Claretta
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Another contemporary, less friendly to the regime, castigated ‘the “Petacci group” of racketeers’, who, in exploiting the dictator’s senile passion for Claretta, had organised in Italy and in the Iberian peninsula ‘a network of dubious but highly profitable commercial enterprises. He [Marcello] was despised yet feared even in the most Fascist circles’.108 A third remembered how irascible Marcello was in his dealings with officialdom, always ready to decry their failure to applaud his brilliant understanding of politics and opportunity.109 According to Zita Ritossa, Marcello publicly claimed that, ‘with a bit of money, I can do everything’, and she added that, before July 1943, he had compiled for Mussolini a detailed list of the ‘traitors’ who were undermining the regime. To derail their sinister plots, he proclaimed, a band of young men, including himself, stood alert and ready to fight for Fascism.110
Given Marcello’s lack of diplomacy in his dealings with the established elite, it is no surprise to find Mussolini’s secretariat collecting negative stories about Marcello well before the outbreak of war. In May 1938, for example, to the scandal of sticklers for bureaucratic propriety, he had written a letter suggesting names for the committee established to judge his application for a university post. In doing so, he was, he explained in another letter, ‘following the Chief’s wishes’. Lest any mistakes be made in that regard, appointment to his selection committee some months later came with evidently ironical bureaucratic advice of the Duce’s ‘benevolence’ towards him and hope in his success.111 His promotion to captain in the navy was similarly assisted by recommendations from on high.112
Files also grew on Marcello’s tendency to absent himself from naval duty and involve himself in such escapades as an incident on the Via delle Terme di Diocleziano in central Rome, where, during a public stoush, his dog bit a journalist. The fracas was reported in Il Messaggero but without naming names.113 Only ten days after this case, Marcello weighed into a brawl with five locals in the centre of the tourist resort of Abbazia (Opatija) in Istria. When the police intervened, they alleged Petacci was drunk, although Zita Ritossa, who was with him and had courageously come to his physical assistance, denied this. A fortnight later another rumpus broke out. On this occasion, Admiral Ildebrando Goiran, in charge of the base at La Spezia where Marcello was meant to be serving, judged him blameless, but added that he could not ignore earlier advice that Marcello’s actions at Abbazia demanded ‘the severest reproof’ and a review of his officer status.114
Following Petacci’s transfer to Venice, his lifestyle did not become any calmer. Soon he was involved in a loud public quarrel with Countess Donatella Parisi, from whom he had rented a house, a dispute which saw the duke of Genoa, long the most prominent royal in Venice, intervening against Petacci.115 The purchase of the expensive Villa Schildhof, with its ample grounds, added to Marcello’s notoriety, supplying further evidence of the Petacci family’s desire to insert themselves into the highest circles of society, whether Italian or wider European. Its actual purchase price, which included the villa’s furnishings, was 1.625 million lire. Scandal shortly after the war suggested that the deal with the Hungarian owners had lacked transparency and, as early as 9 May 1945, Counts Pálffy and Erdödy managed to have the sale declared null and void, with no indemnity being conceded to the surviving Petaccis.116 An appeal from Myriam and her parents, which reached the supreme court, the Cassazione, in October 1949, failed, as did a further legal recourse by Zita Ritossa in 1953–4. At the end of the decade the place was sold to a German family.117 Readers will have to decide for themselves whether the (modernised) villa’s current address, Naifweg 3, Obermais, is appropriate.118
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Despite the official austerity of wartime, Marcello’s effrontery in 1942–3 had known few bounds. In February 1943 he felt able to send the Duce a memorandum impetuously sketching a full scale reworking of national war aims and military strategy. Anglo-American forces, Marcello began by stating, outweighed Italy in North Africa by ten to one. Something had to be done. Spain could be the first target. A secret embassy should proceed there to ensure the Franco regime launched an attack from its sector of Morocco. The best delegates would be people who had good contacts in the Spanish army and clergy, as well as with the papal nuncio and in the Vatican. A careful reader might have been able to come up with a worthy candidate.
