As a child in fascist Italy, Clara Petacci (known as Claretta) was dutifully adoring of Benito Mussolini and the cult of ducismo. She gave the stiff-armed Roman salute while at school (the Duce had declared handshaking fey and unhygienic) and sang the fascist youth anthem ‘Giovinezza’. Her father, the Pope’s personal physician, was a convinced fascist, for whom Mussolini was the incarnation of animal cunning — furbizia — and the manful fascist soul. Claretta herself would have to wait before she met the ‘divine Caesar’.
One day in April 1932, while motoring from Rome to the seaside resort of Ostia, she caught sight of her idol behind the wheel of his Alfa Romeo. ‘Follow him!’ she ordered her chauffeur. The cars drew level, and Mussolini pulled over to confront his pursuer. Petacci was 20; he was 49. But to judge by her diaries — first published in Italy in 2009 as Mussolini segreto (Secret Mussolini) — the encounter was love at first sight. As the weeks went by, the doctor’s daughter began to court the Duce in a decorous way, first by sending him perfumed billets-doux, then by calling him on the telephone. Before long, ‘savage, ardent sex’ took place daily in Mussolini’s headquarters in Rome.
His vainglorious sexual boasting (‘They say I’ve got the most beautiful body in Italy’) worked on her like an aphrodisiac. Richard Bosworth, a research fellow at Jesus College, chronicles the ‘Ben and Clara’ affair in his absorbing new biography, Claretta, an addition to his previous histories of Rome and fascist Italy. Unfortunately for the ‘genteelly reared’ Catholic girl, Claretta was engaged to another man, while Mussolini himself was married with five children. The grandly uniformed Dux surely looked incongruous in her bedroom with its baby-pink telephone and items of pink furniture.
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