by Silviu “Silview” Costinescu

The Jewish Mother of Fascism

Haaretz, Jul 6, 2006

Margherita Sarfatti was known in Italy as Benito Mussolini’s mistress, but she was much more than that. She was his ideological companion, planned the ‘March on Rome’ with him, wrote articles in his name, edited the Fascist Party organ and wrote his first official biography.

ROME – Everyone in Italy wanted to forget the “Duce’s other woman”: the Fascists, because she was Jewish; their opponents, because she was Fascist; and the family, because she became an embarrassing historical burden. As a result, Margherita Sarfatti’s story slipped out of the public awareness, and along with it her central role in Italian fascism and the Duce’s life.

Today, more than 60 years after the Fascist dictator was executed, Sarfatti’s descendants prefer to view her as an intellectual and a patron of the arts, who worked to distanced Italy from the Nazi danger and was forced to flee to Argentina when Benito Mussolini implemented the race laws. They did not hear from her about the 20 years in which she shared Mussolini’s doctrine and bed. Or about the 1,272 letters he wrote her in those years, and which disappeared. No, they are not in her private archive at her home at 18 Via Dei Villini in Rome. At least, that is what her granddaughter, Ippolita Gaetani, who is in charge of the archive, told Haaretz in an exclusive interview. An American cousin, who is also named Margherita Sarfatti, is convinced the letters are in the hands of the Rome cousin.

Many visitors have recently called at the luxurious building in Rome – journalists, researchers, writers (“Italian Night,” by Nicole Fabre, a novel in which Sarfatti is a leading character, was recently published in France). It is a lavish patrician building in ocher, which is a three-minute walk from Villa Torlonia, the Duce’s official residence – three minutes from the villa’s back entrance, it should be noted. “The villa is being renovated,” says a smiling young woman who is working in the courtyard, “but you can visit. Go around to the other side, it’s worth it.”

At the home on the Via Dei Villini in Rome, a gilded bell, a vast black gate, a double wooden door, an elevator in an ornate metal cage, a broad marble staircase. The door is opened by Ippolita Gaetani, a spare, blue-eyed woman of 66, who has a determined, no-nonsense manner. The apartment is spacious, sun-washed, and furnished with classical restraint. The documents and photographs of Grandmother Margherita are housed in one room, in the center of which is the “Holy of Holies”: Sarfatti’s desk. On the wall is a famous portrait of Sarfatti with her daughter Fiammetta, painted by Achille Funi. Next to it are shelves laden with her notebooks and diaries, and a chest with 12 huge drawers.

Before the interview gets under way, the hostess receives a phone call. “I am being interviewed for an Israeli paper,” she apologizes, and adds, “No, no, the ‘good’ paper.” Ippolita Gaetani and her two sisters, Sancia and Margherita, are identified with the Italian left and are quite active on behalf of the Palestinian cause.

Ippolita was 21 when her grandmother died, in 1961, at the age of 81, but never asked her about her past, about her affair with Mussolini or her role in the Fascist movement. And Sarfatti, she says, never volunteered information on the subject. She talked about art, recited Dante, Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe and did crosswords in Figaro Litteraire. “After the war there was a deep collective repression, people tried to forget, did not boast about it. There was a kind of self-censorship. People are only now starting to talk about that period, and also about my grandmother,” Gaetani says.

When did you learn about your grandmother’s part in Mussolini’s life and in the Fascist movement in Italy?

“Very late, at the age of 17, 18, and from friends. It was not talked about at home. There was repression in Italy. Everything was imputed to the Germans, all the evils, the race laws, the persecutions. In my home, too, everything was imputed to the Germans. When I grew up and started to read, I understood that f ascism and Nazism are interchangeable. My mother did not think so – she continued to say that fascism was all right until it cozied up to Hitler.

“In my opinion, if the blacks and not the Jews had been persecuted then, many Jews would still be fascists … In fact, it is the same today. Many Jews in Italy are fascists, because fascism is far closer to today’s Israel; they are persecuting the Arabs. If you go to the Rome Ghetto today, you will see that part of the Rome Jewish community is truly fascist, fascist in its mentality, in the head. And the situation in the Middle East complicates matters. They accuse everyone who speaks out against Israel of being anti-Semitic. And in Italian politics they are far closer to the right than to the left.”

