Mussolini's last lover, Claretta Petacci: sex and family solidarity in the first totalitarian state. Speaker: Professor Richard Bosworth Seminar

Event details

This seminar is part of the History research seminar series. Claretta’s extensive papers fit neatly into the current preoccupation of historians with emotions and psychology and what may be the deep subjective springs of human actions, although dictators have seldom been deemed suitable figures for such analysis. The diary’s pages record orgasm, biting, the extrusion of most bodily liquids, hysteria, fainting fits, illness, anger, jealousy, possessiveness, love and hate, music, poetry, reading and art, as well as politics. They illuminate the ‘private’ at least as much as they do the ‘public’. They draw attention to the Catholic, the familial, the local and Roman, the bourgeois and the personal, even while they display the Fascist, even the radical Fascist (despite the deep hostility that Claretta and her family provoked among those most committed to the R.S.I.). In entering the world of Claretta Petacci and her family, my audience will confront a ‘real’ Italy, one that was not merely ‘legal’ or ideological. Claretta’s story may lack the depth of tragedy. But, in its human texture, commitment and contradiction, as well as its female representation of ‘love’ and sex in high places, it is worth deep and detailed reflection.