In his sexual encounters during these years, Mussolini ranged widely. He even reached into the aristocracy in an affair apparently commencing in 1923 with the Sicilian Giulia Alliata di Monreale, principessa di Gangi (born 1888).30 A photo shows her dark, soulful and sultry, wearing elegant pearls. The two met after she petitioned him for special aid to her family estates and they remained in contact, notably much later during the war, when Claretta, at least according to the postwar memoirs of Ercole Boratto, Mussolini’s chauffeur, was neurotically jealous of her and her ostentatious sensuality, and equally put off by her aristocratic demeanour.31
Noble in title but little else was another lover, Countess Giulia Carminati di Brambilla. She was the partner but not the wife of the count of that title, a landowner near Rovigo. She had been born Giulia Matavelli in the province of Como in 1892, the daughter of a postman, and so, like the other, more genuinely noble Giulia, was about the same age as Rachele Mussolini.32 Neither was in any sense an ingénue. It seems likely that Brambilla and the Duce had sex for the first time in 1921.33 Not long afterwards, two other Fascist bosses, Francesco Giunta and Cesare Forni, fought a duel over her favours.34 Despite what many deemed her promiscuity, she kept a tie alive with the Duce over the next two decades. If not often his bed partner, the countess acted as a secret agent for her sometime lover, deeply irritating Claretta by being a fertile source of malicious rumour about her young rival.35 By the late 1930s photos show a sturdy, even mannish, woman whom Claretta claimed was a bottle blonde, very much looking her years.36 A forgiving popular historian has described her more courteously as ‘not very tall, but attractive, plump according to the tastes of the time and of extraordinary sensuality’.37
Apart from deprecating Brambilla as a gossip, in February 1938 Claretta was not wholly convinced that her physical relationship with the Duce was dead. A month later, Mussolini was driven to assure her that the countess was the last of his old lovers to be sent away; actually, he joked, it was she who had removed herself from his bed some time ago.38 Nonetheless Brambilla kept up correspondence with the dictator, now intimating to him that Claretta had been ‘disloyal’, a charge that disgusted the younger woman, all the more given what she viewed as Mussolini’s insouciant reaction to such allegation.39 Moreover, Brambilla kept appearing at social events where the Duce was obliged to be, forcing Mussolini to find new words to deny that Brambilla mattered. In April 1938 he informed Claretta that, actually, the woman was ‘mad’ but, he added, perhaps summoning memories of Dalser and her public insults to him, she should be feared for her spite and unpredictability. In any case, he ‘detested’ her.40
Despite such venom, no action to banish the countess from his world resulted. Rather, Mussolini seems to have decided weakly that Brambilla was part of the static that blurred the background of his private life. It was only at Christmas 1944 that another of her tirades against Claretta, on this occasion running to eighteen pages, drove Mussolini to outright expostulation: ‘Dear countess and comrade, I beg you not to dim my already exhausted vision with letters that are simply too long, and I also beg you not to make judgements about people who do not matter to you. I beg you to inform yourself better if you think it is worthwhile entering into the private affairs of others and collecting, as you do, the insults and gossip of idiots and the malicious.’41 Whether as a result or because the war was now so desperate, no further letters from her seem to have reached Mussolini’s desk.
