* * *
For the moment, however, Claretta’s radical sentiments, whatever her Fascist zest, did not revive her Duce. His railing against his lot and the inadequacy of the Fascist armed forces only intensified. Officers, he charged, surrendered in droves without fighting, disgracefully happy at their ‘complete lack of racial decorum and national dignity’. Throughout history, Italians could not and would not fight, as Napoleon had rightly understood. ‘The empire’ was ‘entirely undefended’. Such forlorn sentiment was enough to earn another rebuke from Claretta. Baffled by the depth of her lover’s pessimism and misanthropy, she swung all but automatically into her never-ending remonstrance against his promiscuity and failure to give her the love that she deserved and needed.150 He was, it was hard to deny, a public and a private failure. The year of 1942 was not ending well.
The New Year proved worse. Not far beneath the surface of the regime a battle was raging over how to get Italy out of the catastrophic war with the least damage. Among those who had long opposed the German alliance was Ciano, who, in the reshuffle of February, lost the Ministry of Foreign Affairs but was sent instead to be ambassador to the Vatican, with a prospect there, never fully developed, to manage an Italian exit from the war. In so doing he might turn from what Claretta sarcastically defined as ‘The Dauphin’ into Mussolini’s successor.151 In practice, however, Ciano failed to take his chance and the major plotters to remove the Duce were Grandi, Bottai, the former chief of staff, Badoglio, and the aristocratic advisers of King Victor Emmanuel III.
Failing to find an escape from Fascism’s glaring public failings, Galeazzo and Edda Ciano and other members of Mussolini’s family circle instead augmented their campaign against Claretta, helped by the scandals that eddied around her brother. The public, it was rumoured, were joking about a Santa Chiara, protettrice degli affari poco chiari (‘Saint Clara, protector of dubious business affairs’), while, disgracefully, Marcello was thought to have free entry to every place of power and financial advantage in the country.152 It was time therefore, the Cianos insisted, for the relationship to end, with Edda, according to her memoirs, extracting from her father a lunchtime promise in November 1942 to break with all the Petaccis, and a dubiously pious pledge that ‘no woman’ other than Rachele had ‘ever meant anything to him’.153 In response, Claretta stoutly fought her corner in this family war, hardening her overt posture as a convinced Fascist. She warned of the threat from Badoglio and other generals, pleading with her lover to accept that ‘your general staff is a nest of filthy snakes’. They and their traitorous friends, she maintained, had won over the dwarf king. Galeazzo and Edda worked for them. Scorza was a sad joke; what a shame it was to have dropped Buffarini Giudi in the February changes. To stop the conspiracy, Mussolini, she implored her lover, must remember the revolution and arm the Fascist militia.154
But Mussolini by now lacked the fortitude to accept either her advice or the not dissimilar – if cruder – counsel of his wife Rachele, who was demanding that ‘we must make some heads roll’.155 Instead there came the sudden news in May that, in future, Claretta was to be banned from entry to the Palazzo Venezia. In the unpublished biography that the journalist Paolo Monelli prepared in the 1950s (but refrained from publishing after he lost a law case to the surviving Petaccis over a taster he had sent to France Soir), it was maintained that the Ben–Clara relationship was then at breaking point. Had Mussolini’s sacking been a little delayed, Monelli speculated, the Petaccis would have lost their place in history.156 Certainly, Claretta’s emotions knew no bounds as her private life again overwhelmed her Fascism. ‘You have tried to free yourself from me in the most brutal and definitive manner, creating a scandal,’ she cried in admonishment. She had suffered the humiliation of being turned back by the police. ‘You have treated me like a thief and a prostitute.’ She would die, ‘crushed by the pain for ever’.157
Yet she had not forgotten her other campaign. The nefarious plotters, and especially Ciano, she asserted, lay behind her expulsion. They had taken advantage of Mussolini’s present weakness and depression to tell the people that he was ‘useless, past it, defeated’. He must react. He must resume his natural role as ‘the titan, the giant, the world dominator’.158 He must reclaim himself (and Claretta). In her campaign, she had her mother by her side. Giuseppina wrote to Mussolini that he must not for a moment believe the calumnies of Ciano, his wife and their associated ‘canaille’. ‘Claretta’s life,’ she stated, ‘lies in your hands’; her love for him had no limit.159
