Claretta
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Much later, at a pause in his lovemaking with Claretta, Mussolini revealed a little more of his memory of the matter when he affirmed that Dalser had gone mad, and swore that Benito Albino had not been his son. ‘Too many’, he grouched, ‘are attributed to me.’86 There is little doubt, however, that he was lying, perhaps trying to deny to himself responsibility for Dalser and her son’s sad fate. Painful their later lives were. Once Mussolini had achieved political power, he delegated the embarrassment of Dalser to be sorted out by his younger (more respectable and Catholic) brother Arnaldo, so often what Italians call a portaborsa (‘bagman’, or personal agent).87 From June 1926 Dalser, on the orders of the prefect of Trento accepting intimations from on high, was confined to the asylum at Pergine, where she remained for years, when possible talking or writing furiously to inveigh against her fate, and, according to recent analysis, sane.88 Her destiny in this regard has been newly emphasised over the last years,89 all the more because of the parallels that may exist between her case and the habits of the post-Stalin USSR in using allegations of mental infirmity as a way of silencing its opponents.
To her utter dismay, Dalser was now separated from her son, who was rusticated to a distant college in the Piedmontese hills and subject to surveillance lest he try to leave. His surname was now officially not Mussolini, but Bernardi, after a local Fascist chief in the Trentino who had been persuaded it was wise to be his protector (of a kind). Benito Albino grew towards an uneasy manhood, still every now and again insisting that he was ‘Benito Mussolini, son of the other Benito Mussolini’.90
On the night of 15/16 July 1935, with a far-off Duce busy planning the invasion of Ethiopia, Dalser managed to escape from her de facto prison at Pergine, using the classic method of tying her sheets together and clambering down them from her bedroom window. She reached Trento by 3 a.m. As dawn broke, however, the police picked her up. In punishment for her infraction of officialdom’s rules, she was now transferred to another asylum on the island of San Clemente in the Venetian lagoon that was restricted to women patients. It was an institution governed with the severest discipline and secure against flight. Perhaps abandoning hope, she died there on 3 December 1937 of a cerebral haemorrhage, reduced at last to a helpless victim of the Duce’s unremitting harshness.
Their son’s fate was little better. When, in 1932, he began to form a relationship with a local female worker – a pleasant and buxom woman – the two were separated and Benittino was sent to La Spezia under instruction in the navy. A cruise to the Far East followed. However, when he returned to Italy in June 1935 he too was diagnosed as mentally unstable and confined to the vast mental hospital in the Villa Crivelli Pusterla at Monbello in Lombardy.91 He stayed there, failing in one attempt at escape in January 1936 and getting nowhere in an appeal he tried to send to his father two years later. Benito Albino died on 26 August 1942 in poverty, his father not answering pleas to expand on basic funeral costs of 331.50 lire.92 Here perished the last surviving member of the unhappiest of Mussolini’s ‘other families’.
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Yet there were quite a few such families and their histories are not all as sad nor as replete with melodrama as that of Ida and Benittino. After his months at the front and his wounding, in June 1917 Mussolini resumed his editorship of Il Popolo d’Italia and was soon purposefully dragging it out of threatened financial failure. His stance in favour of the war and a revolution to be led by ‘the men of the trenches’ – to his mind a natural aristocracy of will and achievement best represented by himself – grew steadily more intransigent. By the end of 1917 the military defeat at Caporetto and the near-collapse of Italian participation in the war made him seem far-sighted, since now even orthodox liberal politicians took up the cry that the nation must conquer at all and any cost. In December 1917 more than 150 deputies and 90 senators formed themselves into the Fascio Parlamentare di Difesa Nazionale (Parliamentary Union for National Defence), without yet knowing the meaning that ‘Fascism’ was soon to acquire.93 The still loosely organised Fasci di combattimento were to be founded in Milan on 23 March 1919, while the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF; National Fascist Party) emerged on 9 November 1921 in order to suture divisions that had begun to damage Fascist growth especially across the northern regions of the country. Now Mussolini lacked further serious challenge as his movement’s Duce. It was less than a year before he became prime minister, following the paramilitary half-coup known as the March on Rome (celebrated thereafter on 28 October). Open dictatorship began after a speech on 3 January 1925 where he brazenly endorsed all Fascist violence. Italy fell to the rule of a ‘totalitarian’ regime (the adjective was now invented).
