Hot chicks with Il Duce
Women, we are told, really go for bad boys, and you can’t get much badder than this:
Mussolini’s mistress, Clara Petacci, recorded intimate details of her affair with Il Duce in her journal. Her newly published diary reveals Mussolini as a sex-addicted anti-Semite who found Hitler “very likeable” — and who occasionally suffered from impotence.
Those diaries were published for the first time last week, to the considerable consternation of one of Mussolini’s descendants. “This woman would be convicted of stalking today,” says Alessandra Mussolini, Il Duce’s granddaughter. She insists that “not a word” of what Petacci wrote about her grandfather is true.
This is not to say that little Benito was exactly faithful or anything:
Mussolini was as obsessed with sex as he was with his own power. Until the day of his removal from power, July 25, 1943, he had “a woman brought to him every day, every afternoon,” as his valet Quinto Navarra recalls. The women were recorded in the guest book as “fascist visitors.”
“There was a time when I had 14 women and took three or four [of] them every evening, one after the other,” Mussolini said. But now, he insisted, Claretta was the only one. “Amore,” he said, “why do you refuse to believe me?”
Despite this, they were together until the end:
When the miniature Salò Republic came to an end in April 1945, Mussolini offered his mistress the option of fleeing to Spain, but Petacci declined. A short time later, she was hanging upside-down next to Il Duce above the Piazzale Loreto in Milan, shot by partisans. A passerby is believed to have said: “One thing you can say for her: She did have nice legs.”
(Via Common Sense & Wonder.)
jenx »
30 November 2009 · 4:44 pm
what a total scum bag. the dictator, too.
Eric »
30 November 2009 · 5:01 pm
I’m trying to think of a good tie-in for this post to the offering on eBay a couple of weeks ago of what was allegedly Mussolini’s stolen brain, but so far, I’m just shooting blanks.
fillyjonk »
30 November 2009 · 8:46 pm
I guess “she had nice legs” is the female equivalent of “at least the trains ran on time”?
CGHill »
30 November 2009 · 9:43 pm
In the sense that neither is a really good justification, perhaps.
Baby M »
2 December 2009 · 9:10 am
Interesting to read this after having read Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, which has a very good chapter on Mussolini.