Mussolini was a dictator both in life and in bed and constantly demanded sex

On April 28, 1945, Italian partisans shot the leader of the Italian fascists, Benito Mussolini. The same fate befell his mistress, Clara Petacci. Clara was the last woman in the life of the Duce, but" the one and only "it can not be called: Mussolini never suffered from a lack of ladies' 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 brilliant fiance, an army lieutenant, went in a chauffeured limousine to spend the day on the beach. In the back seat between them, Clarette's nine-year-old sister Miriam, who had been keeping the young couple company, was laughing merrily.

The road to the coast was a marvel of engineering at the time: it was built on the orders of the Italian dictator — Prime Minister Benito Mussolini. He was 49 years old and in the prime of life: the Italians adored him and called him "Il Duce", and the leaders of countries around the world treated him with respect. Winston Churchill called him a "Roman genius", and even Mahatma Gandhi praised him for his passionate love for his people.

That day, Il Duce also went for a walk on the sunny Via del Mare in a bright red Alfa Romeo 8C. 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 met her gaze — and fell in love. The dictator braked and signaled the limousine to stop. Claretta immediately recognized Mussolini and jumped out of the car.

Claretta Petacci idolized Mussolini and had been crazy about him since the assassination attempt in 1926.

This fateful encounter, and the passionate but doomed romance that ensued between Claretta and her "Ben," are detailed in a new biography of Petacci, written by the historian Richard Bosworth.

Claretta had been head over heels in love with Mussolini for years, ever since the assassination attempt in 1926, when the mad Irish aristocrat Violet Gibson shot him with a revolver. The bullet only grazed the bridge of his nose. Clarette was then a 14-year-old schoolgirl. She was shocked by the news and wrote an emotional letter to Mussolini: "Oh, Duce, why wasn't I with you? Wouldn't I have strangled this murderous woman?» She wrote that she wanted to put her head on his chest, "to hear your great heart beating." "Duce, I live for you," she added. And so her teenage fantasies gradually became 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 the Duce that he was " extremely personable: very stately, with a charming smile and very beautiful golden-brown piercing eyes that you can see, but you can't look into. It gives you a kind of pleasant excitement."

Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler ride in a car through the streets of Florence.

Despite this, Mussolini's treatment of women was appalling. He was born in 1883 in the town of Predappio near Forli in northern Italy in the family of a blacksmith of socialist views. By adolescence, he had become a regular visitor to a local brothel and later repeatedly admitted that to get aroused, he needed to imagine that the woman in his bed was a prostitute.

The only way to have sex that he understood was rape, and his sexual appetite was terrifying. He needed up to four women a day, and sometimes up to a dozen random mistresses on call. After he came to power in 1922, his subordinates had to sort through letters from suitors, among whom there were many married women, and choose the most suitable candidates for an invitation to bed with the Duce. He received many such letters every day. A select few women were invited to Mussolini's office for a brief and one-sided rendezvous. Sex with a dictator rarely lasted more than five minutes, and he was not at all interested in the pleasure of his partner.

Mussolini preferred women of lower birth. Powerful women humiliated him. When Princess Maria Jose of Belgium tried to seduce him in the bathing cabin of an outdoor pool in Rome, throwing off her dress to reveal very short shorts and two pieces of fabric covering her breasts, he admitted that he did not experience any sexual arousal.

Only the women who resisted him aroused the strongest desire in him. In one of the letters, he talked about how he raped a young virgin: 

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

Claretta Petacci, from a well-connected Roman family, was a very different sort of candidate. A young woman who idolized Mussolini, but was not ready to go to bed with him at the first call. This was something new for the Duce. Mussolini was married to the mother of his five children, Raquela Guidi. He invited Claretta to his official residence, the Palazzo Venezia, through the back door. Her younger sister, Miriam, was once again a companion. The dictator and Clarette talked about sports and poetry. Clarette told him that she wanted to be a spy or a movie actress.

Then he started calling her on the phone ten times a day. He summoned her mother, the formidable Giuseppina Petacci, who was called the "godmother", to his office. 

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

Claretta Petacci was from a well-connected Roman family. A woman who worshipped him, but was not available for sex at the first call — this was something new for Mussolini.

Giuseppina became Mussolini's accomplice, inviting him to spend the night in the family's 32-room Art Nouveau mansion, located in a suburb north of Rome, right in her daughter's pink-decorated bedroom. Even the telephone was pink to match her favorite silk negligees. The girl's mother placed mirrors on the walls and ceiling so that the Duce would get even more pleasure from having sex with her daughter. Clarette was an unmarried virgin in the eyes of Roman society, so her "friendship" with a married man was not subject to publicity because of a possible scandal.

