In 1909 Francesco Saverio had married his cousin, Giuseppina Persichetti, born in 1888 into a fertile Catholic family; she had seven siblings. Her father, Augusto, at least according to his granddaughter, Myriam, had been a leader of the Italian Catholic Youth Society soon after that body came into existence in 1867.52 The Petaccis and the Mussolinis may have been a class apart but, similar to Benito and Rachele, there was no delay in the arrival of children to Giuseppina and Francesco Saverio. A son was born on 1 May 1910, May Day. The Petaccis utterly rejected that date’s coincidence with the socialist workers’ festival by christening their son Marcello Cesare Augusto, thereby arming him with that romanità (spirit of classical Rome) which would become a major theme in Fascist propaganda but which had already before 1914 beguiled the minds of respectable Romans.
During the next year of Cinquantennio (fiftieth anniversary celebrations of national unity), the grandiose Victor Emmanuel monument was opened athwart the ancient Capitol and the nation embarked on aggressive and brutal imperial conquest of the Ottoman provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, which the Italians called Libya, drawing on the Latin word for North Africa.53 Rhetoricians hailed the augmented power of the ‘Third Italy’ and exulted in its modern ‘legionaries’ ‘reclaiming an empire’. By contrast, the revolutionary socialist, Mussolini, at the time of Edda’s birth deeply and ostentatiously anti-national and anti-clerical, lambasted Rome as ‘a parasitic city, full of landladies, shoeshine boys, prostitutes, priests and bureaucrats’.54 Mussolini’s soul, unlike those of the Petaccis, was certainly not yet Roman.
Dreams of empire among the bourgeoisie did not necessarily convert into action. When Marcello grew to manhood, as will be seen below, he proved less Caesar Augustus than princeling, assiduously seeking promotion and financial gain through his sister’s influence. Meanwhile, for more than a decade, with Giuseppina somehow controlling her fertility, he and Claretta were the Petaccis’ only children, before Myriam completed the new generation on 31 May 1923. All were proud to be Petaccis; parents and offspring were deeply bonded as a family, with a commitment that neither Claretta’s entry into Mussolini’s bed nor the ‘tragedy’ of 1945 weakened for an instant.
Such developments in the lives of Roman bourgeois occurred well beyond Mussolini’s ken. In Milan, however, there was plenty to do for the new editor of Avanti! and aspirant leader of a socialist movement seemingly fixed on revolution, even if he never renounced his own social and intellectual ambitions. Advances in his public life could readily be matched by fresh excitement in his private. Now among his widening contacts was Leda Rafanelli, a new woman of the belle époque, primed to open Mussolini’s mind to a rich and world-girdling span of culture and politics. An anarchist of independent cast, Rafanelli flirted with what was called ‘Arabism’ and ‘the spirit of the East’, read books, presided over a salon and enthused about gender and racial equality. An observer might add that, if photos are to be believed, she looked her age and, with a large nose, slim figure and her dark eyes fixed on the camera, she was anything but a conventional ‘Italian’ beauty. But, for a questing Mussolini, it was easy to conjoin physical and intellectual appeal.