But that was not the end of Petacci’s imaginings, fantastical in their span but also traditional in their Machiavellian basis in Realpolitik (rather than in any Nazi-fascist race theory). Marcello was nothing if not global in his scheming. The South American states could be brought into the present conflict. Turkey could be persuaded to invade the USSR and China could do the same. Chiang Kai-shek, Marcello wrote, was a convinced admirer of Mussolini and Japan could divert its warring from China to the rich oil fields of the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) and the vast empty lands of Australia. It could be possible to win Stalin to Italy’s side, for example by offering him India to rule. Marcello had a good friend who could be the special agent in that regard. Britain, too, might be converted to an agreement reviving its rule over Canada and the USA. Samuel Hoare, the British ambassador in Madrid (and an ex-British agent in First World War Italy and financier of Il Popolo d’Italia),119 was a prospective friend of such amendment. Only the USA was likely to be really tough over any division of the world under Italian guidance, since the Americans had everything to gain and nothing to lose in the present war. Germany and Italy, Petacci suggested without going into too many details, could split Africa and the Middle East. If some of these contrivances failed, it was always possible to raise the Arabs against the Jews, arm the Indians against the British and persuade the Berbers to massacre their colonial masters in French North Africa.120 No evidence of a dictatorial response to such a memorandum has survived.
A matter causing wider immediate scandal was Marcello Petacci’s social, political and financial visibility, and especially his dabbling in the gold trade. Among Marcello’s contacts was Santorre Vezzari, a long-serving secret agent of OVRA. Having been first employed in Switzerland in 1924, Vezzari worked as a spy in Madrid from 1931 under the newly installed Spanish Republic, where he devoted himself to developing a network of friends. He also displayed skills in covert currency-dealing across the border with France. His career did take a dip in early 1941 when he was arrested but, by November of that year, he was installed back in Franco’s Madrid as the attaché dealing with trade and exchange. Marcello, meanwhile, pressed him forward as the next Italian ambassador there.121
The Petaccis also developed excellent relations with Admiral Arturo Riccardi, the elderly under-secretary for the navy 1941–3 (he had been born 1878), having assisted the admiral’s son, Roberto, gain entry to a diplomatic career in 1939, after a two-year campaign featuring, his father wrote, ‘some disillusion and anxiety’. Roberto Riccardi remained in service after 1945, becoming an ambassador (to Luxembourg) in 1971. Admiral Riccardi was in compensation a useful support to Marcello’s officer status in the navy, and the Petaccis asked for his intervention in their favour when Marcello’s affairs became complicated.122
By contrast, the minister for trade and exchange, Raffaello Riccardi, an old squadrist who does not seem to have been related to the admiral, led the attack, complaining in November 1941 to Ciano that Marcello was a ‘crooked speculator’ and, the next year, expressing his disgust at Vezzari’s appointment to Spain.123 A few months later the minister blamed Marcello and his clique for the sudden sacking of the director of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, Arturo Osio, after the banker had been rude enough publicly to label Marcello Lorenzino dei medici (‘the doctors’ little Lorenzo’).124 By May 1942 Riccardi had compiled a ten-page document setting out Marcello’s dubious financial ventures through a company he had established called the Compagnia italiana scambi estero ed Europa (the ‘Italian exchange company with Europe and abroad’). Myriam in her memoirs damned this Riccardi for behaving like a ‘rabid dog’ over the matter.125
In June 1942 Riccardi took the story to Mussolini who, Riccardi told Ciano, was indignant at Marcello’s behaviour. The dictator promised to warn Claretta’s brother off such schemes in future and, indeed, from ‘trafficking’ of any kind.127 The gold meanwhile, on Ciano’s initiative,128 was taken into the custody of Carmine Senise, the chief of police, where it remained, still the object of rumour and scandal, in July 1943. In his postwar memoirs, Senise provides a sardonic account of having to deal with the speculations of ‘the brother of that sister, do you get me?’ (as he phrased it to an underling).129 Ciano led the anti-Marcello faction, proof that the dictator’s relationship with Claretta was causing increased worry to his legitimate family, among whom, for example, his capable sister, Edvige, gossiped to Ciano about ‘the shady business dealings of the Petacci clan’, which, she said, had become a ‘national problem’.130 Edda Ciano bearded her father over the matter, only to receive characteristic intimation that Marcello’s real fault was his foolish openness in his business dealings.131
Marcello’s extravagances prompted growing dismay well beyond the Mussolini family. Among the regime elite, Giuseppe Bottai, who had so long tended his own crush on Mussolini, bewailed the fact that Claretta was an inferior imitation of Madame de Pompadour. Nor was it only leading Fascists who viewed the Petaccis as demeaning the Duce. In March 1943 Bottai was irritated enough to record a joke circulating in aristocratic circles which had Claretta finding Mussolini in his bath examining his genitals. ‘Why are you doing that?’ she asked. Her lover’s reply: ‘Because it is the only prick still attached to me.’132 Among people in the know, especially in Rome, Mussolini’s sexual obsession with Claretta (rebuked by Ciano already in July 1940)133 was an ever-greater factor in the decay of the dictator’s image and in public rejection of the notion that Fascism should any longer frame their identities.
