Hypocritically, he imposed severe punishment for adultery - harsher for women than for men. Closer to his heart, he made it an offence to infect anyone with syphilis. He was also against modern dancing, which he complained was "immoral and improper" and he tried to regulate Rome's decadent night life. The pope applauded, but complained that there were still nude shows in defiance of the law.
Il Duce was deeply devoted to his five children and the Italian press portrayed him as uomo casalingo - the perfect family man. But it was hard to hush up some of his not-so-homeloving activities and scandalous stories about his sexual activities leaked to the foreign press.
One of his early mistresses was a neurotic woman named Ida Dalser. They had lived
together on and off until 1915, when he abandoned her. She had a physically deformed and mentally retarded son, Benito
Albino, whom Mussolini acknowledged as his own although he had a horror of deformity and illness.
When Mussolini broke off the affair with her, she had to be confined to a mental hospital.
From as early as 1913, she began claiming that he had promised to marry her. Sometimes she changed her story and claimed that she had actually married him - and she was not going to be bought off with maintenance money for the child. When he was still a journalist on
Il
Popolo d'Italia
in Milan, she stood outside the offices with her son and shouted up to Mussolini to tome down if he dared. His response was simple and direct. He came to the window with a pistol.
Later, she set fire to a room in the Hotel Bristol in Trento, screaming hysterically that she was the wife of II Duce. She died in a mental hospital in Venice in 1935. Their son Benito was confined to an asylum in Milan, where he died in 1942.
* * *
Another woman who Mussolini said "loved me madly" was Margherita Sarfatti, the art critic of
Avanti!
She became the editor of the Fascist magazine
Gerarchia
, ghosted articles in American magazines for him and wrote his official biography, which ends with a description of "his eyes shining with an interior fire". The affair lasted into the 1930s. She was his official mistress, Clara Petacci's only serious rival, but she eventually fell foul of Mussolini's anti Jewish legislation.
In 1937, the French actress Fontanges, who was also a journalist under her real name Magda Coraboeuf, came to Rome to interview Mussolini for
La Liberte
. After the interview, she refused to return to Paris until he had made love to her. He did so, violently. The first time they had intercourse, he tried to strangle her with a scarf.
"I stayed in Rome for two months and Il Duce had me twenty times," she told the press.
Desperate to hush up the story, Mussolini made it clear to both the police and the French embassy that Mademoiselle Coraboeuf had outstayed her welcome. Magda reacted violently.
She tried to poison herself. When that failed, she shot and wounded the French ambassador, who she blamed for having lost her "the love of the world's most wonderful man". She was arrested and sentenced to a year's imprisonment for malicious wounding. In her flat, police found over three hundred photographs of Mussolini.
After the war, she was imprisoned again for having been an agent for the Axis powers.
She eventually succeeded in poisoning herself in Geneva in 1960.
Mussolini was not incapable of sustaining a long-term relationship, though. In 1932, he was being driven to Ostia in his official Alfa Romeo when, at the roadside, he saw a pretty young girl waving and shouting "Duce! Duce!" as he went by. Mussolini told his driver to stop. He got out and walked back to her.
When he spoke to her, she started trembling with excitement. Her name was Clara
Petacci. She was the wife of an Italian Air Force officer, whom she later divorced. Mussolini had him posted to Japan to get him out of the way.
Clara was twenty-four (Mussolini was fifty-three) . She had green eyes, long, straight legs and heavy breasts which Mussolini adored. Her voice was husky and her teeth were small, but she learned to smile with her lips only slightly parted. She was a hypochondriac, sentimental, rather stupid and utterly devoted to Il Duce. He felt the same about her, even taking time off from making the trains run on time to be at her bedside when she had her appendix removed after a near-fatal bout of peritonitis.
But when it came to sex, he was no more gentle and considerate with her than he had been with any of his other lovers. Mussolini gave her a flat at the Palazzo Venezia, where he would have sex with her between one meeting and the next. Perversely, the relationship worked. She stayed with him for the next thirteen years and, when escape was possible, she chose to die at his side in 1945.