Encounter with history

Her mother, Fiammetta, converted to Christianity in 1930 and remained in Italy with her family even after Margherita and her son, Amedeo, went into exile to Argentina following the implementation of the race laws. But Sarfatti feared for the well-being of her daughter and her grandchildren, and after Rome was conquered by the Nazis she made long-distance use of the few connections she still retained from her days of glory in order to ensure that no harm would befall them. Thus Fiammetta found asylum in a hospital, disguised as a nurse; her husband, Livio, who was not Jewish, went into the underground; and their children were sent to Catholic convents. Margherita’s older sister, Nella Errera, did not fare so well. She and her husband, Paolo, who officially denied their Jewishness, were arrested in 1944 by the S.S. and sent to the camp at Fossoli and from there to Auschwitz. They died on the way to the extermination camp.

Did your grandmother talk about the past or feel responsibility for her sister’s death?

“Not with me, not with us, that was taboo at home. She may have had qualms of conscience, but either you commit suicide or you decide to live. People lived with worse things on their conscience. She was actually involved with art – it is not that she harmed or informed on anyone. On the contrary, some historians say that as long as she was by his side, Mussolini did fewer horrible things. She herself did not do anything bad to anyone. That her man was scum – of that there is no doubt.”

The dramatic story of Margherita Sarfatti’s life begins with a tranquil, happy childhood in the ghetto of Venice, where she was born on April 8, 1880, the youngest child of an affluent religious Jewish family, the Grassinis (the father of the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg was her cousin). The lovely girl with red hair and green eyes and insatiable curiosity was raised in a protected setting and surrounded by love, especially on the part of her grandmother, Dolcetta Levi Nahmias, a “woman of valor,” in the Jewish term, from whom she learned to live in the present and not get caught up in the past.

“Oh, God,” she would mumble every night in a prayer she made up, “make me learn how to be happy and learn how to be grateful for all the good things you have given me.” To be happy, at any price: that was the motto that propelled her throughout her life. At the age of 18, despite her parents’ objections, she married Cesare Sarfatti, a Jewish lawyer and socialist, who was 14 years her senior. The Sarfattis had three children: Roberto, Amedeo and Fiammetta.

However, she found life in Venice too confining, and her husband was also eager for a change. The couple moved to the nerve center of Italy – Milan. There Margherita began to carve herself a place in the intellectual elite and to become active in fields which until then had been male prerogatives: journalism and art. To that end, she opened her salon every Wednesday to the city’s Who’s Who and gained the reputation of an impeccable hostess: beautiful, witty and vivacious. Her home became the center of the artistic avant-garde, the melting pot of Futurism, and later of the Novecento Italiano movement. The leading artists, writers and politicians were regulars in her home.

“A kind of acute sense of smell impelled me toward gifted people,” she wrote in her memoirs, which are really a collection of episodes about her meetings with preeminent world figures, including the inventor Guglielmo Marconi, Pope Pius X, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Albert Einstein and many others. Israel Zangwill, whom she calls the “Jewish Dickens,” and Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the Zionist Revisionist leader, were also among her acquaintances.

“She was an educated woman, very attentive to the cultural fashions, a manipulative woman, ambitious and uninhibited, with a singular talent for self-promotion (a talent she showed also after her son died in World War I, appropriating his death as another means of self- promotion),” says the historian Dr. Simona Urso, from the University of Padua, who has written a biography of Sarfatti.

The dramatic pivot of her life – the encounter with history – occurred in 1912, when a young, uncouth and unknown journalist named Benito Mussolini was appointed editor of the socialist journal Avanti, for which Sarfatti wrote art criticism. At 29, he was three years younger than Sarfatti, an ardent socialist from the provinces, a charismatic womanizer with a gift for holding his listeners in thrall with his talk. Sarfatti spotted a “glint of fanaticism” in his eyes and was immediately drawn to the power he projected.

