Claretta
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In highlighting this primacy of the legitimate family, the key document was ‘Mussolini’s last letter to his wife’, where he affirmed that ‘you know that you have been for me the only woman I have really loved. I swear it before God and our Bruno at this supreme moment.’ It was first published in Rachele’s initial memoirs and its authenticity was later approved in Mussolini’s Opera Omnia.83 However, no original survives. Some historians have therefore concluded that there was no such correspondence and the invention sprang from the unsparing struggle that Rachele was prosecuting post-humously against Claretta. Before her death Rachele is said to have admitted the forgery to a biographer, Anita Pensotti.84 Yet Pensotti had elsewhere commented on Rachele’s limited literacy compensated by her iron memory, even for exact phrases.85 In any case, as a more recent biographer of Rachele has urged, the epistolary sentiments were by no means contrary to Mussolini’s conflicted attitude to his wife and family on the one hand and to his young lover on the other, or a reverse of his marked tendency to appease the chivvying woman who was then nearest to him.86 It may be that no last tearful letter was scribbled by a repentant Duce; and yet its attitudes (and its hypocrisy) may well have expressed Mussolini’s mind late in April 1945.
As the postwar decades passed, the popular pull of memory of dictatorship did to some extent lessen, even if Red Brigade terrorists thought that, by kidnapping and murdering the loquacious Christian Democrat party secretary Aldo Moro in 1978, they could thereby expose the fascism lurking beneath the mask of the Italian version of liberal democracy. Academic historians were by then using the massive if unevenly preserved archives of the dictatorship to examine it, with Renzo De Felice composing a biography of Mussolini that ran past 6,000 pages. De Felice disclosed the shadows and, more controversially, some lights in the regime and its dictator. But he remained a rigorously neo-Rankean political historian, eschewing serious commentary on the Duce’s private life and personal emotions. Claretta he dismissed in a short ten pages as apolitical by most definitions;87 her major mention in his volumes was primly confined to a documentary appendix. There, De Felice recounted a jaundiced description by a secret agent, General Giacomo Carboni, of a visit to the Villa Camilluccia in July 1943, just before the dictator’s overthrow by his colleagues in the Fascist Grand Council and at which time, as shall be seen below, the lovers’ relationship was in some crisis. Carboni described Claretta as ‘an insignificant little person’, while her bedroom, into which he claimed to have peeked, reminded him, with its ceiling and wall mirrors (allegedly installed at the wish of Claretta’s mother), a double bed with a rare silk coverlet, adjoined by a black marble bathroom equipped with large central bath set on paving decorated with mosaics in the ‘Roman manner’, of the tasteless pseudo-grandeur of ‘the set of an American film’.88
De Felice was by no means the only historian of Fascism. A vivid democratic debate flourished, and still flourishes, inside and outside Italy about the nature of the dictatorship and its proclaimed totalitarianism (it was the pioneer of this term).89 Mostly, however, neither Claretta nor the complications of family life under the regime has stimulated much serious review,90 with Italian academic historians frequently professing an austere deprecation of biography and ‘scandal’.
In regard to the national reckoning with history, the fall of the Soviet Union and the global triumph of neoliberalism shifted the scene in Italy, where the cultural division into a (largely latent) popular sympathy or nostalgia for Fascism countered by a high cultural commitment to anti-Fascism now withered away along with the nomenclature and apparent ideological base of the country’s political parties. With this drastic change, at least in appearance, sentimental readings of Mussolini and his regime and family revived, being expressed most vividly by Berlusconi, the pre-eminent politician of the new era (if scarcely an orthodox neoliberal). Mussolini, Berlusconi pronounced, ‘never killed anyone’, while the places where he confined his political enemies were, in reality, villeggiature, ‘holiday camps’.91 He compared his own travails in ruling to those of the Duce, in his mind another Italian leader prevented from doing good by the intractability of the national population.92
Such pronouncements from on high fitted into a revival of affection for the regime, with the damnation of Fascism as the partner of Hitlerian Nazism now obscured by an emphasis on the private, the personal and the emotional (and the sexual). In such circumstances, it is no surprise to find that Claretta’s ghost is not confined to sporadic appearance outside a gelateria. Instead she has become ever more significant as a symbol and ‘heroine’ of the regime and, many now accept, her ‘personal tragedy’ carries more important messages and lessons into the present than does the fall of the regime. It is true that Mussolinis of the younger generation still sometimes fill the news. But Rachele, the ‘peasant housewife’, now looks an old-fashioned figure from an Italy that has been lost, whereas Claretta can be portrayed as a feisty modern woman and even a proto-feminist.
