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Claretta Petacci was the exception to the general rule. Mussolini made love to her in his usual perfunctory way ("He doesn't even take his boots off," she once complained), but he showed his affection by installing her in his private apartments a few steps away from his office, where she would "lie for hours on end, waiting for a visit from her master, reading and daydreaming." From childhood on (she was 29 years his junior), Claretta had slept with Mussolini's photograph under her pillow; to be his mistress had been her sole ambition; he was "her first and only real love."
Author Monelli's book is never better than in the account of the last days of Mussolini and his doxie. Utterly defeated, universally despised, the sick and whipped dictator began mouthing extracts from a Life of Jesus and discovering "surprising analogies between his own fate and that of Christ." Too vain to surrender to the British, too indecisive to accept German protection, Mussolini blundered into the waiting hands of his bitterest enemies, the Italian partisans. By the time they dragged him, in pouring rain, to the wall against which he and Claretta were to be shot, he was much too obsessed with fear and misery to give a thought to anyone's feelings but his own. He never answered, and probably never heard, Claretta's last plaintive appeal: "Are you glad I followed you to the end?"