Mussolini the insatiable: He was a violent lover who demanded sex constantly and only truly cared for one woman... the beautiful heiress doomed to die alongside him 

• e-mail

The story begins like a romantic novel. On a glorious spring day in Rome in April 1932, stunning 20-year-old heiress Claretta Petacci and her dashing fiance, an army lieutenant, took off in their chaffeured limousine for a day at the beach.

Giggling excitedly between them on the back seat of the Lancia was Claretta’s nine-year-old sister, Myriam, there as chaperone.

The road to the coast was a marvel of modern engineering, a motorway built at the command of Italy’s fascist dictator — prime minister Benito Mussolini. At 49, he was at the height of his powers, adored by Italians who knew him as Il Duce and feted by leaders around the world. Winston Churchill called him the ‘Roman genius’, and even Mahatma Gandhi praised his ‘passionate love for his people’.

Claretta Petacci idolised Il Duce, and was besotted with him ever since a 1926 assassination attempt

Mussolini, pictured with Hitler, claimed that to be aroused he had to imagine that the woman sharing his bed was a prostitute

That same day, Il Duce was also taking a spin in the sunshine along the Via del Mare in his bright red Alfa Romeo 8C, with its long running boards and rear fin like the crest of a Roman god’s helmet. Near Ostia, Mussolini’s car recklessly overtook the limousine, blasting his horn as he did.

The young woman in the back smiled and waved. For a fleeting moment Mussolini looked into her eyes — and was smitten.

Pulling over, he signalled for the Lancia to stop. Claretta recognised Mussolini at once and scrambled out of the car. ‘I’m going to pay homage to him,’ she declared. ‘I’ve been waiting for such a long time.’

That fateful first encounter and the passionate, but doomed affair that followed between Claretta and her ‘Ben’ is detailed in a riveting new biography of Petacci by historian Richard Bosworth.

Claretta had been besotted with Mussolini for years, ever since a 1926 assassination attempt when the insane Irish aristocrat Violet Gibson took a potshot at him with a revolver. The bullet just nicked the bridge of his nose.

Then a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Claretta had been aghast at the news and penned a gushing letter to him: ‘O, Duce, why was I not with you? Could I not have strangled that murderous woman?’

She told him she dreamed of putting her ‘head on your chest so I could still hear the beats of your great heart. Duce, my life is for you’. Now her teenage fantasies were about to be realised.

Claretta was far from the first to be infatuated. Many women found Mussolini irresistible

Claretta Petacci, from a well- connected Roman family, was a very different proposition. A young woman who worshipped him, but who was not immediately available for sex, was a novel experience

The bodies of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and mistress Clara Petacci, hang by their heels in Milan, Italy, April 29, 1945, after they were executed near the city by Italian partisans

Claretta was far from the first to be infatuated. Many women found Mussolini irresistible.

In 1926, Churchill’s wife Clementine wrote to her husband saying Il Duce was ‘most impressive: very dignified, with a charming smile and the most beautiful golden brown, piercing eyes, which you can see but can’t look at. He fills you with a sort of pleasurable awe’.

And yet his treatment of women was appalling. Born in 1883, in the northern Italian town of Predappio in Forli, Mussolini was the son of a socialist blacksmith.

By his teens, he was a regular at the town brothel, and throughout his life claimed that to be aroused he had to imagine that the woman sharing his bed was a prostitute.

The only love-making he understood was tantamount to rape, and his sexual appetite was vast

The only love-making he understood was tantamount to rape, and his sexual appetite was vast. He needed up to four women a day and at times had more than a dozen casual mistresses on call.

After he came to power in 1922, his staff were under orders to sift through letters from female admirers — mostly married women — and select the likeliest candidates for sex. He received numerous such propositions by post every day.

The chosen few would be invited to Mussolini’s office and sent through for a brief, one-sided encounter. Sex with Il Duce rarely lasted more than five minutes and he had no interest in his partner’s pleasure.

His preference was for women of the lower order. Indeed, powerful women intimidated him.

When the Italian king’s daughter, Princess Maria Jose, attempted to seduce him in a bathing hut at the lido in Rome, dropping her dress to reveal ‘the briefest panties and two scraps of clothing on her breasts’, he admitted that he ‘failed to rise to the occasion’.

It was the women who resisted him who aroused his most aggressive desire. In a letter he described raping a young virgin: ‘I grabbed her on the stairs, threw her into a corner behind a door and made her mine. She got up weeping and humiliated, and through her tears she insulted me.

‘She wasn’t in a sulk with me for long — for three months we loved each other, not with the mind, but with the flesh.’

Claretta Petacci, from a well- connected Roman family, was a very different proposition. A young woman who worshipped him, but who was not immediately available for sex, was a novel experience.

Mussolini, who was married to the mother of his five children, Rachele Guidi, invited Claretta to visit him at his official residence, the Palazzo Venezia, using a back staircase.

Her little sister, Myriam, was again deployed as chaperone, and their conversation was about sports and poetry. Claretta told him she wanted to be a spy or a movie star.

He then began to phone her up to a dozen times a day. He summoned her mother, formidable Giuseppina Petacci, who was known as Il Madro or ‘the Godmother’, to his office.

He demanded: ‘Is your daughter pure? Keep her under surveillance . . . Whoever has the privilege of being close to Mussolini cannot have boyfriends.’

Eventually, he sought Giuseppina’s permission to be Claretta’s lover. ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘The idea that she will be near a man like you is very comforting to me.’

Giuseppina was complicit in the affair, inviting Mussolini to spend nights at the family’s 32-room modernist mansion in the northern suburbs of Rome, in her daughter’s bedroom decorated in pink — even the telephone — to match her favourite silk negligees.