Busy times for a political chieftain, it might seem, and also for a man with three young children to look after ‘at home’ (Rachele was seriously afflicted by the influenza epidemic of 1918 that took many lives and, the following year, Bruno’s survival was imperilled by an attack of diphtheria).94 Nonetheless Mussolini found space for another affair, one that also produced a son, this time with a young, slim woman with naturally curly, fair hair whom he met after she won employment in the office of Il Popolo d’Italia. Her name was Bianca Ceccato. Her talented son was to call himself Glauco Di Salle, after his stepfather. Following the Second World War and until his death in 2000, De Salle had a distinguished career as a playwright and cultural administrator. For some years up to 1976 he worked in the management of the great publishing house Mondadori, an enterprise, as has already been seen above, much interested in selling the memory of Fascism.
It was during this time that his mother was persuaded to ‘tell all’ about what she called her ‘love story’ (the celebrated American film, based on the vastly popular novel by Eric Segal, came out in 1970). In 1977, after some revelations in the weekly Panorama, under the pseudonym ‘Bianca Veneziana’ (Ceccato’s mother was born in Venice), a memoir of her affair with Mussolini was published under the title Storia italiana d’amore (‘An Italian love story’). It did not equal Segal in sales. Nor can its accuracy be guaranteed. A historian may report its evidence but always with suspicion that what it says was contaminated by the long gap between its writing and the events it described. It may be as useful for understanding memory in the 1970s as it is for what happened in 1917 and after.
Nonetheless, the tale it tells of office grooming and seduction by an older, more sexually experienced and worldly-wise man, is credible. Like Ida Dalser, Ceccato was born in the Austrian-owned Alto Adige/Süd Tirol, but was a generation younger, her date of birth being 18 January 1900. During her childhood her parents changed lodgings frequently and her father, a seaman, was often away. At one time or another Bianca went to school in Venice, Treviso and Sondrio, moving to Milan to live with an uncle soon after the start of the war, after her mother’s florist business had failed owing to the departure of tourists from Venice. In 1917 Ceccato was pleased to obtain a secretarial position on Il Popolo d’Italia, without, she claimed, having any idea of its political orientation. Mussolini now appeared, limping due to the wound on his ankle (in 1945 he still needed orthopaedic help to his lower left leg). ‘He spoke in rapid phrases,’ she remembered, ‘and in a dry tone’.95
He noticed her, with what was likely predatory intent, and quickly promoted her to be his secretary at double her existing pay. Matters proceeded thereafter with predictable steps. First he caressed her hands one day when she brought him something; next he bought her a coffee. Then there was ‘another, less paternal, touch’ and he kissed her hand. One cold windy night they met outside office hours. He quizzed her about her life (and possible sexual experience) and then sent her grandly home in a carriage, a poor girl given a glimpse of the great life. The pattern recurred as spring 1918 began to unfold.
A young girl’s fancy might turn to love and Bianca was flattered to be taken out by a soldier friend of hers. At news of that flirtation, Mussolini exploded with jealousy and sacked her out of hand. However, others on the office staff intervened and ‘an elderly
journalist’ offered to write a letter of apology for her, with the counsel that it be sent to Naples, where Mussolini had gone on some political deal or other.96 The trick worked and Bianca got her job back. But now Mussolini became more pressing, writing her three letters in reply to her ghosted effort. In them he spoke of love and desire, expressing the hope that he could ‘dress her in silk and hear the rustle, . . . put a diadem on her head’ or, in heartily male imagining, ‘drive her across Italy in my high-octane automobile’.97
For a few weeks she resisted, despite her innocence not yet seduced by his clichés. But he stepped up his campaign, telling her that the tapping of her typewriter was distracting him from his daily labours into contemplation of her ‘white hands’.98 By May 1918 there were lavish gifts deposited on her desk; a bunch of red roses, a perfumed personal notebook, and, with a flash of authorial vanity, a copy of his War diary, which had been serialised in the paper since 1915. One day, Mussolini fondled her hands and kissed her fingers one by one.
