Benito Mussolini's women

Benito Mussolini's women

Benito Mussolini had two wives, several mistresses and dozens, possibly hundreds, of casual lovers during his lifetime. Here are the most important women in his life.
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini: Benito Mussolini's women 

Italian dictator Benito Mussolini

Ida Dalser:  

Mussolini struck up a relationship with the beauty therapist in around 1909. They may have married in 1914, although no records survive. In 1915 she bore him his first child, which they named Benito Albino Mussolini. But the couple soon became estranged and Mussolini subsequently tried to expunge both Dalser and his son from his life, regarding them as an embarrassment, particularly after he married another woman, Rachele Guidi. Dalser was eventually sent to a psychiatric hospital and her son also ended up in an asylum, dying at the age of 26.

Rachele Guidi: 

The deterioration of Mussolini's relationship with Ida Dalser was in part due to the romance he struck up with Rachele Guidi, whom he married in 1915. She bore him three sons and two daughters, and seemed willing to overlook his many infidelities. At the end of the war, with her husband and his mistress being hunted by partisans, 

she too tried to flee Italy. But she was captured and handed over to US forces before being released after a few months' internment. She subsequently ran a restaurant in the village in which she grew up in Emilia Romagna.

Clara Petacci: 

She was just 20 when she became the mistress of the fascist dictator, who was married with five children and 29 years her senior. In April 1945, with total defeat looming, the couple tried to escape to Switzerland but were caught by partisans in northern Italy, executed and strung up by their feet from a petrol station. Her diaries, in which she documented her relationship with the fascist leader, were published for the first time in 2009. "Do you know, my darling, that last night at the theatre I undressed you at least three times?" she recalled him telling her in 1938.

Margherita Sarfatti: 

Sarfatti was the daughter of a wealthy Italian Jewish lawyer and grew up in a grand palazzo in Venice. Despite being married, she embarked on an affair with Mussolini in around 1911. But the romance did not protect her from Mussolini's growing anti-Semitism. When the fascist government introduced race laws targeting Italian Jews in 1938, she fled the country and moved to Argentina and Uruguay, working as a journalist. She returned to Italy after the war.

Casual flings: The dictator, who liked to present himself as an insatiable Latin lover, is thought to have had hundreds of casual lovers, many of them Italian women who offered themselves to him out of admiration for his fascist beliefs. He lost his virginity at the age of 17 to a prostitute. He later described her as "an elderly woman who spilled out lard from all parts of her body." Once he had risen to power as head of the fascist party, his valet claimed that Il Duce had "a woman brought to him every day, every afternoon". They were recorded in the guest book of his official residence, Palazzo Venezia in Rome, as "fascist visitors". Mussolini himself liked to brag about his love life. "There was a time when I had 14 women and took three or four them every evening, one after the other," he once said.