Before she left, however, their conversation went down another track. ‘Do you know what I shall do?’ she asked. ‘I’ll be an artist.’ ‘Great,’ the ageing dictator replied. ‘What sort?’ ‘Cinema,’ Claretta replied. ‘I’ll elevate the character of Italian cinema.’ Mussolini reacted positively to this gambit. ‘That’s a good idea. You’re by no means stupid and you have all that’s needed to do it. You’re beautiful. You’ve got a slim, elegant figure. You speak clearly and well. Yes, it’s a great idea.’ But Claretta had not finished with her love life and its complexities. If she worked in such a profession, with its disreputable image in the most orthodox circles, maybe Riccardo could not continue as an officer? And what about the other man who had talked to her of his passion? Mussolini, who may have been getting decidedly hungry, was left to protest that she was always raising issues that were ‘tangled and difficult to resolve’. His real advice, repeated twice, was that she marry Federici and opt for a peaceful future; ‘It is better,’ he counselled sagely, ‘not to leave the old road for the new . . . then you can see. Addio,’ he finally managed to say.40
* * *
The marriage with Federici went ahead, being solemnised on 27 June 1934, a fortnight after the first confabulation between Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler at Venice, by no means yet a meeting of Fascist minds.41 Within days, the Nazis, to Italian dismay, perpetrated the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in Germany, murdering the most obvious of their opponents, whether in the Nazi party or not. On 25 July it was the turn of the Austrian chancellor Dollfuss to be killed; his wife and children were staying with the Mussolinis at the Riccione beach house.42
For upwardly mobile, snobbish Roman bourgeoisie like the Petacci family, however, such inauspicious horrors were merely noises off. Claretta and her Riccardo’s wedding was held at San Marco, an elegant little church forming part of the Palazzo Venezia complex and said to date back to 336 CE (although it has been much restored since then). Claretta wore the ermine-fringed wedding gown that had once been her mother’s. The officiating priest was the elderly Cardinal Pietro Gasparri (born 1852, he would die in November 1934); Francesco Saverio Petacci was his personal physician.43 Gasparri had filled the high office of papal secretary of state, in charge of Vatican diplomatic dealing, from a wartime appointment under Benedict XV to 1930. He had thus performed a major role in the negotiation of the Lateran Pacts of 11 February 1929, the arrangement that formalised cohabitation between church and state in Fascist Italy. A more prestigious figure was hard to imagine, and the Petaccis were giving major public proof that Francesco Saverio was a person who counted within the Vatican. On 25 June, Pope Pius XI himself received the couple and gave them his blessing.44
Nor was the honeymoon a downmarket event. It began at the Hotel Danieli in Venice and proceeded into a fortnight’s cruise around the eastern Mediterranean, with stops at Istanbul (where Francesco Saverio had been born), Jerusalem (where the couple’s Christian devotion could prosper), Athens and Alexandria (where ancient civilisations could be admired).45 By the second half of July the Federicis made landfall at Naples and, following a stop in Rome, moved to Orbetello and the air base where Riccardo was stationed. According to Myriam’s memoirs, however, the marriage, despite its Catholic profile and socially ambitious trappings, had already slipped into crisis. The wedding night had gone badly. Federici had been bored to death on the cruise. And, no sooner were the couple back in Rome, than he was talking about a separation.46 Can Riccardo Federici have immediately detected that a third person was involved in the couple’s relationship?
It may be that hindsight made Myriam exaggerate the swiftness of the marital collapse. But, by spring 1935, Claretta’s correspondence with Mussolini had revived, mixing an ever-heightening ecstatic worship and a practical devotion to family affairs. Now she philosophised about how, still a child at the time of the Gibson attack, she had dreamed of ‘saving your life, with my only reward from you [voi] a kiss on my dying lips. To die for you and with you, a sublime concept of life, where light and dark merge, where one looks into the mystery with a smile of happiness achieved (and I accompany you on the sad journey with sweet caresses). You are like a powerful and beautiful god, whose light of love dazzles but does not burn, whose rays shine out over yourself but not just for yourself.’
