The Petacci family’s most vaunted dwelling place, however, was the stridently modernist Villa Camilluccia, a massive – 700-square-metre, 32-room, 2-storey – residence in the northern suburbs of Rome beneath Monte Mario. At first appearance it might suggest a full conversion of the Petaccis to the taste and philosophy of Fascism. However, much about it belied its apparent commitment to revolution, rather confirming the family’s determination to climb socially by any means. Occupying a large block of land at Via della Camilluccia 355–7, it was equipped with a swimming pool, tennis court (according to gossip, the court was never prepared for play and the pool’s drainage system did not work),29 terraces replete with gymnastic equipment, orchard, flower garden, chicken run and two separate guard posts, while boasting a huge salone with crystal doors (the servants’ quarters doubled as an air raid shelter). Claretta’s own bedroom, equipped with large mirrors, exuded female sentiment of a cloying kind, displaying a fondness for silk fabric conforming to her taste in plunging negligees, and a devotion to the colour pink in its furnishings and even its telephone.
After the fall of the dictatorship the Villa Camilluccia experienced an uneven fate. It was sacked by an aggrieved populace in July 1943 and then handed over to the Istituto del Santissimo Crocifisso, a Catholic charitable organisation – founded under Fascism – committed to children’s welfare.30 Following the establishment of the Italian postwar republic, those members of the Petacci family who had escaped Claretta’s and Marcello’s fate in 1945 sued for the Villa’s return with tardy success: in 1960 the Italian state paid out an ordered 22.5 million lire (of a requested 104 million) in compensation.31 But Myriam and the Petacci parents lacked sufficient will or capital to restore it, with the Villa lingering for a time as the ‘Palazzi restaurant’ before being bulldozed in 1975. The site, somewhat incongruously, now houses the Iraqi embassy. However, its story still attracts naive celebration by cultural historians lauding ‘a courageous example of modern architecture, spare and essential, with an intense and complex use of space’ and hailing it as an effective marriage of Le Corbusier and Palladio.32
Less remarked upon but worth a tourist visit in Rome is the Petacci family tomb in the Campo Verano, the city’s cemetery, spreading behind the Basilica of San Lorenzo towards the Tiburtina railway yards, and subject to vicious Allied bombing on 19 July 1943, an attack which triggered the Duce’s first fall. Claretta’s corpse was interred there one spring day on 16 March 1956. Her remains had travelled a complex course from the Piazzale Loreto, even if, unlike those of her partner Mussolini, they had not suffered the bathetic fate of being purloined by nostalgic admirers.33 The final burial in Rome had been allowed by the Italian state after Ugo De Pilato, the lawyer of Claretta’s still living parents, Dr Francesco Saverio Petacci and Giuseppina Persichetti, petitioned the government in January 1954 for charity. ‘Two elderly parents, severely struck by fate,’ De Pilato wrote in lachrymose vein, could thereby find some closure, a mandatory concession when ‘the memory of this unhappy creature inspires throughout Italy and outside the country merely sentiments of sorrowing sympathy and reverence’ and neither criticism nor disdain.34
In the present day, few of the tourists who throng Rome find their way to the mausoleum. Yet to bask in this small corner of the city’s history does have its attractions for a visitor. The web offers two pathways to the Petacci tomb. In the romantic evocation of the Rome daily Il Messaggero – which under the regime employed her doctor-father as a medical commentator – Claretta is recalled as ‘Mussolini’s woman’, it being stressed that she ‘died tragically’. Nonetheless, it is quickly admitted that the tomb of the comic film star Alberto Sordi has more appeal, with many other actors resting nearby awaiting veneration.35 A local news-sheet counsels a rival track. Its ‘third itinerary’ directs pilgrims past the Jewish sector of the cemetery and on to the nearby tomb of the comic dramatist, Eduardo De Filippo. Up a rise to the right rest the remains of his brother, Peppino, buried in a pyramid-shaped edifice. Opposite stands the tomb of the Petaccis and just a little further on, we are told, that of Attilio Ferraris, a celebrated footballer in the Fascist years, who in 1934 was a member of the first Italy squad to win the World Cup.36
It is plain, therefore, that a host of ideas and memories whisper across the contemporary Campo Verano.37 But the Petacci tomb deserves inspection. It is built, as was expected in the 1950s, of pre-stressed concrete, now blackening and crumbling with age and carbonation, and is reached via a short stairway. From this elevated site, the tomb rises some 30 feet farther into the skies, being surmounted by a slightly curved roof. A long glass shield, broken into rectangles, protects the inhumations. At the bottom, Francesco Saverio and his wife lie united in death, as they were in life. On the side, Claretta’s younger sister, the sometime starlet Myriam, rests alone. But these family members are as subordinate to Claretta here as they were in history. It is she who commands the tomb.
