The business affairs of the Pallottellis deteriorated further following Pachmann’s death, with the collapse of the family publishing company and the failure of other ventures in the concert world, despite many supplications for support from Mussolini. He was mostly accommodating. However, in 1932 he refused to back a scheme to have the Pallottellis’ music review compulsorily sold to all visitors to the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, as well he might have done if any credence should be given to the view in much current historiography that the exhibition was a pure expression of revolutionary culture. Mussolini’s police chief, Arturo Bocchini, was independent enough in 1935 to rebuff a request from his Duce to get Count Francesco his driver’s license back after a ‘serious crash’.109
With the family fortunes plummeting, the solution for the Pallottellis became that which can be discerned in the imperial story of many European powers, that is, ‘to go out and govern New South Wales’. With a recommendation from on high, by 1938 Count Francesco could rejoice in employment in the Fascist administration of Ethiopia, leaving Alice and her children in their flat in Rome. But dull governmental activity could not fill his days, so the count was soon trying to pressurise Rome into subsidising grand mining opportunities, which he claimed to have discerned in the new colony. In the interim he sought and won a pay rise. Alas for such entrepreneurship! The mining projects got nowhere and, in May 1940, the count chose a good moment to scuttle back to Italy. Thereafter he remembered to draw his pay but signally failed to resume labour in the colony110 where, in any case, British imperial arms were quickly demonstrating that Ethiopia had been held by a Sawdust Caesar. Soon, rather than dealing with the grand world of empire, the Pallottelli files were focusing on the couple’s dealings in Fabriano, with the perhaps happy news in December 1942 that Count Francesco had his driving license back since ‘he was an agricultural producer of particular significance’.111
Alice Pallottelli was meanwhile deploying her historic connection with the dictator to urge that one citizen of Fabriano be let out of confino, a second off his taxes, a third allowed to transfer from the army to the air force, a fourth to move from the Greek front to home service near his family at Pesaro, and a fifth (a woman) to get a job as a school cleaner. Alice also asked that quite a large fund be found to assist in the restoration of a small local church, and urged that public telephones be installed in a number of paesi near Fabriano.112 In May–June 1943 she confronted the graver problem of a report that her elder son, Virgilio, had been shot down on 23 May 1943 over Algeria and that it was not known whether he was alive or dead. Could government agents do everything possible to clarify the matter?113 They did. Now happy reports arrived that Virgilio Pallottelli was alive. After the crisis of July–September resulted in the foundation of the RSI, he and his mother continued to have dealings with the Duce until April 1945.
* * *
Whereas useful detail survives on Pallottelli and a number of Mussolini’s other lovers, Romilda Minardi Ruspi has left a meagre record,114 except in Claretta’s diary, given her recurrent jealousy over the sexual relationship between Ruspi and the Duce until the end of his life. Perhaps because of this durability, in 1945 Ruspi was well enough known to be included in a scandal sheet rushed out by anti-Fascists. She was there described as ‘the daughter of a washerwoman . . . married to a printer from Frascati’. She had worked at the Villa Torlonia as a maid of some kind, attracting Mussolini with her ‘bosomy figure’.115 Claretta summed her up curtly as ‘about forty, beautiful but mature-looking’.116 No photograph of her seems to have survived. Ruspi was born around 1900 and her sister, Renata, worked on the staff of the Villa Torlonia and may have been the lover of Prince Giovanni Torlonia. Renata was confident enough in 1938 to make the recommendation that Mussolini intervene in favour of the Duchess Maria Torlonia in Sforza Cesarini in regard to a financial dispute that the duchess was having with a government agency.117
In the anti-Fascist account, Ruspi’s husband, Giovanni Minardi, was annoyed at his wife’s seduction but was mollified by being despatched to work in Paris on a party newspaper in a much better paid job than he had occupied in Rome. The family was also given a villa at Ostia Lido and other financial help, under the excuse of paying for the education of the three Minardi/Ruspi children.118 Romilda Ruspi came from a lower class background than most of Mussolini’s other lovers and, indeed, than Claretta. In attempted self-exculpation to Claretta, the Duce often made it sound as though Ruspi’s presence on the staff of the Villa Torlonia had made sex with her inevitable. Once again, Mussolini continued to 1945 to feel some responsibility for her.
