ROME - Everyone in Italy wanted to forget the "Duce's other woman": the Fascists, because she was Jewish; their opponents, because she was Fascist; and the family, because she became an embarrassing historical burden. As a result, Margherita Sarfatti's story slipped out of the public awareness, and along with it her central role in Italian fascism and the Duce's life.

Today, more than 60 years after the Fascist dictator was executed, Sarfatti's descendants prefer to view her as an intellectual and a patron of the arts, who worked to distanced Italy from the Nazi danger and was forced to flee to Argentina when Benito Mussolini implemented the race laws. They did not hear from her about the 20 years in which she shared Mussolini's doctrine and bed. Or about the 1,272 letters he wrote her in those years, and which disappeared. No, they are not in her private archive at her home at 18 Via Dei Villini in Rome. At least, that is what her granddaughter, Ippolita Gaetani, who is in charge of the archive, told Haaretz in an exclusive interview. An American cousin, who is also named Margherita Sarfatti, is convinced the letters are in the hands of the Rome cousin.

Many visitors have recently called at the luxurious building in Rome - journalists, researchers, writers ("Italian Night," by Nicole Fabre, a novel in which Sarfatti is a leading character, was recently published in France). It is a lavish patrician building in ocher, which is a three-minute walk from Villa Torlonia, the Duce's official residence - three minutes from the villa's back entrance, it should be noted. "The villa is being renovated," says a smiling young woman who is working in the courtyard, "but you can visit. Go around to the other side, it's worth it."

At the home on the Via Dei Villini in Rome, a gilded bell, a vast black gate, a double wooden door, an elevator in an ornate metal cage, a broad marble staircase. The door is opened by Ippolita Gaetani, a spare, blue-eyed woman of 66, who has a determined, no-nonsense manner. The apartment is spacious, sun-washed, and furnished with classical restraint. The documents and photographs of Grandmother Margherita are housed in one room, in the center of which is the "Holy of Holies": Sarfatti's desk. On the wall is a famous portrait of Sarfatti with her daughter Fiammetta, painted by Achille Funi. Next to it are shelves laden with her notebooks and diaries, and a chest with 12 huge drawers.

Before the interview gets under way, the hostess receives a phone call. "I am being interviewed for an Israeli paper," she apologizes, and adds, "No, no, the 'good' paper." Ippolita Gaetani and her two sisters, Sancia and Margherita, are identified with the Italian left and are quite active on behalf of the Palestinian cause.

Ippolita was 21 when her grandmother died, in 1961, at the age of 81, but never asked her about her past, about her affair with Mussolini or her role in the Fascist movement. And Sarfatti, she says, never volunteered information on the subject. She talked about art, recited Dante, Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe and did crosswords in Figaro Litteraire. "After the war there was a deep collective repression, people tried to forget, did not boast about it. There was a kind of self-censorship. People are only now starting to talk about that period, and also about my grandmother," Gaetani says.

When did you learn about your grandmother's part in Mussolini's life and in the Fascist movement in Italy?

"Very late, at the age of 17, 18, and from friends. It was not talked about at home. There was repression in Italy. Everything was imputed to the Germans, all the evils, the race laws, the persecutions. In my home, too, everything was imputed to the Germans. When I grew up and started to read, I understood that fascism and Nazism are interchangeable. My mother did not think so - she continued to say that fascism was all right until it cozied up to Hitler.

"In my opinion, if the blacks and not the Jews had been persecuted then, many Jews would still be fascists ... In fact, it is the same today. Many Jews in Italy are fascists, because fascism is far closer to today's Israel; they are persecuting the Arabs. If you go to the Rome Ghetto today, you will see that part of the Rome Jewish community is truly fascist, fascist in its mentality, in the head. And the situation in the Middle East complicates matters. They accuse everyone who speaks out against Israel of being anti-Semitic. And in Italian politics they are far closer to the right than to the left."

Encounter with history

Her mother, Fiammetta, converted to Christianity in 1930 and remained in Italy with her family even after Margherita and her son, Amedeo, went into exile to Argentina following the implementation of the race laws. But Sarfatti feared for the well-being of her daughter and her grandchildren, and after Rome was conquered by the Nazis she made long-distance use of the few connections she still retained from her days of glory in order to ensure that no harm would befall them. Thus Fiammetta found asylum in a hospital, disguised as a nurse; her husband, Livio, who was not Jewish, went into the underground; and their children were sent to Catholic convents. Margherita's older sister, Nella Errera, did not fare so well. She and her husband, Paolo, who officially denied their Jewishness, were arrested in 1944 by the S.S. and sent to the camp at Fossoli and from there to Auschwitz. They died on the way to the extermination camp.