Indeed, Rafanelli’s range and unconventionality stunned the young man from Forlì. Her endorsement of ‘free love’ seemed enticingly to offer him a more earthy consummation of their friendship, although it is doubtful whether coitus between the two ever occurred. Nonetheless, hard at work in his editorial position, and writing furiously there and elsewhere, Mussolini eagerly found time for penning frequent epistles to Rafanelli and for plotting meetings with her in his spare time, either in the afternoon when others might take siesta or late at night, trysts that might entail sex. In pressing himself upon her, Mussolini often adopted a flamboyance that, in retrospect, sounds more hers than his: ‘With you I feel miles from Milan, politics, journalism, Italy, the West, Europe . . . Let’s read Nietzsche and the Quran together.’ ‘Let’s talk unrestrainedly of the past, of the present, of the future: of everything and nothing.’ Yet the practical could creep in: ‘Listen. I am free every afternoon. Write to me when I can come, and I shall be there punctual and discreet’, he wrote, coyly signing himself off ‘B’.55
Sadly for Mussolini’s hopes that Leda’s feminine magnetism could pull him away from his humdrum life with what he told her deprecatingly was his ‘domestic tribe’,56 their politics were not to prove compatible. With the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, and the debate it at once unleashed over how the ‘least of the Great Powers’ could most benefit from it, his and Rafanelli’s paths separated for ever. By October 1914 Mussolini had succumbed to the idea that Italian participation in battle must accelerate social revolution (and his own advancement), while she kept an anarchist’s hatred of the war-making state, its militarism and imperialism. Correspondence between the two ceased. In later years Rafanelli kept to her faith, never regretting her loss of contact with the ‘class traitor’, Mussolini. She endured Fascism, for a time still able to publish but eventually reduced to poverty. By the 1930s she was getting by as a fortune-teller and teacher of Arabic. However, she outlived the Duce, after 1945 publishing some of their letters. With typical sangfroid, she greeted the imposition of Christian Democrat rule in Italy by republishing an early polemic she had written against priestly chastity.57 She died at a good age in 1971. A memoir came out four years later.58
In any case, during much the same months that Mussolini was being uncharacteristically starry-eyed about matters of the soul in communion with Rafanelli, another older woman, also born in 1880, entered his life, offering sex as well as social, cultural and political instruction. Her name was Margherita Grassini Sarfatti, sprung from a wealthy Venetian Jewish family and married at eighteen to the socialist lawyer Cesare Sarfatti, fourteen years her elder. They had two sons and a daughter, born respectively in 1900, 1902 and 1909. A photo from 1912 shows that, by then, Sarfatti had begun to put on the weight of encroaching middle age, with a figure that was matriarchal not lissom. It displays her as having possessed a round face, regular features, curly hair, rich jewels, and an elegant and expensive gown. She certainly was not as idiosyncratic-looking as Rafanelli but she, too, was not classically beautiful.
Sarfatti’s English-language biographers, Philip Cannistraro and Brian Sullivan, have labelled her ‘Mussolini’s other woman’, although this claim for exclusivity will be seen, through the following pages, to be undeserved.59 Cannistraro and Sullivan state that the two had become lovers by 1913. At that time, Sarfatti presided over a more orthodox and worldly salon than Rafanelli’s. Wealthy, confident and independent, Sarfatti rendered herself an important figure in Milan’s artistic life, while also being a socialist activist. She belonged many rungs up the class ladder from Benito and Rachele, who still lived in a small flat on the edge of the city and were troubled by household bills; Rachele frequently lamented that her partner spent too much money on books, objects that were not for her.60 However, Sarfatti met Mussolini at a gathering of the city’s intellectual elites and decided immediately that he was another ‘Napoleon’, adding, with what might be read as a combination of sexual attraction and effortless superiority, that he, too, like the French hero, was a parvenu anxious to rise, equipped with burning eyes and irresistible physicality.61
Rafanelli was thought to have had an affair with the Futurist painter Carlo Carrà when they both for a while lived in Egypt. But Sarfatti was in contact with all of Italy’s ‘generation of 1914’, among them Marinetti, D’Annunzio and Giuseppe Prezzolini, the editor of the intellectually independent journal La Voce, where Mussolini had assiduously endeavoured to establish a presence. To these three could be added a slew of painters, philosophers and poets who ranged a long way from the Sarfattis’ commitment to socialism (they were equally alive to current developments in feminism and Zionism). Although Cesare and Margherita’s marriage was drifting apart, the two lived in a large and elegant apartment among the best people of the city and could afford to run a co
untry house near Lake Como and the Swiss border, eloquently depicted by Cannistraro and Sullivan as ‘a rustic two-story structure decorated with green shutters and a red stucco exterior. Perched on the edge of a hillside . . . [it] commanded a magnificent view of the valley below and the Alpine foothills beyond.’62
Her wealth and self-confidence allowed Sarfatti to talk glibly, then and later, about achieving a revolution in national consciousness63 and ideas (and, behind them, a savoir-faire) that attracted Mussolini, still aspiring to make his own intellectual mark and hopeful of giving his personal imprint to socialist thought. Holding almost painful intellectual aspirations, Mussolini had zealously improved his qualifications to teach middle school French through an exam at Bologna University in November 1907.64 At home, where he could command his own status, Rachele, at least according to her postwar memoirs, was expected respectfully to address him as professore until after the birth of their fourth child in 1927.65 No wonder, in 1912, he was ready to accept any invitation from Sarfatti. Here then was another older woman, like Rafanelli (and Balabanoff) at least as much in control of her relationship with the young socialist editor as he was. In their initial contact, she did most of the teaching and he the learning.