In 1939 the dictator dated the prime moments of his affair with Ruspi to 1927–9, claiming predictably that his only motive had been sexual, ‘no love, no sentiment’.119 Initially coitus seems to have occurred somewhere in the Villa Torlonia but later, in the 1930s, Ruspi was established in a flat in the Via Po, half a kilometre away.120 A son, Massimo, had been born in 1929 and Mussolini sometimes, but not always, denied paternity.121 However, he admitted to Claretta that the relationship with Ruspi by 1939 had existed for ‘fourteen years’ and it continued into the war, with Mussolini accepting that he must protect Ruspi and her children from untoward events.122 Claretta’s jealousy did not hamper the Duce’s sexual visitations to Ruspi’s nearby flat, even if, on 11 July 1940, what the couple saw as a formally couched ‘armistice’ was signed between Mussolini (as ‘Ben’) and Petacci (post-dated a year). In this mock treaty the dictator swore not to allow Romilda Ruspi to ‘enter . . . the Villa Torlonia for any motive at all’, nor to ‘see Signora Ruspi more than once per month without a single exception’ and to ensure that any visits he made to her house were confined to ‘twenty minutes’. The pact was a parody of that being arranged in the greater world with the surrender of France to the Axis powers, and was therefore viewed by the lovers as all the more amusing. A final clause noted that, if the terms were broken, ‘hostilities will resume’.123
* * *
Given the number of women involved and Mussolini’s readiness to treat them as though he were a ruling sultan, it is no surprise that a popular study of the subject is entitled The Duce’s harem.124 Yet there are some surprises in the story of Mussolini’s sex life, where, at a moment of modesty, his tally to Claretta was a total of ‘about thirty’.125 Part of the current image of patriarchal sex is that the older man should seek young, slim, beautiful women as his partners. Whether true or not, such girls were certainly what Berlusconi liked to suggest were his bedfellows. Yet, with the exception of Bianca Ceccato and the office romance at Il Popolo d’Italia, Mussolini’s other women were mature, experienced and married; divorce, unless managed through some special Vatican network, remained illegal within Italy. Most often the Duce’s partners sprang from a more elevated class background than his own (and certainly than Rachele’s). A number were females of considerable culture, who evidently interested ‘Professor Mussolini’, the aspirant intellectual. A few were rapidly set aside by the Duce and all were the subjects of hasty denials to his new young lover that he had really cared for them at all; lust, he reiterated, was his sole motive. Yet quite a few retained contact, even sexually, with the dictator well into middle age. The majority could also rely on Mussolini’s patronage if they fell into financial or other trouble and find a patron’s protection for the children whom the Duce had conceived with them. So, perhaps, a harem is a fitting analogy since, while Mussolini remained married to Rachele, Pallottelli and Ruspi, Curti and Ceccato, in one way or another, continued to act as sub-wives, and neither they nor Mussolini saw much problem in so doing.
Another observation may be more important. Mussolini’s sex life had curious parallels with his politics as dictator, given its combination of violence, unalloyed egoism and an acceptance of, or even a preference for, the established and traditional over the new and radical. Can the liaisons that the Duce undertook with a list of middle-aged, experienced and worldly-wise women have been the equivalent of his knowled
ge as dictator that, despite blarney about Fascist social and cultural revolution, he must get along with the monarchy, the Vatican, big business, large landowners and the pre-existing national establishment? For all his lustfulness, there was also something careful and predictable, even appeasing, about Mussolini’s sexuality, and a curious unity between the unspoken assumptions of his public and private lives.