Benito Mussolini was the son of communist Alessandro Mussolini. Benito himself became one of the chief agitators and propagandists for the international communists

Mussolini’s Jewish Lover Who Crafted Italian Fascism

Haaretz, Nov 23, 2014

Margherita Sarfatti wasn’t just the dictator’s most erudite paramour; she was his secret adviser and ideologue. The English version of her memoirs is finally out.

On November 14, 1938, shortly after the Italian Racial Laws were passed, Margherita Sarfatti slipped out of her home near Lake Como, got into her car and asked her chauffeur to drive her to the nearby Swiss border.

Among the few belongings the Jewish socialite and art critic had stuck in her two suitcases were 1,272 letters she had received from Benito Mussolini over their 20-year romantic and ideological relationship — a sort of insurance policy. Sarfatti, 58 at the time, would return to Italy only in 1947 after living in exile in France, Argentina and Uruguay.

In addition to art essays she wrote for local newspapers during her exile, Sarfatti published in 1945, shortly after Mussolini’s death, a series of articles in the Argentine paper Crítica in which she revealed details about her relationship with Il Duce. Scholars believe she waited until he no longer had the chance to harm the family members she had left behind in Rome.

Today, 70 years later, these articles have been published in the English-language book “My Fault: Mussolini As I Knew Him.” Dubbed by Enigma as “the unpublished memoir of Mussolini’s longtime lover,” the book’s 18 chapters come edited and annotated by historian Brian R. Sullivan, whose commentary is informed by three decades of research in Italy, France, Switzerland, Britain and the United States.

Just as the story of the long, intimate relationship between Sarfatti and Mussolini lay forgotten in archives for years until Philip V. Cannistraro and Sullivan published their 1993 work “Il Duce’s Other Woman,” Sarfatti’s memoirs remained abandoned in the shadows of history for decades.

Indeed, Sarfatti wasn’t just one of Mussolini’s hundreds of lovers. The aristocratic, intellectual and ambitious wife of wealthy Zionist lawyer Cesare Sarfatti, and mother of their three children, did not only share her bed with Il Duce. She also helped him forge and implement the fascist idea; she contributed advice — and Sullivan says, money — to help organize the 1922 March on Rome in which Mussolini seized power.

During those 20 years she was his eminence grise and unofficial ambassador, glorifying him in her 1925 biography that was translated into 18 languages.

Il Duce’s many frailties

It was Clara Petacci who has gone down in history as Mussolini’s most famous lover. In April 1945, Italian partisans shot her and Il Duce and hung their bodies upside down in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto. But after their intense 20-year personal and political relationship, Sarfatti was apparently the one who knew him best — maybe even better than his lawful wife, Rachele Guidi.

“Mussolini and Sarfatti had shown each other their souls,” Sullivan writes in the book’s long introduction. “She had listened to his secrets she knew most everything about Mussolini’s hidden weaknesses, his human frailties, his crude behavior, his superstitions, his ignorant misunderstandings about so many scientific and medical matters, and about his syphilis.”

But according to Sullivan, as much as Mussolini feared that Sarfatti would expose details on their sex life, he feared even more that she would reveal other shortcomings — and destroy the demigod image he had worked so hard to create.

Although Sarfatti’s 1955 Italian-language autobiography “Acqua Passata” (“Water Under the Bridge”) does not mention her relationship with Il Duce, her memoirs make up for it. She recounts a raft of personal and political anecdotes, provides quotes from Mussolini and talks about his sex addiction and cocaine use. But she never slides into bedroom gossip.

From her descriptions Mussolini comes across as a brilliant, charismatic statesman — but also an egocentric one ridden by inferiority complexes, fears and superstitions. He was also an unbridled womanizer, not to mention a manipulator who didn’t hesitate in his youth to threaten suicide in a letter to his mother “if she failed to send him some money for food.”

Sarfatti, meanwhile, comes across as a haughty, self-confident woman who often boasts of her good judgment, intuition and wisdom in both political and personal affairs.

Despite the book’s title “My Fault,” chosen by Sarfatti decades ago for the memoirs, she expresses no regret over her relationship with Mussolini, who was responsible for the deaths of her sister and brother-in-law on their way to Auschwitz, the destruction of Italian democracy and the establishment of a dictatorship. On the contrary, Sarfatti evades responsibility, putting all the blame on Mussolini.