* * *
A third lover from the 1920s, but one who was sufficiently provocative to be sent into an earlier exile, was Cornelia Tanzi, a poet and dancer born in 1908. Tanzi was a sexually experienced woman who happily embraced Roman high society during these decades. She earned her greatest notoriety, when, after the liberation of Rome, she was one of the first to be condemned for collaborationism, which may have been polite code for her promiscuous dealings with Mussolini, other party chiefs and, after 1943, the German military. Certainly by the 1990s her activity was portrayed, and forgiven, as such,42 although in 1944 there had also been complaints about her greedy search for financial reward; her salon in the Via Margutta was said to have become a springboard for intellectuals on the make.43 In 1938 Tanzi was the object of further nattering between the dictator and Claretta, with Mussolini dismissing her as a ‘whore’, whom he had never loved at all.44
In more cavalier fashion than with Brambilla, Tanzi paid no attention to Fascist decorum, with phone taps revealing her devil-may-care boasts about imprinting her lipstick deep onto the Duce’s lips during their sexual congress. As Mussolini remarked to the ingenuous Claretta, he was worried and irritated that her forthrightness was demeaning of him. He had therefore rung Tanzi to tell her to desist, ordering her to get out of Rome ‘for two or three years’. She did so.45 When she returned to the capital, she remained under police surveillance, despite suffering from breast cancer.46 As Mussolini repeated on more than one occasion, what he really disliked was the way that Tanzi and Brambilla went around the country boasting that they had bedded him. For the patriarchal dictator, it scarcely needed noting, male promiscuity was all to the good but open female sexuality was not.47 Any close contact between Tanzi and the Duce now ceased, although, following Italy’s entry into the war on the side of the Nazis in June 1940, Mussolini did moralise about her arrest for breaking petrol rationing and misusing a government-owned car.48
Two years earlier, Mussolini had gone into detail with Claretta about what it had been like to have sex with Cornelia Tanzi: ‘She wasn’t ugly’, he muttered. ‘Really she was neither beautiful nor ugly. She had long, long legs, and was slender, soft, tall, dark. But she was frigid, coldness personified . . . Reckon with the fact that she never felt anything at all even with me. She would arrive, strip, let her slip fall, so you could see her two long legs. Then she would lie down and be ready to go without any particular sign of anything. Always indifferent, [afterwards] she would get dressed again and leave. All in less than half an hour. To tell you the truth, the last time for me was a dreadful struggle’, Mussolini admitted, because he could not arouse himself to an erection. ‘Then, I don’t know, that day she had on a perfume, with a really disgusting smell. Sorry, but you know I am really very aware of such things.’ He had never loved her and their coitus had been a terrible effort for him; but then he was an ‘animal’, he concluded complacently.49
Another brief bed partner of these years, but one about whom only a little is known, was Ines De Spuches, the wife of a squadrist from Brescia who, by 1927, was reinforcing imperial rule in Libya. A son called Benito, who was probably the dictator’s, was born that year. Young Benito was destined to be killed, little more than a boy, by partisans in February 1944 after he had enrolled in the RSI’s Guardia Nazionale Repubblicana (GNR; National Republican Guard), an event solemnly recorded by Claretta with her indefatigable registration of her rivals’ history.50 In April 1940 the dictator mentioned to his lover that he had noticed De Spuches’ name as attending a ceremony over which he had presided in the Foro Mussolini (now the Foro Italico). ‘I didn’t even look at her,’ he assured his Claretta briefly. ‘She makes me sick.’51
* * *
Of those women with whom he no longer consorted the one who lived on in his memory was Margherita Sarfatti, with his frequent bleak recollection to Claretta of their deeds together. Sarfatti’s recollections were similarly bitter: in the tract that she wrote in 1947, but which remained unpublished, she was insistent on the subject of his drift into tertiary syphilis (Mussolini had already been deeply perturbed at the news in 1939 that she was contemplating another study of his life).52 Eventually she would insist that, after he removed her from her cultural leadership, Mussolini ‘increasingly surrounded himself with poorly educated, even ignorant, individuals’, people – whether male or female – who were just not of her class.53 Once she had been dropped from the regime’s decision-makers, she contended in exculpation, ‘behind the mask of Fascism lay an abyss of corruption, nepotism, favouritism and ar
bitrary lawlessness’.54
