Here, then, is another curious tale, one that cannot be wholly verified but does ring true, at least in regard to Elena Curti’s place in Mussolini’s life from 1942 to 1945. Back in 1922 Mussolini was meanwhile wrestling with the complications of government, which became greater on 10 June 1924 when a band of squadrists, whose chief had received training in Chicago, kidnapped the moderate socialist parliamentarian Giacomo Matteotti from beside the Tiber in Rome, before beating and murdering him. For six months Fascism and its Duce tumbled into crisis while the old national elites – monarchy, papacy, business, industry, agriculture and intellectuals – worked out whether violence so near the prime minister could be tolerated.117 It was. Italy was indeed to fall under the yoke of Mussolini’s dictatorship.
Safely installed as his nation’s Duce (but one adroitly seeking a deal with the Vatican), on 28 December 1925 Benito and Rachele were finally united in religious ceremony. Their three children (Edda, Vittorio and Bruno) had been baptised two years earlier, with matters kept in the family, since the officiating priest was Don Colombo Bondanini, Arnaldo Mussolini’s brother-in-law.118 Whatever had been happening to Benito and Rachele over the last years in their bedtime behaviour, they now produced two more children, another son, Romano (born 26 September 1927, his name once more expressing romanità, if not so grandly as that of Marcello Cesare Augusto Petacci) and a second daughter, Anna Maria (born 3 September 1929). In such fecundity, Rachele and Benito were doing their well-publicised best to enhance national demographic growth. The Duce, however, was still tied to Margherita Sarfatti and to a number of other women, at least three more of whom would bear his children. In both his public and private life he had come a long way, but he had not yet reached his climax.
2
A DICTATOR’S DISTRACTIONS
His Muse and other bedfellows
Violet Gibson was another woman in Mussolini’s life. He did not go to bed with her. Rather, just before 11 a.m. on the morning of 7 April 1926, this genteel Irish lady of aristocratic background shot at the dictator as he emerged from an official appointment at the Campidoglio in Rome. (He had just launched an international surgeons’ conference.) The bullet Gibson fired winged him where his nose met his forehead. After a moment of panic in the crowd, Mussolini had a bandage stuck across the shallow wound. With considerable courage, that afternoon he allowed himself to be photographed as he fulfilled other speaking duties, first to party officials and then to city crowds in the evening. He eventually rang his brother, Arnaldo, in Milan, as he was accustomed to do late each night. Arnaldo gave thanks to God for protecting the Duce. Pope Pius XI, whom Gibson had also half thought of killing, agreed. In gratitude for the dictator’s survival, Te Deum services were sung across the country.1
The next morning, Mussolini departed on a naval vessel on a mission to Libya; a photograph taken at the time shows him striding along the deck with a plaster covering most of his nose. Gibson sat in gaol awaiting the sluggish process of Italian justice. Judges and diplomats debated her case with care and attention. More than a year later, on 12 May 1927, she was expelled from the country to spend the rest of her days confined in St Andrews Hospital for Mental Diseases at Northampton.2 Conditions there were less harsh than the ones Ida Dalser was experiencing at Pergine, although Gibson’s sympathetic biographer is doubtful whether she should have been pent up for life. Violet Gibson long outlived the Duce, dying on 2 May 1956.
Among the many who reacted to Mussolini’s seemingly miraculous escape from assassination was a fourteen-year-old bourgeois Roman girl, Claretta Petacci. Not a great success at school (she did not enter one of Rome’s celebrated licei, where the ambitious children of the city’s elite, soon to include Vittorio and Bruno Mussolini, were educated), Petacci was thought by her parents to be somewhat delicate. It was her brother Marcello who, it was planned, would follow the family tradition and go into medicine. If a fulsome posthumous publication, edited by his father, is to be believed, Marcello Cesare Augusto was by 1926 already making his mark. Two years earlier, when only fourteen, he had published a written piece about ‘Africa’, and was soon giving public talks on St Francis, Dante and other writers. After attending middle school at the private Istituto cattolico di Sant’Apollinare in Rome, he did not complete liceo in the Italian capital, instead moving to Brussels before entering university at Pisa.