In his diary, Bottai, perhaps with the male jealousy of one who, for so long, had been transfixed by Mussolini’s charisma, was pleased to hear of the ban, hoping that this time Claretta’s departure was ‘definitive’. An attempt to expel her earlier in May had soon collapsed.160 Nor, this time, did the relationship cease, even when, on 14 July, for the third time, Claretta was officially stripped of automatic entry to the Palazzo Venezia.161 In reality the ‘Ben and Clara’ affair drifted on, despite ever more open discontent among the Italian elite with Mussolini’s leadership and ever-louder mutterings about the whole Petacci family. On 21 June a rumour had swept the sets of Cinecittà that the grocery supplier of the Petacci family was to be arrested for ration-breaking, but that Myriam had intervened to save him.162 From among the plotters, General Quirino Armellini recalled in his memoirs his disgust that the Villa Camilluccia promiscuously housed Francesco Saverio, Giuseppina, Myriam and Boggiano and Mussolini’s lover, ‘a family of whores’.163 On 16 July the Duce ignored advice from Scorza’s radical chef de cabinet to shoot Ciano, Badoglio and Marcello Petacci out of hand or risk losing all popular support.164
Skirting the latest ruling against her occupying the Sala dello Zodiaco, Claretta characteristically translated the troubles of the nation and the regime into her private world, on 18 July informing her lover melodramatically that, ‘if you fall like a Myth, like God, the only thing left for me to do will be to kill myself’. The issue was not just political. Mussolini had rung Ruspi from the Villa Camilluccia and had not ended his contact with Pallottelli. ‘I tell you that today all that exists is my tragedy, my pain, my delusion. You have the right of life or death over me; the sentence must be worthy of our love.’165
But politics kept surfacing, too. On 20 July Claretta warned her Ben against attending the meeting of the Grand Council scheduled for the evening of the 24th. The army, Freemasonry, the royal house, Badoglio, ‘Grandi the Englishman’, all were preparing the ‘major coup’, she prophesied, all would pull him down. They duly did, with Mussolini going like a sleepwalker to dismissal by the king on the late afternoon of the 25th, after the Grand Council, meeting late into the previous night, had terminated his rule – almost as though he were not a dictator but just another parliamentary politician beset by a cabinet crisis. Before Mussolini drove to the palace, both Rachele and Claretta (whom a telephone tap recorded being rung at 3.45 am)166 gave the same advice, despite their different peasant and Catholic bourgeois cultures and despite their womanhood: ‘Arrest them! Kill them all!’ ‘You alone are the judge,’ Claretta added emotionally. ‘No one has the right to give you counsel or suggestion. Don’t destroy yourself to satisfy those who do not understand you and wish you evil. Remember who loves you and who never tires of giving herself to you.’167 But, on 25 July 1943, Mussolini did not listen. The Fascist regime, mark I, had collapsed. Could Claretta and the rest of her family find a path to a Fascist regime mark II? And what would Mussolini and his legitimate wife and children make of such a prospect?
6
THE WINTER OF A PATRIARCH AND HIS DUCESSA
On 29 August 1943 Il Messaggero carried a banner headline: ‘Filmed: a life as it was lived.’ A subheading added ‘The Petacci family in Novara prison – How the fortune of Claretta Petacci and Miria di San Servolo was made and passed on.’ In the small print of wartime, the front-page story was lavish in details. It began with the looting on the morning of 26 July of the medical practice of Francesco Saverio Pe
tacci on the Via Nazionale. Furniture, books, white medical gowns, microscopes and stethoscopes had all rained down onto the street below. The crowd, it was reported, had joined the assault with ‘knowing laughter and graphic commentary’. How, the paper asked artlessly, could someone who had written in its pages attract such hostility? Such a short time before, Dr Petacci’s contributions had ‘aroused scant or no interest’, the account continued in more sardonic vein, even when, for example, they had respectfully attributed the following remarkable skills to his ‘benefactor’ (in the coy phrasing of the time):
intuitive power (that is, the ability to foresee events), concentration, analysis, calculation, judgement, readiness in planning and decision-making, wide perspective, solid memory, iron will, self-control, energy, tenacity, firmness, resolution, imperturbability, a proper approach to all great issues, administrative skill, loyalty, eloquence, staunch psychic resistance and an excellent arterial system for nerves, lungs and brain.1
As a result of such ample ‘knowledge’, Il Messaggero observed, Dottor F.S.P. had been ‘well looked after and protected’ before July 1943 by ‘a personage of the highest status’. Yet that altissimo personaggio had not cared so much about the doctor’s medical science as about his ‘cute daughter, Claretta by name’. She had presented herself one day to this ‘most elevated personage’ [still unnamed in the article] on the Roman Lido in a ‘teeny bathing costume that allowed view of her by no means displeasing figure’ and ‘bronzed bosom’. Once introduced, this young woman had gushed about the poetry she had been accustomed to send him, while adding guilelessly that she loved flowers. In all honesty the man had struggled to remember her verses. But the next day they were back in contact and soon ‘the personage’ was inviting Claretta to ‘visit his garden’ at the Villa Torlonia, not a tiring trip since her house lay on the Via Spallanzani. In gratitude the man in question organised an exhibition of Claretta’s paintings at the Collegio Romano in the Campus Martius, although, since Claretta had talked of art but not actually painted, the family had to rush around to hire someone else to daub some artwork that could be shown. The hired hand did so at a rate of four paintings per day.
