Having preached her case with ability and care, Claretta ‘suddenly leaning forwards slightly . . . grasped my hand and said imploringly, in a voice choking with emotion: “Put me with him!”’ Bellini was not sure how to reply to this tearful appeal and, before he did, Claretta interrupted to cry that what the partisans intended was to shoot Mussolini, meeting protestations from Bellini that the matter was not yet decided. Claretta was not naive enough to believe his attempt at neutrality, and pressed on to her final point and a demand that he make her one last promise: ‘I want to die with him. My life will mean nothing once he is dead. I would die anyway, but more slowly and with greater suffering. That is all I am asking: to die with him. You can’t deny me that.’77 With that request, the interview was over.
After midnight and in pouring rain, the partisans decided to permit Claretta to be reunited with her lover and, at the same time, to transfer him from what they feared were the insecure barracks at Germasino to an isolated peasant house owned by the De Maria family at the settlement of Bonzanigo, back southwards down the lake, on the hill above a village called Giulino di Mezzegra. It was after 3 a.m. when they arrived. Ben and Clara were found accommodation in a peasant-style, iron double bed, the first they had shared since 28 October 1943. According to her popular biography, however, Claretta was menstruating and no final sex act was possible.78
* * *
It is from now that the story flows into many rival streams, flooded with (dubious) detail, with one commentator who remained nostalgic of Fascism publishing a two-hundred-page study of ‘Mussolini’s last five seconds’.79 The books, articles, interviews, films and TV documentaries on the Duce’s death are mostly blatant in their contemporary political colour, usually anti-communist and sympathetic to a degree with Fascism. They are probably more useful as primary sources in the analysis of conspiracy theory, especially as it attaches to Mussolini, than as secondary sources on the history of 1945. They will not preoccupy this book.
Still the simplest and most credible account is that provided by the communist partisans who, however much prompted by Partito Comunista Italiano chiefs, were the first to tell the tale. Here the chief figure is the man who then called himself ‘Colonel Valerio’ but was actually Walter Audisio (although a vast conspiracy literature denies such identification), a middle-ranking communist official and Resistance fighter. He had been chosen by the CLNAI (Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale Alta Italia) – the de facto liberation government in Milan – on the evening of 27 April, to go as quickly as possible to Dongo and there execute Mussolini, in advance of what may have been (rival American and British) Allied secret service plans to capture the dictator and send him to trial.80
* * *
According to Audisio’s memoirs, when summoned on the afternoon of 28 April by her executioners from the bed on which she lay already dressed, Claretta had trouble tottering to the partisans’ Fiat 1100 in her black chamois-leather high heels.81 Another account claims that, when roused, she could not find her knickers, only to be roughly told by her lover: ‘it doesn’t matter. Come as you are. You shouldn’t worry so much about whether you are properly dressed.’82 When, not long after at around 4.15 p.m., she and Mussolini awaited the final shots at the gates of the Villa Belmonte, Audisio’s version maintained, Claretta was ‘out of it, completely stunned, moving erratically’.83 Others of greater piety or sentimentality say that, at the last, she had time to kiss a cross and admit that she had sinned against ‘Heaven and Earth’.84 Still more romantic versions depict her throwing her body in front of the Duce when the fatal shots rang out, attempting to grab one of the executioner’s guns in a loving attempt to save him, or the two collapsing together in a final embrace.85
There is a considerable and growing literature emphasising the injustice and illegality of the killing of Claretta along with her lover. No doubt, strictly speaking, this claim is correct. Yet late April 1945 was not a time of much legal nicety, whether in Italy or other parts of Europe. Nor was Claretta the only Fascist woman then to die; the Marchese Carla Medici del Vascello, the aristocratic last lover of the ex-party secretary Roberto Farinacci, for example, was also shot along with her partner ‘while trying to escape’ in these days.86 And, given her iron determination – reiterated on so many occasions – to stay loyal at any cost to her version of her relationship with Mussolini, however far from reality it was, perhaps death at Giulino di Mezzegra was indeed the kindest fate for Claretta Petacci and her obsession.
