Mussolini was a dictator both in life and in bed, and constantly demanded sex (11 photos)

On April 28, 1945, Italian partisans executed the leader of the Italian fascists, Benito Mussolini. The same fate befell his mistress, Clara Petacci. Clara was the last woman in Mussolini's life, but she couldn't be called "the one and only": Mussolini never suffered from a lack of female attention.





This story began as a romantic novel. On a beautiful spring day in April 1932, in Rome, the stunning 20-year-old heiress Claretta Petacci and her dashing army lieutenant fiancé set off in a chauffeur-driven limousine for a day at the beach. Between them, Claretta's nine-year-old sister, Miriam, laughed merrily in the backseat, keeping the young couple company.

The road to the coast was a marvel of engineering for its time: it had been built by order of the Italian dictator, Prime Minister Benito Mussolini. He was 49 years old and in the prime of his life: Italians adored him, calling him "Il Duce," and leaders around the world revered him. Winston Churchill called him "the Roman genius," and even Mahatma Gandhi praised him for his passionate love for his people.

That day, Il Duce also went for a drive along the sunny Via del Mare in a bright red Alfa Romeo (8°C). Near Ostia, Mussolini's car easily overtook the limousine, honking its horn as usual. The girl in the back seat smiled and waved. For a moment, Mussolini's gaze met hers—and he fell in love. The dictator braked and signaled the limousine to stop. Claretta immediately recognized Mussolini and jumped out.

"I need to greet him. I've been waiting for this for a long time," the young woman declared.



Claretta Petacci idolized Mussolini and was obsessed with him from the moment of the assassination attempt on him in 1926.

This fateful meeting and the passionate but doomed romance that developed between Claretta and her "Ben" are detailed in historian Richard Bosworth's new biography of Petacci.

Claretta had been head over heels in love with Mussolini for many years, ever since the assassination attempt in 1926, when the mad Irish aristocrat Violet Gibson fired a revolver at him. The bullet only grazed the bridge of his nose. Claretta was a 14-year-old schoolgirl at the time. She was shocked by the news and wrote an emotional letter to Mussolini: "Oh, Duce, why weren't I with you? Wouldn't I have strangled that murderous woman?" She wrote that she dreamed of laying her head on his chest, "to hear your great heart beat." "Duce, I live for you," she added. And so, her teenage fantasies were gradually becoming reality.

Of course, Claretta wasn't the only girl in love with Mussolini. Many women found him extremely attractive. In 1926, Winston Churchill's wife, Clementine, wrote to Duce that he was "extremely imposing: very majestic, with a charming smile and very beautiful golden-brown piercing eyes, which one can see but not look into. He gives one a kind of pleasant thrill."





Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler drive through the streets of Florence.

Despite this, Mussolini treated women horribly. He was born in 1883 in the town of Predappio near Forlì in northern Italy, the son of a blacksmith with socialist views. By adolescence, he had become a regular at the local brothel and later admitted repeatedly that to become aroused, he had to imagine the woman in his bed was a prostitute.

The only way he understood to have sex was rape, and his sexual appetite was terrifying. He needed up to four women a day, sometimes even a dozen casual mistresses on call. After he came to power in 1922, his subordinates had to sort through letters from admirers, many of whom were married, and select the most suitable candidates to invite to bed with the Duce. He received numerous such letters every day. A select few women were invited to Mussolini's office for brief, one-sided encounters. Sex with the dictator rarely lasted more than five minutes, and he was completely uninterested in his partner's pleasure.

Mussolini preferred women of lower birth. Powerful women humiliated him. When Princess Maria José of Belgium attempted to seduce him in a bathing cabin at an outdoor pool in Rome, dropping her dress to reveal very short shorts and two pieces of fabric covering her breasts, he admitted he experienced no sexual arousal.

Only women who resisted him aroused his strongest desire. In one letter, he described raping a young virgin:

"I grabbed her on the stairs, threw her into a corner behind the door, and made her mine. She rose in tears, humiliated, and through her tears, insulted me. She didn't sulk for long—for three months we loved each other, not with our minds, but with our bodies."



Claretta wasn't the only one who fell head over heels in love with the Italian dictator. Many women found him irresistible.

Claretta Petacci, from a respectable, well-connected Roman family, was a very different kind of candidate. A young woman who idolized Mussolini but wasn't ready to sleep with him at the first call. This was something new for the Duce. Mussolini was married to the mother of his five children, Rachele Guidi. He invited Claretta to his official residence, the Palazzo Venezia, through the back door. Her younger sister, Miriam, was again his companion. The dictator and Claretta discussed sports and poetry. Claretta told him she wanted to become a spy or a film actress.

Then he began calling her ten times a day. He summoned her mother, the formidable Giuseppina Petacci, known as her "godmother," to his office.

"Is your daughter pure? Keep her under surveillance... Those who enjoy the privilege of being close to Mussolini cannot have suitors," he told her.

The dictator asked Giuseppina's permission to become Claretta's lover. She agreed, adding that the very thought of her daughter being with such a man was very comforting.



Claretta Petacci came from a well-connected Roman family. A woman who idolized him but was not available for sex at the drop of a hat—that was something new for Mussolini.

Giuseppina became Mussolini's accomplice, inviting him to spend the night at the family's 32-room Art Nouveau mansion in the suburbs north of Rome, right in her daughter's pink-decorated bedroom. Even the telephone was pink, matching her favorite silk negligees. The girl's mother hung mirrors on the walls and ceiling so that Duce would enjoy sex with her daughter even more. Claretta, in the eyes of Roman society, was an unmarried virgin, so her "friendship" with a married man was kept secret due to the potential scandal.

