The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘My super great Duce, you are a divine being’
Miranda Seymour admires a study of Mussolini’s notorious mistress
Most of the world – as Richard Bosworth points out at the start of this scrupulously forensic examination of a woman for whom his own sympathy is discreetly scant – has forgotten about Claretta Petacci. Not so Italy. Villa Fiordaliso, the art nouveau mansion beside Lake Garda that Petacci and her family unhappily shared with their SS guard from 1943 to 1944, is now a popular hotel and wedding venue. Guests can sleep in “Claretta’s bedroom”, furnished – very creepily – precisely as it was in 1944.
Thirty kilometres north along the lake, at the Villa Feltrinelli, bookings are never scarce for another bedroom, that of Italy’s humiliated puppet dictator, who took up residence there in 1943, deprived of actual power by Hitler and denied any tryst in the villa with Petacci by the formidable presence of his wife, Rachele. But so vexed was Rachele by the threatening proximity of her rival that, one morning in October 1944, she stormed into the Villa Fiordaliso with a pistol, shouted “whore” at Petacci, and said: “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 his idol.”
In Rome, there’s no longer a chance to inspect Claretta’s mirrored pink bedroom, where even the telephone – on which “Ben” used to sweet-talk his lover almost 20 times a day – was bright pink. Demolished in 1975, the Petacci family’s 32-room Villa Camilluccia has been replaced by the Iraqi embassy. Enthusiasts, though, can still hunt down her family tomb in a Roman cemetery, where a life-size statue of Petacci presides over her own coffin. A marble sheet covers her curves more decorously than the plunging negligees she favoured in life, a pair of which she packed in April 1945 for her journey to an ignominious end: first shot, then hanged upside-down in Milan alongside the more vigorously maltreated corpse of Mussolini.
Ben and Clara may not merit the place Bosworth proposes for them as Italy’s most star-crossed lovers, but there’s no questioning Petacci’s right to be considered one of the pushiest groupies of all time. In 1926, the year after Mussolini assumed his role as dictator, an Irishwoman called Violet Gibson fired on him from a crowd and grazed his cheek. Dramatically, Mussolini donned a bandage and carried on with his day’s harangues. Petacci, already in the habit of covering her schoolbooks with drawings of her hero, shot off an adoring letter to “my super great Duce”, lamenting that she had not been there to strangle the wicked foreigner, “that murderous woman, who wounded You, a divine being! [...] Duce, my life is for you!” Petacci was just 14.
Mussolini liked young girls. (“I drank the sweetest cup of your virginity,” he wrote to one 18-year-old in 1918, when already embarked on the predatory career that earnt him the title “The Great Ejaculator”.) But 14 was pushing it, even for Benito. Then, six years later, spending a day at the beach with her fiancé and family – bourgeois Romans with an eye on the main chance – Petacci spotted her hero and reaffirmed her passion. She was, she announced, a poet. Three days later, while her mother sat praying outside in the family car, a primly dressed Miss Petacci read her poems aloud to Mussolini. And then, surprisingly, the dictator sent her home.
Petacci began her extraordinary diaries – she kept them until her death – shortly after that momentous first meeting in 1932. Their relationship flourished: the habitually promiscuous Mussolini enjoyed playing the role of fatherpatron to a chaste young woman; Petacci’s devotion to the man she called her “Sun God” went handin-hand with a determination to do well for her family, an ambition Mussolini obliged. When, directly after the honeymoon, she took against her violent and unpleasant spouse, Riccardo Federici, her Duce stepped in to pack him off to Ethiopia.
In 1936, Italian troops marched into Addis Ababa; Vittorio Emmanuele III became both king and emperor; and Mussolini, the power above the throne, finally asked Petacci’s mother permission to sleep with her (newly separated) daughter. Permission was granted; a balance of power was not. Petacci’s parents readily agreed that she should enjoy no other intimacies. As far as her lover went, Claretta learnt to rejoice when he was faithful for a week. On one thrilling occasion, he stuck it out (so to speak) for a whole month.
Plenty has been written about Mussolini’s sex life, but little of it captures him as faithfully as the Petacci diaries. “Clara, I am you and you are me,” runs the famous note found hidden within a gold locket sewn into Petacci’s shoulder pad when her body was cut down from public display. Privately, however, the dictator’s voice was both boastful and repellent. “A need to crush and break,” he bragged after one coupling. “I am a wild animal.” Lavatorially obsessed, he told his beloved that “pissing” made him think of her and that the way he made love to one of her rivals was “like going to the toilet”.
Romeo and Juliet they were not, but there were happy times. Mussolini serenaded Petacci on his violin. They listened, many times, to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. (“A shame that he was a Jew,” said Mussolini. “Great but still a Jew.”) Sex grew problematic, but Petacci’s thoughtful father, a doctor, obliged with injections. The cabinets of her pink bathroom were stocked with Hormonin, a forerunner of Viagra.
Loyal to the degrading end, Petacci exerted no mollifying influence on her lover. Xenophobic, anti-Semitic, ruthless, amoral and idle, she is fortunate to have fallen into the hands of a calm, kind and fair-minded biographer, one who balances all Petacci’s vices against the fact that her life ended with humiliation, hardship and a shameful death, all for the sake of a vicious oppressor in whose greatness she never ceased to believe.