Then came a sudden switch in her rhapsodic prose. She had a brother to defend. Marcello’s boyhood heroism, she feared, had not been documented, yet was true, whether in Rome or Belgium, where by a miracle he had survived his savage anti-Fascist enemies. He had published and spoken publicly across a wide field, prepared his university thesis, and he and his father had just put together an important paper demonstrating that aluminium, so useful in the kitchen, did not cause cancer. Could the Duce see that he received proper and swift recognition?
But then another twist, and Claretta returning to her themes of infinite and undying love and her profound sadness at being locked far away in the Maremma – so boring compared with vivacious Rome – and there separated from Mussolini, and mostly frustrated when she did show up in Rome but failed for one reason or another to see him. Could he now organise the despatch of Federici to the Italian colonies in Africa Orientale Italiana (where the attack on Ethiopia that occurred on 3 October was being prepared)? That posting might allow him to rehabilitate himself, whether among his fellow officers or in the reputation for violence within his marriage, as yet hinted at rather than fully described by Claretta, and ‘finally give me a bit of peace’. ‘I feel so little, such a nullity compared with your grandeur, and it is only your patient goodness that gives me the courage to speak to you and to tell you that I love you,’ she signed off beseechingly.47
The third anniversary of their first meeting, 24 April 1935, was a natural prompt to write again. But, on this occasion, family concern predominated. Her father’s law case, being pursued against the Suore di Carità Figlie di Nostra Signora al Monte Calvario, was going badly. The nuns were the owners of the clinic, the Villa del Sole at Via Saffi 66, where F.S. Petacci was a consultant from 1914 to 1933.48 They had parted in conflict and now it seemed that the case was to be hurried to a conclusion that would cost the Petaccis both financially and morally. Could Mussolini find a way to intervene? She sent him a folder with the details although, she concluded with studied innocence, ‘I’m not really capable of talking to you about business matters.’49
In November came the good news that Federici had indeed been posted to the African war. But before he went – at least by Claretta’s account, which also stressed that she was ill in bed with what she averred was ‘meningitis’ – he had slapped her, ‘so violently . . . that I fell to the ground. I can’t tell you my parents’ reaction,’ she ran on. ‘This morning Papà wanted to go to the prosecutor’s office, but I could not allow him to attract such humiliation and scandal. You [Voi] understand that a radical solution is needed. Tell me, I beg you, that you understand me. Make him leave within 24 hours for Africa and a destination where he will suffer,’ she asked no longer such a demure innocent, ‘where he will pay for the evil he has done me and the suffering inflicted on my parents. I beg you, if you care for me at all, don’t abandon me. You are the only possible salvation.’50 According to Myriam, Federici’s savagery within his marriage had driven Claretta to stay in bed in convalescence for three months after initial treatment at Santo Spirito hospital in Rome.51
Claretta may have been unhappy in her marriage but the New Year brought unexampled triumph to the Duce, when, on 5 May 1936, Italian troops marched into Addis Ababa and proclaimed victory. From his balcony facing the Piazza Venezia, in successive speeches on 5 and 9 May, Mussolini exulted over ‘our lightning victory’, a triumph to be recorded as ‘an uncancellable date for the revolution of the Blackshirts and for the Italian people who have resisted [their opponents] and not bowed to the League of Nations’ and its attempted institution of punitive sanctions. Now and forever, Italy possessed an empire, the Duce boasted, ‘a Fascist empire, an empire
of peace, an empire of civilisation and humanity’, an empire ‘returned to the fateful [seven] hills of Rome’.52 Now the diminutive Victor Emmanuel III could rejoice in the title of ‘King and Emperor’ and was also saluted by public demonstrations outside his Quirinal Palace. Now Mussolini had attained the apogee of his fame and power. Maybe he really was the modern equivalent of the Sun God, his propagandists urged.