The coffee is ready and Gaetani pours it into a demitasse.

Did your grandmother talk about the past or feel responsibility for her sister's death?

"Not with me, not with us, that was taboo at home. She may have had qualms of conscience, but either you commit suicide or you decide to live. People lived with worse things on their conscience. She was actually involved with art - it is not that she harmed or informed on anyone. On the contrary, some historians say that as long as she was by his side, Mussolini did fewer horrible things. She herself did not do anything bad to anyone. That her man was scum - of that there is no doubt."

The dramatic story of Margherita Sarfatti's life begins with a tranquil, happy childhood in the ghetto of Venice, where she was born on April 8, 1880, the youngest child of an affluent religious Jewish family, the Grassinis (the father of the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg was her cousin). The lovely girl with red hair and green eyes and insatiable curiosity was raised in a protected setting and surrounded by love, especially on the part of her grandmother, Dolcetta Levi Nahmias, a "woman of valor," in the Jewish term, from whom she learned to live in the present and not get caught up in the past.

"Oh, God," she would mumble every night in a prayer she made up, "make me learn how to be happy and learn how to be grateful for all the good things you have given me." To be happy, at any price: that was the motto that propelled her throughout her life. At the age of 18, despite her parents' objections, she married Cesare Sarfatti, a Jewish lawyer and socialist, who was 14 years her senior. The Sarfattis had three children: Roberto, Amedeo and Fiammetta.

However, she found life in Venice too confining, and her husband was also eager for a change. The couple moved to the nerve center of Italy - Milan. There Margherita began to carve herself a place in the intellectual elite and to become active in fields which until then had been male prerogatives: journalism and art. To that end, she opened her salon every Wednesday to the city's Who's Who and gained the reputation of an impeccable hostess: beautiful, witty and vivacious. Her home became the center of the artistic avant-garde, the melting pot of Futurism, and later of the Novecento Italiano movement. The leading artists, writers and politicians were regulars in her home.

"A kind of acute sense of smell impelled me toward gifted people," she wrote in her memoirs, which are really a collection of episodes about her meetings with preeminent world figures, including the inventor Guglielmo Marconi, Pope Pius X, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Albert Einstein and many others. Israel Zangwill, whom she calls the "Jewish Dickens," and Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the Zionist Revisionist leader, were also among her acquaintances.

"She was an educated woman, very attentive to the cultural fashions, a manipulative woman, ambitious and uninhibited, with a singular talent for self-promotion (a talent she showed also after her son died in World War I, appropriating his death as another means of self- promotion)," says the historian Dr. Simona Urso, from the University of Padua, who has written a biography of Sarfatti.

The dramatic pivot of her life - the encounter with history - occurred in 1912, when a young, uncouth and unknown journalist named Benito Mussolini was appointed editor of the socialist journal Avanti, for which Sarfatti wrote art criticism. At 29, he was three years younger than Sarfatti, an ardent socialist from the provinces, a charismatic womanizer with a gift for holding his listeners in thrall with his talk. Sarfatti spotted a "glint of fanaticism" in his eyes and was immediately drawn to the power he projected.

A Jew and a racist

Thus began a romantic and political relationship that lasted for two decades. Initially his passion was greater than hers, as reflected in a letter he wrote to her friend, the poet Ada Negri: "I am worried and a little sad. She is distant and does not write. What a pity! To waste the days of love thus." And, as his sister Edvidge wrote in her memoirs, "Benito's love for this writer was new and deep, because she was able to control his true mental workings and frames of mind."

Their romantic relationship quickly generated furious quarrels, because of Mussolini's macho refusal to abstain from other women. Sarfatti was unwilling to share her lover; she had enough with his wife and mother of his children, Rachele. Nevertheless, their meetings became more frequent and they constantly exchanged notes and letters. They refrained from displaying their relationship in public, but seem not to have made any special efforts to hide it from their respective spouses.

