage and run up them to take her place on the small central balcony, her head just appearing above the parapet, and there she would shout out the words she had heard earlier on the radio from one of Mussolini’s speeches to the crowds in Piazza Venezia. Below, playing among the great granite boulders shaped by the wind and the rain, the other little girls would wrap pieces of cloth round cushions and stones, turning them into dolls – all the numerous offspring which the regime demanded from Italian women, making the little girls feel like the “housewives” they’d heard the grown-ups speak so much about.

  On one occasion Mussolini lifted the rules which protected Villa Torlonia from unwanted visitors to allow a team of American film-makers in to create a documentary on his domestic life. Making sure at the outset that the distribution of the completed film within Italy would be prohibited, Mussolini gave his consent to being filmed sitting in an armchair and reading the newspaper – wearing thick reading glasses to do so – and for his children to be filmed as they went to school. Only Rachele managed to avoid the camera, although she underestimated a cameraman’s skill in keeping one eye fixed on the camera focus and the other on the alert for anything else happening in the background – in this case the American operating the camera noticed that Rachele had come out of the kitchen, quickly panned over to her and succeeded in filming her as she moved.