Thereafter their mutual infatuation ‘spread with the fury of a fire’. The protector, despite being of a certain age, was ‘completely smitten’. Claretta, as a ‘worthy daughter’ of her family, did not want to keep the altissimo personaggio for herself alone but happily shared him with her sister, the bel canto singer and film star ‘Miria di San Servolo’. While such generous apportioning prospered, the Petaccis moved into a ‘delightful villa on Rome’s periphery’. There, or on trips to the Adriatic, Giuseppina Persichetti, ‘the mother’, ‘followed the twists and turns of the happy idyll’ with approval and support, even if the unnamed personage’s jealousy now ‘locked Claretta away [in the Villa Camilluccia] for weeks on end’.2 On 25 July the Petaccis speedily left Rome for Milan, whence they soon fled to Boggiano’s family castle at Meina on the Piedmont–Lombardy border.
According to the additions in Paolo Monelli’s unpublished biography, news of Mussolini’s fall had sent Giuseppina into a rage against the King and Badoglio, while Myriam wandered around the Villa Camilluccia crying (in a curious ordering of her thoughts) that the mob would kill everyone and rob them of all that they had accumulated.3 At Meina, on 12 August, Claretta, her mother, father and sister were arrested. They were then escorted to the Castello Visconteo-Sforzesco gaol in Novara, to much gossip and censure in the town, focusing on their ‘corrupt’ dallying with the altissimo personaggio.4 (Boggiano had earlier been confined at the Regina Coeli prison in Rome.)
Thus was the scandal salaciously narrated, with journalists ignoring Marcello, who, from 20 August, had also been imprisoned at Forte Boccea in the capital after initial confinement by the naval authorities at Taranto. He was threatened with immediate trial and, at least in his frightened imagination, execution under charges of corruption and unacceptable association with the Duce.5 However, he was released by the Germans on 12 September and escorted to a meeting at their embassy with such regime notables as Raffaello Riccardi, Attilio Teruzzi (minister of colonies 1939–43), Guido Buffarini Guidi’s brother and General Renzo Montagna of the Fascist militia (to become police chief under the new regime). According to Montagna, he and the other Fascist bosses were appalled at having their lives linked to Marcello’s; they loudly demanded that he be treated as a separate case and expelled from their presence.6 Marcello was able quickly to get out of Rome, find Zita and his sons in a safe haven on Lago di Garda, transport them to Meina and then go down to Novara to discover what had happened to his parents and sisters.