Pesky Pact of Steel

Sarfatti maintains that fascism began as a positive idea that was distorted over the years. She claims that even Mussolini underwent a complete change. “After less than a decade in power, Mussolini seemed to me to have become someone else,” she writes. “He began to deny even the right to interior freedom and to subject the very souls of his people to the power of the state.”

As Sarfatti puts it, Mussolini’s alliance with Nazi Germany, which she opposed, was the main cause of his downfall. “But the Duce did not form the Rome–Berlin Axis or the Pact of Steel with the Führer by accident. Mussolini harbored within him a number of defects that attracted him to the Germans of his time. Thus he succumbed to the illness of power, to the madness of the Caesars.”

About one matter, though, she does accept the blame. “I cannot hide behind my work as an art critic. I must accept my responsibilities. I believed in Fascism and fought for it in the beginnings,” she writes.

“Worse, I wrote a book read by many that interpreted the goals of Fascism in a favorable light and proclaimed to the entire world that Mussolini was a hero of historic proportions. That was my fault …. It is my duty to declare that Mussolini fell because of his complete moral bankruptcy.”

Lamenting the failure of her “final, desperate attempt to guide Mussolini,” she adds: “Meanwhile, we discovered that behind the mask of Fascism lay an abyss of corruption, nepotism, favoritism and arbitrary lawlessness.”

Like most Italians, Sarfatti saw Mussolini as the embodiment of the “good tyrant,” adding that she had hoped he would turn out wiser, more level-headed and more just than the leaders produced by the ballot box.

Sullivan lambastes Sarfatti’s attempt to put all the blame on Il Duce. He writes that since it was Sarfatti, more than Mussolini, who crafted the ideological and philosophical basis of fascism between 1913 and 1919, she can’t evade responsibility for what others did based on her views. He adds that the original manuscript contains inaccuracies and spelling mistakes.

In his copious comments and remarks — often more comprehensive than the original text — Sullivan contends that after Sarfatti fled Italy, she agreed with Mussolini not to reveal details about their relationship. In exchange, no harm would befall her family still in Rome, among them her daughter Fiametta, her son-in-law and their three children.

But history lost out, Sullivan concludes, in that the book was not published in the late 1940s. Sarfatti possessed priceless photographs, letters and documents in Mussolini’s own hand.

“At least some of that historically precious material might have become available to scholars over sixty years ago,” Sullivan writes. “Instead, it passed into the possession of Sarfatti’s heirs after her death. They have refused permission to anyone to study those valuable records. Indeed, they have consistently denied their very existence. One can only hope they will have a change of mind.”

WHO WAS MARGHERITA SARFATTI, BENITO MUSSOLINI’S MISTRESS?

GRUNGE /AUG. 3, 2022

Behind every man is a powerful woman — or so the old cliche goes. In Benito Mussolini’s case, there were many women behind him. According to “Claretta: Mussolini’s Last Lover” (via The Italian Insider), the dictator maintained numerous mistresses and casual partners in addition to his wife of 30 years, Rachele. His final and perhaps most famous mistress, Clara Petacci, was even executed alongside him (via History).

But before Clara, Mussolini preferred his women on the older, more sophisticated, and mature side — and there was one in particular that stood out. Although not as famous as Petacci, Mussolini’s most important mistress bar none was the wealthy Venetian socialite and erudite Margherita Sarfatti. Now, she has drawn interest from historians because she was his closest confidant and, in many ways, a founder of fascism — but also because she was Jewish. Although mostly lost to wider audiences, the brilliant and cultivated Sarfatti can be rightfully called the woman who picked up a modest newspaper editor and molded him into “il Duce,” Italy’s dictator that would eventually drag the country into history’s bloodiest conflict. Here is her fascinating story.

FROM WEALTHY BEGINNINGS

Margherita Sarfatti was born in the lap of opulence. According to the Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, Benito Mussolini’s future mistress was born in 1880 in Venice, the scion of the wealthy Venetian Jewish Grassini family. Her family owned a palace on the edge of the old Venetian Ghetto and had a distinguished family history within the recently-unified Italian state.

