Claretta

by R. J. B. Bosworth

  Bompiani’s publication was not complete before Mario Monti replaced Berlusconi as prime minister in November 2011, while in the background Dell’Utri’s troubles in court multiplied. Moreover, in April 2011 Franzinelli published his devastating (and courageous) exposure of the long history of the diaries’ faking. His denunciation did earn a brief acknowledgement at the back of reprints of the 1939 diary.117 When the entries allegedly covering the years between 1935 and 1937 followed, the introduction was again included but eventually accompanied by the admission that Franzinelli had indeed picked up ‘mistakes’, while it was also now announced that a trial was proceeding in Switzerland over who actually owned the diaries.118

  To be sure, the farcical tale of the Hitler diaries, with its own pattern of business corruption and levity and academic vanity, offset with occasional honesty and scholarship, is better known than the Mussolini story.119 In historical celebrity, the Führer always trumps the Duce. Yet the fraudulent Fascist writings have been harder to kill. Italians have shown themselves more readily won over than their sometime German allies by dulcified accounts of dictatorship and by the idea that conspiracies obscure the truth with the same inevitability of winter fogs in the Val Padana. As one popular historian stated in 2014, history was a synonym for lying, in practice never more than victors’ accounts.120 In such circumstances, it would be rash to conclude that, in the long-playing melodrama of the Mussolini diaries, Italians will not eventually be persuaded to watch act four.

  In this Italian predilection for mysteriously hidden evidence lurks another deep irony. One major reason why anyone who flicks through the content of the Diari veri o presunti might conclude that they are forged is that they contain no mention of Claretta Petacci.121 Rather, and presumably fitting the life assumptions of a mother and daughter from Vercelli, Mussolini’s private life appears conventional, with him not forgetting to expatiate on his deep respect for Rachele and his love for his (legitimate) children. ‘The family is everything for me,’ he was made to write in November 1939, ‘the squeak of the door, the special smell, a well-known object come back into my attention, the sound of the voices of those who are mine, restore me and fill me with comfort . . . Rachele has known how to give our house the simple and healthy, patriarchal, nature of our Romagna.’122

  Yet while Dell’Utri, Bompiani and Libero were pressing on regardless with selling the fake diaries, it was already becoming widely known that Mussolini’s last lover had left behind a hefty record of their affair and of many other aspects of the last decade of the dictatorship. A genuinely intimate account of the Duce could now oust the forged version. In November 2009 the journalist Mauro Suttora, a senior editor of Oggi among other attainments, had edited a valuable selection of Claretta’s flood of entries (her scribblings in 1938 alone covered 1,810 pages, although many of these contained fewer than one hundred words). Suttora’s edition covered the years from 1932 to 1938.123 In his introduction, the journalist briefly described the diaries’ provenance, underlining the comment of Emilio Re, the inspector general of the state archives who presided over their discovery in 1950, that ‘people search for Mussolini’s diaries. But the real and important Mussolini diaries are these ones by Petacci, where the dictator becomes a man and is revealed without make-up or artifice. In the diaries and letters there can be found not merely the dictator’s romantic life but also high politics and, on crucial occasions, the life of the entire country.’124

  Claretta’s diaries may have long been shrouded by the Italian state. But their pathway into the archives was clear enough. Just before her final flight to Milan on 18 April 1945, Claretta had packed her personal records into crates and passed them into the hands of her friend, Countess Caterina Cervis, who worked for D’Annunzio’s widow, owner of the Vittoriale complex, which included the Villa Mirabella, Petacci’s last sanctuary by Lago di Garda. Cervis and her husband buried the trove and, after 1945, began to realise that it might bring them financial gain.