* * *
In their denunciation of the Petaccis’ sins and their glorying in their retribution in Rome, the newspapers failed to report the fate of the Villa Camilluccia, which was ransacked more thoroughly than the clinic in the Via Nazionale. By August Ursuline nuns of the Most Holy Crucifix had taken it over as an orphanage, despite what they described as its battered state. They found room for fifty children in its generous interior.7 For the time being, the Petaccis accepted this situation, although they compiled a long inventory of stolen property. It included fourteen pairs of shoes (they were recovered), a beaver-fur jacket worth 60,000 lire, belonging to Claretta, and three other furs, Myriam’s property, the richest of which – of white ermine – was claimed as costing 150,000 lire; they were lost for ever. So, too, were many silk negligees and quite a bit of beachwear. Numerous plush items of furniture also vanished.8
In regard to assaults on their persons and property, the Petaccis were treated worse than the Mussolini family, most of whom left for Germany on 27 and 28 July.9 The Cianos, after a month of house arrest and in the face of rising public opprobrium over their wealth and its allegedly corrupt sources, were ill advised enough to follow them on 27 August, a fatal choice for Galeazzo.10 Mussolini himself, after being bundled away from the royal palace, was confined first on the island of Ponza, taking over quarters that once housed an Ethiopian prince, and then at the naval base of Maddalena in Sardinia, across the water from Caprera, Garibaldi’s island of retreat. There the fallen dictator received a belated sixtieth birthday present from Hitler of a complete twenty-four-volume German edition of Nietzsche’s works, enough to keep him going for some time, it might be thought. Finally, from 28 August, Mussolini was escorted to Campo Imperatore, high in the Apennines east of Rome and south of the Terminillo resort, where, in their salad days, he and Claretta had disported themselves, sometimes with Myriam and Marcello in tow. It was from Campo Imperatore that, on 12 September, the Duce was rescued by an SS glider team, and delivered to a reunion with his legitimate family near Munich.11
* * *
The post-Mussolini regime, headed by Pietro Badoglio and lasting forty-five days, gave few indications of stirring a revolutionary tide among the Italian people, who wearily looked to the king and officer corps to chart a way out of a hopeless war. No one much protested when the new chiefs kept the word ‘totalitarian’ as a positive in their political vocabulary, went on executing peasant soldiers for ‘desertion’12 and did not immediately cancel anti-Semitic legislation. Revenge killing or other onslaughts against Fascist bosses were few, the shooting in mysterious circumstance of ex-PNF secretary Ettore Muti near the Roman Lido on 24 August being the exception.13 Terms of surrender to the Allies were agreed on 3 September, but Badoglio and King Victor Emmanuel bungled the revelation of this deed and management of its military consequences.
On 8 September the two men skedaddled from Rome to Brindisi, while the vengeful Germans seized control of the country down to Naples and beyond. Thereafter Italy descended into civil war, fought between those willing still to call themselves Fascists and anti-Fascists from a wide political spectrum; one early victim was Claretta’s cousin, Raffaele Persichetti,14 who died near the Ostiense station in Rome on 10 September. There a road is now named after him, skirting a number of Fascist buildings and running alongside what from 1938 to 1944
was the Viale Adolf Hitler. The bitter conflict, often as in this case splitting families and friends, continued for twenty long months while Anglo-American forces slowly pushed north. During that time, a resuscitated Fascist Republic – with Mussolini as puppet dictator and equipped with a constitution after a meeting at Verona in November 1943 – shared governance in the north with the ever-more ruthless Germans. Killings of soldiers and civilians multiplied on the ground, while a regular toll of victims was exacted through what our neoliberal leaders now euphemistically call ‘aerial strikes’; by 1945 more Italians had died from wartime bombing than Britons, despite the entrenched memory in that country of the Blitz. Some 200,000 Italians had perished in the conflict until July 1943; more than 250,000 fell between then and the advent of peace in May 1945.
The hostility aroused by the Petaccis during the forty-five days of the new regime deserves notice, indicating deep popular resentment at their social climbing and rumoured corruption, as well as a dislike and perhaps envy of the dictator’s unrestrained and flaunted sexuality (one popular curse against the Duce during the war had been that he be punished by someone cutting off his balls).15 Nonetheless, the Petaccis’ experience at this time turned out to be an ill wind that blew some good, at least until April 1945, all the more so since Romilda Ruspi and the Pallottellis may have had a few unpleasant weeks but they escaped the punishment inflicted on the Petaccis. In the Novara gaol, the irrepressible Claretta was scribbling away at a prison diary; it would become a useful document after the Petaccis’ eventual release and, during the Repubblica Sociale, the regular emphasis on family distress and sacrifice that she depicted shored up her connection with the dictator. Mussolini’s sister remembered her brother saying after the Petaccis’ release that he could not break with Claretta after she had suffered so much for him.16
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