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In 1945, Mussolini had been deposed and was living a shadow life as Nazi Germany’s puppet governor of northern Italy. The communist partisans were after him and he hoped that he and Claretta could escape to Switzerland or Germany. But as they left Milan, the partisans intercepted them. When they said Mussolini would be executed, Claretta begged to die with him. She said that she had given him “true love, absolute devotion,” and that her life would “mean nothing once he is dead.”

They were executed together by firing squad and their bodies were laid out at the Piazzale Loreto in Milan. Later their corpses were strung up by the heels from steel girders in the public square, a spectacle of contempt that expressed the partisan hatred of Mussolini’s long, violent, cruel regime. As Bosworth writes, the photo of Claretta, with hair flowing down, became the “visual niche” that installed her in the world’s memory.

Claretta’s diaries prove that she believed sex and power were linked, each enhancing the other. In her view, as one journalist wrote, the definition of great sex was sex with a great man. “How I adore you,” she wrote to Mussolini after making love with him. “You were so beautiful this evening, as aggressive as a lion, violent and masterful. You are the man who triumphs over other men and over life.”

You were so beautiful this evening, as aggressive as a lion, violent and masterful. You are the man who triumphs over other men and over life

Her diaries reveal that Mussolini curtly dismissed much of the world he knew or thought he knew. He believed the British were drunken, brainless pigs, he despised the French for being cowardly and didn’t think much of his fellow Italians. He had a theory that four million Italians were descendants of slaves, therefore worthless. His dislike of Jews seems to put him in a category with Hitler.