* * *
With Federici fading into the background, Claretta thought that the magic of love had become real. But did Mussolini? Or did he view Petacci as just another female who had gone out of her way to be bedded? Did he even at a minimum share her artless effusions about their relationship? His record suggests that most likely he took the sex that was offered to him and scarcely shared his new partner’s romantic outpourings. Yet, even at the beginning of their affair, oddities can be found. As a lover, Claretta came into the Duce’s life along with her mother and the rest of her family. On 29 October 1936, for example, a letter from Giuseppina Persichetti to the Duce survives in which Claretta’s mother expressed her thanks to the dictator, ‘with the devoted and grateful heart of a mother’, for taking up her son Marcello’s latest cause.74 But this effusion was neither the sole nor the strangest connection existing between Mussolini and Signora Petacci.
Sources diverge whether the event took place at the Sala del Mappamondo of the Palazzo Venezia with the dictator erect in full dress uniform. But, according to Myriam’s memoirs, it was on 16 October 1936 that the Duce, formally asked Claretta’s mother: ‘Signora, may I love your daughter?’75 Giuseppina nodded her agreement, adding: ‘The idea that she will be near a man like you [voi] is very comforting to me.’76 Perhaps, long ago, Mussolini had made the same request to Bianca Ceccato’s mother, who had also known of her daughter’s affair. But Persichetti was an ostentatiously Catholic woman, a lay terziaria of the nuns of the Poor Clares.77 While at home she was said to spend much of her time reciting the rosary or praying in her room to Santa Rita (the patroness of impossible causes)78 or the Madonna of Pompeii (devotions which, as will be seen, she passed on to her elder daughter). Even if Claretta had separated from Federici (who, at his wedding ceremony, was claimed to have groaned that ‘marrying her [Claretta], I’m really marrying her mother’),79 Mussolini was still united in wedlock with Rachele, the mother of his five legitimate children. He and Claretta were doubly adulterers, damned by any reading of Catholic law.
And why too did Mussolini ask permission of Signora Petacci and not of Claretta’s father? And why did Giuseppina take it as natural for that to happen? There can be little doubt that, for all the exclusion of women from the political life of Fascist Italy, this mother ruled the family hearth. Equally, Francesco Saverio may have been troubled by his daughter’s affair with a man of his own age,80 although he scarcely refused the advantages that he and his family would gain from it. Perhaps it is proof of the cheap corruption of the Petacci family,81 a demonstration that they shared with Moravia’s fictional characters in Gli indifferenti. Or maybe the story is evidence of the manner in which very many bourgeois Italians managed throughout the dictatorship to be Catholics, Fascists and familists. Certainly, through to 1945 and after the war, the other Petaccis, father, mother, brother and sister, would remain ever present in the relationship between Claretta and Mussolini.
Even as their sex life began, Claretta kept the dictator informed about family matters. ‘Little Mammina’ had been so ill that, for a while, she could not be moved, but now she was feeling better, she related cheerily.82 ‘Papà’ was having trouble with the family landlord, who was driving them out of their flat in the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, causing trouble and expense and ensuring that his complaints got as far as ‘Sua Eccellenza Pacelli’ (later Pope Pius XII, 1939–1958), who had replaced Gasparri as papal secretary of state.83 Could Mussolini intervene to do something? she was presumably again suggesting.