"Once she told me, 'I loved only two men in my life, and both were extraordinary.' I believe she was referring to Mussolini and to my grandfather," Margherita Magali, Amedeo's daughter and Sarfatti's favorite granddaughter, told Haaretz. "She also advised me not to go to bed with my boyfriends, because for them, she told me, 'It is something else completely: they get up, put on their pants and it's all over.' She encouraged me to preserve my 'innocence' until I was married. Slightly strange advice, coming from her."

The First World War proved tragic for the Sarfatti family: Roberto, the eldest son, was killed in battle at the age of 17. "I am tormented by the pain you no longer cause me," his mother wrote in one of the poems she dedicated to him. After her paramour seized power in the country, the Fascist government awarded Roberto Sarfatti a posthumous medal for heroism.

Even though her father converted to Christianity and her mother was a Christian, Magali some time ago supported a suggestion by a Milan Jew to add a Star of David to her hero-uncle's grave at the Asiago memorial site. But her brother Roberto, who is named after the fallen soldier, and the cousins from Rome were not enthusiastic about the idea. "He died as an Italian, not a Jew," says Roberto, who remembers his grandmother as a domineering, intolerant woman.

Official Israel did not hold anything against Mussolini's mistress, and according to Gaetani, her grandmother visited Israel several times. Among the documents in the apartment is an entry visa to Israel from 1959, on which is imprinted the signature of the consul, Shlomo Nahmias (the same name as her beloved grandmother).

The 1922 March on Rome to seize power in the country was apparently devised in the Sarfattis' country home, near Como. It was Mussolini's finest hour, and Sarfatti's, too. The redheaded girl from the ghetto, the daughter of religiously observant parents, was about to bask in the glow of Fascist power. "The pursuit of power seems to have been the strongest bond between them," writes the historian Philip Cannistraro (with Brian Sullivan) in "Il Duce's Other Woman" (William Morrow & Co., 1993) about the two lovers, who by now made no effort to hide their relationship.

According to the rumors that were rife in Italy at the time, Rachele Mussolini, who remained in the north with the children, was having an affair with a railway worker, and Cesare Sarfatti was also no romantic slouch. When her husband died, two years later, Sarfatti moved to Rome and became the "Duce's other woman." Her personal relations with Mussolini were idyllic: he spent more time with the children of his mistress than he did with his own children, and in this period her political influence was also at its zenith. She was the Duce's ghostwriter, writing newspaper articles in his name, edited the Fascist organ and wrote his first official biography, which, as it happens, was first published in English, in Britain.

"This is a woman who received power in a framework that deprived women of all effective political and personal power," Dr. Urso notes. "Sarfatti was the first to discern the need to create appropriate cultural baggage for fascism and an artistic language that would represent it, and she worked toward promoting the Novecento artistic movement, whose representatives in the 1930s became the leading purveyors of Mussolini's propaganda. She herself probably took part in formulating this ideology."

How is it possible to reconcile her Jewish origins and the path of Mussolini?

"Her connection with Mussolini can be explained, in part, by the road they both took from socialism to fascism - an ideological path that a whole generation embarked on. Fascism attracted many Jews, who were convinced that Italy's unification, the Risorgimento (Resurgence), for which Italy's Jews were among the fighters in 1848, was not yet complete. They looked forward to the end of an era and to the birth of a new Italy. And they, their generation, were to be the new Italy. Let us also not forget that Sarfatti was a Jew but was no less of a racist than Mussolini."

The Italian historian and journalist Giorgio Fabre agrees. In his newly published book "Mussolini Racist," he refers to writings published by Sarfatti, sometimes under a pen name, even before she met Mussolini: "From this period and the columns in Avanti, Margherita embarked on the course that would lead her, with a certain consistency, to write for 30 years pages and pages of racist-discriminatory comments against blacks and Asians. These writings are not very well-known, but their tone and meaning are unequivocal, and they are now starting to be studied."

What about the contrast between Sarfatti's feminism and the macho Mussolini?

Urso: "In fact, she was never a true feminist. She drew close to the feminists only because that was the only way women could engage in politics."

Were her fascist attitudes a deliberate ideological choice or were they influenced by her ties with the Duce?

"Of the two, she was the clear-headed one. One can say that she was as much of a fascist as Mussolini - Fascism was the invention of the two of them."