Above the first layer of interments and pushed back a little lies a solid black marble coffin. It is labelled CLARETTA 28-II-1912 – 28-IV-45. Strikingly set above it is a white marble statue, larger than life-size, of the dead woman. She is wrapped in what might be a sheet or toga (and not her favoured negligee, often worn late into the afternoon).38 Her shoulders, upper arms, hands and feet are bare, with her upper leg revealed beneath a diaphanous layer. Her right knee is slightly raised, suggesting motion, although her legs are placed primly together. She has her chin up, with her breasts thrust forward (perhaps to the pleasure of Mussolini’s passing ghost). Her hair is a little unkempt. Her smile is contained. But the most expressive feature of the statue is the large hands, which are turned outwards, presenting her arms and shoulders, bashfully offering herself and her soul to a chosen partner. In death, Claretta remains young and austerely beautiful. The lines of her body may be exposed but not in a sensual manner; her sculptor has left her decorously promising eternal love, not lust.39 It may be, nonetheless, that the tomb’s history is passing. On 28 October 2015, ninety-third anniversary of the Fascist takeover in Rome, the tomb was reported to be in serious decay and of potential danger to onlookers; no surviving member of the Petacci family had then offered to repair it.40 In August 2016 it was officially declared to be in ‘a state of abandon’ and therefore a possible object of removal, with the authorities complaining that all attempts to contact the family heirs in the USA had failed. But, shortly after, another report indicated that Ferdinando Petacci had been actively trying to preserve the family tomb and blamed the cemetery authorities for their failure to assist him.41
After all, Campo Verano is not the only site of Claretta’s physical commemoration. Inevitably the centres near Lake Como, where lover and dictator were executed, have also from time to time sought to record suffering and death (and to attract visitors). In 2010 the Berlusconian mayor of Giulino di Mezzegra caused some consternation by urging in an online article the erection of a statue of Claretta on the left side of the Villa Belmonte, at the gates of which it was generally agreed Mussolini and his partner met their end.42 Controversy lingers to this day, with rival fascists and neofascists contesting the wording that should accompany a small surviving memorial there, and continuing to debate whether Claretta’s death can in any way be justified.43 Fifty years earlier, similar controversy arose after the family erected an 80cm by 40cm cross on a white marble base in memory of their dead daughter, ‘innocent victim of a horrible crime’ – government toleration being granted with the cautious request that the memorial not intrude onto public land or constitute a traffic hazard.44 Soon, however, other phantasms gave more troubling meaning to the site with neofascists adding a plaque to Mussolini and the Fascist cause, an appendage that prompted police intervention and the transfer of the commemorative material to the town cemetery.45
Sites of memory carry power. But Claretta’s story also retains its spark in written version. Indeed, in a neoliberal age which glories in the individual and celebrity, Claretta and her fate loom ever larger
in popular histories of Mussolini and his Italian dictatorship. Their implications deserve analysis. An extensive literature, much of it foreign, has been regularly alarmed since 1945 whenever fascist political groupings have surfaced in Italy.46 The country did, after all, unlike Germany, allow the existence of an avowedly neofascist party, the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI; Italian Social Movement), the title invoking the radical-sounding ideology of the RSI or, more subtly, the message that ‘Mussolini [è] sempre immortale’ (‘Mussolini lives for ever’).47 Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the MSI became an acceptable partner of Berlusconian government, before, like its communist enemy, abandoning its past identity (and name) during the change from First to Second Republic and swearing itself now ‘post-fascist’. Yet the MSI was not the only home of admirers of the interwar dictatorship. With or without the approval of the MSI’s leadership, more extreme fascist grouplets have existed and still exist, with Casa [Ezra] Pound being the most active current example.48