Sometimes their conversations took a homely turn. So, following a speech that had attracted the usual ‘oceanic crowd’ to Piazza Venezia, Mussolini wondered out loud about the need that mothers and children had for a comfort stop. ‘One time there were hundreds of kids standing there for hour after hour and someone or other continued to talk, he never ended. Then I saw the kids shuffling from one foot to another and so I interrupted and said: “Tell me what you have to say, but now get them to break ranks and let the kids have a piss”.’ Next time he promised, too, with what a Prussian might read as unnecessary laxity, that he would make sure they were properly equipped, each with a bag containing a bread roll and prosciutto. Then they could eat and not get tired – words that gave Claretta the excuse to gush that, in his presence, no one ever tired.84
The New Year of 1937 solidified the relationship. By October Claretta moved on from what had been mainly succinct entries in her diary to record in rivers of prose every word that the two exchanged, whether by phone or when they were having sex in the beautifully frescoed and gilded Sala dello Zodiaco of the Palazzo Venezia. She gained access to the building from the Via degli Astalli, the service entrance. It stood around the back of the palace opposite the small balcony jutting out into the Piazza Venezia where Mussolini was accustomed to harangue applauding crowds. She was driven there by the family chauffeur, sometimes with her mother or father for company. Once inside, she would wait, often for some hours, for Mussolini to emerge from his office in the still more grandiose Sala del Mappamondo. The Sala dello Zodiaco was equipped with a divan bed and two armchairs, a gramophone on which (generally classical) music could be played, as well as a bar (although neither was a drinker). It possessed an annexe with a wobbly toilet, bidet and washbasin. There was no shower but Mussolini was old-fashioned enough to prefer to freshen up with eau de cologne85 and did not always shave every day. While alone, Claretta would sometimes smoke, an activity that the older Mussolini disapproved of, although he had only given up cigarettes in the early 1920s (he similarly and fruitlessly had once tried to persuade Edda to avoid the noxious weed).86 After sex, because of work demands or a speech needing to be delivered, Mussolini would sometimes depart abruptly, leaving Claretta in the darkened room.87
From February 1937 the Petacci car began its journey not from the nearby Corso Vittorio Emanuele but from the space outside the top-floor flat of Via Lazzaro Spallanzani 22. This street ran off the Via Nomentana; its haut bourgeois villas looked out directly onto the park of the Villa Torlonia. With the sort of historical resonance readily found in Rome, Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729–99) had been a priest and pioneer in the medical study of reproduction.88 With or without reflection on such history, Claretta joined Sarfatti, Ruspi and Pallottelli in living close to her lover; indeed she was the nearest of all. On 27 February, Claretta’s diary recorded that they had made love, ‘for the first time at my place. I shall never forget your emotion. You told me you were thrilled like a boy’ (and it cannot have been difficult for Mussolini afterwards to stroll back across the road to his legitimate family’s residence).89
Zita Ritossa, the partner, not the wife, of Marcello, wrote a bleak account in the 1950s of the Petacci family dwelling place. She and Marcello had met in Milan and, sometime in 1938, he had escorted her south to introduce her to his parents. ‘My mother is the one who rules the family; she is our home Duce,’ he informed her. My father is ‘meek and mild and does not take any decision without first referring it to his wife’. When Ritossa entered the Via Spallanzani apartment, she met a woman whom she described as ‘tall, large and dressed in black, with skin of an indefinable colour somewhere between grey and purple. She had a hooked nose and hooded eyes.’90 This formidable de facto mother-in-law rigorously cross-examined Zita about her family background, politics and religion, with her responses being greeted for a time with evident disapproval. The flat, Ritossa recalled, had been full of heavy black furniture and seemed to her like ‘a sumptuous family tomb, stuffed with enormous pots and vases and with gilded stucco everywhere’; in its taste, it clearly looked back to a Roman bourgeois past instead of expressing Fascist modernism. Eventually, however, Zita won Marcello’s mother over to tolerance of some kind, although she continued to know that ‘Mamma Giuseppina’ was ‘the great registrar of the life of her children’ and would erupt like a volcano should there be any hint of trouble for them. Claretta by contrast, she remembered, ‘practically lived in her bed’ and often did not even come down for
family meals.91
Maybe the elder Petacci daughter was tired out from her lovemaking, or by the other sporting activity that sometimes accompanied it. Mussolini, an executive with a generous measure of free time, spent quite a few of his winter days in 1936–7 at Terminillo, a ski resort a hundred kilometres east of Rome which, establishing itself as a major tourist venue, delighted in the Duce’s patronage. Claretta developed the habit of following him to the mountains, with thirteen-year-old Myriam in tow as a chaperone,92 presumably on Giuseppina’s command (Myriam was destined to grow up quickly). Although there could be problems – he might have his own youngest son, Romano, then nine, with him, or Claretta might prove an inept skier, fall and retire to bed, a place she always preferred to the ski slopes93 – they did find a few hours together for sex in late afternoons in his hotel room. On other occasions they were restricted to exchanging glances, which she always nervously hoped were meaningful.94