Now it was 21 May and Mussolini melodramatically mumbled that he would kill himself unless they could satisfy their love, sounding like a sex-struck boy when he was twice her age. They met outside the Teatro Lirico, where once Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore (‘The elixir of love’) had premiered and where Mussolini was destined to make his last public speech in December 1944. Around the corner lay a small hotel. Mussolini pushed her through the entrance and soon they were in a ‘cold, inhospitable, almost bare room’, furnished with two iron beds and little else. She took off her hat; he laid his stick aside. They pushed the beds together. A maid arrived bearing ‘a dish of prosciutto crudo, some bread rolls, a bottle of spumante’; ‘it was my wedding banquet’, she recalled ruefully, while Mussolini expatiated again of suicide, his and hers.99 After this lovemaking finished and they separated, Mussolini wrote her another letter of intense romance: ‘Today, my love, I drank the sweetest cup of your virginity . . . It is midnight and now you are asleep. I shall pass by your window and waft you a kiss from the tips of my fingers. In the blinding clarity of a spring moon. Your devil adores you.’100
The affair continued tumultuously, at least according to Bianca’s memory. Mussolini presented her with a pistol so she could defend herself ‘against all those who will want to bring you harm’.101 Perhaps more winningly, there was money to buy herself a stylish hat and new shoes, and then, later, after he had a financial coup on the stock market, a new suit. Her mother learned of the affair and threatened the married man, ‘Signor Mussolini’, with retribution, prompting him to talk vaguely of divorce from Rachele some time in the future; Signora Ceccato drew back when Mussolini extracted his own revolver and, at the same time, magnanimously promised financial support for her daughter.102 There was a trip to the beach, which resulted in another violent copulation resembling rape.103 When Bianca fell pregnant, Mussolini organised and paid for an abortion, buying her a gold box where she could place their mutual photos as a talisman of love. In 1919 the sex continued. In their bed-chat, Mussolini grew sentimental about his mother, ‘who had loved him so very much’; he was also given to reciting the details of earlier affairs.104 He took her to see Aida from a box at La Scala, but fell asleep and snored (he had been drinking). They had a weekend together in romantic Venice and were rowed about in a gondola. Earlier, she had prayed for him at Mass when she knew he was about to fight a duel. He confided to her that Rachele only wanted to be a peasant and did not read books as she did.
With the arrival of summer, she told her partner that she now wanted to bear his child. But it took her prayers to the Madonna at the Cappella del Sacro Cuore in what was about to become the city’s Catholic University before, in February 1920, she again found herself with child. Glauco was born on 30 October. Mussolini had fussed over Bianca during her pregnancy and after the birth was, for a while, tender towards her and their infant. Separation only came after Mussolini moved to Rome to become prime minister and, even then, he made sure Bianca received 2,000 lire per month in living expenses. He did, however, offer the cynical advice that ‘all men, my dear, should dedicate at least ten minutes per day to their own wives. If a wife feels betrayed by her husband, she will end by betraying him.’105 The relationship between Bianca and Benito only finished after she fell in love with another man, presumably her future husband, Giuseppe Di Salle, six years her junior; they eventually had two children of their own. In 1927 the police raided their flat, seizing the love letters that Mussolini had written to her. Ruminating over past conquests, as he liked to do with Claretta (and as he had done with Bianca), Mussolini remembered that it was Bianca who told him, whether truthfully or not, that Rachele was having an affair. Then he did admit that Bianca’s son was probably his. ‘But nothing needed doing’, he told his new lover. ‘She does not interest me a jot any more.’106
In Claretta’s record of her affair with Mussolini there are quite a few parallels with Bianca’s story, enough to arouse suspicion that Glauco Di Salle, embellishing his elderly mother’s memory, added details that owed something to what, by the mid-1970s, had already been revealed about ‘Ben and Clara’. Claretta, too, recorded a complaisant (and greedy) mother, a somewhat paradoxical female religiosity, a countering claim of devilry by Mussolini, his golden recollection of Rosa Maltoni’s maternal love, exchanged threats of death and suicide, and rapid and violent coitus. Yet the Petacci diaries had not yet become available and at least some of the love story there narrated between Mussolini and ‘Bianca Veneziana’ may be true. Mussolini certainly recorded her name in his listing of past conquests to Claretta. Nonetheless, Bianca Ceccato was unusual in her youth, virginity and body shape compared with other women who bore, or claimed to have borne, Mussolini’s children.