At Dongo, when the news came of the shooting of Mussolini and Claretta, the time of execution for the fifteen Fascist bosses and Marcello had arrived; Virgilio Pallottelli and Elena Curti, although arrested, were not deemed significant enough for the death penalty. Claretta’s brother had been allowed to say farewell to Zita, who, along with their sons, had been put in a room in the small Hotel Dongo. When Marcello emerged from there and was led towards the shoreline and the place of execution, the Fascists greeted him with hostile screams that he was a ‘spy’ and a ‘traitor’;87 they must not have their ideological purity impugned by dying in his company, they shrieked. There was a moment of hesitation among the partisans, with the communists favouring immediate death for all, and the liberals suggesting Marcello should be killed alone, with eventual agreement that the firing squad should direct its bullets against the fifteen first. Twelve of them made the sign of the cross before they died; three – including Bombacci – did not.88
A few moments later, as he was pushed, terrified, towards the row of corpses, Marcello, detecting in his captors a moment of distraction, took his chance to struggle free. He ran first towards the hotel and his family, was grabbed there by four partisans, but again broke their hold on him. ‘Still yelling he ran to the water [of the lake], threw himself in and swam out with powerful strokes,’ Bellini recalled. ‘He did not get far’, however, but was mown down by a hail of bullets from ‘submachine guns, rifles and revolvers’.89 According to more melodramatic accounts, his family watched his last dive into the lake from their hotel window, with allegedly devastating permanent effect on the mental health of Benvenuto. In her memoirs, however, Zita remembered rather that, late on a busy afternoon, her two children were taking a siesta, while she watched the horror alone.90 A recent ‘anti-anti-Fascist’ history claims that, after her husband’s death, Zita was raped by the partisans, who imprisoned her for a couple of days, but there is no contemporary evidence of such assault.91
While blood spread on the surface of the lake in a large red stain, the local priest proffered last rites of a kind by directing the prayer of absolution towards it.92 After floating back to the surface, Marcello’s corpse was pulled to the shore and dumped on top of the dead Fascist bosses in the back of a truck that already contained the remains of Mussolini and Claretta. Its engine spluttered into life and at around 8.20 p.m. it and its macabre cargo headed for Milan. All that was left at Dongo, Bellini recalled, was a pool of coagulating blood and a smell of powder.93 Myriam later clung to a theory that the body extracted from the lake was not actually Marcello’s. He had preserved himself somehow under water, reached a friendly shore undetected and some day would, like a sleeping Barbarossa, reveal himself to his sorrowing family; his coffin at the family tomb in Campo Verano, she contended in her memoirs, stood in fact still ‘empty’.94
* * *
The truck reached Milan after 3 a.m. and was directed to the Piazzale Loreto, one square down from the railway station. The stopping place had been chosen because, at 6.30 a.m. on 10 August 1944, fifteen anti-Fascists had been taken out of the San Vittore prison to be publicly executed at the Piazzale by a Fascist firing squad composed from a paramilitary force calling itself the Legione Autonoma Ettore Muti, after the party secretary killed in Rome in August 1943. The corpses were then left to rot in the sun for the rest of the hot summer day and only handed to their sorrowing families that night after a merciful intervention from Cardinal Schuster. Now, eight months later, was the time for vengeance.
The
evident popular thirst for retribution has stimulated quite a lot of unhistorical moralising about the crowd’s behaviour. Sandro Pertini, for one, remembered being shocked by the ‘rancour’ on display and set a track that others would follow by distinguishing between Mussolini, ‘a war criminal’ who had received his just desserts, and Claretta, ‘a courageous and loyal woman’ who had won his ‘respect’.95 Again, however, judgement needs to be put in the context of a war that had killed at least 50 million Europeans, a tyranny, however erratic its practice, which was responsible for a million premature deaths at home and abroad, and a still unfinished civil war, which had provoked more death and destruction than the rest of the Italian war effort.