But what, it must now be asked, was a genteelly reared Catholic girl of the Roman bourgeoisie – presented with a sports car by her doting parents on her eighteenth birthday,126 soon to be engaged to Riccardo Federici, a lieutenant in the national air force eight years her senior – to make of her induction into the dictator’s life? Was she to be just another short-term sexual partner or another sub-wife? Or, as her ambitions expanded, could she oust Rachele as the wife of wives? What would her pious family, especially her ultra-Catholic mother, make of this relationship? Or was Claretta Petacci to be the female who would break the mould of Mussolini’s lust, his modern, modernist or radical Fascist ‘new woman’? What, in sum, would Benito Mussolini do to Claretta Petacci and what would she do to him, and how did that contact, which had begun with a passionate, girlish letter in 1926, expand into what, in ‘wromantic’ Italian representation, was the greatest, most tragic (and most Fascist) love affair of modern times? Indeed, was Claretta, as has been claimed, ‘the most famous lover in the entire history of Italy’?127
3
AND SO . . . PAUSE . . . TO BED
Predatory Dictator meets Catholic Girl
In 1929 a new novel took the Italian literary scene by storm. Although initially published at the author’s expense it rapidly sold out, demanding immediate reprintings. The book was entitled Gli indifferenti (eventually to be translated into English as The time of indifference).1 Its author called himself Alberto Moravia, although his true surname was Pincherle. He had been born in Rome in November 1907, his rich and distinguished upper-bourgeois family residing in a comfortable flat outside the Borghese gardens, positioned less than a kilometre from the Villa Torlonia. An uncle, Augusto De Marsanich, was a Fascist dignitary who after 1945 became the second leader of the neofascist MSI. Moravia’s cousins by contrast were the Rosselli brothers, Carlo and Nello, murdered in France in 1937 at the behest of Ciano in one of the regime’s most public and brutal crimes. Moravia’s mother came from Catholic nationalist stock in Dalmatia and his father from that world of assimilated Venetian Jews which incorporated the Sarfattis. Moravia was a sickly boy, diagnosed as suffering from a tubercular bone infection. He was often bedridden and so avoided public schooling at liceo or university. Still a teenager, he began writing Gli indifferenti while he was living for health reasons at Bressanone/Brixen in the Alto Adige/Süd Tirol, a town that Italy had annexed through its victory in the First World War.
After 1945 Moravia became a leading anti-Fascist, happy to be associated with that majority of intellectuals who fellow-travelled with the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI; Italian Communist Party). In 1947 he published Il conformista (filmed by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1969),2 a novel expressing the ideas of psychologist, Erich Fromm, that Fascists were in their hearts people with a ‘fear of freedom’ (and, by implication, recalcitrant to fulfilled sex),3 men (it was a male-driven ideology) afraid to understand or express themselves.4 The Moravia of this era became an international celebrity. Under the regime, by contrast, Moravia did attract some controversy, increasing after the racial laws were implemented; nonetheless he generally fitted himself into Fascist cultural requirements, without ever launching into the more fervent or opaque efforts to talk up a political religion. His focus was instead on the barrenness of the bourgeoisie and their hypocrisy and vacuity. Members of the class who by the late 1930s the regime itself was abusing as ‘slipper-wearing cowards’ were exposed under Moravia’s scalpel as bored and exploitative. Their sexual relations were loveless, fear-laden and patriarchal. Their jabber about family tenderness and commitment was false.
This visceral dishonesty was the theme of Gli indifferenti, amplified by the novel’s setting in that soft and corrupt Rome that Italians mistrusted, with characters who were anything but bearers of heroic romanità. It was hard to detect in Gli indifferenti a whiff of stalwart Fascism. The plot revolved around a widowed mother, Mariagrazia Ardengo, mutinously entering middle age (like Pallottelli and Ruspi), her daughter Carla (not Clara), approaching her twentieth birthday, her son, Michele (not Marcello), attending university. Mariagrazia had for fifteen years been the lover of Leo Merumeci, a rich entrepreneur (Leo was Mussolini’s star sign). As the book opened, Leo was tiring of Mariagrazia and aware (as she was, too) of her body’s growing flabbiness. He therefore turned his lascivious attention to Carla and, by the novel’s end, the young woman, under tormented pressure from her mother, agreed to bed him, all the more because Ardengo family finances were threadbare. Michele watched these bleak events with growing bitter realisation that lying and betrayal conquer all.
Here then may be evidence of a case where life imitated art. It might be suggested that the Petaccis in the 1930s played out in the real world what the ‘realist’ novelist, Moravia, had imagined a decade earlier as he surveyed from his sickbed, with youthful nervous insight, his bourgeois Roman world. Yet, as shall be seen over the next pages, ‘real reality’, what actually happened to the Petaccis, how they in fact comported themselves and how their lives fitted into Roman, bourgeois, Catholic and Fascist patterns of behaviour, offers a far richer canvas of human peccadilloes than Moravia’s literary evocation of them. As in Gli indifferenti, the fate of the Petaccis is replete with hypocrisy, vacuity, exploitation, ennui, sex and death, but, at the same time, it is paradoxically warmed by family compact, belief, action, sacrifice and even love, somehow defined.
