Word: petaccis
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...family of Clara Petacci, mistress of Benito Mussolini who died with him at the hands of a Milanese mob in 1945, sued the Italian government for return of 36 love !enters from Il Duce to Clara, plus pages from her diary and other personal documents. Although the government confiscated the papers because of their "national historical interest." Rome buzzed with the word that the letters are not yet entirely historical. As the rumor went, the government is reluctant to part with evidence that many a now prominent Italian asked favors of Mussolini through the dictator's doxy...
...Read this letter as if it were my love testament," wrote pert Clara Petacci to her paramour, "because it is the last one that you will get ... If sometimes I felt in me the desperate attempt to free myself of this amorous vise-remember how you hurt me-those were waves of revolt...
Trinkets in Triplicate. Before leaving her villa on Lake Garda to join Mussolini on their final journey, La Petacci entrusted the whole agonized portfolio of her stormy love to two friends, Carlo and Caterina Cervis, who shared her villa. The dossier, inventoried in triplicate by the methodical Clara, included most of the "Dear Ben" letters she had written to Benito, plus recordings of her lover's own speeches and copies of his letters, a trunkful of trinkets and keepsakes, and volumes of diaries, including one kept on toilet paper during her imprisonment by the Badoglio government...
...four years the hunt turned up nothing. Then an anonymous letter to a Milan newspaper offered a tip. The police responded, and in Clara's old garden they dug up a trunk, four suitcases and three wooden boxes, all crammed with Petacci mementos...
Arbitrary Act? In time, the government returned to the Petaccis most of Clara's tangible assets, but the letters and diaries it claimed as documents of state. Writ followed court writ as the Petaccis tried to reclaim their property. Italy's best jurists pulled their chins over the puzzling problem of whether or not a dictator's mistress "carries out functions which can be compared to those of a public official." Last week the Petacci lawyers filed what they hoped was a final brief. "It is absurd," they said, "as argued by the state, that the loves...