Throughout these years, his admiring father recalled, Marcello had eagerly served the Fascist and patriotic cause, founding a youth group at the Sant’Apollinare, where he enrolled ‘his school friends and even some engaged in priestly training’.3 Marcello had been precocious in his political awakening, joining Associazione Nazionalista Italiana (ANI; Italian Nationalist Association) before his tenth birthday in 1920, and quickly becoming a ‘centurion’ in their youth group. ‘That year and the following ones, he engaged in frequent battles with subversives, especially in the Monteverde area’, F.S. Petacci reported proudly. ‘His temperament meant that he gave no allowance to the fact that his adversaries were often numerically superior’ when they engaged in their suburban skirmishes. Sternly he resisted their deviant plots and stood alert beside his flag, ‘on one occasion with rather grave medical results’.4 When the ANI, which was much more respectable in class terms than the PNF, dissolved itself early in 1923, Marcello rapidly became a card-carrying Fascist and, still only thirteen, ‘participated in all the meetings and [punitive] expeditions’ of his branch in Rome.5
If Marcello was preparing himself for an active and rewarding masculine life under Italy’s new regime, Claretta, like the great majority of girls of her class background, was readied for Catholic marriage. Formal education began with the nuns in elementary school and was completed before the end of middle school in the tripartite Italian system. Her training entailed some familiarity with music (she took lessons on the harp, the violin and the piano, without advancing too far in her playing) and art. In this latter case, she displayed in adulthood an ability for depicting country scenes and a more surprising skill in caricature.6 Her mother, then and later, was rarely without her rosary beads, and the Petaccis saw no contradiction between their Catholic and Fascist (and class and family) beliefs. However, in her choice of fandom, and covering her schoolbooks with images of her peerless hero, Mussolini, young Claretta displayed a hint of teenage rebellion against the many images of the Madonna and the innumerable saints that sustained the church’s presence in Italian lives.7 Perhaps, given her father’s vocation, she had been especially aware of her leader’s speech on 7 April to surgeons from across the world.
Certainly, that very afternoon, Gibson’s assault provoked Claretta, from her comfortable apartment on the wide avenue running beside the Tiber about halfway between the Victor Emmanuel monument and St Peter’s, to pen the national leader a long, passionate letter. Renouncing female mildness, it thirsted for vengeance. How dreadful it was that a woman had been involved, Claretta exclaimed. ‘What ignominy, what cowardice, what opprobrium’ (can her vocabulary have been spruced up by mother?). ‘But, then, she is a foreigner and that explains everything!’ Claretta maintained with ready xenophobia. How appalling that there had been this and other attempted attacks on one who was ‘my super great Duce, our life, our hope, our glory’. ‘O, Duce, why was I not with you?’ she added with teenage rage and self-obsession. ‘Could I not have strangled that murderous woman who wounded you [Te], a divine being? Could I not have cut her out for ever from Italian soil, stained with your blood, your grand, good, sincere, Romagnol blood?’ Then, she mused with a shift back to more intimate emotion, might she not have lain her ‘head on your chest so I could still hear the beats of your great heart?’ But it was not the time for too many girlish dreams. Rather she must stand up for discipline. As a ‘small but ardent Fascist’, her letter ended, she, like all Blackshirts, was ready fervently to swear, ‘in the motto that expresses all the love that my young heart feels for you! Duce, my life is for you! The Duce is safe! Viva il Duce’ and signed ‘Clara Petacci, (four
teen years old), Lungo Tevere Cenci, number 10’.8
* * *
Claretta never forgot the ardour that in 1926 had aroused her to such heights but rather remembered it with advantages. Not long after her sex life with Mussolini began, her lover’s flicking over old photos turned up an image of Violet Gibson. ‘How overwhelming it is!’ she recorded herself as muttering in reaction. ‘To see that old ugly black [dame] with glasses who is pointing a gun a few steps from your face . . . In this photo,’ she reflected, ‘you can see and understand that inexplicable instant that kept you safe.’ He had turned his head and ‘that unconscious move saved him. God saved him for our patria.’ Moralising done, Claretta trembled at the thought and clung to her lover with renewed passion. The old man did not seem to share the fierceness of her sentiments, however, instead complacently patting himself on the back about how lucky he had always been.9
After all, he may have reflected, when Gibson fired on the dictator, Claretta was just another biddably loyal teenager. At that time, apart from Rachele, the leading woman in the Duce’s life was still Margherita Sarfatti. Indeed it was in that year of 1926 that Sarfatti published a book entitled Dux, which many observers have viewed as the key work in cementing an image of the dictator in Italian hearts and so establishing a personality cult. Actually the biography was first published in English in September of the previous year under the less aggressive sounding title The life of Benito Mussolini, and sought to combine a reading of the Duce that could attract both Italians and foreigners.10 Yet, an analyst of the story of Mussolini’s representation has argued that, from 1926, the dictator became an ever more exalted being,11 one translated into the divine essence that Claretta had worshipped in her letter.