Yet an idyll it was not to be. Claretta and her Ben made passionate love, but they also began to fight over Mussolini’s other women and over nothing in particular. So, on 5 April, Claretta briefly recorded coitus but added that, afterwards: ‘I cried so much. You wanted to leave. You were strange and nervous. You said awful things to me, then peace. But I was terrified. I thought . . . [here she could not continue] and I suffered so much’.95 And Claretta was gradually realising that Romilda Ruspi retained her place in Mussolini’s schedule, which was also frequently broken by his trips, whether official or familial. At the opera, he might still smile more upon his old lover than his new. Claretta tried an ultimatum: ‘When you rang me, I told you to leave her. You [snapped back,] “No”.’96 Yet there were magic moments. On 8 July he took her to Castelporziano ‘for the first time, after I had dreamed about it for so long. A magnificent day, unforgettable flashes of light.’97
But there was a problem of a different kind. On 13 July Claretta’s diary read ‘Terrible. The world is falling on me. I am dying.’98 Mussolini, in a rage, had accused her of sexual disloyalty. He ignored her protestations of the next day that she had only sometimes met ‘an old friend of Marcello’s who, at my brother’s bidding, saved me many times from my husband’s violence’ and who she had recently asked to act as a go-between with Federici with a view to having their marriage annulled. ‘I really love you,’ she ran on, ‘I only live for you and from you. Since I was a child I have adored you and today and always you are my reason for living . . . I beg you on my knees with all the goodness that you have always lavished on me: don’t abandon me, don’t believe those who want to cut you off from me.’ But on 15 July, Claretta received a curt message that she could pick up her paintings from the Palazzo Venezia; Mussolini was giving them back to her to signal the end of their relationship.99
The man involved was Luciano Antonetti, born at Alexandria in 1899. He possessed a minor curriculum vitae in Fascism (his father was podestà – Fascist mayor – of a paese in the province of L’Aquila). By the 1930s Antonetti was the owner of a failing small building company (one of Giuseppina’s brothers, Guglielmo, was a more successful developer in Rome whose fortune grew after 1945).100 Antonetti was also ill with TB and, in fact, died in June 1938. Already, the year before, the secret police were watching him and reporting to the Duce about his meetings with Claretta. On 15 July they advised that the Petacci family thought that Mussolini would get over his current determination to break with Claretta.101 Eventually he did. But the resolution of the conflict saw a remarkably major role played by Claretta’s mother, in this instance as indeed in many others il madro102 (best, if inadequately, translated as ‘The Boss’ or ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’), the real head of the Petacci family.
In her own jottings, Claretta traced Mussolini’s abrupt mood swings over the ten days between 15 July and his departure for a brief family holiday at Riccione. She did mention that, on the 17th and the 20th, her mother had gone with her to the Palazzo Venezia and, on the 18th, Mussolini had come to the Via Spallanzani.103 But police reports offer more detail about a Catholic mother’s supervision of a de facto sexual alliance. It was Mussolini who had taken the initiative to bring Giuseppina to his office on 16 July, where, insisting on speaking to her alone, he abruptly demanded: ‘Is your daughter pure?’ Mother assured him that she was. But Mussolini urged: ‘Keep her under surveillance, monitor her constantly. I’m trusting you with her,’104 almost as though he was translating to his private life a pattern of secret policing, which in the public world of Fascism was in the able hands of Arturo Bocchini, the head of the regime’s secret police, whom the Duce saw most mornings.105 One of the listed informants of the Fascist police state was none other than Edoardo Petacci, born in Constantinople in September 1895, the much younger brother of Francesco Saverio; it is not known, however, if his spying extended to his brother’s family.106
However, when Giuseppina got back to the Via Spallanzani, where she summoned all the saints to the family’s cause, Claretta was recalcitrant, bawling that she could not break with Antonetti when he was so ill. She also turned on her mother and blamed her for introducing her to Antonetti and encouraging her to see him alone and in public. Horrified, Giuseppina, perhaps seeing herself dragged off to prison, now demanded that the police put a tail on Mussolini’s apparent rival. The next morning Giuseppina and Claretta were back at the Palazzo Venezia, for a confabulation with the Duce that lasted for two long hours from 11 a.m. In that time, Claretta did not speak. But her mother again emphasised the practical justifications that had inspired her daughter’s meetings with this other man and insisted that their tie was no more than ‘a simple friendship’. At that phrase, Mussolini burst out, in the Julius Caesar-style third person, very much on his high horse: ‘Whoever has the privilege of being close to Mussolini cannot have either boy friends or girl friends’ and shouted that he never wanted to see Claretta again.
