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{en} Margherita Sarfatti. My fault: Mussolini as I knew him, ed. Brian R. Sullivan. New York: Enigma Books, 2014. <autobiography>

• Written in 1943-45, the memoir was previously published only in Spanish installments in a Buenos Aires daily newspaper, 1945.

Abstract

"Margherita Sarfatti first met Benito Mussolini in 1911 at the socialist daily Avanti! In what became a turbulent love affair she emerged as an important writer, art critic, and major adviser to the founder of the Fascist party. Even though she converted to Catholicism, she was cast aside once Hitler came to power and fled to South America in 1938. During her long exile where she constantly feared for her children who had remained in Italy and were in danger during the war, Sarfatti decided to tell the story of her relationship with Mussolini and the role she played in many important Fascist artistic, cultural, and ideological issues until 1934. Most of Italy's modern architecture and many of its painters owe Sarfatti both their success and lasting legacy. At first she wrote her memoir in English under the title My Fault. But in 1945 a daily newspaper in Buenos Aires, Critica, published a Spanish version in fourteen installments. In the full text Sarfatti bares all about her stormy relationship with the intensely womanizing dictator whom she knew was quite incapable of any kind of monogamous relationship. Yet the attraction remained long irresistible and that passion jumps off these pages with unrelenting strength."--

Contents

Introduction -- Between the devil and the deep blue sea -- Signorina Guidi, Rachele -- War, wounds & women -- Defeat, victory, defeat -- The inevitable dictator -- History's jokes -- Why Matteotti? -- Dictatorship -- Human kindness -- Women and family -- The duce's children -- The Ciano family -- Four or five things I know about him -- Mussolini encounters Hitler -- Mussolini and Hitler face to face -- Austria and Ethiopia -- The duce's women -- The end of the nightmare -- Epilogue