Mussolini's Daughter: the Most Dangerous Woman in Europe by Caroline Moorehead

Author:Caroline Moorehead
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

Rather more enjoyably, Edda went off to Venice. She played poker with Nelson Page and lost 5,000 lire to him. At a lunch party given by Elsa Maxwell, her hostess told her that it pained her to hear so much German spoken in the streets. Edda, laughing, replied that in the ‘next war’, Italy and Germany would fight side by side, and that ‘when we make war on England’, she expected that the Americans would join them. She was still in Venice when she was handed a telegram from Rachele telling her that the King had awarded Ciano the prestigious Collare dell’ Annunziata, the highest order in his gift, having been persuaded by Mussolini that not to bestow it after a successful foreign campaign would be an insult. Ciano, too, was now ‘cugino’, cousin, to the King.

In Rome, in the summer of 1939, even as Europe hovered on the brink of war, there had never been so many splendid dinners given in private palazzi, with so much whisky obtained on the cheap through Vatican sources, so much silver and gold on display, or so many liveried servants. There was a craze for dancing, especially the Lambeth Walk, frowned on as a British import. There was, wrote the memoirist Claudia Patrizi, ‘an air of falseness’, the beautiful women who spoke English and the elegant men reminding her of an ‘international mafia’ sporting themselves as in the time of the Paris Directoire. ‘The nouveaux riches were at their most snobbish, and the aristocracy at its most venal . . . lying and obsequious’. Everyone addressed each other as ‘tu’.

Conversation was all about sex and intrigues, and its frivolity had never seemed to Patrizi so absurd, as if to mock the austerity and prudishness of the regime and to keep at bay the thoughts of war. Husbands were decreed to be mere nuisances and wives were divided into three categories: the frigid, the accessible and the untouchable, deemed useless because already paired off. At midnight, Patrizi wrote, the musicians arrived in the grand palazzi and dancing began. Edda loved dancing. The few aristocrats from the ancien régime, invited to bestow respectability and style, tried but, too awkward and reserved, failed to join in the festivities. Bocchini’s spies were present at all such gatherings, often in the guise of guests. Ciano himself had never seemed so vain, so full of energy, so triumphant as the beau monde pressed its invitations on himself and Edda – who seldom accepted – and pretty women vied for his attention. Foreign visitors spent nights in his garçonnière or in the Palazzo Chigi, where he kept a private room with a divan. The more the international political situation grew complicated and menacing, the more sure of himself Ciano seemed, whether at the Circolo della Caccia, the Palazzo Colonna or the golf club at l’Acquasanta, where his irresponsible indiscretions were assiduously noted and quickly relayed to the diplomatic community. His acolytes fawned, observed his moods, listened to his tirades against Mussolini – whom he now referred to as ‘il vecchio’, the old man – and tolerated his capriciousness.

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