Sarfatti’s early life was filled with well-connected relatives. Her father, Amedeo Grassini, was an attorney for the City of Venice and counted among his friends Giuseppe Sarto, the man who would later become Pope Pius X — one of the leading Catholic opponents of socialism. Her grandfather Marco was a Knight of the Crown of Italy. Her mother’s side ironically included a handful of relatives who would go on to be anti-fascist activists in opposition to Sarfatti’s own activities.

Sarfatti was educated mostly by private tutors, including Venetian Biennale founder Antonio Fradeletto, who was also a staunch anti-socialist like Pius X and Sarfatti’s father (via “Everyday Life in Fascist Venice”). But despite this ambient or perhaps in reaction to it (a streak that would mark her life), Sarfatti became enamored with the works of Karl Marx and left-wing ideologies such as feminism. Her final act of rebellion against her parents came in 1898 when against her father’s wishes, she joined the Socialist Party and married lawyer and Zionist Cesare Sarfatti (her father was an Orthodox Jew opposed to Zionism), per The Forward. She pulled him into her political circles, and his connections launched her career after the couple’s move to Milan.

EXPANDING HER POLITICAL CIRCLES

Her marriage to Cesare Sarfatti (above) introduced her to the cosmopolitan world of early 20th century Milan, Italy’s intellectual and financial center and hotbed of radical ideas. Soon, she entered his social circles in a foreshadowing of her future political career. First among these was Gabriele D’Annunzio, one of her husband’s close friends. According to Britannica, D’Annunzio was a writer and playwright who would go on to make his fame as an Italian irredentist in his attempt to seize the city of Fiume (today Rijeka in Croatia).

She also became acquainted with Russian Jewish feminist Anna Kuliscioff, who was living in Milan. According to the Jewish Women’s Archive, Kuliscioff focused mostly on the conditions of working-class women, and Sarfatti was soon drawn to her for her focus on women’s issues. Around this time, Sarfatti began her journalistic career. According to the Italian publication La Voce, in 1909, she got a job writing for the Italian socialist magazine Avanti. With this platform, she ran and wrote supporting pieces for Kuliscioff’s feminist movement and even bankrolled her through her husband. Thus, Sarfatti’s political future was solidified in her early years. But she never would have obtained the influence she achieved after World War I without her crucial interest in art and art history. Her role as an art critic went hand-in-hand with her political activism and helped birth the ideology of fascism.

MARGHERITA SARFATTI, ART CRITIC

Margherita Sarfatti, as noted in the Italian arts magazine Cambi, was an avid collector of modern art. But she was also one of its biggest promoters. According to the Jewish Women’s Archive, in 1909, she and her husband began hosting informal gatherings of artists at their Lake Como villa. Among them was Filippo Marinetti, the founder of Italian Futurism, which the Guggenheim Museum says was an avant-garde artistic movement that “exalted the new and the disruptive,” focusing primarily on the industrial and technological innovations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sarfatti promoted Marinetti and other artists in her circles through Avanti.

According to Britannica, Futurism was very much compatible with the socialism of the early 20th century. The movement, much like socialist ideologues, sought to push back or even wipe away traditional values in favor of a modern, technical society. As seen in a portrait of a ballerina by futurist Mario Sironi (via Cambi), it broke with historical Italian depictions of people, which were historically rooted in the Classical and Renaissance traditions. This was Sarfatti’s original artistic background. But a series of events saw her expelled from the socialist party. She subsequently abandoned the avant-garde in favor of a more traditionally-inspired modern movement called “il novecento.” But it was not purely of her own doing — she had influence from the man that would become il Duce.

MEETING IL DUCE

In 1912, Margherita Sarfatti’s publication Avanti received a new boss (via Jewish Women’s Archive). He was a young member of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) named Benito Mussolini. He became Avanti’s manager and Sarfatti’s superior. Sarfatti was drawn to the new editor, whom she described (per Haaretz) as a handsome womanizer and implacable socialist with a “glint of fanaticism” in his eyes. But at the time, it was simply a workplace affair that Sarfatti”s husband Cesare tolerated.