Sarfatti, whose husband had died in January 1924, had been persuaded to write Dux not long afterwards, receiving approval and assistance from Mussolini and ignoring the fears that beset the Duce that the Matteotti crisis would end his career. Her own biographers provide an extensive analysis of the text or texts, given that there were variations between the English and Italian editions. They note how she could not resist inserting herself into the book’s pages, explaining that she viewed it ‘as a kind of dual biography. She wove her presence subtly into the narrative at every important phase, and recorded her presence at all major events’.12 Yet, rather than saluting her, readers were more likely to absorb the image of a grand and popular leader who had risen ‘by sheer force of will above his squalid environment’ in the provincial Romagna.13 Sarfatti exaggerated Mussolini’s poverty all the more plausibly since his modest origins in Predappio were so different from her family’s Venetian opulence. In so far as the installation of the dictatorship was concerned, Sarfatti asserted, other Fascists scarcely mattered. Mussolini dominated all as ‘a vigorous and courageous man of action, the master of horses, airplanes, sports cars, and speedboats’, naturally and inevitably elevated to his proper role as ‘prime minister and world statesman’.14 Her nation was now indeed ‘Mussolini’s Italy’.
In her narration Sarfatti did not hide the dictator’s sex life, justifying to him her choice in that regard with the comment that the biography was ‘taken up largely with details which you, perhaps, will dismiss as gossip’. But, she added knowingly, ‘I have read too much of history to disdain gossip.’15 So she acknowledged the wild oats that he had broadcast in his youth and even made coded reference to Dalser. Rachele, by contrast, she ignored completely (in return, the Duce’s legal wife nourished a lifelong hatred of Sarfatti).16 In a way that was well tailored to Mussolini’s autobiographical musings, warmest mention of a woman was given to his mother, Rosa Maltoni. Only a mother’s ‘female tenderness’, Sarfatti declared in amiable phrases, ‘can teach and keep alive in the warrior that gentleness which is simultaneously pure force. It recalls that dream-like image of maternal tenderness in the heart of a boy growing to be a man. It is thus the greatest, most profound and precious, the unique, live point of contact which the Leader can retain with ordinary men.’17 A Fascist boy, it seemed, owed much to his Mamma. With less than feminist sentiment, Sarfatti announced that she was happy to write what she called ‘a woman’s book’ that did not refrain from intimacy, yet approved her sometime partner’s misogyny and the increasingly patriarchal Fascist intention aggressively to deny any prospect of suffrage or other form of enhanced female equality.18
Perhaps somewhere between the lines of the biography, evidence could be detected of the withering of Sarfatti’s physical ties with Mussolini. At the end of the book she noted that, during the war, Mussolini had told her that he was ready to die, since he now had children. They ensured, he stated, that ‘I am continued’.19 Sarfatti was one partner whom the Duce had not impregnated. Nonetheless, for quite a few more years, she could rejoice in being what her sentimental biographers call the Duce’s ‘Muse’.20 For a decade following its foundation in 1922, she occupied a major editorial role in the party’s theoretical journal, Gerarchia, and, in her salon and in the regime’s cultural politics, she strenuously sponsored the cause of what she called the Novecento italiano (‘Italian twentieth century’). This movement, composed of intellectuals happy to accept her patronage, was to express the Fascist version of modernism, ‘preparing our forces and militarising our spirit’ against the nation’s competitors and foes.21 It was to make Milan, and perhaps Rome, surpass Paris as the city of the modern mind, art, architecture and all cultural form. It was to confirm Sarfatti, in the metaphor of Cannistraro and Sullivan, as ‘the uncrowned [cultural] queen of Italy’.22 In acceptance of this status and her national identity, in December 1929 Sarfatti was baptised in a private ceremony by Pietro Tacchi Venturi, the Jesuit who regularly acted as the middleman between pope and Duce.23 From 1931 Sarfatti moved into a commodious eighteen-room flat in the Via dei Villini, only a few hundred metres from the Villa Torlonia.24 In most senses, other than the physical, she clung to her role as ‘Mussolini’s other woman’.