The allure of neofascism, however defined, retains a fascination to some, although the main ideological inheritance is transferred less by the ghost of Mussolini, despite regular pictorial representation of a dominating Duce,49 and more by that of Hitler or, for example, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the poetic and mystical leader of the Romanian Legion of the Archangel Michael. In any case, when surveying the anti-democratic right in Italy, it is important to underline that, across the postwar generations, it was not so much Mussolini’s mind as his body (and, often enough, if with some hesitations, its mingling with Claretta’s) that entranced some Italians. Hardly was the dictator dead and his regime destroyed than the Mussolini family re-emerged at the centre of memory reconstruction. Each of Mussolini’s legitimate offspring, except for Anna Maria, a sufferer since childhood of polio, published accounts of their childhoods. The eldest son, Vittorio, provided a model of buoyant description in 1957 through the celebrated firm of Mondadori in Milan.50 That same year, Mussolini’s younger sister Edvige also sketched a sanguine recollection of her brother, a memoir published in Florence by La Fenice (‘The Phoenix’, meant to be a telling name), a business that was assembling what became forty-four volumes of Mussolini’s Opera omnia (they omit all but the skimpiest and most formal reference to Claretta).51 Edda, Mussolini’s eldest child, had been estranged from her father by his failure to prevent the execution of her husband, Galeazzo Ciano, in January 1944, and, as early as 1952, a short work recounting that ‘tragedy’ or ‘betrayal’ appeared under the authorship of an adaptable ex-Fascist intellectual, Emilio Settimelli.52 Other, more forgiving autobiographical works followed, even after Edda’s death in 1995.53 Prize for the best title should, however, go to a study by Fabrizio, Edda’s eldest child, born in Shanghai in 1931. It is entitled Quando il nonno fece fucilare papà (‘When Grandpa had Daddy shot’).54
By then, it was the Duce’s youngest son, Romano, born in 1927 and a globally applauded jazz pianist, who was assuming the lead in representing the family,55 perhaps in part stimulated by the political career of his daughter, Alessandra, in and beyond the MSI.56 After an initial career in modelling and risqué film, Alessandra Mussolini kept the family name in the headlines through campaigning that has combined her grandfather’s political and sexual appeal.57 Romano died in 2006 but his name survives in the Centro Studi Romano Mussolini and the attached Museo Mussolini, which today can be visited at the Villa Carpena, the Romagna estate purchased under the dictatorship.58 In 2013–14, Mussolini’s birthplace in the paese of Predappio, near Forlì, housed an extensive exhibition on the young Duce’s life, illustrated by a lavish guide edited by Franco Moschi, a more distant member of the clan.59 Rumours continue of the establishment of another museum in the surviving and aesthetically attractive Casa del Fascio (the former Fascist Party headquarters) at Predappio. Others of the extensive new generation of the family have engaged in well-publicised historical reflection60 and legal process,61 while one entrepreneurial relative was reported to have moved from offering private lessons in seduction to launch a ‘Seduction School’ at Cervia on the Romagnol Adriatic.62
Back in the first decades after 1945, each family member had produced his or her book with the assistance of an eager journalist and, in its pages, there were few attempts to do more than portray a happy surface of family life. Pride of place in this insertion of the Mussolinis into memory and nostalgia went to Mussolini’s widow, Rachele, who had led the way for the entire family with a memoir published by Mondadori in 1948; its two accompanying postwar photographs illustrated Rachele either virtuously knitting or hand-making fettuccine.63 Serialised first in sixteen issues by the illustrated magazine, Oggi, and then much translated, Rachele’s words reached a remarkable claimed total circulation of more than 104 million readers.64 Her account made only passing reference to Claretta, until a brief admission of Rachele’s public confrontation with her in October 1944. The younger woman’s conjunction with the Duce in death was blamed on unknown forces, who ‘at the last minute wanted to put her near Benito in order to heighten the scandal involved’.65
Until her death in October 1979, sudden enough to forestall a planned audience with Pope John Paul II,66 Rachele stayed in the news, whether through autobiographical writings or interviews (journalists were needed for both).67 The image that resulted was of an ever-loyal wife and mother, expert at cooking pasta and the other dishes of her region, a generous but demanding and by no means stupid head of her family’s domestic hearth.68 Certainly regime propaganda and perhaps reality had long represented Rachele this way.69 But, under the postwar republic, her embodiment of a ‘timeless’ sposa e madre esemplare (‘ideal wife and mother’) was confirmed.