  The surviving Petaccis either had similar ideas or were moved by familial piety. In October 1949 Giuseppina Persichetti was the first of their number to return from Spain. When she arrived at Gardone, however, the Cervises received her frostily, refusing her requests to hand over what Claretta had entrusted to them. In February 1950 a leak to Il Corriere della Sera made public what had been done in 1945, with the effect that Italian government officials recovered the Petacci papers. They carried them off to the archives in Rome where Emilio Re prepared a full catalogue.125 With Myriam now also back in Italy, in July 1951 the Petacci family sued for the return of their property, seeking 394,935 lire in additional compensation. The favourable judgement in January 1952 was reversed on appeal, with the state’s lawyers emphasising that the documentation had ‘genuine political import’ and was not merely private, for it demonstrated that Claretta’s influence on the Duce had steadily grown. ‘Petacci’, the court heard, ‘may have lacked the highest degree of education. But she was not deprived of natural ingenuity and sometimes, when not blinded by jealousy, was possessed of penetrative understanding.’ Moreover, given the way that she recorded what Mussolini said over the phone ‘almost stenographically’, the diaries could be viewed as much Mussolini’s as hers.126 They belonged therefore to national and not just Petacci family history.

  Legal activity continued over the return of the Villa Camilluccia, the possible prosecution of those partisans who had killed Mussolini and his lover, and the dispute with Zita Ritossa. However, the Petacci papers remained securely in the vaults of the Archivio Centrale dello Stato, a grand Fascist building in the model regime suburb of EUR (Esposizione Universale Romana), planned under the dictatorship and, perhaps paradoxically, completed after 1945.127 Hopes that the papers would fall back into family hands evaporated. Claretta’s mother, Giuseppina, died in March 1962; her father Francesco Saverio in 1970. Ever since the war, Myriam had acted as the real head of the family and custodian of Claretta’s positive memory. Her life ended in May 1991 amid further controversy and talk of new litigation.

  The spur was the emergence in the family of Ferdinando Petacci, the second son of Claretta’s elder brother, Marcello. Ferdinando had worked in a range of business activity in the Americas, from 1983 residing in various parts of the USA. His main address is now in Tempe, Arizona. Over her last years, Myriam lived in a flat in EUR in declining economic circumstances. She was nursed by Rita D’Agostini, once a maid in the Mussolini family house and a staunch supporter of the MSI. But, when Ferdinando arrived for his aunt’s funeral, he charged D’Agostini with purloining jewels that Myriam had conserved, with stealing 23 million lire from her accounts and even with hastening her death. Prime among the lost property was, allegedly, a ‘testament’ that Claretta had written down before her death and, presumably, not passed on to the Cervises.128 In response, D’Agostini came out fighting, telling journalists that she was the real Fascist. Myriam, she reported, ‘could not bear’ her nephew who, in return, had ignored her and done nothing to alleviate her ‘squalid, solitary, final agony’. Nothing that he claimed was true, she concluded firmly.129

  No concrete results of this spat have been recorded and, since then, no further talk of any mysterious last writings by Claretta has recurred. But Ferdinando has very much become the new head of the family and ever-active conservator of (a version of) Claretta’s memory, as well as that of his parents and grandparents.

  In regard to its trove of Petacci papers, the Archivio Centrale rigorously observed a seventy-year rule. But such a fiat meant that, from the first decade of the new millennium, the diaries could be read and assessed by journalists and scholars and made available for public reckoning. As was noted above, a first selection from the material, covering the years from 1932 to 1938, was published by Suttora in 2009. Two years later, with Franzinelli now editing, another extensive selection appeared with entries from 1939 to 1940. A further volume, again edited by Franzinelli and covering the tumultuous times from 1941 to 1945, has, for obscure reasons, not
been published at my time of writing.130

  For Ferdinando, issues involving his aunt and parents have become imbricated with the vast theorising about Churchill’s dealings with Mussolini that has involved many Italian historians and commentators. Its origin may well have lain in Fascist wartime propaganda depicting ‘the English’ as the prime national enemy and was certainly cherished by neofascists after 1945; one grew almost apoplectic in expressing his dislike of Churchill’s fat pink face, which he compared to ‘that of an over-fed eunuch’.131 This associated story of forgery, political manipulation, naive or wilful misreading and/or invention of evidence has recently been recounted by Franzinelli, with the same immense critical skill that he displayed in unravelling the faking of the Mussolini diaries.132 Ferdinando Petacci, who must reject such findings, had already made plain his views in a preface attached to Suttora’s collection,133 and took them further in a coda published with the volume about 1939–40.134 In this latter case, Ferdinando began with the assertion that his aunt had actually been an ‘anti-Fascist’ arguing that, right from the first meeting in 1932 with the Duce, she had been motivated not by passion but the desire to spy. It was that devotion which kept her attached to the Duce, even when he began to mistreat her. Whatever her sex life, she remained in her soul a Catholic, and her profound religious belief eliminated any temptation to indulge in that anti-Semitism legislated by the regime after 1938. In Ferdinando’s reading, the diaries were therefore not ‘real’, since they did not really convey his aunt’s actual thoughts and personality (and covert actions), but only Mussolini’s. For example they did not hint at the possibility that, given his contacts in the Vatican, Francesco Saverio Petacci could have acted as a conduit to pass Claretta’s secrets to the British.