Sarfatti’s association with Mussolini, however, changed the course of her life. According to historian Brian Sullivan (via the American Interest), Mussolini and Sarfatti had diverged from standard Marxism into a mixed (but not yet fully defined) ideology that combined socialism with Italian nationalism. Thus, when World War I broke out, Mussolini was an ardent supporter of Italian intervention in the war, while his bosses in the PSI wanted to stay out of it. So Mussolini left Avanti, founded his own paper called “Il Popolo d’Italia,” and was promptly expelled from the PSI. He signed on and went to fight in the trenches of World War I (above).

By 1914, Sarfatti’s positions had evolved to favor military interventionism, perhaps under the influence of her friend and confidant Gabriele D’Annunzio. Thus, she followed Mussolini and became Il Popolo’s primary patron and caretaker while Mussolini was fighting on the front lines. Eventually, this mixed ideology of socialism and nationalism, pending a firmer ideological platform and some additions, became fascism.

FAMILY TRAGEDY

Margherita Sarfatti’s family life was not the happiest. As noted in the Jewish Women’s Archive, her politics and marriage created rifts with her parents. Her sister Lina responded to widowhood by committing suicide in 1907. In 1918, tragedy struck again when Sarfatti lost her eldest son Roberto in World War I — a conflict in which she had favored Italian involvement.

Roberto Sarfatti enlisted in the Italian Army at age 17 and was sent to fight with the elite Alpini mountain troops in Northeastern Italy, where his grave stands today. He was killed in action while fighting against Austro-Hungarian troops. Roberto’s devastated mother memorialized him in a book of poetry called “The Living and the Shade.” Less expected was the glowing obituary he drew from his mother’s lover Benito Mussolini in Il Popolo.

Mussolini idealized the younger Sarfatti as an Italian hero. The future Italian dictator recalled the first encounters with Roberto, noting that despite being a young, quiet boy, he still burned with the desire to go fight for his country — even as an underage teenager. Per Mussolini, the sacrifices of youth like Roberto were all the more admirable because these young men had placed service to their country above living their lives — something a man who died at 30 could not say. Roberto and his fellow soldiers were heroes, and Italy would be best off singing their praises — a glowing tribute by any standard. The author of the salute to the fallen Jewish soldier eventually joined Adolf Hitler in adopting anti-Jewish policies.

FROM MISTRESS TO GLOBAL RENOWN

Margherita Sarfatti was many things — art critic, journalist, political activist. But it was her position as Benito Mussolini’s mistress and her subsequent related projects that catapulted her to international fame, thanks in no small part to her intimate knowledge of the future dictator’s life. But Mussolini may have never become a dictator without her influence.

Mussolini took power in 1922 following the famous October March on Rome. But according to eyewitness Marco Augusto Frigerio (via la Provincia di Como), Mussolini was unsure that the march would be successful, fearing it might turn into a bloodbath. So before the march began, Mussolini stopped at a villa on Lake Como called “Soldo” — the vacation home of none other than Sarfatti herself — and confessed his misgivings to her and his compatriots. Sarfatti allegedly told him, “You will march or die. But I know you will march.”

Mussolini did and was triumphant. Sarfatti became the right hand of one of Europe’s leaders. Thus, in 1925, she published a biography of Benito Mussolini, which became a bestseller thanks to its intimate portrayal of the dictator. The book generally lionizes Mussolini, making it more of a sympathetic account of how the dictator rose to power rather than pure biography. Sarfatti had practical reasons for doing so: In tying her political destiny to Mussolini, Sarfatti had become the mother of fascism, an ideology she helped create and defend until it backfired on her.

FASCISM’S MOTHER

Margherita Sarfatti was a signatory of the Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals, which framed the movement as the continuation of the Italian nation’s spirit and history. Now, Sarfatti realized that the ideology needed an anchor in Italian culture to make this statement more than rhetoric, so she settled upon Italy’s rich artistic heritage, which she argued had been sidelined in favor of more established French avant-garde artists even inside Italy itself.

