Mussolini, the children (legitimate and otherwise) and the special relationship with the only one he wanted next to

This story starts from the end, from a day ofApril 1945, when an armored car is about to cross the border with Switzerland, near Lake Como. It is what remains of an army in retreat under the weight of a defeat not yet accepted, and of people who flee to look beyond the Alps for that beautiful death that is part of the myth of their youth. Because it is one thing to be defeated and another to be defeated. Next to to the Duce of Fascism, now resigned and almost indifferent to fate, he is there a young woman of 23 years, blonde, beautiful, proud. Few know who he is. But he keeps her close, calls her by name, Elena, even if he calls her “you”, she addresses him deferentially, “Duce”. She knows he is her father but not for a moment did it occur to her to turn to him as all children in the world do, “dad”. He is the boss, even if he is defeated, but the Duce has no children, he cannot be a father. Until the end Mussolini will write to his children, the legitimate ones, simply signing himself Mussolini.

Yet there is something tender, strange, unusual, perhaps even a little Mussolini’s, in the relationship that in the dusky twilight of Salò was born between this dead man, and this girl who is his daughter but who he doesn’t know whether to consider his daughter, Elena Curti, died two days ago almost a hundred years old in her home in Acquapendente, born from the relationship between the then director of the Popolo d’Italia and a young Milanese seamstress, Angela Curti. Almost as if in Salò the evening lights had softened the selfish and bold indifference of all time.

Mussolini had many illegitimate children, more than we know today, and it has them always kept hidden. He didn’t want to see them, he didn’t want to know they were there, he did everything he could to hide the traces. He had recognized only one, Benito Albino, but at the beginning, in 1915, when still as an anticlerical socialist he was a supporter of free love. Then nothing more, respect for the bourgeois canon had rewarded everything, and he hadn’t wanted any more hassle of his many lovers. Entrusting his brother Arnaldo with the management of the most delicate cases, the inconveniences of life.

With Elena Curti, no. Things turned out differently. The Duce had continued to see mother Angela occasionally also in Rome, in the years of his heyday, and once he moved to Gardone at the helm of the Social Republic, in 1943, he wanted Elena with him. She had recently learned her true paternity directly from her mother who until then had kept everything silent from her, had met Mussolini for the first time at Palazzo Venezia in ’41, and somehow reunited with her natural father. A beautiful photo taken on 23 April 1945 shows her with Mussolini in the courtyard of the prefecture of Milan, about to leave for Switzerland. She has a face full of dignity, despite the desperation of those days she is still dressed in uniform, wearing a black tie which for a woman of an army on the run seems an almost inexplicable habit.

Yet it is there, as it had been in the previous year and a half. Mussolini makes her stay next to him, meets her at first every Thursday, then gradually more often. “Elena”, “Duce”. He talks to her, gets told, the blondie is her confidante, the old boss trusts her, making her a sort of particular secretary. Elena lives in Maderno and arrives in Gardone by bicycle. The bond becomes ever closer, it is always with him so much so that Petacci mistook it for another flame and so much so that Elena is with him first in Milan then in the column of Aublindo trying to cross the Swiss border. She is sitting next to him when the vehicle stops, the Germans arrive and make Mussolini get into one of their trucks in which he will then be intercepted by the partisans.

So it seems almost a retaliation of history that the father of five children and cantor of the bourgeois values ​​of God, country and family, in the most difficult moment he has with him not his wife or one of the “official” heirs, but one of the many sons of guilt with which he had disseminated Italy. There is no beloved Edda, there is not Rachel, there is Elena Curti, the tailor’s daughter, the fruit of one of the many relationships of the last thirty years. Many, but very few important. On the other hand, for Mussolini the love relationship was many things at once – physical outlet, will to affirmation, fascist machismo, atavistic priapism, – but almost all attributable to the hat he was looking for as soon as the intercourse was over. “As soon as I finish making love to a woman the first thing I think is where I put my hat”.

And it had been the same with Angela Curti, Elena’s mother, a beautiful Milanese whom Mussolini had met around 1921, when the woman had turned to him to ask him to intercede for the release of her husband, an early fascist who got into trouble. Mussolini interceded the man but took him a wife, almost as a due reward. It was or had been, more or less, the times of the socialist Angelica Balabanoff, of the thirty Ida Dalser, mother of Benito Albino, of the secretary of the People of Italy Bianca Ceccato (with whom he had another son, Glauco di Salle) and of the ‘omnipresent Margherita Sarfatti, Mussolini’s true life partner, the only one who has dominated him intellectually, with him for twenty years, until Claretta Petacci took over in the early 1930s. Without even she has ever claimed to be the only one. Other women, other amorazzi, other illegitimate children. But only one among many (six are more or less sure, of which there are names and surnames) was with him in Dongo. Elena Curti, who died on Sunday at the age of one hundred. Funeral today.