  After such remarkable claims, Ferdinando switched his attention to Churchill and to the ‘lost’ Mussolini letters, reiterating the views of the numerous paladins of this conspiracy theory that, in 1945, the ruthless British prime minister needed to dispose of embarrassing papers and agents who had served their use. Ferdinando gave a new twist to the conspiracies, suggesting that the diaries had probably been interfered with somehow and by somebody. They had, for example, been manipulated to accuse Mussolini of responsibility for the Holocaust, when he was not really a sincere anti-Semite. So, Petacci concluded with a bleak refusal of the merit of any historiography, ‘in so far as Italy is concerned, only archaeologists in some far-off future perhaps will be able to reconstruct the history of our country, if technological advances allow them to distinguish between false and authentic documentation’.135

  Failing any evidence to sustain Ferdinando Petacci’s spirited comprehension of his national and family history, an analyst has every reason to rejoice in the amplitude of the Petacci papers and in the bright light that they throw on the Italian dictatorship and many of the interpretative disputes that mark it (as they should do while democratic history can thrive or survive as ‘an argument without end’).136 For anybody wanting to probe the nature of Mussolini’s dictatorship, in sum, diaries – real and conjectured – are the beginning of wisdom.

  What Ciano reported in his version, published quickly in the postwar period, was largely political and diplomatic, although the fact that he was a brilliant young man ensured that his unspoken assumptions revealed much about how a natural young conservative coped with chat about Fascist revolution and its totalitarian realignment, in theory, of all Italian hearts and minds. Predictably, the fake Mussolini diaries tie simplistically with the historiographical assumptions of 1950, privileging high politics and the making of peace and war. They naturally connect with the old-fashioned, neo-Rankean approach to history, sustained to his death in 1996 by De Felice as the doyen of Fascist studies, and by no means yet abandoned in many Italian and foreign academic studies of the regime.

  By contrast, the Petacci diaries and letters, and the other material, doubtless on occasion fragile and scandalous, need to be read between the lines, just as all historical sources do. Claretta was undoubtedly ‘telling her own story’ as she obsessively scribbled down every remark her lover directed at her, either over the phone or when they were in more intimate contact, whether to do with their latest squabble or with politics and ideology. She was also endeavouring to tell the Duce’s story as a man of sublime grandeur (and occasional personal weakness). Claretta may have been starstruck. But she never lost a sense of self nor a kind of self-importance. The haste of her writing demonstrates an urgency that drove her as a diarist, stark proof that her subjectivity was engrained into her pages. As time went on and she matured in her own fashion, she became ever more resolute in a self-defined task to stiffen the Duce against his sea of troubles.

  It would be naive to ask whether Claretta was telling the truth in her pages, and there must have been occasions when she misunderstood or slanted material in her own favour. Diarists, by definition, like to think that they matter and are given to exaggeration on that score. Yet the veri-similitude of Claretta’s account is unchallengeable and it and the other sources that can be brought to bear on the Petacci family story open new avenues of understanding of the Mussolini dictatorship and its curious medley of avowedly ‘totalitarian’ social engineering and practical compromise with existing Italian histories. In so doing, Claretta’s extensive papers fit neatly into the new preoccupation of historians with emotions and psychology and what may be the deep springs of human actions. Their pages record orgasm, the extrusion of most bodily fluids, hysteria, fainting fits, illness, anger, jealousy, possessiveness, love and hate, music, poetry, reading and art, as well as politics. They illuminate the ‘private’ at least as much as they do the ‘public’. They draw attention to the Catholic, the familial, the local and Roman, the bourgeois, the personal, while displaying – despite the deep hostility that Claretta and her family provoked among those most committed to the RSI – the Fascist, even the radical fascist. In entering the world of Claretta Petacci and her family, readers will confront a ‘real’ Italy, one that was not merely ‘legal’ or ideological. Claretta’s story may lack the depth of tragedy. But, in its human texture, commitment and contradiction, as well as its female representation of ‘love’ and sex in high places, it is worth deep and detailed reflection.