Striking in this regard is Roberto Festorazzi’s 2012 popular biography, emphatic that Claretta ‘died for love of Mussolini’.93 Festorazzi is a historian ready to purvey some of the more outrageous conspiracy theories that circle over ‘the last days of Mussolini’ and has been happy to acknowledge his admiration for a Fascist grandfather.94 But, privileging the personal over the ideological, he elevated Claretta to a higher historical plain than she had earlier achieved. Especially after 1943, she was, Festorazzi has contended, a ‘sort of Ducessa’, ‘queen’ of the RSI–Nazi alliance, a ‘fervent Fascist’ new woman, and ‘pro-German in her innermost marrow’. All in all, she acted as Mussolini’s ‘lover, friend, secretary, confidante, faithful disciple and goad’.95 Such a record renders her ‘a contemporary heroine’, ‘a universal symbol of the deepest oaths of love’. By her behaviour in April 1945, Claretta riveted onto the ‘act of dying a symbolic force, a profound drama, a visceral pathos, in a word, a dignity which the execution of the Duce alone could not have had’.96 Her sacrifice had absolved Mussolini of many of his sins. Yet such saintly qualities did not entail a diminution of her sensual power. Claretta, Festorazzi concluded, is a myth, largely because she is ‘the type of woman that every male dreams of and desires, even while knowing he cannot deserve her’.97
If this interpretation is to be believed, it might almost be thought that Claretta was a more significant Fascist than Mussolini. Yet in composing his book, Festorazzi made only minor use of the massive documentation, which, over the last decade, has significantly elevated Claretta’s importance in modern Italian history, and disclosed evidence that carried implications well beyond national borders. No historian of the regime can now fail to consult the diaries that Claretta scrawled almost every day into a succession of notebooks after she first met the Duce in April 1932. To the revelations in that source – many older and powerful men have had sex with younger women but an account from the female partner is highly unusual – can be added an extensive correspondence. During the nineteen months of the RSI’s existence, Mussolini wrote no fewer than 318 letters to his lover. An edition of these, including in footnotes many of Claretta’s responses, appeared in 2011, with decidedly forgiving academic commentary.98 Claretta wrote back to her lover, often at greater length, and other members of her family – father, mother and sister – also found reason to send extended epistles to the dictator.
Claretta’s record may be an indispensable source for the comprehension of Mussolini’s regime but another of the many ironies in the history and historiography of Fascism is the controversial place of diaries in the dictatorship’s telling. Long pre-eminent was that composed by Mussolini’s son-in-law Ciano, born in 1903 and from 1936 to 1943 the youngest foreign minister in Europe. By 1943 Ciano, in his heart a young conservative, Fascist-style, had transmuted his early callow enthusiasm for the Axis into a bitter dislike of his German allies. On the evening of 24/25 July he duly voted to remove his father-in-law from power. Amid the confusion that followed, Ciano was foolish enough to seek sanctuary in Germ
any, defying Edda’s advice to go to what would have been a more accommodating Spain.99 He was soon arrested and confined in Verona, with both the Nazis and radical Fascists determined on his execution in retribution for the July ‘betrayal’, and – everyone, including Mussolini, knew – for the more general failings and equivocations of the Italian dictatorship. While the RSI was establishing itself and Mussolini was trying to work out what his life meant as a puppet dictator at Gardone, Ciano went to his death on 11 January 1944. Both Rachele and Claretta vengefully approved his punishment.100 Mussolini, who acknowledged that he was the person really responsible for the faults attributed to Ciano, accepted it much more uneasily, with a typical mixture of unhappiness and self-pity.