But Mussolini’s rancour has left a more detailed record, if only because Claretta so eagerly recorded her partner’s splenetic rejection of the claim that it was Sarfatti who had made him. Not long into her diary, Claretta noted in November 1937 Mussolini’s irritation when he remembered that ‘Margheritaccia’ (‘Yucky Margherita’, the suffix expressing eloquently his current aversion) had ill-naturedly told him that his ugly short legs wrecked his otherwise grand male beauty (which, naturally, Claretta hailed). Then, he ran on to the reminiscence that the active sexual relations of Benito and Margherita had only lasted through 1918–20, during which period, he would later add, he was not having sex with his wife. To kindle the affair, Sarfatti had propositioned him, he contended, while they were sharing a taxi, once they alighted dragging him off to a hotel room. There, he narrated, ‘it was ghastly, terrible . . . I could not do anything. I thought it might be the position we had adopted, I changed various times, nothing, impossible. Nothing happened. It was the stench of her flesh.’ However, he continued, eventually he ‘got used to it’. ‘But, the first time nothing.’ He might have gone further in such description but Claretta noted primly: ‘I interrupted him from his over-intimate description of the meeting because it was annoying me too much.’55
Thereafter Sarfatti retained a prominent place in their conversations, all the more since Mussolini was increasingly given to a crass anti-Semitism that underscored the regime’s more studiously intellectual Manifesto della Razza (‘Race Manifesto’), issued on 14 July 1938 to emphasise Fascism’s opposition to the principles of the French Revolution of 1789.56 Sarfatti, Mussolini retorted on another occasion, was ‘an ugly witch’, resembling a badly restored painting. In fact she, like Brambilla, was one of those women who, he charged, once they reached a certain age, ‘give themselves to the chauffeur, the waiter, the portiere (caretaker). And are ready to pay them’, desperately and despairingly promiscuous. She was no longer Sarfatti, he and his new lover joked, but Rifatti (‘the done-over one’).57 Her intelligence was ‘Jewish’ and that meant he had been able to have sex with other women in front of her, for example Ester Lombardo (1895–1982), a writer and feminist, in some dissent from the regime; she was also of Jewish extraction.58
Contrary to his contention that their sexual relationship had ended in 1920, in his memory he still numbered Sarfatti as one of his horde of bed partners in 1924.59 But, by August 1938, he had decided that allowing Sarfatti to write Dux had been the greatest mistake of his life, since it had contaminated his story with hers. Inevitably she had written what he now knew was a ‘Jewish’ book; like all of her race, she was a ‘fanatic’, scorning himself and all other Italians, the entire Gentile race, as goyim: this word Mussolini was sure should be translated as ‘dogs’, perceiving it to express an ageless Jewish contempt and antipathy towards anyone not of their blood and religion.60 Now he had decided that the smell, which had disgusted him during their first sexual meeting, was ‘Jewish’; she and all her people composed the ‘cursed race, the killers of God’.61 In reality, he told Claretta, he had been a convinced racist since 1921; in that regard he had no need to mimic Hitler. Certainly he had cut all ties with Sarfatti since 1934, when she left Gerarchia.62
In January 1940 his memory became still more brutal, although its accuracy was doubtful. ‘No, I never loved her,’ he told Claretta. ‘Rather she trapped me with that Jewish insistence and impudence that they use to sniff out the man of the moment. Imagine that she had the courage to turn up at the hospital where I lay with my war wound and where my wife was present.’ On that occasion she fled, but ‘from then on, she never left me in peace for a moment . . . I told you that it didn’t work the first time. We never really were in harness; there was always something dividing us. There was a tremendous argument we had from 10 in the evening till 5 in the morning. It was then that I realised that I was deeply anti-Semitic.’ He and Sarfatti squabbled over the meaning of an ivory crucifix that stood on his table. She claimed that it was really a Jewish symbol that the Christians had stolen. ‘That was the death of our relationship,’ Mussolini avowed with a version of virtue that might appeal to the daughter of a papal physician. ‘It was then that the chasm of race opened between us.’63
Despite such dictatorial ranting and the grossness of his anti-Semitic prejudice, Mussolini did not condemn Sarfatti to death or imprison her in a concentration camp (he complained to Claretta that Sarfatti had not thanked him for such generosity, and again blamed her Jewishness for the ingratitude).64 Rather in December 1938 she was allowed to depart to Paris where she flirted with the established anti-Fascist exile community, while telling anyone who wanted to listen of her ‘boundless hatred’ of Mussolini. In March 1939 she was joined by her son Amedeo, en route to a refreshed banking career in Montevideo, who relieved her complaints about ‘pauperism’ by passing over thirty-six diamonds that he had brought from his mother’s stock at home. Despite the ever-toughening legislation against Jewish businesses and properties in Italy, the regime also permitted the export of quite a few of her valuable collection of paintings and sculptures.65
When, in September, the Germans invaded Poland, sparking the Second World War (with Italy for nine months adopting a policy of ‘non-belligerence’), Margherita Sarfatti fled across Spain to Portugal. At that perilous moment, Mussolini personally intervened to allow her an Italian passport that ensured her passage. By mid-September Sarfatti had joined her son in Uruguay.66 Her daughter, Fiammetta, lived out the war in Italy, where she died in 1989, celebrated in the press for her aristocratic taste and her vast and beautiful art collection.67 Following time in Argentina and the USA, Margherita Sarfatti returned to Italy in 1947, dying in her villa near Lake Como in October 1961.