  1

  SEX AND THE COMING DICTATOR

  One per day through his adult life. Five thousand. Four hundred. One hundred and sixty-two. About twenty (by Rachele’s reckoning). The number of women with whom Mussolini is said to have had sex varies wildly.1 In a conversation with a (male) admirer in 1937, Mussolini deprecated too elevated an estimate of his sexual prowess. ‘As far as women are concerned,’ he declared, ‘my experience is the same as all healthy men, neither more nor less than others. If I, Mussolini, had had truck with all the women they claim for me, I would have to have been a stallion rather than a man.’ A Don Giovanni or a ‘ladies’ man’ must be despised, he added.2 By contrast, when indulging in bed-chat with Claretta, Mussolini boasted on one occasion that he simply could not remember the tally of women whom he had penetrated. Then he liked to savour how, some time not long after his installation as prime minister, he had kept fourteen different lovers on the go at the same time, satisfying four of them every day. In May 1938 he boasted to the wide-eyed Claretta that he had sex with one at 8 p.m., another at 9, another at 10 . . . before climaxing with ‘a terrible Brazilian’ whose name he had forgotten (leaving open the distinct possibility that he was fantasising to his credulous young partner).3 On another occasion, he complained to Claretta that, in 1923–4, he had been lonely, with only Margherita Sarfatti, Bianca Ceccato and another woman showing up in his bed from time to time.4

  Any sexual pleasure for him or them may have been brief. Quinto Navarra, major-domo at Palazzo Venezia, in his graphic but controversial memoirs, allegedly written after the war by two journalists on the make, reckoned the Duce took two or three minutes over each copulation,5 with the implication picked up by the biographer Denis Mack Smith that sex with this dic
tator was rape or something similar to it – ‘sadism’ not love.6

  Whatever the case – and all the literature on the subject, marked as it is by scandal, innuendo or sentiment, needs sceptical scrutiny – by most accounts sex and Mussolini went together as automatically as a horse and carriage. To use a cruder parallel from the animal world adopted by the sometime Fascist and later radical conservative and celebrity journalist Indro Montanelli the dictator dealt with women as ‘a cock does his hens’.7 A contemporary journalist-historian, Roberto Olla, has a more circumspect metaphor: ‘sex . . . was at the centre of the myth of Mussolini: all the rest turned upon this, like a wheel around a hub’.8 The most extreme representation of the Duce in this regard came in a tract written in 1945 by Carlo Emilio Gadda, another intellectual with a Fascist past by then renounced. It was entitled Eros e Priapo. Long held to be obscene, the work was published in expurgated version in 1967 when Gadda labelled his old leader ‘the leading Harvester, Fantasist and Ejaculator’ of Italy. Under this dictator’s rule, he declared, all that women had to do for the patria was ‘to let themselves be fucked’. In his opinion, the Duce’s governance was less revolutionary or tyrannical than priapic.9

  It is therefore surprising to find Alexander Geppert, a German cultural historian, maintaining that Adolf Hitler was ‘an adored object of desire, a powerful sex symbol and a pined-for lover’, stimulating in his fans carnality of greater intensity than that aroused by Mussolini. The Italian dictator, by contrast, Geppert argues, ‘appears as a different type of leader – less sexualised and more avuncular – who was to be contacted for direct advice and uncomplicated assistance’ by women of the people.10 Geppert’s sample of Germans is meagre and he seems to have done no serious research on Italy. He has not noticed, for example, a letter reeking with childish passion that Mussolini received from a Florentine first communicant in May 1936. ‘I, so little, with so many defects, so distracted and sometimes disobedient to Mamma and Papà, so negligent with my school work, such an egoist’, she wrote with pre-teenage angst to a master on high. ‘If only I could receive you together with Jesus! To be on my tongue, to lie on my chest, to rest on my poor heart! How good that would be!’ she concluded in innocent intermingling of fleshly fellatio and holy sacrament.11