One night, after they returned home to his father’s house from an outing to the theatre, Mussolini demanded that Rachele be allowed to live with him. Anna, her mother, would not countenance it, so Mussolini produced a pistol and said: “You see this revolver, Signora Guidi? It holds six bullets. If Rachele turns me down, there will be a bullet in it for her and five for me. It’s for you to choose.”
Anna gave the couple her blessing. A few days later, Mussolini rented two cramped damp rooms in Forli.
“We moved into the place one night,” Rachele recalled. “I remember how tired and happy he was perhaps a little uncertain of my reaction because the marriage papers were not yet ready. But I understood I saw the man of my heart there before me, eagerly awaiting the only gift life could give him — my love. His young face was already lined by his daily struggle. There was no hesitation. I went with him.”
Life together was hard. Mussolini was offered a job as editor of a newspaper in Brazil which he was tempted to take; but Rachele’s pregnancy, with the first of their five children, prevented him from accepting it.
Rachele, Mussolini and their growing brood lived together in the two rooms for three years. He became the Secretary of the Forli Socialist Federation, and used his wages to fund his own weekly paper La Lotta di Classe — “The Class Struggle”. He wrote all four pages of it himself, drank wine with his friends and, occasionally, pinched the bottom of a pretty girl. But for the time being he remained faithful.
He also wrote another novel, this time about the Archduke Ferdinand who committed suicide with his seventeen-year-old mistress at Mayerling. It remained unpublished. Like The Cardinal’s Mistress, it was practically soft porn. Throughout his life Mussolini had a taste for cheap and erotic novels.
Gradually, La Lotta di Classe became influential. As his message spread, Mussolini began to spend more time away from home. The temptation this put in his way proved irresistible.
By the time Mussolini came to power, he was insatiable. He compulsively sexually confronted any women who came up to his hotel room, or the flat he had in the palazzo in the Via Rasella. There were no ifs or buts and no niceties. He simply took them with a frantic passion. He rarely bothered with a bed, preferring to do it on the floor or against the edge of his desk. The act was perfunctory. He would not bother to take off his trousers or his shoes. The whole thing would be over in a minute or two.
As a young man he had preferred intellectual women, especially schoolteachers, but as he grew older, anyone would do provided they were not too skinny. He liked his lovers to smell a lot. He particularly liked the smell of sweat, though a strong scent was good too. He was not that clean himself, often dabbing himself with Cologne rather than washing with soap and water. He often did not bother to shave; once he even turned up unshaven at an official reception fir the King and Queen of Spain.
The sexual act was always performed purely for his own gratification. He thought of neither the woman’s pleasure nor her comfort. But the women did not seem to mind. Without the tiniest preamble, he would launch himself on female journalists, the wives of party members, actresses, maids, countesses and foreign visitors. Afterwards, they would speak of their sexual encounter with him with pride. Many said they enjoyed his no-nonsense approach. They liked the brutal carnality of it. As he reached a climax, he would curse violently; then, for a moment, he would be tender. Sometimes, when he lifted himself from a woman’s body, he would take up his violin and play something beautiful. The whole experience of sex was unselfconscious and animal though, once he was satisfied, women seemed to perceive in him a deep affection.
One of his casual lovers said that, at first, she was repelled by his clumsy attempt at foreplay, which amounted to roughly squeezing her breasts before he forced himself upon her. But afterwards, she found herself going back to him because she was unable to resist “a man of such importance”.
Mussolini had a free hand because Rachele did not want to come to live in Rome. She was conscious that she looked and talked like a peasant. In Rome, she felt gauche and out of place. She also knew of his many mistresses. Often, when he said he was visiting his family, he was staying with one of them, Margherita Sarfatti. But it did not bother her. He loved his family and the marriage was a happy one. Hard-working and longsuffering, she was the perfect Fascist wife.
His love of sex and children was soon turned into public policy. He urged a doubling of the birth-rate. Italy needed large families, he said, to have more soldiers. He imposed a tax on
“unjustified celibacy”, while employers were told to discriminate in favour of family men.
Hypocritically, he imposed severe punishment for adultery — harsher for women than for men. Closer to his heart, he made it an offence to infect anyone with syphilis. He was also against modern dancing, which he complained was “immoral and improper” and he tried to regulate Rome’s decadent night life. The pope applauded, but complained that there were still nude shows in defiance of the law.
Il Duce was deeply devoted to his five children and the Italian press portrayed him as uomo casalingo — the perfect family man. But it was hard to hush up some of his not-so-homeloving activities and scandalous stories about his sexual activities leaked to the foreign press.
One of his early mistresses was a neurotic woman named Ida Dalser. They had lived together on and off until 1915, when he abandoned her. She had a physically deformed and mentally retarded son, Benito Albino, whom Mussolini acknowledged as his own although he had a horror of deformity and illness.
When Mussolini broke off the affair with her, she had to be confined to a mental hospital. From as early as 1913, she began claiming that he had promised to marry her. Sometimes she changed her story and claimed that she had actually married him — and she was not going to be bought off with maintenance money for the child. When he was still a journalist on Il Popolo d’Italia in Milan, she stood outside the offices with her son and shouted up to Mussolini to tome down if he dared. His response was simple and direct. He came to the window with a pistol.
Later, she set fire to a room in the Hotel Bristol in Trento, screaming hysterically that she was the wife of Il Duce. She died in a mental hospital in Venice in 1935. Their son Benito was confined to an asylum in Milan, where he died in 1942.
Mussolini seduced the anarchist intellectual Leda Rafanelli in 1913. Only later did she discover that he was married. He explained that Rachele did not mind his infidelity. He wanted to continue the affair, claiming that every good newspaper editor needed a talented woman as an official mistress.
Another woman who Mussolini said “loved me madly” was Margherita Sarfatti, the art critic of Avanti! She became the editor of the Fascist magazine Gerarchia, ghosted articles in American magazines for him and wrote his official biography, which ends with a description of “his eyes shining with an interior fire”. The affair lasted into the 1930s. She was his official mistress, Clara Petacci’s only serious rival, but she eventually fell foul of Mussolini’s anti Jewish legislation.
In 1937, the French actress Fontanges, who was also a journalist under her real name Magda Coraboeuf, came to Rome to interview Mussolini for La Liberte. After the interview, she refused to return to Paris until he had made love to her. He did so, violently. The first time they had intercourse, he tried to strangle her with a scarf.
“I stayed in Rome for two months and Il Duce had me twenty times,” she told the press.