Countess Fiammetta did well to ignore the scandalous gossip, retailed by Mussolini’s chauffeur after the war, and given some credence by popular historians of the Duce’s sex life, that she, while a teenager as young as fourteen, had joined her mother in romps with the dictator.68 Certainly the Petacci diaries have no report of any such events. Rather Mussolini briefly named Fiammetta when he was expatiating on the pretentiousness of aristocratic salons: ‘the human collection that evening was revolting, disastrous. I’ve never seen uglier men and women. Of the two hundred women perhaps ten were passable,’ he remarked disparagingly. ‘Sarfatti’s daughter was there but she kept turning her back on me.’69
Still greater scandal was stirred by Mussolini’s telling Petacci that no less a person than Maria José, the crown princess of Italy (born 1906), tried to arouse him sexually, only for him to fail at her bidding. The chauffeur, Boratto, mentioned a visit by an ‘illustrious’ female to the bathing hut at Castelporziano on the Roman Lido, grace-and-favour usage of which the royal family had given Mussolini in the 1920s. It had been an embarrassing moment, Boratto recalled, because the Duce was then entertaining Claretta, who had to be hidden away during a two-hour confabulation. Boratto maintained that thereafter ‘successive meetings occurred . . . of a more intimate character’, when he would see princess and dictator go inside together wearing only their bathing costumes.70
Such allegation fitted the longstanding rumour that, although Maria José was regularly bearing children for the Savoy dynasty (Maria Pia in 1934; Vittorio Emanuele in 1937; Maria Gabriella in 1940; Maria Beatrice in 1943), she hated its austere and soulless lifestyle and found her husband, Umberto, cold or by preference a homosexual.71 The idea that Maria José would seduce her country’s dictator must nonetheless be severely doubted when there is more credible evidence that her circle, with aristocratic disdain, mocked Mussolini’s dress sense, aggressive baldness and the premature white hair it disguised.72 Maria José, who separated from her husband once the monarchy fell in 1946 and died in her nineties in January 2001, kept a lengthy diary but it is not to be made available to readers until 2071.73
What was Mussolini’s version of the alleged affair, as disclosed (or fantasised) to Claretta? The date in her diary
was 7 November 1937, a day suited to boasting since, that morning, Mussolini had signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the countries set to be Italy’s allies in World War II. Despite encroaching autumn, it must still have been warm since, in the afternoon, Mussolini and Petacci repaired to Castelporziano. At first they played ball but then she said she was tired and so they stripped off, lay down and sunbathed. And Mussolini began to talk about ‘the princess’. She had shown up one time, he remembered, with only enough warning from an aide for him swiftly to pull on his towelling shorts. ‘Am I disturbing you?’ she had asked. ‘But no, Your Highness, of course not,’ he replied deferentially. ‘And then with a tug she let fall her dress and . . . she was almost naked, a pair of the briefest panties and two scraps of clothing on her breasts. I was quite at a loss,’ he recalled dreamily.
Two courtiers had accompanied her. But she signalled them to leave, suggesting that she and the Duce should dive into the waves, since it was mid-August and boiling hot. She could swim well but, in the water, kept bumping suggestively into Mussolini’s legs. Then they lay on the sand together and chatted about one thing or another. ‘She isn’t excessively clever,’ the Duce pronounced, ‘but she has a measured, not a flighty intelligence. Before understanding and replying, she likes to think it over.’ So, Mussolini ran on, ‘with any other woman who had come beside me in this condition of nudity, I would have seized my chance’. She may not have been totally beautiful but physically she was not bad. Anyway, in normal circumstance, he would not have refrained from acting. However, his penis gave no sign of interest. So, with evening darkening the sky, he told her that he had work to do. She commiserated about how boring it must be, but asked expectantly if she could come back the next day.
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