Urgent in Ciano’s defence had been his wife, Edda, Mussolini’s eldest and favourite child. Then and later, she might have been willing to admit that ‘marriage was not my most authentic vocation’. But, at the death, she stood by her man as purposefully as both Rachele and Claretta had done in July 1943 and would do, or seek to do, in 1945. When it was plain that Ciano was to die, Edda fled with her children and an accommodating partner to Switzerland, carrying with her the extensive diaries, often anti-German in their import, that had been kept by her husband. According to Edda, they weighed no less than 48 kilos, six more than she herself when she reached Ischia in 1945. Concealed with difficulty beneath her winter clothes as she crossed the border, they occasioned scurrilous rumours that she was pregnant.101 In such flight, she broke with her father to his frequent lament. On publication after 1945, the Ciano diaries became the most basic source of all serious accounts of the regime, with their exposure of not so much German arrogance and perfidy as Fascist levity and bellicosity.102
As has already been noted, the immediate postwar years unleashed a flood of memoir-writing in Italy as in other combatant states, almost all of it exculpatory, much military or diplomatic, and little of major significance. Over the next generations, the major addition to such literature was the diary of Giuseppe Bottai, the most self-consciously intellectual of Fascist ministers, if a man who nurtured something like a crush on his leader. It appeared in 1982. Bottai survived the war and died in 1959, while his son, Bruno, made a highly successful diplomatic career, rising to be bureaucratic head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (and honorary president of the Federazione Italiana del Cricket). In retirement, Bruno Bottai published his own family story, which, however, lacked the glamour of the Petaccis and Mussolinis.103
Shadowing such publication and any understanding of the regime was another diary, Mussolini’s own. Quite a few survivors from the regime, including his sister, claimed to have seen the Duce regularly jotting down notes and opinions.104 The fate of such alleged writings soon became a rich part of the vivid conspiracy theories which were circling, and continue to circle, over Mussolini’s last days and which, as will be noticed later in this book, include claims about the treasure that he, the Petaccis and others who went to their doom may have been carrying, as well as a ‘lost’ packet of letters, which the Duce and Winston Churchill had allegedly exchanged over the years. There is also the issue of how exactly the dictator and his lover died and why she did so, with Churchill again starring as the one who, it is claimed, wanted most to be rid of her. (For more detail, see chapter 7.) Yet the simple truth remains that the correspondence has never emerged, and the case for it ever having existed is slight to non-existent.
In regard to the general history of the regime, central place in arguments about missing evidence should be assigned to the ‘Mussolini diaries’, the false Mussolini diaries that is. The fine contemporary historian Mimmo Franzinelli has trenchantly narrated how they appeared, reappeared and then appeared again and, despite frequent exposure of forgery, stubbornly failed to die.105 Their composition began at Vercelli in the early 1950s at the hands of Giulio Panvini Rosati, a pensioner who had once worked for the local police under the RSI, his wife Rosetta Prelli (still in awe of Mussolini’s and Gabriele D’Annunzio’s charisma) and their daughter Amalia (‘Mimi’). The women made themselves into experts in mimicking Mussolini’s handwriting, and were soon adroitly penning a version of the regime’s past. They finished their labour in 1955. They then tried to sell their handiwork for millions of lire, soon assisted by intermediaries from the world of neofascism, and persuaded Mondadori to assess the diaries. However, when consulted, Rachele and other members of the family denied their authenticity, although a sale did go ahead with Time-Life. Just as a fortune beckoned, however, suspicious journalists from Il Corriere della Sera asked for police evaluation and the sham was exposed.