It was to please Mussolini that Claretta married her fiance, Lieutenant Federici, in 1934. After a honeymoon in Venice, she returned to Rome, to the arms of her lover. They made love with an animal passion. Once Mussolini sank his teeth into her shoulder, leaving deep marks, and another time tore her ear, biting. 

Clarette answered gently: 

Wife of the dictator Donna Raquel Mussolini in 1924.

What Mussolini's quick-tempered but patient wife, Raquel, knew about this novel is unknown. In 1910, she gave birth to a daughter, Edda, out of wedlock. Four years later, he left her and married the beautician Ida Dalzer, who was three years older than him. The following year, he and Mussolini had a son, but the marriage broke down, and Ida threatened to ruin Benito's ambitious political career by revealing his financial machinations. Mussolini arranged for Ida to be declared insane and imprisoned in a mental institution, 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 Raquel and married her in December 1915. She was well aware of her husband's desire for violent and brutal sex with crowds of different women. He showed her the mountains of letters from women begging for a date with him, and Raquel just laughed. But Clarette was not to be dismissed so easily.

Mussolini was a stranger to affection, he identified sex with rape.

At the end of 1939, Mussolini sent Claretta's husband to Tokyo as an air attache. His mistress was completely his now, but he was haunted by the thought of her sleeping with other men. When he suspected her of being too close to a family friend, he flew into a rage and threatened to cut her throat or send her to an insane asylum. At the same time, the Duce was not prevented from having other mistresses, including the Frenchwoman Magda Fontanier, an extravagant journalist who wore a black fox fur coat with antelope leather shoes.

Clarette loved to hear the details of his sexual relationships with other women. Mussolini had told Claretta that the fake princess, whose real name was Madeleine Corabeuf — was one of those terrible women who spread rumors about 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 it discouraged him from having sex with foreign women. Meanwhile, the "princess" published a description of their date in the French newspaper Le Matin, noting that Mussolini was in such a hurry to remove her underwear that he tore it, and the sexual act was so fast that she did not even know when it ended. The report caused such a scandal that she was fired from the editorial office.

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

Europe was teetering on the brink of war, and sex was no longer the driving force in the Duce's life. The rise of the Third Reich led to a change in relations with Hitler. Mussolini was once the all-powerful supreme ruler of the state. In 1934, a 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). All Mussolini could think of now was how to please the German Fuhrer.

The Italian dictator began to persecute the local Jews. In June 1940, when France almost surrendered, Italy entered World War II on the side of Nazi Germany. It was only with the entry of the United States into the war in 1941 that the Duce's position began to deteriorate. There was famine in Italy due to the Allied blockade, and the Italian forces, which outnumbered the British and Commonwealth forces in North Africa, were pushed back.

When the Allied forces launched an offensive in Europe via Sicily in July 1943, Mussolini held a biweekly meeting with King Victor Emmanuel of Italy. "My dear Duce, this is not good at all. Italy is torn to pieces. You are the most hated man in Italy, " the king told him.

The next day, Mussolini was deposed and placed under house arrest with armed guards. And in September, his flirtation with Hitler paid off: a specially designated Waffen SS unit was sent to Italy to rescue Mussolini. He met them with tears in his eyes: "I knew my friend Adolf wouldn't leave me."

Benito Mussolini delivers a speech to a crowd in 1911.

Hitler installed Mussolini as the puppet head of Northern Italy, which was under German occupation. Benito brought his mistress from Rome, but in April 1945, the Allies launched another offensive, and Mussolini and Claretta decided to escape to neutral Switzerland. At 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 mountain of blankets. In the next truck, they found a terrified Clarette.

The grave of Claretta Petacci in the Verano Cemetery in Rome.

The lovers were taken to the commune of Medzegra, where they were sentenced to death on April 27, 1945, two days before Hitler's suicide. As the partisan commander cocked his rifle, the faithful Clarette threw her arms around her lover and cried, " No! He must not die!» The first bullet killed her instantly. The gun jammed, and the second bullet only wounded Mussolini. He tore open 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 their legs in Milan on April 29, 1945 after they were executed by Italian partisans

The bodies were taken to a gas station in Milan's Piazza Loreto, where they were hung by their legs and beaten. When Clarette was shot, she was not wearing any underwear, and to preserve decency, an elderly woman in the crowd tied her skirt between her legs before her corpse was hung by the legs next to the body of her lover.