The photographic record shows the nineteen corpses laid out on the square (added to those brought from Dongo was Achille Starace, who was executed after being found jogging in a state of mental confusion around the city) before a jostling crowd. Mussolini’s body was the object of special abuse. He had part of his head kicked in so viciously that brain matter began to seep out of it and his left eye was dislodged from its socket. At some stage his head was laid on Claretta’s breast, bloodied by the shots that had killed her. The dead dictator was given a phallic Fascist gagliardetto or sceptre to clutch as symbol of what has been called ‘the most derisive [last] orgasm’.96 As a more sensitive onlooker recalled of this rough humiliation of the lovers: ‘They looked flabby . . . Their faces were bloated and anonymous, as if they had never lived, cadavers that had not been cleaned up by undertakers.’97
Eventually, at around 11 a.m., seven of the bodies were strung up from their heels on a steel stanchion 4 metres above some Esso petrol pumps at the side of the square. Claretta was set next to her lover. Since she had no underwear, her skirts were first pinned up by a charitable priest, who had found someone among the crowd with a safety pin, before being secured with rope.98 At 2 p.m., following intervention by the US military authorities, the bodies were taken down and all nineteen corpses were taken away. Mussolini’s body went first, to suffer the last abuse of an autopsy ordered by the Americans, certain that their science could help them understand a dictator’s errant psychology. Claretta and Marcello, soon to be joined by Benito, were taken to the central Musocco cemetery in Milan99 and interred in anonymous graves. The troubled ‘Ben and Clara’ relationship had ended, perhaps in tragedy, perhaps in bathos, although, as was reported in the introduction to this book, its ghost continues to walk abroad.
* * *
In her last hours at Dongo, Bonzanigo and Mezzegra, Claretta had at last seemingly shaken off her family, in the past so insistent a cushion to, or distraction from, her ‘love’ for the Duce. Certainly she made no last-minute attempt to save Marcello from his brutal destiny, another whose execution was scarcely ‘legal’ in the narrow meaning of the word. With the deaths of Claretta and Marcello, Myriam and her parents were left to work out their own futures; they would, however, never want, nor be able, to renounce their connection with Mussolini’s lover.
After they moved from the Ritz Hotel at Barcelona to Madrid, the Petaccis took up residence in the Calle de Lagasca 122, in a bourgeois zone of a city still not fully recovered from the vicious fighting (and Fascist bombing) during the Spanish civil war. As the family’s main money-earner (although Giuseppina was soon ready to publish in Spanish a memoir of Claretta),100 Myriam resumed her cinema career, starring in nine romances between 1946 and 1950, one of which, Cita con mi viejo corazón (1949), was directed by Ferruccio Cerio, a Fascist director who had supported the RSI and also sought sanctuary with Franco, before returning to Italy and soon dropping out of the film business.101 For these Spanish films, Myriam took the pseudonym ‘Miriam Day’ in place of Miria di San Servolo. If her career in Spain eventually came to a dead end, Myriam declared virtuously that, after the Second World War ended, she had rejected ‘fabulous sums’ offered by Hollywood, one of which was to star as Claretta in a film of the Mussolini love story.102
Beset by much confusion, Myriam divulged in her memoirs that she did not hear about Marcello’s death until July 1945 and, fearful of her mother’s weak heart, kept the unhappy news from her parents for some months after that. In June 1948 they were joined in the Spanish capital by Zita Ritossa. But a permanent stay there proved impossible for Zita when she could not find a decent school for the psychologically damaged Benvenuto. Nonetheless, the two boys did take their first Communion in Madrid in 1949, with family influence presumably helpful in obtaining the presence at the service of the papal nuncio to Spain.103
Myriam returned to Italy to live in 1951, quickly taking a leading part in a succession of legal proceedings, as well as in a controversy that had begun earlier over whether the body buried under Marcello’s name at Musocco was really his.104 She resumed residence in Spain from 1956 to 1959. After this third retreat, she joined her parents in a rented flat in Rome.105 More lawsuits followed, including one against her de facto sister-in-law, Zita Ritossa.106 Francesco Saverio, although never able to regain his position at the Vatican, survived well into his eighties, outliving his wife by almost a decade. Myriam, in declining financial circumstances, lasted until 1991, leaving Ferdinando, an emigrant to the USA, as the only survivor from her immediate family