* * *
The story began on 24 April 1932, a sunny day in Rome. That afternoon, the Petaccis, by now residing even more centrally and respectably at flat 6, 326 Corso Vittorio Emanuele, decided they deserved an outing. Mother Giuseppina, little sister Myriam (not yet nine), Claretta (who had just celebrated her twentieth birthday) and her fiancé, Lieutenant Riccardo Federici (who may have boasted noble antecedents),5 piled into their commodious, chauffeur-driven Lancia Astura limousine with its Vatican number plates.6 For propriety’s sake, Myriam was positioned as a sort of chaperone between Claretta and Riccardo;7 among good Catholics, bodily contact must not become incontinent (and Myriam was destined often to repeat the protective role while her sister dallied with a different partner). What a good idea it was to go for a spin down the new Fascist motorway that led to Ostia, the beach and the Tyrrhenian Sea!
A similar pleasurable thought occurred to the Duce. After all, for some years, he had grown accustomed to utilising the bathing hut at Castelporziano, so graciously made available to him by the Savoys, with its direct telephone connection to his office, its shower and a bed. On 24 April, having given his chauffeur, Ercole Boratto, the afternoon off, he decided to drive himself in his red Alfa Romeo 8C, oblivious to the fact that Boratto judged his master a poor driver, too easily distracted at the wheel.8
After all, few clouds seemed to shroud the world that Mussolini bestrode. True, the fascistic Nazi party of the rather odd German Führer, Adolf Hitler, was gearing up for elections in July, where its vote was destined to expand exponentially, and the Depression was beating down on the German and most other European economies. But Italy seemed to have escaped the worst of the crisis through what was judged in many places its leader’s genius. To reinforce his fame, over the last few weeks the Duce had granted a set of interviews to the Polish-born, Swiss-residing, German-Jewish journalist, Emil Ludwig. Their exchange went agreeably well, Ludwig being beguiled by what he described as Mussolini’s good humour and mastery of detail when presented with more than four hundred questions. ‘In conversation,’ Ludwig reported, ‘Mussolini is the most natural man in the world . . . I have no hesitation in describing him as a great statesman.’9 Perhaps there was a hint of future concern when disc
ussion had wandered onto some potentially treacherous issues, but the dictator, as yet no friend of Hitler, pronounced worthily that ‘national pride has no need of the delirium of race’. The only worry came when, with the interview all but over, he philosophised in words, often to be repeated, that sounded almost wistful: ‘fundamentally I have always been alone’.10
Only a few months before, on 21 December 1931, Mussolini had lost his brother Arnaldo, dead at the age of forty-six, the same as Mussolini’s mother. Claretta would remember to send a comforting note on the first anniversary.11 His father Alessandro had lasted until he was fifty-six. From now on, Mussolini’s private meditations often turned to mortality. Perhaps the wistfulness was enhanced further by the fact that Edda, his elder daughter and favourite child, had been married to Galeazzo Ciano in a high society wedding at the church up the road from the Villa Torlonia on 24 April 1930, exactly two years before he met Claretta. Mussolini missed Edda, all the more when she swiftly departed to Shanghai, where Ciano had been appointed Italian consul. Distressing rumours soon suggested that the marriage had its tares, that Edda was indulging in the regrettable habits of gambling and drinking Coca-Cola, and that Galeazzo may have been bedding a spritely married American called Wallis Simpson,12 while busying himself in promoting an arms trade between Italy and Chiang Kai-shek (Jiǎng Jièshí) and pro-Fascist elements in China.13 Contact between father and daughter slackened. For a while Mussolini tried to correspond regularly by telegram14 but intimacy had been lost; the two were drifting apart. Could Edda somehow be replaced by another?
Down the Via del Mare he drove; his masculine pride meant that Mussolini liked to go as fast as possible and his Alfa swept past the Petacci’s Lancia with a derisory toot. But Claretta recognised the driver and, all a flutter, urged the chauffeur to pursue Mussolini into Ostia, where the two vehicles drew to a halt. Claretta leaped out and, at least according to her sister’s much later memories, cried to her astonished fellow passengers: ‘I’m going to pay homage to him. I’ve been waiting to do so for such a long time. There are no other people around. Riccardo, you come too, and speak with the Duce.’15
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