On 19 October 1922, with the March on Rome in early preparation, Mussolini became the father of another illegitimate child, Elena Curti. This daughter, unlike Glauco Di Salle, was destined to accompany her father in that convoy which took him and Claretta to their deaths in April 1945. During the Duce’s last days, she was a member of one of the five families or sub-families who clung to him, in a reductio ad absurdum of Italian familism (actions which will be narrated in detail in chapter 7). Again, quite a lot of the information available on Curti’s life is post facto, recorded in even more recent times than that concerning Ceccato, the key source being the publication in 2003 of the memoirs of the eighty-year-old Elena, who had only just come back to live in Italy from self-imposed political exile in Spain.107 Over the next years, she became something of a celebrity in the world of Berlusconian ‘anti-anti-Fascist’ revisionism, all the more because in 1943 she had opted to back the RSI. According to her interviewers, she is a sassy old lady, still alive in 2016, and happy to confirm rightist conspiracy theories about the reality of a Mussolini diary and a florid correspondence between the Duce and Churchill.108 With what may be regarded in some circles as charming idiosyncrasy, she believed that astrology provides a fine explanation of historical actions and, like Claretta, at an earlier time she enjoyed painting.
In her memoirs and interviews, there is only thin evidence of Elena Curti’s begetting. It seems that her father, Bruno, a member of a Fascist paramilitary squad, was gaoled late in 1921 for a violent attack on his party’s socialist enemies. While he was locked away, his boss, with little sense of honour, slept with Angela Cucciati, his twenty-two-year-old wife (already the mother of a two-year-old child). Angela had been born at Lodi into a small business family, who soon transferred their work to Milan; she lived until 1978. Pregnancy resulted from her affair with Mussolini, which was over by February or March 1922 (when Bruno Curti left prison). Roberto Festorazzi describes Angela unkindly as ‘a seamstress with large breasts who worked in a fashion shop’.109 A surviving photo more fetchingly shows a pretty young woman with dark curly hair, a generous mouth and a wistful look.
According to Elena, the love between her mother and the Duce did not die but rather was rekindled in visits that she made often enough to Rome, notabl
y after her marriage broke down in 1929. Again in Elena’s memory, Mussolini would ring to summon Angela to his side and did not mind having to do so four or five times before he could reach her and make their assignation, which could also be in Milan, should Mussolini be visiting there.110 Other proof of such trysts is lacking, however, and the state archives show Mussolini rejecting a request for an interview from Angela Cucciati in March 1933. Another file that year recorded rumours from a tapped telephone of a new affair in her life.111 At around the same time, Cucciati’s passport was taken from her.112 Perhaps to escape this imbroglio, in 1930 Elena had been carried off by her legal father, who was reportedly dismayed by continuing police surveillance of the family, and placed in a boarding school.113 She grew up slowly thereafter, having limited contact with either of her legal parents or grandparents. Eventual release from college was, she recalled, ‘traumatic’.114
What does seem to be true is that, in 1941, her mother took her to the Italian capital, after telling her who her real father was, and arranged a meeting with the Duce. The dictator, Elena claimed, was ‘indulgent and understanding’ of her nineteen-year-old self. When she and her mother returned to Milan, he rang to talk philosophy, which she wanted to study. Soon he sent her an introductory history of Greek philosophy, the attraction of which was augmented by the banknotes stuffed into it. The archives contain her letter of thanks, not for the money, but merely hoping that Mussolini would approve of her decision to take her study of philosophy further.115 Thereafter she and her father became and remained friends; she moved back to Rome and the two met regularly throughout the Duce’s last years, much (as will be seen) to Claretta’s disgust – she assumed Benito had found a new, younger, lover, and was not disabused of her fears until April 1945. In her diaries, however, Claretta confirmed that Mussolini had bedded Angela Cucciati and acknowledged his daughter.116