That statement sent both Claretta and Giuseppina into floods of tears, with their violent passion persuading Mussolini to relent. But, when they got back to their flat, this time Francesco Saverio Petacci decided to get in on the action, entreating Claretta never to see Antonetti again and insisting that, if she did, they would have her put into a lunatic asylum. In his anger he threatened to slap her across the face or, as he phrased it, ‘I shall slaughter you like an ox.’ After such a pinnacle of hysteria, it was nonetheless agreed that Claretta could say goodbye to Antonetti at her dressmaker’s. But that was to be it.107 And it was, as perhaps Giuseppina told Mussolini in their next meeting on the 20th (for which no police report exists).
The crisis, then, had been surmounted. Soon Claretta was back to writing rhapsodic accounts of their sex life (and more jarring ones of their frequent squabbles). On 3 August, she noted they had had sex three times; what a man ‘my great big love’ is, she reflected contentedly. She was equally delighted to be taken to the seaside and sometimes they again made love back at her family house.108 Although still very much an odd couple, they had confirmed their relationship. Somehow surviving Mussolini’s deep egoism and his other sexual ties, the ‘Ben and Clara’ partnership would last till death.
4
SEX, LOVE AND JEALOUSY
Politics and the family
Petacci’s first full diary entry featured her actions on 15 October 1937, an autumn day when it was still warm and sunny in Rome. The Duce was recently back from his trumpeted visit to Germany of 27–30 September, when, according to regime propaganda, the ‘Axis’ that tied the two countries in alliance had been mightily reinforced. To Claretta, Mussolini reflected, ‘although the Germans are difficult to keep as friends, they are a fearful enemy’ (there were in all ‘one hundred million’ of them) and so it was just as well that he had conquered them utterly, having stayed ‘smiling and affable’ throughout his trip.1 True, Dino Grandi, the sometime Fascist ras (local boss in Bologna) and minister of foreign affairs who had been despatched in 1932 as ambassador in London, was sensing more negative ramifications, since British public opinion now vie
wed Italy as ‘potential enemy number 1’.2 But the new foreign minister, Ciano, was confident that he could win advantageous appeasement from Neville Chamberlain’s government and steer his nation to increased international power.3
In Spain the civil war ground on, but the humiliating Italian defeat at Guadalajara in March had not led to further losses and, on 21 October, Francoist forces wiped out the last Republican resistance on the Asturias front, a region once a working-class redoubt. Within Italy, there were few hints of lingering anti-Fascist sentiment, with PNF secretary Achille Starace assiduously driving newly totalitarian (or populist) policies along a line touted as ‘going to the people’. In June, local fascists in France, sponsored by Rome, had murdered Carlo and Nello Rosselli, the most active leaders of émigré opposition to the Fascist regime. When a careful businessman warned the dictator against stretching national resources too far in his adventures at home and abroad, Mussolini grandly swept his doubts aside: ‘You’re wrong. Italy is rich and money there is. You just have to know from where to extract it. Anyway an economic issue has never arrested the march of history.’4 In October 1937 there was every reason to believe that the Italian dictatorship, entrenched into the souls of the Italian people, was, as its propaganda stentoriously proclaimed, in irresistible rise.
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