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R/£ The Memoirs of a Mistress
November 26, 2009 Edition 1
Belfast Telegraph
BENITO Mussolini and Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's two most charismatic leaders of the past century, have more in common than we thought.
Both emerged as dynamic leaders when Italian democracy was tying itself in knots. Both enjoyed vast popularity almost amounting to fan-worship, which endured for years and appeared immune to scandal. Both were short and sturdy, of classic peasant physique.
And both, it emerges, had gargantuan sexual appetites.
Exactly how gargantuan became clear this week with the publication of a memoir by Patrizia D'Addario, the prostitute who claims to have spent two nights with Berlusconi last year, and of the intimate diaries of Clara Petacci, Mussolini's most enduring mistress.
Describing the night they spent together in his villa in Rome, D'Addario recalls: "After the first assault, in which he achieved complete satisfaction, we started all over again... He never even appeared slightly tired... I'd never seen such passion for sex with a woman... I was honest when he asked me if I'd enjoyed myself. It didn't seem right to lie. He obviously took this as challenge and began again... Then more sex... He goes down on my intimate parts and stays there for a long time, such that I thought that he might be sleeping. But no, of course not. He starts up again with more energy than before." He didn't let up until eight in the morning.
The diaries of Petacci, shot dead with the ex-dictator as they were fleeing to Switzerland at the end of the war, have been published following the expiry of a 70-year secrecy rule on state documents.
Both Mussolini and Berlusconi, it emerges, demanded sex in industrial quantities. Even for Patrizia D'Addario, with years of experience as an escort behind her, the number of women Il Cavaliere (Berlusconi's Italian nickname) liked to have on tap was a shock. "The prime minister needs cuddles," she writes in Gradisca, Presidente (Take your pleasure, prime minister). "Having been an escort, I thought I'd seen a fair few things, but I'd never seen 20 women for one man... Normally in an orgy you have roughly the same number of men and women, otherwise people get upset. But here the other men had no say. There was just one man with the right to copulate, and that was the prime minister."
Mussolini was in the same league. He told his jealous lover Clara that the idea of sleeping with only one woman was "inconceivable. There was a period in which I had 14 women and I'd take three or four every evening, one after the other... that gives you an idea of my sexuality." Nicholas Farrell, author of a biography of Il Duce, has calculated that Mussolini enjoyed at least 5 000 women during his life. "Mussolini's butler revealed that he was screwing women all the time," Farrell said yesterday, "even behind Clara Petacci's back."
Like Mussolini, Berlusconi clearly has incredible stamina. Despite his age (74) and a brush with prostate cancer, he was inexhaustible, D'Addario reports - though he failed to satisfy her.
The only striking difference between the two men's sexual behaviour is aftercare. Despite her grudges - Berlusconi's alleged failure to do what he promised and help her sort out a property problem - she admits that the prime minister was the perfect gent in the morning. "Coffee or tea?" he inquired.
"And as a parting gift he gave her "a tortoise, covered in precious stones. I had to admit it was lovely."
Mussolini by contrast was far more brusque. According to Petacci's diaries, his trysts occurred anywhere the fancy took him, on the carpet or against a wall, and ended abruptly, without "coffee, liqueur, or even a piece of cake".
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