Precisely to please Mussolini, Claretta married her fiancé, Lieutenant Federici, in 1934. After a honeymoon in Venice, she returned to Rome, into the arms of her lover. They made love with animal passion. Once, Mussolini sank his teeth into her shoulder, leaving deep marks, and another time, he tore her ear apart with his bite.

"I'm losing control. I want to spank you, hurt you, be cruel to you. Why does my love manifest itself with such cruelty, with such a desire to crush and destroy? "I am a wild animal," Mussolini wrote.

Claretta responded tenderly:

"My great, great love, you were so beautiful this evening. You were as aggressive as a lion, cruel and domineering."



The dictator's wife, Donna Rachele Mussolini, in 1924.

What Mussolini's fiery but patient wife, Rachele, knew about this affair is unknown. In 1910, she gave birth to a daughter, Edda, out of wedlock. Four years later, he abandoned her and married a beautician, Ida Dalser, who was three years his senior. The following year, she and Mussolini had a son, but the marriage fell apart, and Ida threatened to ruin Benito's ambitious political career by revealing his financial fraud. Mussolini had Ida declared insane and committed to a mental hospital, where she remained until her death twenty years later. Their young son, Benito, was also under police surveillance.

After annulling his marriage to Ida, Mussolini returned to Rachele and married her in December 1915. She was well aware of her husband's thirst for brutal, violent sex with crowds of women. He showed her mountains of letters from women begging for dates with him, and Rachele merely laughed. But Claretta was not to be dismissed so easily.



Mussolini was averse to affection; he equated sex with rape.

At the end of 1939, Mussolini sent Claretta's husband to Tokyo as an air attaché. His mistress was now entirely his own, but he was haunted by thoughts of her sleeping with other men. When he suspected her of an intimate relationship with a family friend, he flew into a rage and threatened to slit her throat or commit her to an insane asylum. Meanwhile, nothing prevented the Duce from having other mistresses, including the Frenchwoman Magda Fontagne, an eccentric journalist who wore a silver fox fur coat with antelope leather shoes.

Claretta loved hearing details of his sexual relationships with other women. Mussolini told Claretta that the false princess, whose real name was Madeleine Corabef, was one of those terrible women who spread rumors of a man's homosexuality or impotence if he refused her. According to Benito, he had no choice but to rape her. Twice. Mussolini also told Claretta that this had discouraged him from having sex with foreign women. Meanwhile, the "princess" published a description of their encounter in the French newspaper Le Matin, noting that Mussolini was in such a hurry to remove her underwear that he tore it, and that the intercourse was so quick that she didn't even realize it was over. The report caused such a scandal that she was fired from the editorial board.



King of Italy Victor Emmanuel III (right), Adolf Hitler (center), and Benito Mussolini (left) watch a military parade in Rome in 1941. Still from a television newsreel.

Europe teetered on the brink of war, and sex ceased to be the driving force in Il Duce's life. The rise of the Third Reich led to a change in his relationship with Hitler. Mussolini had once been the all-powerful supreme ruler of the state. In 1934, war between Italy and Germany was narrowly avoided when Hitler ignored Mussolini's wishes and attempted to annex Austria (a goal he achieved in 1938). Now Mussolini was only concerned with pleasing the German Führer.

The Italian dictator began persecuting local Jews. In June 1940, when France was about to surrender, Italy entered World War II on the side of Nazi Germany. Only with the entry of the United States into the war in 1941 did Il Duce's situation begin to deteriorate. Italy was starving due to the Allied blockade, and Italian troops, outnumbering those of Britain and the Commonwealth in North Africa, were pushed back.

When Allied forces launched their European offensive through Sicily in July 1943, Mussolini held a conference with King Victor Emmanuel of Italy, whom he met with every two weeks. "My dear Duce, this is no longer good. Italy is torn to pieces. You are the most hated man in Italy," the king told him.

The next day, Mussolini was overthrown and placed under house arrest with armed guards. And in September, his flirtation with Hitler bore fruit: a specially assigned Waffen SS unit was sent to Italy to rescue Mussolini. He greeted them with tears in his eyes: "I knew that my friend Adolf would not abandon me."



Benito Mussolini delivers a speech to a crowd in 1911.

Hitler installed Mussolini as a puppet leader of northern Italy, which was under German occupation. Benito brought his mistress back from Rome, but in April 1945, the Allies launched another offensive, and Mussolini and Claretta decided to flee to neutral Switzerland. Near Lake Como, Italian partisans stopped a truck in which Mussolini, disguised in a Luftwaffe uniform and carrying a suitcase of cash, was hiding under a pile of blankets. They found a terrified Claretta in the next truck.



Claretta Petacci's grave in the Verano cemetery in Rome.

The lovers were taken to the commune of Mezzegra, where on April 27, 1945, two days before Hitler's suicide, they were sentenced to death. As the partisan commander cocked his rifle, the faithful Claretta wrapped her arms around her lover and cried out, "No! He must not die!" The first bullet killed her instantly. The rifle jammed, and the second bullet only wounded Mussolini. He tore his shirt and demanded that his captors finish the job. They shot him in the chest.



The bodies of Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, hung by the feet in Milan on April 29, 1945, after they were executed by Italian partisans.

The bodies were taken to a gas station in Piazza Loreto in Milan, where they were hung by the feet and beaten. When Claretta was shot, she was wearing no underwear, and to maintain her appearance, an elderly woman in the crowd tied her skirt between her legs before her body was hung by the feet next to her lover's.