She knew that he would not leave his wife and family for her, and she knew that he was not faithful to her. Nevertheless she would wait in her apartment, hour after hour, reading love stories, drawing designs for new clothes, painting her nails, or simply staring out of the window or into the mirror. Often he would not turn up until ten o'clock at night. Sometimes not at all, and she would curse the old countesses he was making love to on the black velvet sofa downstairs.
While she tolerated these little peccadilloes, she constantly worried about losing Mussolini's love. She fretted that he might go back to an old mistress or find a new one.
Angela Curti or Margherita Sarfatti were two names that constantly cropped up; and she heard that there was another woman called Irma who was trying to take him away from her.
Sometimes she would berate Mussolini about his other lovers. He would grow angry and insult her. She would cry, which would make him more angry still.
She asked Zita Ritossa, her brother's mistress, how she could keep Mussolini's love. Zita advised her not to make herself so readily available to him. Clara said she had already tried that, but it did not seem to bother him.
Indeed, by 1939, Mussolini was trying to get rid of her. He told Princess di Gangi of Sicily that he found Clara "revolting". In the spring of 1943, the police guarding the entrance of the Palazzo Venezia were given orders not to let Clara in. She pushed past them, only to find Mussolini cold and unforgiving.
"I consider the affair closed," he said. It was the kiss-off line he had used a hundred times before with other mistresses.
But Clara cried and he softened. He tried on several other occasions to dismiss her, but the outcome was always the same. The war was going badly, he would say, and his liaison with her made him look weak. It would not matter if he had hundreds of mistresses, but his devotion to just one had led to harmful gossip. One of his officers said that Clara was "doing Il Duce more harm than the loss of fifteen battles".
While Mussolini gave Clara practically nothing - a small present now and again, and occasionally 500 lire to buy a dress - the hard-pressed Italian tax-payer thought that Mussolini was using their money to keep his mistress in luxury, while they suffered the deprivations of war. In fact, it was Roman shopkeepers and businessmen who were keeping her in expensive clothes and perfumes in an attempt to ingratiate themselves with Il Duce.
"I won't come in the day any more," Clara begged. "Just after dark. For a few minutes, just to see you and to kiss you. I don't want to cause a scandal."
The real scandal, though, was her family. Before the war they had built a luxurious villa in the fashionable Camilluccia district. It had black marble bathrooms. Knowing which side their bread was buttered, they lavished special attention on Clara's bedroom. The walls were mirrored and the huge silk-covered bed was raised on a dais. But when Mussolini visited and was asked whether he liked the place, he replied: "Not much."
Clara's mother suggested that she ask Mussolini to pay for the villa, but Clara refused even to suggest it. However, everyone assumed that he had picked up the tab.
Even if they did not receive direct patronage from Il Duce, the Petacci family were clever enough to use their position to their advantage. Clara's brother Marcello, a naval doctor, for example, made a fortune smuggling gold through the diplomatic bag.
In July 1943, when the Allies landed in Sicily, Mussolini was voted out of office by the Fascist Grand Council. The next day he was arrested by order of King Victor Emmanuel III.
Clara was arrested too and imprisoned in the Visconti Castle at Novara. There she spent her time writing love letters to her beloved Benito - who she addressed as "Ben" - and filling her diaries with memories of the wonderful times she had had with him.
"I wonder if you'll get this letter of mine," she wrote, "or will they read it. I don't know and I don't care if they do. Because although I used to be too shy to tell you that I loved you, today I'm telling all the world and shouting it from the roof-tops. I love you more than ever."
The letters never reached him. They were intercepted by the censors
Mussolini was rescued by the Germans and set up a puppet state in Northern Italy. Clara, determined to rejoin him, persuaded the nuns who were looking after her to smuggle a letter out to the German headquarters in Novara. They sent a staff car to fetch her.