Amid the undergrowth of party rivalry and plotting, Marcello and his sister had relied (and would soon rely again) on the support of Guido Buffarini Guidi, since 1933 the under-secretary for the interior and a rising figure in the regime’s hierarchy, once a client of Ciano but now scenting a higher position.134 Perhaps Mussolini was seeking an escape from such dirty warring when, in February, his ministerial reshuffle dismissed Ciano, Raffaello Riccardi and Buffarini Guidi, the last not even saved when Claretta publicly burst into tears at the news.135
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Between 1941 and 1943 these eddies of Petacci family life and ambition complicated Claretta’s relationship with Mussolini at least as much as had the Duce’s manly refusal or emotional inability to cast off Ruspi and Pallottelli. The first year had contained one major step, when, in March 1941, ‘Clara Persichetti’ as she called herself tellingly, travelled to Budapest in the company of the family lawyer, Gino Sotis, to petition for divorce. Perhaps assisted by the fact that Marcello’s business arrangements embraced Hungary (he was seeking involvement in oil production in Transylvania),136 the decree was granted on 29 December 1941, having also been approved by Riccardo Federici from Tokyo.137 From then on, somewhere in Claretta’s dreams (and very likely those of her mother) lay the hope of a second marriage for both her and the Duce and thereby a victory of the Petacci family in the war that they now openly contested with all the Mussolinis. In February 1942 Claretta turned thirty; the photographic record shows her to have developed a mature figure, often partly hidden beneath flowing ankle-length gowns. In quite a few ways she may have remained infatuated with the Duce, but Claretta Petacci was no longer an ingenuous teenager.
In her diary she had begun the year by wishing sentimentally that the sun would rise again on her lover’s fortunes, so that ‘a smile can return to [his] handsome face today veiled in shadow’.138 Such happy expectations proved barren, however. In their first meeting of the year, Mussolini – who, Claretta did not fail to record, had already seen Ruspi from 8.30 to 9 a.m. that morning – rambled on about the Four-Power Pact that had earned some diplomatic praise back in 1933, and which in regime propaganda was dubbed the Patto Mussolini (‘Mussolini Pact’). Its provisions, the Duce pronounced with his usual cynicism towards an ideologically driven Axis, had arrayed Britain, France, Italy and the United States (his memory was deficient in this last regard) in a system that could have kept German dynamism under control.139 Five days later, by contrast, he swung around to deem the current conflict a ‘war of religion’ and ideology, while whingeing about a flu that was afflicting him and, during a visit to the Villa Camilluccia, seeking a proper prescription from Francesco Saverio. Mussolini was also disgusted by what he heard of weak-kneed Italian military performance in Dalmatia and by the inability of the regime’s authorities to repress the black market at home.140
It is almost a surprise to find Mussolini dropping in on the Petacci family on Sunday, 10 May, before he was due to leave for a tour of inspection in Sardinia, in order to have sex twice, on the second occasion, in Claretta’s judgement, in a pleasingly ‘frenzied fashion’. Her own sensual joy did not last, however, and she was soon in tears from nameless fears about what might happen to him on his journey (he did return, but with another bad cold).141 By the end of the month she was telling him dolefully that she was just another of his concubines and whores, while urging him desperately to buck up and ‘rediscover his [real] self’.142