According to “Margherita Sarfatti and Italian Cultural Nationalism,” Sarfatti sought to give fascism prestige by framing its art in continuity with Roma and the Renaissance — the two most notable periods of Italian high culture. Fascism would herald the “second Italian Renaissance” that would restore Italian artistic supremacy at France’s expense. Sarfatti’s answer to France’s avant-garde style, which she decried for its lack of human representation and deviation from classical forms, was il Novecento. The very name hearkened back to the Quattrocento school of the Renaissance, whose most famous member was Piero della Francesca. Novecento style sought to harmonize modern art forms with the Italian tradition of human representation best captured in classical and Renaissance art. But fascism did not create the Novecento style. In fact, some of its artists were wary of Benito Mussolini.

Under Sarfatti’s advice, Mussolini instead promoted art through state patronage, prizes, and conferences, seeking a middle ground between state needs and individual creativity without sabotaging the production of art. Alongside her projects for preserving and rejuvenating local Italian culture, Sarfatti hoped to reclaim the glory of Rome with Mussolini as her caesar.

THE CULT OF IL DUCE

Per the book “Right-Wing Women,” Margherita Sarfatti was not only known as fascism’s image maker but also as Mussolini’s personal propagandist. Sarfatti created a sort of cult around Mussolini in her biography of the dictator, focusing primarily on Italian women and, by extension, men as well. In Mussolini’s biography, Sarfatti wrote, addressing the dictator directly, that the work was a “woman’s book” that placed Mussolini in a quasi-religious context as the light and savior of Italy.

Sarfatti first set up the Italian dictator as the natural leader of his people. She first tied him in with Rome, calling him an “archetype of the Italian … Roman from top to toe.” Mussolini was from the Emilia-Romagna region; its capital, Bologna, was known as a center of Renaissance art. Sarfatti wasted no time in creating an implicit association between the achievements of the past and Mussolini in the present, implying that Emilio-Romagnan Mussolini was destined to continue the cultural achievements of his countrymen.

Finally, Sarfatti had a large collection of anecdotes to choose from to build Mussolini’s virile and savvy political image. For instance, she stressed his toughness by recounting a story of how a young Benito slashed a bully’s face with a stone for stealing his wheelbarrow. Later, she described his review of his Blackshirts in Rome from horseback amidst the ruins of ancient Rome, no doubt drawing parallels between the dictator and the Roman generals of old. However, according to The Forward, she omitted the more intimate aspects of their relationship, in particular sexual matters and drug use. Those surfaced in a later memoir.

FALL FROM GRACE

In the 1920s, Margherita Sarfatti seemed to have a lock on Benito Mussolini. According to the Jewish Women’s Archive, she was a well-known writer for the fascist magazine Gerarchia, was Mussolini’s inseparable companion, and had devised the visual aspects of Italian fascist culture herself. But her influence began to wane by the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Per The American Interest, Sarfatti began facing attacks from within Italy’s National Fascist Party, which accused her of using her influence to benefit foreigners and advance her own hold over Mussolini to the detriment of everyone else. According to Prof. Piero Foa, whose family knew Sarfatti, Jews in Italy increasingly came under attack in the press from elements sympathetic to Nazi Germany — despite Mussolini’s public denunciation of these elements. Sarfatti was among those attacked, but she stood by the dictator, even trying to downplay her Jewish ancestry.

In a letter written to Jesuit priest Pietro Tacchi Venturi (via “Pouring Jewish Water Into Fascist Wine”), she mentioned that at some point, she had received Catholic baptism and had her daughter Fiammetta baptized in 1927 at the age of 17. This was perhaps done to stave off anti-Semitic attacks against her, although she remained — at least per a 1956 letter — a Catholic later on. Regardless, Mussolini began to lose interest in her sexually, taking the younger, prettier Clara Petacci (above) as mistress in 1932. Now, despite that, Sarfatti continued to defend Mussolini, even visiting America in 1934 (via Selva) to promote Italy and Italian women in the United States. But her days were numbered.