For the rival Mussolini household, ‘alike in dignity’ to the Petaccis in our story, the deaths at Mezzegra, the abuse in Milan and the history of the Italian dictatorship left a legacy from which it was difficult to shake free but which offered richer rewards than were allowed to the Petaccis. On 29 April 1945 Rachele had been arrested and spent some days in the San Donnino prison, where other prisoners included the widow of Roberto Farinacci and their children. Mussolini’s legal wife may have been disgusted to find that one repeated topic of conversation among party loyalists was whether the Duce had demeaned himself, his ideology and regime by dying in Claretta’s company.107 Yet, the greatest contempt at the way Mussolini had perished was scribbled by his sometime deep admirer, Giuseppe Bottai, by then disguised as an anonymous soldier in the French Foreign Legion in Algeria: ‘That detail of Petacci “facing justice” at the side of Mussolini struck me very hard. It had been easier to pardon him as a man than to forgive him for his brothel-style condemnation that he had brought upon himself.’108
One Fascist confined at San Donnino was Buffarini Guidi; he was soon released, then arrested again and, in July, executed for his political crimes. For Rachele, however, there was a transfer on 2 May under Allied auspices to a military camp at Terni, northeast of Rome, followed from 25 July by a comfortable enough period of confino on Ischia, where – according to one sentimental journalist – she took pleasure cooking bean soup for her children.109 Eventually she returned to the family estates in the province of Forlì, welcoming the final interment of Mussolini’s corpse in the family tomb at San Cassiano outside Predappio on 1 September 1957. Rachele died at the Villa Carpena on 30 October 1979.
Among those who dwelled at the Villa Feltrinelli not long to survive the war was Bruno’s widow, Gina Ruberti. In April 1945 she found refuge with friends at a lakeside villa near Como where she sought to live a quiet life with her small daughter. However, on 3 May 1946 she died late at night when the speedboat that she was sharing with two British officers sank, sparking predictable gossip about what she had been getting up to with her foreign friends or, indeed, whether the British secret service had murdered her. In death she was thus fitted into the huge tangle of conspiracy theories that continue to be woven about anything, however tangential, that might be imagined to bear connection with Mussolini’s last days.110
In 1944–5 Edda Ciano spent months in a Swiss clinic, revealing, according to her Swiss psychiatrist, ‘a profound disgust for all sexual matters’.111 She was returned to Italy at the end of August 1945 and was sentenced to two years confino on Lipari, the largest of the Aeolian Islands, where, by one questionable account in denial of the Swiss analysis, she enjoyed a passionate affair with a local communist.112 Soon amnestied, she spent the rest of her
life in houses at Capri and Rome, dying on 8 April 1995. She remained an advocate of dictatorship113 but was never fully re-integrated into her surviving family.114
After 27 April Vittorio Mussolini, his wife, children and cousins were hidden for a while by sympathetic priests near Como. Over the next months Vittorio was piloted along Catholic networks to Spain, back to Genoa and then on to Argentina, under its friendly dictator, Juan Perón. The Duce’s eldest son reached Buenos Aires shortly before Christmas 1946. Twenty-one years later, he moved his life to Italy again, married a second time and died on 12 June 1997. The two youngest Mussolini children, Romano (born 1927) and Anna Maria (born 1929), had different fates. Romano became an internationally acclaimed jazz musician, and did not die until February 2006. As was noted in the introduction, Romano, perhaps encouraged by his politician daughter, Alessandra, during his last years favoured the development of a pious memorial site to his father linked to the family estate at the Villa Carpena. His polio-stricken sister, Anna Maria, had a much shorter life, dying on 25 April 1968, but did leave behind two young daughters.115
Claretta Page 29