During these months Claretta did occasionally venture away from Rome, for example spending time in September 1942 with Myriam in Venice and Arenzano (where Boggiano met them), to the Duce’s jealous irritation. When she travelled by train to Milan, he almost sounded like Giuseppina in his spartan view of family life, as he pressed Marcello into joining the trip as a chaperone.143 As far as the wider world was concerned, the Duce’s mood darkened further. On 30 November he told Claretta in lachrymose phrasing: ‘Nothing matters to me anymore; I am deluded and tired. Everything is the reverse of what I awaited and hoped for . . . Nothing and nobody interests me; not even you.’ How much better it would have been, he concluded, if he, and not Bruno, had died in 1941!144 To be sure, two days later, after he spoke to applause in the Fascist parliamentary chamber – his tone, he congratulated himself, had been ‘symphonic, Beethovian’ – there were moments of optimism (and swift intercourse).145 But on 4 December he revived familiar complaints about how young Claretta was compared with him, how certain she was to betray him, and how dissatisfied he was with Edda’s conduct and attitude. They did manage sex but not until he had taken some ‘heart pills’ (perhaps Hormovin).146 By now Dr F.S. Petacci was required to appear at Palazzo Venezia in order to inject him every second day with what were probably vitamin supplements.147
Just before Christmas 1942 Claretta took a new line in a long conversation that she recorded, expressing sentiments destined to become more prominent in her mind over the last two and a half years of their relationship. Here was a Claretta who was getting on top, a woman whom some would eventually call La Ducessa (‘the female Duce’). Mussolini awoke on Saturday, 20 December, in terrible pain and, after injecting himself with sodium bromide, he took another, stronger, anti-spasm pill and almost became unconscious until Claretta, who had arrived, calmed him with a massage. He told her, however, that he was finished and it was time to leave office. Claretta refused to accept such logic and demanded he must not ‘yield to the English and the priests’. They then put on a recording of their favourite, Beethoven’s 7th Symphony. When it reached its second movement, Mussolini was deeply moved and cried ‘for the fir
st time since the death of Bruno, crying in great gulps, lying stretched out on the ground, with his eyes covered in the dark’. That burst of emotion made Claretta sob as well and set off a further long excursion into the failure of his life and works that not even the playing of Vivaldi’s ‘Spring’ from The Four Seasons could arrest.
When he resumed his theme – the need in sackcloth and ashes to approach the pope and the English in order to have Rome declared an ‘open city’ and so be saved from bombing – Claretta grew almost stern with him, transmuted into a mother unable to tolerate weakness or backsliding. He must not accept a ‘spiritual suicide’, she declared. He must not bow to ‘subtle manoeuvres by “Anglo-priestly” forces’. He must not allow the nation’s capital to lose its ‘Roman and Fascist’ imprint and limply consign it to the Vatican and ‘priestly power’. He was ‘the chief’ and could not ‘yield his command’ nor ‘go into exile’. He must stand up against the ‘sheep and canaille’, the pathetic beings who were betraying him. Rather than obeying corrupt generals and a cowardly monarch, he should summon to his cause ‘the authentic Italian people’.148
If ideology mattered, Claretta’s outburst made her sound like the most fanatical Fascist ‘new woman’, a fervent adept of a new political religion. It was quite a change. Until then her politics had been little more than a reflection of her love of, or obsession with, Mussolini’s person. Her family had similarly been more engaged in their own social advancement that in devoting themselves to the belief system of Fascism. Giuseppina had clung to her rosary beads, Francesco Saverio to his papal contacts, Myriam to her career and noble connection, while always protected by her sister’s readiness to announce that ‘any friend of Mimi is a friend of mine’.149 Marcello, who had been pleased by the patronage of Mario Donati, was doubtless polishing his contacts with Franco’s Spain or Admiral Horthy’s Hungary, but had seemed more interested in profit than ideological purity. However, from 1942, the private hopes of the Petacci family were to become ever more enmeshed with Fascism, its factions and fate. Private and public life were destined to become ever-more entangled.