Her political testament

Her glory days were shortlived. Toward the end of the 1920s, ill winds began to blow in Rome. Sarfatti, who was approaching 50, put on weight and started to show signs of irritability and despotism. Her impatient lover turned his attention to other, younger women, and her Jewishness also started to bother him. His advisers, who had no liking for the leader's "Israelite" mistress, urged him to bring to Villa Torlonia his forgotten family in the north and to dump the "Jewish whore." This time Mussolini was happy to do their bidding, and thus Sarfatti moved from a house across the street to the apartment at 18 Via Dei Villini.

It was the beginning of the end. "Mrs. Sarfatti is experiencing a crisis. Her salon, where cabinet ministers and also senators were seen in the past - everyone who wanted to stand out in one way or another - is growing emptier from week to week," the writer Corrado Alvaro, one of the regulars in her new home, wrote in his diary. Gradually Sarfatti was shunted aside, and by the implementation of the race laws in Italy, in 1938, was removed from all the positions she held and barred from writing in the press.

She realized that the time had come to leave. She reached the decision at the country home near Como, the place where she and Mussolini had sown the seeds of Fascism and where she had planned the March on Rome with him. But that summer, when a relative sent her an innocent-looking postcard and wrote a warning, in English, between the lines, "Look out, you are watched," Sarfatti did not tarry to wax nostalgic about the past. Within a short while, she packed two suitcases and asked her chauffeur to drive her to the nearby Swiss border. Reportedly she took with all her jewelry, valuable notes and a priceless treasure: 1,272 love letters from Mussolini - a kind of insurance policy.

"If you read in the papers that I took my life because of depression or longing for Italy, or something like that, do not believe it: know that I was rubbed out," she said some time later in Paris to her daughter, who was sent by Mussolini's aide to try to convince her to come back. Dr. Urso explains, "Outside Italy, Sarfatti could have constituted a problem for Mussolini, because of what she knew and everything she could have written about the regime."

Sarfatti, fearing Mussolini's long arm, wanted to get to the United States, but when all her efforts to obtain a visa failed, she decided to sail into exile in Argentina. Now almost 60, she was afflicted with longing and with concern for her daughter in Italy. "Fiammetta my darling, my treasure, at last letters are starting to arrive from you, late, not in the right order, but I can now place on my heart the paper you have touched, on which you wrote, which you caressed with your gaze, with your fingers," she wrote her in a letter that is in the archive on Via Dei Villini.

By the time she returned home, in 1947, Italy had already erased from its memory both the Duce and his "other woman." Only her two children, Fiammetta (whom she had not seen for eight years) and Amedeo, were on hand to greet her at Ciampino Airport. Sarfatti died on October 30, 1961, in her home near Como, anonymous and forgotten.

By fleeing the country, Margherita Sarfatti may have spared herself the fate of her sister Nella, who perished on a transport to Auschwitz, or the end of Claretta Petacci, who is burned into the Italian collective memory as the Duce's legendary lover who was executed alongside him. But Sarfatti also imposed upon herself a vow of silence and upheld that vow throughout her exile in Argentina and after her return. This may have been the price she had to pay Mussolini to buy her freedom and ensure the safety of her daughter and grandchildren. To the day of her death, she made no public comments about him or about the Fascist movement, and her memoirs mention the word "Fascism" only once - and Mussolini himself, not at all. Her image soon faded into the dimness of libraries and archives.

Was she ever contrite about her ideological choice? Her relationship with the Duce? How did she react after the war and the Holocaust?

"Contrition is not an appropriate word for her," Dr. Urso says. "In a book she published in 1937, 'America, The Pursuit of Happiness' [in Italian], she writes between the lines about what the regime in Italy should not have become and effectively accuses Mussolini of betraying Fascism. This is her political testament. Afterward she did not say another word on the subject. It follows that her negative opinions in this regard are limited to the axis with Hitler and are undoubtedly related to Fascist Italy's anti-Semitic choice. And because she chose not to say anything in public, she did not express herself about the Holocaust, either."

Her dramatic story is hardly known internationally or in Israel. How did it come about that, in contrast to Eva Braun, Claretta Petacci or Evita Peron, Sarfatti has remained almost completely anonymous?

"Her story is known in Italy, though mainly by historians, of course, and the reason is probably because the mistress of Mussolini's who was engraved in the memory is Petacci, who was with him in his last years and died by his side. Sarfatti, with her many inner contradictions, was an unusual character -for sure, not a tragic one - whom it is difficult to categorize, so she did not become an icon like Evita - though in my opinion she would have been very happy to be remembered as a kind of 'Evita.'