Fascists in Love

Personally, I am really amazed that Benito Mussolini—yes, he is the famous author of the above passage—got anyone into his bed, ever. But as R. J. B. Bosworth points out, and at considerable length, Il Duce somehow managed this with both astonishing frequency and an equally surprising assortment of women, some high-born, others less so. Maria José, who would ultimately become queen of Italy, was one; Margherita Sarfatti, a Jewish journalist who grew up in a palazzo in Venice, was another—although by 1938, when Mussolini’s infamous Race Laws were implemented, he was openly regretting the latter.

But the most persistent, passionate, and foolish among his many conquests was Claretta Petacci, in 1926 a silly bourgeois girl of 14 when she wrote Mussolini her first mash note on the occasion of a failed assassination attempt against the leader—”O Duce, why was I not with you? .  .  . Duce, my life is for you. .  .  . My super great Duce, our life, our hope, our glory”—and later, an even sillier woman throughout her abbreviated epistolary existence. Time and again, Mussolini ordered Claretta to destroy his rambling letters. But how could she? She “wept with joy and emotion,” Claretta wrote him, when she learned “by chance that Hitler called you his ‘most faithful friend.’ ” As things turned out—in so many ways, not least during Claretta’s final hours—her life really was for him.

Of course, the reader may justifiably wonder on finishing Claretta what, exactly, “Ben” (as Claretta liked to call him) actually offered women in the way of appeal. He had five legitimate children, and nine who were not. At home, his betrayed wife Rachele was expected to call him professore, although Mussolini’s intellectual achievements were limited. (It was, for instance, his opinion that although Ludwig van Beethoven was a talented composer, it was “a shame that he was a Jew. Great but still a Jew.”) As for Mussolini’s lovemaking, it was accompanied by bloody bites and severe scratches inflicted on poor Claretta (who wrote everything down; she was that kind of girl) along with promises of more violence to come: “I want to thrash you, harm you, be brutal with you. .  .  . I am a wild animal.” He was the kind of man who believed that the artificial insemination of cattle was unfair—to the cattle.

True, Benito Mussolini, vicious, meanspirited fascist though he was, managed for quite some time to seduce not just women but an entire nation, and then plunge that nation into a disastrous war alongside yet another vicious dictator. But alas, there are women who like that kind of bullish, unleashed power, both in and out of bed. And they are not alone.

As I know only too well, since I spend a fair amount of time in Rome each year, Rai Storia, Italy’s History Channel, scarcely lets a week go by without airing some piece of documentary footage featuring Mussolini: his manic speeches, his violent death, his brutality, his intricate personal life. And when that’s not being broadcast, there’s inevitably some half-hankie docudrama about impetuous, difficult, passionate Edda, Mussolini’s favorite child, who wears beautiful furs in her role as the Contessa di Cortellazzo e Buccari, but is unhappy in love. (The series does boast a bittersweet ending, of sorts: By the end of World War II, Edda manages to escape to Switzerland, which is the good news—for Edda. Disguised as a peasant woman, however, she is forced to ditch the furs.)

So R. J. B. Bosworth is not wrong when he writes that “Italians have shown themselves more readily won over than their sometime German allies by dulcified accounts of dictatorship.” It is, for example, still illegal in Italy to give a fascist salute “ ’to exalt exponents, principles, and methods’ of the extinct National Fascist Party,” as Italian law has it. But trust me: The mythological Mussolini lives on and on, as does fascism. And this longevity is even more astonishing when you consider Mussolini’s minimal physical appeal: Square-built and stocky, he had button eyes and a bullet-shaped head framed by a shaved pate and fearsome jutting chin. Of these drawbacks, however, he was astonishingly unaware: Like Vladimir Putin, Mussolini enjoyed displaying his physique during excursions by the sea.

Obviously, there were compensations for Claretta. Where did the couple make love? In the gilded and star-spangled Zodiac Room in the Palazzo Venezia—the same palazzo from which Mussolini delivered his rabid monologues to cheering crowds. How did Claretta get there without being seen? In a car driven by the family chauffeur, with either her mother or father in attendance. (The father, a physician, had many uses, it turns out: When the Duce grew concerned that the approach of war might dampen his lovemaking ardor, Doctor Petacci prescribed German-made Hormovin, “the Viagra of its time,” as the author observes.)

What was Claretta’s preferred venue? Bed, you will not be surprised to learn, where, “armed with a box of chocolates,” she spent most of her mornings. Her preferred acquisitions? Jewels, furs, and Lanvin perfumes, even though these last luxuries were foreign and, therefore, nominally banned. What happened to her husband, Riccardo Federici, an air force lieutenant whose ambitions Claretta supported, even though he didn’t have much use for her? He got promoted, thanks to Mussolini.

Naturally, there were scenes—in war and peace, by no means unusual in Italy. Claretta was so jealous of the other women in Ben’s life that she spied on them. Rachele was so jealous of Claretta that in late 1944, the unhappy wife arrived at her rival’s villa at 10 in the morning where (finding Claretta still in a negligée) she screamed the word “whore” any number of times, adding: “Signora, I am no longer young and I know it. But believe me, if the Duce saw you at the moment, without all the make-up, he would not consider you any more as his idol.”

At which point, Claretta fainted several times, revived only by cognac. This was actually not unusual for her. In December of that same year, she wrote Mussolini that after tuning in to one of his last diatribes, she was, she reported, “on my knees before your voice,” having “sustained you with my soul, with the violent beating of my heart as I listened enraptured .  .  . a shudder froze me, and I cried, throbbed.” Then she fainted. Again.

What to make, then, of Claretta: Mussolini’s Last Lover? Well, it is certainly dense and packed with incident narrated, quite often, by Claretta’s own throbbing voice. But I am sorry to say that when you have a perpetually fainting, shuddering sap for a subject, it’s difficult to keep interest from flagging. You just don’t want to see another letter—not from him, not from her. And evidently, Claretta herself was of similar mind. By the very end—this would be late April 1945—when Mussolini was captured by partisans near Lake Lugano, and Claretta, wearing a stylish mink, suddenly popped up uninvited (“perhaps to his mute surprise,” as Bosworth observes), the two lovers had a final explosive argument about one of his other girlfriends. Then Claretta grabbed a surprised partisan by the hand and declared imploringly: “I want to die with him. .  .  . That’s all I am asking: to die with him.”

It is at this juncture that the reader thinks: Good idea. And the partisans felt the same.

Judy Bachrach, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, is the author, most recently, of Glimpsing Heaven: The Stories and Science of Life After Death.