Although the exact dating of the affair is uncertain, it was at this time of victory or its approach that Mussolini added another woman to his string of partners. In early April 1936, he granted an interview to a blonde French journalist who gave her name as Magda Fontanges and who had worked for Liberté in Paris and, during the Ethiopian war, been stationed in Rome by Le Matin. She appeared nattily dressed, wearing antelope-skin shoes and a silver fox fur, but her teeth were much discoloured by chain-smoking. She had pursued a career as an actor and would become a spy. Allegedly she had taken earlier lovers from the French and Italian elite; she certainly had been divorced some years earlier.53 Her real name was Madeleine Coraboeuf (born 1905): she was destined to be promoted by Mussolini’s memory to ‘Countess De Fontanges’.54
He had other details to tell Claretta on a later occasion. ‘She was one of those awful corrupt women who put an alternative before you,’ he recalled on 13 March 1938, the day following the Anschluss in the wider world, the German annexation of Austria, which lost Italy all its strategic gains won in the First World War against Germandom. ‘You could either take her or not take her,’ he explained. If the latter, there was the danger that she would write you up as ‘an invert or as impotent . . . So I took her twice.’55 He continued:
And the shameful woman went off to tell all to a paper. Exactly how it had all happened. She said that it had been so rapid that in my haste at pulling down her panties, they ripped with a strange sound. [Can Paris fashions not have been so sturdily sewn as their Italian equivalents?] And then it was so quick that she had not noticed when I had finished. She told everything, exactly everything. Not even a whore [Claretta still demurely wrote down ‘p . . .’ for puttana] would have had the courage and the lack of shame.
Mussolini only stopped his flow of details because Claretta went pale at his narration.56 The by no means reliable Indro Montanelli claimed to have heard Fontanges’s side of the story, where her main recollections were of the torn undies and the speed of delivery. Not a great lover, she reckoned: ‘He is just like a Romagnol cock’;57 rapid and unfeeling.
Mussolini asserted ingenuously on another occasion that the whole business had put him off foreign women for ever.58 For there was a sequel. After the escapade, Fontanges was encouraged to leave Italy and not return. Her employers sacked her, perhaps troubled by her impropriety. She blamed the French ambassador, Charles de Chambrun, and on 17 March 1937 at the Gare du Nord in Paris shot him in the stomach, shouting a derisive Merci.59 The bullet did not kill him, however, and at the subsequent trial her lawyer obtained for her a mere year in prison and a small fine. She emerged unrepentant and spent some years trying to get back to Italy while also proclaiming her faith in Fascism. Eventually she went over to the Germans, agreeing to spy for the Abwehr, activities which earned her a sentence of fifteen years’ hard labour from the postwar French republic. She was released in 1952, again incarcerated in 1954–5, and, after further travails with drugs and mental instability, committed suicide in October 1960.60
* * *
The wild and embarrassing sexual bout with Fontanges over, might Mussolini now see Claretta as a woman and not a child? The Duce’s sister, Edvige, certainly remembered that she first heard of Signorina Petacci at much the same time as gossip was circulating about Fontanges.61 During the months of colonial war, Claretta had continued her artless siege of her Duce. On 6 January 1936 she had sent him one of her pretty paintings, on the 28th she wrote about how she longed to leap into his arms like a happy child, on 16 February she hoped that nothing was troubling him. ‘To you [Voi] perhaps it does not matter, but I suffer every little thing with you and I glory with you in every little greatness.’62 To be sure there were still times when her adoration seemed unrequited. Mussolini might remember ancient empire and victory in Africa but he forgot her birthday on 28 February and Petacci did not fail to remind him of his failure. This time she sent a sketch of the seaside, ‘your sea’ as she defined it, and waxed lyrical about the recent Italian victory at Amba Alagi. How could she complain about the birthday, she wrote coyly? ‘I am such a silly little girl. How can you remember such tiny insignificant things in your vast, marvellous work, where every precious instant is directed at creating power and glory’?63
