Category:Sarfatti, Margherita (1880-1961)

Margherita Sarfatti (1880-1961)

Margherita Sarfatti was born in Venice on April 8, 1880, to a wealthy Jewish family. In her mid-teens she converted to the cause of Marxist socialism. She married young, at the age of eighteen, to Cesare Sarfatti, an established lawyer, who was thirteen years her senior, in 1898. After the family settled in Milan in 1898, she became immersed socialist political life as a participant in Anna Kuliscioff's salon, art critic for the party daily, L'Avanti! , and proponent of voting rights for women. After Mussolini and radical elements won control of the Socialist party in 1912, Margherita abandoned Kuliscioff and her old reformist patrons and began a romantic and political partnership with the young revolutionary firebrand. Two years later, she followed Mussolini out of the Socialist Party over the issue of Italian intervention in World War I. In those years she provided ideas, financing, and emotional support to Mussolini as he struggled to find a new role to play and a constituency to mobilize and lead during the WW1 and its aftermath with the founding of the Fascist party in 1919.

Sarfatti enjoyed her greatest power and influence in the decade that followed the establishment of the dictatorship in the mid-1920s, as director of Mussolini's journal, Gerarchia, the principal source of Fascist orthodoxy. With the support of the Duce, she emerged, first of all, as the most important promoter of artistic modernism. After the death of her husband in 1924, Sarfatti moved to Rome, where she presided over the most important salon of the era. Weekly receptions in her home brought together prominent intellectuals, artists, and political figures. She was arguably the most powerful woman in Italy during the 1920s.

By the mid-1930's, Margherita's power and influence began to wane as a result of changing personal and political circumstances. In 1933, Mussolini cut any personal relationship with her and had her removed as editor of Gerarchia. With the passage of the Racial Laws in 1938 her position became untenable. She left Italy in December of that year for Paris. Once World War II began, she fled to Portugal on a passport that Mussolini had provided her. She spent the war years in Uruguay, Argentina and the United States. Margherita returned to Italy in 1947 where she led a quiet life outside of the limelight. She died at the family villa, Il Soldo, near Lake Como and the Swiss border, on October 30, 1961.