She arranged for huge mirrors to be fixed to the walls and ceilings for the further sexual pleasure of Il Duce as he made love to her daughter.

But as long as Claretta was, in the eyes of Roman society at least, an unmarried virgin, her ‘friendship’ with a married man could not be publicly acknowledged because of the potential scandal.

So it was as much to please Mussolini as for any other reason that Claretta married her fiance, Lt Federici, in 1934.

After a honeymoon in Venice, she returned to Rome to her lover’s arms. They had sex with bestial urgency. On one occasion he sank his teeth into her shoulder, leaving deep marks, and on another he tore her ear by biting it.

‘I lose control,’ he told her. ‘I want to thrash you, harm you, be brutal with you.

‘Why does my love express itself with such violence, a need to crush and break? I’m a wild animal.’

Claretta responded with flattery. ‘My great big love, you were so beautiful this evening. You were as aggressive as a lion, violent and masterful,’ she wrote.

What Mussolini’s fiery, but long-suffering wife Rachele made of the affair is not known. In 1910, she had given birth to his daughter, Edda, out of wedlock. Four years later, he abandoned her to wed beautician Ida Dalser, who was three years older than him.

They had a son the following year, but the marriage disintegrated, and Ida threatened to wreck her ambitious husband’s burgeoning political hopes by exposing his financial dealings.

Mussolini reacted by having Ida declared insane and held in an asylum until her death more than 20 years later. Their baby son Benito was also locked away.

Declaring that marriage null, Mussolini returned to Rachele and married her in December 1915.

She was only too aware of her husband’s need for rough, unceremonious sex with scores of women. He’d show her sheaves of letters from women begging to meet him, and she laughed at them.

But Claretta was not so easy to dismiss.

In late 1939, Mussolini sent Claretta’s husband to Tokyo to be the Italian air attache. Now he had his lover to himself, yet he was plagued by the thought of her with other men.

When he suspected her of becoming too close to a family friend, he flew into a rage and threatened to cut her throat — ‘I will slaughter you like an ox’ — or have her sent to an asylum.

Il Duce, of course, considered himself free to take other lovers, including a French journalist, Countess Magda Fontanges, who wore silver fox furs and antelope skin shoes.

Claretta loved to hear details of his sexual encounters with other women. He explained to her that the fake countess — real name Madeleine Coraboeuf — ‘was one of those awful corrupt women’ who spread rumours that any man who refused their advances was homosexual or impotent.

He had no choice, he said, but to ravage her. Twice. It had, he told Claretta, put him off sex with foreigners.

Meanwhile, the ‘Countess’ published a description of their encounter in French newspaper, Le Matin, claiming Mussolini had been in such a hurry to remove her undergarments he ripped them, and the sex act was over so quickly she didn’t realise it was done. The report caused such a stir that the editor sacked her.

As Europe hovered on the precipice of war, sex was no longer the driving force in Il Duce’s life.

The rise of the Third Reich had seen his relationship with Hitler change. Once, Mussolini had been the all-powerful senior statesman. In 1934, war between the two countries had been narrowly averted after Hitler had disobeyed Il Duce’s wishes and attempted to annex Austria (a feat he achieved in 1938). Now, it was the Fuhrer whom Mussolini was desperate to please.

So, he began persecuting Italian Jews. In June 1940, with France about to fall, Italy entered the war on the side of the Nazis.

It was after America’s entry into the war in 1941 that Il Duce’s fortunes began to deteriorate.

Italy was starved by an Allied blockade and its troops, which had outnumbered British and Commonwealth forces in North Africa, were driven out. As Allied troops began the invasion of Europe via Sicily in July 1943, Mussolini had his regular fortnightly meeting with the Italian king, Victor Emmanuel.

‘My dear Duce, it’s no longer any good,’ the monarch told him. ‘Italy has gone to bits. You are the most hated man in Italy.’

The next day Mussolini was deposed and placed under house arrest under armed guard until, that September, his courting of Hitler paid off.

A specially dispatched cadre of the Waffen SS was sent to rescue him. He welcomed them tearfully with the words: ‘I knew my friend Adolf wouldn’t desert me.’ 

King Victor Emanuel III (right) Adolf Hitler (centre) and Benito Mussolini (left) watch fascist troops march past from a balcony in central Rome in 1941 television file footage

Hitler installed him as the puppet head of German-held north Italy.

He brought his mistress from Rome, but in April 1945, as the Allies advanced, Mussolini and Claretta decided to flee to neutral Switzerland.

Near Lake Como, Italian partisans stopped the truck in which Mussolini, disguised in a Luftwaffe uniform and clutching a suitcase of cash, was hidden under a pile of blankets.

In the next truck, they found a terrified Claretta.

The pair were driven to the village of Mezzegra where, on April 27, 1945 — two days before Hitler committed suicide — the death sentence was quickly pronounced on them both.

As the chief partisan raised his rifle, Claretta, devoted to the end, threw her arms around her lover and screamed: ‘No! He mustn’t die!’

The first bullet killed her instantly. The rifle jammed and then the second shot only wounded Mussolini. He ripped open his shirt and begged his captors to finish the job. They shot him in the chest.

The bodies were transported to the Piazzale Loreto in Milan, to be beaten and strung up by their ankles from a rusty rail at an Esso petrol filling station.

Claretta was not wearing underwear when she died. To preserve her decency, some of the older women in the crowd knotted her skirt between her legs before she was suspended like a slab of meat, next to the body of her lover.

CLARETTA: Mussolini’s Last Lover by R. J .B. Bosworth (Yale University Press, £18.99).