The real heartland of what has been brilliantly defined as a popular ‘nostalgia . . . without knowing well, in truth, for what precisely’70 was located less in books than in the photographic weeklies and monthlies, which, almost immediately after 1945, became the preferred reading of middle Italy. Oggi, the most successful of these ventures, soon had a circulation of well over a million copies, and its nearest competitor, Gente, 300,000.71 By 1974 Oggi’s run had grown to more than 4 million.72 The preferred subject matter of such weeklies was ‘an infinite quantity’ of written or photographic memory. When Mussolini appeared in its pages, he tended to be ‘in intimate, familial dress’, the Duce, it was averred, having instituted a ‘special sort of dictatorship’.73 Readers might also agree that he headed a special sort of family, although the term was not used, where, as a ‘typical Italian male’, he could range unhindered from Rachele’s bed. (Actually, the two slept in separate wings of the Villa Torlonia, their estate in Rome, given all but rent-free to the family from 1929.) Even while they expatiated on Mussolini’s human (and humane) normality, the weeklies did not forget the ‘tragic love story’ of ‘Ben and Clara’.74 As a piece in Oggi in 1952 underlined, in her death, Claretta had above all shown herself ‘a faithful and courageous woman’.75
Prompting the memory of this part of Mussolini’s life were the surviving members of the Petacci family. They were led by Claretta’s little sister Myriam, who may have had a faltering career in cinema but who knew something about publicity and was committed to resuscitating the honour of her family at least as fervently as were the Mussolinis theirs. In 1950 Myriam came back from sanctuary in Franco’s Spain to launch legal proceedings to claim her sister’s recently discovered diaries and other papers. Defeat followed initial victory in that case but, during 1955, Myriam won space in four successive issues of Oggi to tell her and her sister’s story.76 In time, not long before her death on 24 May 1991, she published a fuller memoir and self-defence with the assistance of the journalist Santi Corvaja.77
In the photo-magazines, Myriam was joined by Zita Ritossa (‘Zizi’), the partner of her brother, Marcello, and mother of his two sons, Benvenuto Edgar (born in 1939) and Ferdinando, two years his junior. Unlike Myriam, by then in Spain, Zita, her husband and children were, like Claretta, members of the final convoy that was blocked
by partisans near Dongo on 27 April 1945, with fatal results for Marcello. Ritossa, who had given an extensive interview to a journalist, Luigi Saolini, as early as October 1945,78 bolstered no fewer than fourteen issues of Tempo, another of the illustrated magazines, in 1957 giving her account of this event, her own family life and the stony reception which she had received from the Petaccis when introduced to them as Marcello’s partner; the two did not marry. In 1975 Ritossa added a shorter account in Oggi, focusing on Claretta.79 In between, she tried to fob off Myriam and her parents in their attempts to sue her for ‘an unacceptable disclosure of matters pertaining to private life’; legal judgment on the case swung backwards and forwards in 1958, 1960 and 1961, before the Cassazione supreme court ruled in the Petaccis’ favour on 20 April 1963.80 The postwar history of the Petaccis has been studded with – usually newsworthy – litigation. It still is.
Nonetheless, during the first decades after the war, the Petaccis did not prevail over the Mussolini family in their struggle to attract public approval of their past. Indeed, in 1956 an editorialist in Tempo declared that, for all the romance in Claretta’s life and death, she should be viewed as merely a ‘minor figure in the history that we are living’.81 Such a dismissive conclusion must have appealed to the Mussolinis: Rachele had continued to refuse to talk about her husband’s last affair or at best pronounced patronisingly that she was sorry for how Claretta had died and now took pious pains to remember her in her recitations of the Ave Maria.82
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