Now Sarfatti’s ambitious daughter, Fiammetta, also opted for the Christian over the Jewish faith, while Amedeo, the banker son of the family, became a Catholic in 1932. For quite some time, Fiammetta had been her mother’s public companion until married into the upper echelons of the aristocracy in October 1933 (her husband was Livio Gaetani d’Aragona, of an ancient Neapolitan family that had once sired Pope Boniface VIII, born Benedetto Caetani). Almost a decade later, the Petaccis would also delight in joining themselves to the nobility, although Myriam’s husband, the ‘Marchese’ Armando Boggiano, was scarcely the equal in social caché or ancient bloodlines to the Gaetanis. Nonetheless, historians over-ready to locate a social and cultural revolution in Mussolini’s Italy plainly underestimate this tendresse for affiliation into the aristocracy among the movement’s female elites. Within the Mussolini family itself, Galeazzo Ciano in 1939 could rejoice in being the 2nd count of Cortelazzo, a title, doubtless nouveau, that had been granted to his father, the admiral and Fascist minister, Costanzo Ciano. It was one of the many signs of her son-in-law’s elevated class stature that Rachele held against him.
Sarfatti may have sought to entrench her family as well as her intellectual clients into the most distinguished sectors of Italian life. But she also acted for a time as a sort of personal assistant to Mussolini. Once established in Rome as prime minister, Mussolini did not automatically bring his wife and growing legitimate family to share his life there, instead leaving them in Milan under the supervision of his brother, Arnaldo, after 28 October 1922 editor of Il Popolo d’Italia, and his portly sister, Edvige. In 1925 the family purchased the estate called the Villa Carpena near Forlì (raising the Mussolinis to landowners, if not aristocrats).25 Rachele, preferring the country to the city, was always happiest there. Two years later, the family holdings in the Romagna – la provincia del Duce (‘the Duce’s territory’, in regime propaganda) – were augmented when the Mussolinis graciously accepted the donation ‘by the people’ of the Rocca delle Caminate, a heavily restored castle in the region. The family also ha
d use of a beach house at Riccione on the Adriatic. It was only on 15 November 1929 that the Villa Torlonia, with its large park on the Via Nomentana not far beyond Rome’s Aurelian Walls, became the regular urban residence of Rachele and the children, the reuniting of the family spurred by the entry of Vittorio and Bruno into the Torquato Tasso liceo, which stood less than half a kilometre away.26
Until this transfer, Mussolini led the de facto bachelor existence that is not unknown in other politicians’ lives. Sarfatti had found him a flat on the top floor of Via Rasella 155 in central Rome, down the hill from the royal Quirinal Palace. There the household was run by a capable woman from Gubbio called Cesira Carocci (born 1884). Sarfatti had chosen this housekeeper too, as well as selecting a dentist, an optician and a gynaecologist for the Mussolinis. She similarly arranged the eventual deal whereby the aristocratic Torlonia family (who had Jewish origins) offered their villa to the nation’s leader at a peppercorn rent; Mussolini took over rooms there in July 1925, although he did not yet abandon his flat in the Via Rasella.27 Carocci, who is said to have readily performed such basic tasks as cooking and washing for the Duce (and even purchasing his underwear), lasted in her role until 1934 when Rachele, jealous of Carocci’s past clientelistic relationship with Sarfatti, belatedly sacked her.28 Then and later, Mussolini, in this case certainly a good master and perhaps with gilded memories of his rumbustious freedom in the Via Rasella, went out of his way to subsidise Carocci’s retirement, taking time even in 1944 to send her 5,000 lire from his personal funds.29
* * *
It has already been noted how Mussolini loved to go back over his past affairs in his conversations with Petacci, such half-pornographic historical recollection presumably aimed at arousing them both. In their chats Mussolini often returned to his time in the Via Rasella and his happy bedding of very many women there. He also remembered his physical collapse in February 1925, when he had vomited blood, in what was probably the first manifestation of the ulcer that would trouble him throughout the rest of his life. He was grateful that Carocci had rushed to his aid and brought in the doctors, well before the news reached Rachele in Milan.
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