Although the Germans did not trust her, they thought they could use her. They found her a villa on Lake Garda where Mussolini could visit her every day. Her guard at the villa was the young and charming Major Franz Spogler, who reported directly to Gestapo headquarters in Vienna.
However, the Germans' plans fell a little flat because Rachele learned that Clara was around. Her jealous outbursts meant that Mussolini could see little of his mistress. But occasionally, in the evenings, he would leave his official Alfa Romeo outside his office to allay suspicion and drive over to see her in a small Fiat. Their meetings were cold and sad.
Twice he told her that he did not want to see her any more. On both occasions, she began to cry and, yet again, he relented.
Eventually Rachele could take no more and went to see Clara herself. Clara sat in silence while Rachele berated her. Then, when Rachele's ranting finished, Clara said quietly: "Il Duce loves you, Signora. I have never been allowed to say a word against you."
This placated Rachele for a moment. Then Clara offered to give her typed copies of the letters Mussolini had sent her.
"I don't want typed copies. That's not why I came," Rachele shouted and flew into a rage again. She hurled abuse at Clara. With her face growing redder and redder, Clara phoned Mussolini.
"Ben, your wife is here," she said. "What shall I do?"
Rachele grabbed the phone and forced Mussolini to tell Clara that he had known
beforehand that Rachele had been planning to come to see her. Rachele told Clara that the Fascists hated her almost as much as the partisans did.
Both women ended up crying. When Rachele eventually left, her parting curse was:
"They'll take you to the Piazzale Loreto"- Milan's haunt for down-and-out prostitutes. This is exactly what happened.
As the Allies fought their way up the Italian peninsula, Mussolini left Rachele to make a last stand at Valtellina. When they parted in the garden of their villa, he said he was ready to
"enter into the grand silence of death".
His advisers told him that he should fly to safety in Switzerland or Spain. A former mistress, Francesca Lavagnini, invited him to join her in Argentina, while (tiara suggested that they stage a car accident and announce that he had been killed.
Mussolini rejected all these proposals. Once he had made sure Rachele and his family were safe, he urged Clara to flee to Spain. The Petacci family went, but Clara herself refused to go.
"I am following my destiny," she wrote to a friend. "What will happen to me I don't know, but I cannot question my fate."
Together Mussolini and Clara fled north to Como. There, Elena Curti Cucciate, the pretty, fair-haired daughter of his former mistress Angela Curti, joined them. Mussolini went for a walk with her, which sent Clara into paroxysms of jealousy.
"What is that woman doing here?" she screamed hysterically. "You must get rid of her at once. You must! You must!"
He didn't. Instead, Elena and Mussolini travelled on in a German convoy, but Clara caught up with them when they were stopped by a partisan road block on the road to Switzerland. The partisans said that, to prevent unnecessary bloodshed, they would allow the Germans through - but not any Italian Fascists. Clara urged Mussolini to disguise himself as a German and make his escape. Then she burst into tears. He donned a German greatcoat and helmet and climbed on board a German lorry. As it pulled away, Clara ran after it and tried to clamber on, but one of Mussolini's ministers grabbed her. It took all his strength to pull her off the tailboard.
Someone, however, had spotted Mussolini at the road block. In the next town, the convoy was searched and he was found. The redoubtable Clara caught them up again, only to be arrested herself. At first, she pretended that she was not Clara Petacci but a Spaniard. She even asked the partisans what they would do to Clara Petacci if they caught her. But soon she confessed.
"You all hate me," she told her interrogators. "You think I went after him for his money and his power. It isn't true. My love has not been selfish. I have sacrificed myself for him."
She begged to be locked up in the same jail as him.
"If you kill him, kill me too," she said.
Orders were given to take Mussolini and Clara to Milan. When the two cars carrying them met up on the road, they were allowed a few moments to talk. Clara was absurdly formal.
"Good evening, Your Excellency," she said.
Mussolini was angry to see her.
"Signora, why are you here?" he demanded.
"Because I want to be with you," she replied.