In contrast to the war’s impact on Mussolini’s relationship with Rafanelli, battle strengthened rather than shattered this tie. The death of Sarfatti’s eldest son, Roberto, not yet eighteen, in January 1918, on one of his first forays to the front as a lieutenant, reinforced his mother’s firming commitment to the nation of Italy and her renunciation of cosmopolitan socialism for what was becoming Fascism. As will be seen in the next chapter, through the 1920s Sarfatti for a time cemented a place as the most important woman in Mussolini’s (and Italy’s) life. She became a major intellectual force in the dictatorship, even if, by the late 1930s and with the regime drifting ever more into anti-Semitism, Mussolini assured Claretta that his sexual congress with the Venetian had only lasted two years, by implication from 1918 to 1920, and that he had always resented in a manly fashion Sarfatti’s arrogant interference in high politics and seen through her cultural pretensions.66
Today Sarfatti remains a figure of debate, a situation enhanced by the fact that her unpublished archive apparently preserves 1,272 letters sent by Mussolini to her over the decades, a tally which, if correct, surpasses his correspondence with Claretta. In the Sarfatti letters, a rich source may await historians of Mussolini’s sexual congress, although a recent republication of a disorganised tract, edited with recurrent interventions by Sullivan, scribbled down by Sarfatti in 1947, is of meagre value. It is full of ire against the Duce and emphatic that he was indeed a mad dictator, a victim of incurable syphilis, presumably caught in his youth.67 The charge about his venereal infection cannot entirely be written off and has been given some support in a detailed analysis of Mussolini’s recuperation in 1917 after his wounding at the front in a military hospital.68 However, the presence of syphilis was not endorsed either by Mussolini’s Nazi doctor, Georg Zachariae, in tests conducted in 1943–4,69 nor by the American medical team who, in 1945, detached brain slivers from the dictator’s corpse for autopsy.70 Moreover, no sign of damaging inheritance of the disease by the legitimate and illegitimate children whom Mussolini fathered has been detected (with the dubious exception of Benito Albino, son of Ida Dalser, whose life and death are described below). An Italian observer with some medical training has concluded that Mussolini may well have caught gonorrhoea from one of his early brothel visits but denied that there is any evidence of the much more serious disease.71 In sum, the allegations about syphilis must be treated as unproven, and be viewed with all the greater suspicion given the recurrent temptation to pronounce that political ‘bad guys’ are also very likely mad.
In Ida Irene Dalser (born – like Sarfatti and Rafanelli – in 1880), Mussolini was to form a relationship with someone who was not his social and intellectual superior. Sarfatti and Rafanelli, in their different ways, exploited their lover in as energetic a fashion as he did them. By contrast, Dalser was Mussolini’s financial and social victim.
Dalser had been born at Sopramonte, a village in the hills above the city of Trento, then ruled by Austria and to become one of Italy’s major territorial gains from the First World War. Her father was the mayor of the paese and relatively well off, if scarcely the class equal of the Sarfattis.72 Nearby lay the small town of Pergine, equipped with an ample asylum for the mentally unstable that would eventually number Dalser among its patients; it is set evocatively below the medieval castle that once guarded the town and its valley. In her twenties, she trained as a nurse at Innsbruck and then, more adventurously, in massage and orthopaedics in Paris. Enriched by a modest inheritance, in February 1913 Dalser opened in Milan the Salone Orientale d’Igiene e Bellezza Mademoiselle Ida (‘Mademoiselle Ida’s Eastern Salon of Health and Beauty’), enticing customers through a joint evocation of the fascinating East and French romance. By then a photo shows a dark, plumpish woman with heavy tresses, wide lips and a long cleft or dimpled chin.