THE RACIAL LAWS

In 1935, Germany passed the Nuremberg Laws, which, among other things, forbade marriages between Jews and non-Jews. Now, per Prof. Piero Foa, Mussolini originally opposed them and their progenitor, Adolf Hitler. He had discounted German racial supremacy, noting that while Roman Italy was producing literary luminaries such as Virgil, the Germanic tribes were barely literate. Together with Margherita Sarfatti, he published a series of tracts in the 1920s calling on Jewish Italians (as opposed to Italian Jews) to remain in Italy instead of moving to British Palestine, suggesting that Mussolini considered Jews as Italians, contra Nazism. He backed up his words by opposing Germany’s 1936 attempt to annex Austria.

So why the shift? As noted in the Review of Politics, Italian and German geopolitical interests converged, leading to the 1936 Rome-Berlin Axis. Italy, however, was the junior (subservient) partner. Per “Italian Fascism and the Racial Laws of 1938,” Italy soon had to align fascism with Nazism, so Italians became part of the Aryan race. Jews were banned from a host of positions and forbidden from marrying non-Jews, as had been common before, going from being part of the Italian nation to being a separate nation-within-a-nation. Per The Guardian, Italians were also banned from marrying Africans, a common occurrence in the colonies, where Italian soldiers often took Eritrean wives. For Sarfatti, Mussolini’s about face must have come as a shock for her, especially since she had dedicated the 1930s to defending him against charges of anti-Semitism (via Jewish Women’s Archive).

EXILE

Margherita Sarfatti’s reaction to the racial laws was to leave Italy. According to a 1939 communique published in Time, that year found her living in an upscale Paris hotel. Now, she seemed to be in denial about what the future held, which was not unexpected considering that she had been Mussolini’s “closest feminine confidant” even up to 1935 after he had set her aside. Speaking to the International News Service, she said, “I have not been exiled … Please make it clear.” Her language suggests that she still loved Mussolini and hoped that he would reverse the racial laws and stop “[paling] around with Jew–tormenting Adolf Hitler,” whom she, like Mussolini before 1935, hated (via Time).

According to the art journal Selva, Sarfatti decided not to return to Italy once the war broke out. Instead, she settled in South America, where she became an art critic and had a particularly strong impact in Brazil. Brazilian artists, in particular, many of whom were either educated in Italy, of Italian descent, or both, promoted her work and the Novecento movement she had helped create back in Italy.

Sarfatti remained in South America until 1947, promoting the Novecento style, but soon saw her work undone under the postwar order. Because the Novecento was associated with fascism, it was sidelined as a reactionary style that should be forgotten. When New York’s Museum of Modern Art did a 20th-century exposition of Italian art, it omitted almost all mentions of the Novecento, and Sarfatti’s life work fell by the wayside.

A DIVIDED LEGACY

Margherita Sarfatti eventually returned to Italy, where she died in 1961. But per The Forward, while writing in the Argentine newspaper Critica, she penned a tell-all series about her relationship with Benito Mussolini, which she published after his death in keeping with her agreement not to divulge his intimate details in exchange for her children’s safety. Sarfatti’s new portrait of Mussolini depicted a sex-addicted, syphilitic cocaine abuser whose lust for power and alliance with Adolf Hitler doomed him, but it omitted intimate sexual details. She blamed herself, noting that “[she had] believed in fascism and fought for it in the beginning.”

Unexpectedly, Sarfatti’s legacy is taboo; she never discussed it even with her own family. As her granddaughter Ippolita Gaetani discussed with Haaretz, many Italian Jews supported fascism, which the Jewish Sarfatti helped create. Yet, the fascists that she had encouraged to seize power in 1922 eventually cooperated with the Germans that deported her sister Nella to her death in Auschwitz. Ultimately, Ippolita notes that her grandmother relished the deadly combination of fame and powerful men — and she surrounded herself with them. When she met the young and ambitious Benito Mussolini, it seemed like destiny. But as Ippolita noted, Sarfatti was conflicted by the end. She never discussed the details of her personal life with Mussolini nor whether she felt any guilt for her sister’s death. All the mother of fascism had to say for herself was that il Duce was at his best when he was with her.

Capisci?

Also check: Why was Hitler attending the funerals of Jewish socialist revolutionary Kurt Eisner?

To be continued?
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! Articles can always be subject of later editing as a way of perfecting them