Mussolini's Personal Sex Factory

Mass Production Comes to the Land of Casanova 

Clara Petacci in the 1930s.

I knew that Benito Mussolini had a retinue of mistresses. And I had known for quite a while that the mistress he died with, Clara Petacci, was 33 years old and came from a good family. It turns out that her father was the pope's doctor. Later I became familiar with the formidable Margherita Sarfatti, a journalist from a wealthy Venetian family who authored a biography of Mussolini in the mid-1920s.

What I didn't know was that the mistresses were only the tip of the iceberg. Underneath that tip, obscure to the world but not to its participants, lay an army of virtually anonymous, disposable receptacles for the dictator's apparently endless lust.

There are, of course, precedents for Mussolini's sexual career. In Italy alone, we can point to Giacomo Casanova in the eighteenth century. And, in modern times, there is Gabriele D'Annunzio. In 2013, Lucy Hughes-Hallett published a whole book about him. I read the book a little while ago. D'Annunzio is, I think, central to an understanding of Italy in the first third of the last century. He was also a despicable human being.

More broadly, I think it's fair to say that promiscuity and serial adultery are not rare phenomena in the world of humans, and that in this world rich and powerful men have long been accustomed to receiving what has been called the tribute that beauty owes to power.

But Benito put the power of a totalitarian government behind his enterprise.

A 2012 story in the Guardian tells us that "Mussolini's sexuality has been 'ignored' by historians as being unworthy of study." In the last few years that has changed. NYU professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, in her 2020 book, Strongmen, describes Mussolini's sex machine in detail on pages 126-128:

"Mussolini had always had a busy sex life. Before World War I, for example, he was living (as of 1910) with his future second wife, Rachele Guidi, and seeing his future first wife, Ida Dalser. He was also spending time with ... Margherita Sarfatti and courting the anarchist Leda Rafanelli while having quickies with countless others. ... 

"During his early years in power, with his wife Rachele still living in the Romagna region, Mussolini made his apartment on Via Rasella in Rome his bachelor pad. His housekeeper Cesira Carocci prepared his partners for intercourse and sometimes serviced him too. His brother Arnaldo disbursed funds for abortions, maintenance of illegitimate children, and silence. In 1929, when Mussolini made peace with the Vatican and Rachele and their children moved into Rome's Villa Torlonia, the dictator debuted a new personality cult theme of 'family man' and transferred his sex life to his Palazzo Venezia office. Police chief and OVRA secret police head Arturo Bocchini became his chief enabler after Arnaldo died in 1931. Bocchini's operatives worked with Il Duce's personal secretariat staff to vet and track prospects and arrange for postcoital punishments or payments.

"Police files, diaries, and testimonies from Mussolini's inner circle and his last major lover, Clara Petacci, suggest that he had extramarital sex with up to four different women daily during his twenty-three years in power. His sex life is best visualized as a pyramid. Rachele, his wife, was on top, then his major lovers Sarfatti and Petacci, and then a dozen or so regular partners whom he saw once or twice a month. If he had children with the women, the relationships could go on for decades. ... The pyramid continued with a dozen semi-regular partners and ended with the thousands of women he summoned, screwed, and had surveilled. ..." 

A Different View

Antonio Gramsci was the head of the Italian communist party when he was arrested in 1926. Prison life exacerbated his already poor health. He remained in prison until 1933, when he was transferred to a series of clinics. In one clinic the authorities actually removed the bars from his window. He died at a clinic in Rome in 1937, at the age of 46. He was married and had two children.

While he was in jail Gramsci wrote his Prison Notebooks, where I found the following: "The formation of a new feminine personality is the most important question of an ethical and civil order connected with the sexual question. Until women can attain not only a genuine independence in relation to men but also a new way of conceiving themselves and their role in sexual relations, the sexual question will remain full of unhealthy characteristics ...." (Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, ed. and trans., Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, 1971, p. 296. For details of his imprisonment, see pp. xciii-xciv. See also this 2023 article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.) 

I guess Rush Limbaugh would call him a feminazi. 

Gramsci was a communist. Mussolini was a fascist. These two men saw women in very different ways. Which view do you prefer?

The photograph of Clara Petacci is from Wikimedia Commons. 

See also As the Tide Goes Out; The Correct Strategy: Fight; The Face of Fascism; What Happened in Ferrara?