Word: petaccis
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...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...
...follow the traditional social season-Seville in April, Madrid in May and June, San Sebastian in July and August (then back to the Madrid black market for the drab winter months). Now they jam the Palace and Chicote bars, their ranks reinforced by distinguished foreign refugees such as the Petacci family of Mussolini's late mistress, Clara...