In April 1959 Amalia was arrested and put on trial for forgery and fraud, soon to be found guilty; she and Rosa Panvini were sentenced to brief terms in gaol from which they were quickly released.106 The first act of the history of the Mussolini diaries was thereby over, except for a brief epilogue in 1967, when mother and daughter (despite Amalia having had brief further trouble over forging a cheque to a local butcher) again sold their labour, this time to The Sunday Times. However, the renewed falsehood was quickly apparent, and there were further arrests, with De Felice signalling his authoritative disapproval of the pages given to him for inspection. Rosa Panvini died in 1968 and, although Amalia lived on to 1986, she failed to convince with an imaginative new claim to have acted as a medium of the Duce when doing her writing.107
But the diaries had not lost their charge. A bizarre struggle over them continued among ‘expert’ academic historians, both Italian and foreign, who were regularly asked their opinion of the texts. The Englishman Denis Mack Smith, from his base at All Souls Oxford often in battle with De Felice, announced that the calligraphy was definitely Mussolini’s, adding in sphinx-like words that this ‘was the diary that Mussolini would have wanted to write’.108 Brian R. Sullivan, a North American expert in the tenebrous world of the secret services, declared the material genuine but then recanted in 1987, after hostile graphological analysis at Sotheby’s. Soon he changed tack once more, now taking up existing Italian suggestions that Mussolini had copied his own diaries some time at Salò (or had them copied by a third party) and that revision explained their variation from what he had written in the 1930s.109
The diaries, it was becoming evident, were impossible to kill off in a turbid world of masked owners and special agents seeking scoops for their press barons on either side of the Atlantic, as well as in that Italian arena where memory and popular history promiscuously mingled. Academic historians did not help much. Before his death, De Felice in 1995 made a U-turn of his own to suggest that the material ‘could have preserved the echo of the originals’. Nicholas Farrell also plumped for authenticity.110 Emilio Gentile, De Felice’s successor at Rome University, demurred, as later did Giordano Bruno Guerri, Bottai’s biographer. But Romano Mussolini reversed his own and his family’s longstanding dismissal of the diaries and in 2005 proclaimed their trustworthiness.111 Act three of the diaries’ drama was about to begin.
Marcello Dell’Utri, a Sicilian senator who had for decades worked closely with Berlusconi in financial, cultural, press and political matters, emerged as the new protagonist of the diaries, even if he found much other work on his plate. He had held a key role in the foundation of Forza Italia (1993), the initial Berlusconian ‘party’. From 1997 to 2013 Dell’Utri was also fighting a sustained battle in the courts against claims that he nourished close ties with the Mafia. Eventually, in 2014, after Berlusconi had fallen from office, Dell’Utri was condemned to seven years’ confinement, with numerous other misdemeanours on his record or still under trial. After fleeing to Lebanon, he was arrested there, returned to Italy and gaoled.
It was this man who, in 2007, announced that the diaries had been purchased from Swiss owners by a local company, seemingly under his aegis, and would now be made available through the well-known publishers, Bompiani. Ignoring the reiterated doubts of Gentile, Guerri and other leading Italian historians of Fascism, between 2010 and 2012 Bompiani put onto the marke
t four volumes of what it called ‘the diaries of Mussolini, real or conjectured’ (presunti). Covering the years from 1935 to 1939, they were given further exposure by the ultra-neoliberal and anti-leftist daily paper Libero, which in March–April 2011 serialised the writings in thirty parts. Its editor, Maurizio Belpietro, took pains to ‘honour’ Dell’Utri for their discovery and, it was said, sales of the paper increased markedly.112 Displaying his own anti-anti-Fascism or more, Dell’Utri did not forbear to speak in September 2010 at a conference in Rome arranged by the Associazione di promozione sociale Casa Pound Italia (‘The Society for Promoting Casa Pound to the Italian People’) in celebration of ‘the diaries re-found’, while Pasquale Squitieri, whose career in cinema had been enlarged by a term as a Berlusconian member of parliament, took rhetoric to new and empyrean flights when he told another Rome conference in November: ‘We must cut the word false from the documents. Are the Gospels false? Jesus left nothing written down.’113
The first volume of the diaries to be published, that covering the year of 1939, was bolstered with a lengthy, if anonymous, introduction. There, some of the worries about the veracity of the material were conceded but always with the claim that there was an equal, and probably more convincing, view that they were genuine. Helpfully, Emilio Gentile’s once authoritative rejection was now conditioned by a note saying, despite his grave doubts, that he could not fully judge the diaries’ authenticity. Similarly, readers learned that Eugenio Di Rienzo, an editor of Nuova Rivista Storica, a leading academic journal, had qualified his repudiation with the Delphic remark that, ‘if we are dealing with a falsehood, it is, like all falsehood, based on an element of truth’.114 The introduction ended with what was stated to be a wholly objective ‘scientific’ analysis positively adjudging the writing style, and the chemical composition of the paper and ink used.115 Sales rocketed past 10,000.116