A cult of virility and violence

Mussolini’s brutal sex-addiction makes for dispiriting reading, but provides material for a fine psychological study, says David Gilmour

Bunga bunga may be a recent fashion, but adultery for Italian prime ministers has a long history. The first of such statesmen, Count Cavour, had affairs with married women because he was too nervous of being cuckolded to risk having a wife of his own.  One of his successors, Francesco Crispi, suffered such amatory turbulence that the police were often called to break up screeching rows between his wives and his mistresses; in old age he was accused by the press of trigamy because he had fathered children by two women in consecutive years while being married to a third.

Silvio Berlusconi clearly devoted more time to dalliance than Cavour or Crispi, who were after all serious politicians. Yet even he may have been overshadowed in this sphere by the fascist prime minister Benito Mussolini. In this engrossing book Roberto Olla guesses that the Duce had about 400 ‘relationships’, some of which endured a decade or more. Many of them, however, lasted barely half an hour, including the time taken to undress and tidy up afterwards. No moments were wasted on a chat or a cup of tea.

Mussolini served his sexual apprenticeship chiefly in brothels, and later admitted that he regarded all women as prostitutes: sex with them, he said, was ‘like screwing a whore’, they existed simply for his ‘carnal pleasure’. Strutting about, rolling his eyes, scowling and jutting out his chin, he was proud of his violent behaviour. Women preferred ‘men to be brutal’, he asserted, ‘like cavalry soldiers’. He wanted them to tremble at his ‘love-making’ (sic), because it was like a ‘cyclone, uprooting everything in its path’. Returning to equestrian imagery, he told one lover he wished he could have ‘entered [her] on a horse’.