At around this time Dalser met Mussolini, it is said on an occasion when she had entered the office of Avanti! in order to place an advertisement for her business.73 The two could reminisce over the fact that each had lived for a while at Trento but not met there, and ‘Professor’ Mussolini may have been tantalised by her French accent and familiarity with Paris, always the city of his dreams. Sex began soon afterwards, perhaps initially aroused by a massage that Ida gave Benito at her salon. By 1914 the two were indeed close, Mussolini writing kindly to her in August after her brother died in the Habsburg armies in Galicia, and while Mussolini was still a vociferous socialist opponent of ‘the atrocious and bestial war that is covering the whole of Europe with blood’.74
One month later, Mussolini, in the way that he had, dashed off a letter during a visit to Rome to ‘My little Ida’, assuring her: ‘I embrace you with all the passion of our moments of intimacy and love. I am your savage friend and lover, Benito.’75 ‘I have you in my blood and you have me in your blood’,76 he added, with a sentiment destined to recur in more decorous phrasing during his relationship with Claretta. But Mussolini’s private dealings with Dalser now rubbed up against his public life when he renounced the editorship of Avanti! and set up at Il Popolo d’Italia. It has long been established that the heavy cost of this venture was borne by pro-war Italian capitalists and the French, and later British, secret services.77 But another contributor to Mussolini’s swift re-emergence as a journalist was Ida Dalser, who, perhaps thinking of herself as his ‘wife’, sold her beauty salon in his cause, resulting in her moving to cheap lodgings on Milan’s periphery. She also switched her own politics from the socialist to the patriotic, anxious – as so many others of Mussolini’s women were – to follow where her man led. Soon after, Dalser fell pregnant and on 11 November 1915 bore the son whom she named Benito Albino and whom she asserted was Mussolini’s.78
Some commentators claim that, late in 1914, Dalser and Mussolini went through a church wedding ceremony, a year before the civil marriage that formally united the Duce and Rachele in what may have been bigamy. But allegations about the other matrimony depend on ‘stolen’ or non-existent documents. Mimmo Franzinelli, for one, is unconvinced that Mussolini could then have been dragged into church for whatever purpose.79 Unsurprisingly, Marco Bellocchio’s prize-winning 2009 film version of the story, entitled ironically Vincere (‘Conquest’), takes the bigamy for granted. With that move up-market and up-class which is so often part of cinematic representation, the film portrays a world that was much lusher than the one Benito and Ida (and Rachele) actually occupied. The more clear-eyed critics concede that Vincere scarcely aspired to narrow historical accuracy, however much Bellocchio did expose to his audiences Dalser’s victimhood and Mussolini’s tyranny.80
One month after the birth of Dalser’s son, Mussolini, by then a corporal in the army, in marrying Rachele produced official confusion over his personal details, which the milita
ry did not at first plumb. When they wanted to inform his wife of an attack of typhus, they approached Ida, not Rachele. In April 1916 there was a violent physical confrontation between Ida and Rachele beside their man’s hospital bed, where the (pregnant) Rachele proved the stouter fighter, driving her rival off amid tears and imprecations.81 Whatever doubts Mussolini may have had about the choice between these women, later that year, with the birth of a new legitimate son – named Vittorio as a sign of coming victory – the Duce, as he was already being called by his admirers, tried to pay Dalser a de facto alimony of 200 lire per month. This act implied her dismissal from his bed, although he did acknowledge his paternity of ‘Benittino’, as his mother called him.
But Dalser was not happy to be shrugged off and, for quite a few years, hauled her one-time partner from court to court. Moreover, she took every possible opportunity, preferably public, to castigate Mussolini for deserting her and their son, even if, two decades later, Mussolini assured Claretta complacently that ‘Ida’ had been utterly forgotten, just as Sarfatti and other old lovers had been.82 ‘Coward, pig, assassin, traitor’, Dalser would yell beneath his flat or office window, while informing any who wanted to listen that she had been ‘seduced and abandoned’, as had her son, by her perfidious sometime comrade and lover.83 Mussolini’s then close associate Cesare Rossi recalled her ‘neurotic and intransigent temperament’, while also noting how Mussolini threatened her with a revolver in 1920 when he endeavoured in Fascist manner violently to frighten her off.84 Rachele, Rossi added, carefully watched over these continuing ramifications of the affair and, in manly conversation, Mussolini allowed that he should be grateful for his legitimate wife’s care and willingness to forgive his carnal sins. In her plain good sense, she resembled Napoleon’s mother, he murmured with a parallel that would often spring to his mind.85
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