Perhaps it was victory that made the change. Some time in the spring or early summer of 1936, Ben and Clara did finally become lovers in the physical sense. On 2 June (the anniversary of Garibaldi’s death in 1882, also destined to be the date in 1946 that Italians voted out the monarchy, the foundation day of the republic), she used tu for the first time in their correspondence. In Claretta’s mind, sex with a great man was indeed great. ‘My great big love, how I adore you! You were so beautiful this evening. From your masculine face sparks of force seemed to light us up. You were as aggressive as a lion, violent and masterful . . . I am overwhelmed with emotion. I see you as a giant of beauty and power. You are the man who triumphs over other men and over life. When I was thirteen, ignorant of everything, I had already offered you my whole life. Now I breathe your breath, I live sublime moments of dreaming near you and my whole life is yours. I love you,’ she concluded in transport but then added in more homely sentiment, ‘I hope that your little ones get better soon and you smile always.’64 Five days later, she returned to her elation, reusing the intimate form Tu but giving it a capital letter to signify his dominance: ‘I don’t want to bore you, and you, every so often, like the sun shining between the leaves, can shine on me a ray of light and joy . . . I’d like to kiss your strong hands, I want to be between your feet like a little unhappy cat and earn a caress now and again.’65
In June 1936 Mussolini might have been having sex with an adoring woman, much younger and prettier than his usual bed companions. But, in another sector of his private life, the euphoria of Addis Ababa had proved hubristic. Claretta’s reference to his ‘troubled little ones’ had been vague. The actual problem was Mussolini’s youngest child, Anna Maria, then aged six, who had been stricken with the incurable disease of poliomyelitis. By 10 June she was on the edge of death. Rachele looked unavailingly to quack medicines for solution. But Mussolini, in the crisis an anxious and paternal father, watched over Anna Maria through the nights and turned up at his office in the mornings, unshaven, red-eyed and exhausted. It was only in the next month that it became clear that Anna Maria would pull through. But she bore the burden of polio until her death.66 Despite or because of this crisis within his legitimate family, on 11 June Mussolini found time to appoint his son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano, who was just thirty-three, as the youngest foreign minister in Europe: Edda’s husband was soon fecklessly piloting Italy into what proved its costly and damaging intervention on Franco’s insurgent side in the Spanish Civil War.
Claretta also had matters to confront, notably what was to happen to Federici now the third person in their marriage had become sexually active. In a letter of 31 May to the Duce she had bewailed her husband’s reappearance from campaigning in Africa (where he had joined Mussolini’s sons, Vittorio and Bruno, and son-in-law Ciano on care-free, murderous bombing raids against the all but defenceless Ethiopians). ‘My God, what anguish,’ she confessed. ‘I am desperate. I feel a weight on my heart like an enormous stone. You [Voi] know the torture of my life with him and he hasn’t changed. He’s still got that terrible woman [there must have been a fourth in the marriage]. He’s still the same.’ Could he do something? she asked plaintively. Certainly, ‘I shall do whatever you wish. Mamma is sick over the bad things he does to me.’67 ‘I don’t know whether I detest or despise him the more,’ she added a few days later, before
insisting melodramatically again ‘if they took me away from you, I’d have no reason to go on living’.68
A solution was arriving. On 28 July Claretta and Riccardo formally separated. To be sure, Federici did not altogether disappear from his wife’s life, occasioning a long and hysterical letter on 16 October which either implied that he had returned to rape her in marriage (she wrote ambiguously that his ‘beastly carnal instinct’ had demanded ‘his complete legal freedom’) or was spreading tales of her promiscuity, charges that had annoyed the godlike Duce and upset her ‘poor, dear mother’. ‘Don’t abandon me, don’t let malice crush me again, don’t refuse me a helping hand. I beg you on my knees for mercy from my love,’ she adjured Mussolini.69
Mercifully, if quite a bit later, in autumn 1939 Federici was despatched to Tokyo as Italian air attaché. Since February 1938 Mussolini had promised Claretta that Japan was to be her husband’s remote destination.70 The mills of military and Fascist bureaucracy in this regard, however, ground slowly. Federici himself had in fact petitioned Mussolini for a transfer overseas in 1937, claiming that his wife’s tie with the dictator interfered with his duty as an officer (and gentleman).71 The solution of promotion, better pay and a distant appointment was one that Mussolini had already adopted for the husband of Romilda Ruspi. Myriam Petacci, not reckoning much with the Tripartite Pact that by then bound Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan together, deemed the Tokyo posting the equivalent of relegation to ‘the antipodes’.72 Federici would stay in Japan until 8 September 1943, when he opted to support Badoglio and King Victor Emmanuel III rather than the RSI. He survived his subsequent harsh Japanese internment, returning to Italy only after 1945. Some years later, he married again and had a distinguished career as the commandant of Ciampino airport in Rome and eventually, having reached the rank of air general, worked as a representative of the national air force with NATO. He died in October 1972.73
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