Victoria de Grazia - The Perfect Fascist: A Story of Love, Power, and Morality in Mussolinis Italy

When Benito Mussolini welcomed Attilio Teruzzi into his office at Palazzo Venezia on March 17, 1926, hugged him, teased him about his upcoming marriage, and flirted with his attractive American fiance, it was a private moment with a public purpose. This was the first time that Mussolini, in his double capacity as president of the Council of Ministers and duce of fascism, had been asked to bless a marriage. He was touched. I am happy that you are marrying an American, he told Teruzzi. English women are ugly, French women perverse, Spanish women bring us bad luck, and we get along with America. There are also a few dollars there, which doesnt hurt. In sum, he heartily approved.

At the time, Teruzzi, a one-time career military officer, was undersecretary at the Interior Ministry and a rising star in the fascist establishment. His fiance, Lilliana Weinman, a rising opera diva known by her stage name Lilliana Lorma, had left her calling to marry. The couple was in love, idealistic, and eager to promote Teruzzis political career.

When they made their engagement official, word quickly spread. One of the most visible and vigorous New Men of the Fascist Revolution was marrying a powerful specimen of Americas New Woman. But as the late June wedding date approached, Teruzzi and Lilliana were faced with a predicament. They wanted their union to express Mussolinis latest dictum: All within the state, nothing outside of the state, nothing against the state. But there was no protocol for a fascist wedding. With Lillianas notions of staging and celebrity, and Teruzzis instinct for ritual and rank, they decided they would have to fashion the event themselves.

No expense would be spared. The dollar was strong, and the brides fathers elastic-webbing factory on Manhattans Lower East Side was booming. He would pay for everything, settle a rich allowance on his daughter, and even outfit the grooms familyall good and humble people. The wedding would be a true affair of state, with cabinet ministers and the whole Fascist Grand Council in attendance. The groom had asked Mussolini to act as his witness at the civil ceremony, together with his own immediate superior, the minister of the interior. The bride would have as her witnesses the American ambassador and her mentor, Tullio Serafin, formerly of La Scala and now the Metropolitan Operas lead conductor.

The prenuptial reception, for four or maybe five hundred guests at the Hotel Palace on Via Veneto, would be exquisitely bon ton, with a string quintet, cocktails, and masses of flowers. The couple would invite only the crme of the emerging fascist elite: the quadrumvirs (who had led the March on Rome), Milanese businessmen, illustrious prefects, and wheeler-dealer lawyers. There would be representatives of the arts and the doyennes of the regimes new salon life, journalists and foreign correspondents, aristocrats, a sprinkling of the international smart set, and the brides proud party of fifty relatives and friends, who would come from New York City, Vienna, and Rzeszw, the onetime Little Jerusalem of Austrian Galicia, her familys homeland.

In a nod to Mussolinis recent rapprochement with the Vatican, the couple decided they would hold a church wedding as well as the civil ceremony. For that, they would need the popes dispensation, as the bride, being of the Jewish faith, was an infidel in the eyes of the Catholic Church. The civil ceremony would come first, to show that the Italian state was the paramount authority. It would be officiated by the governor of Rome at the Campidoglio, with the groom in plain black shirt with war decorations and the bride in lavender silk georgette. Since the Catholic Church held that it was a sin for a couple to consummate the union before sanctifying their marital vows, the religious rites would take place that same afternoon at the Basilica of Saint Mary of the Angels, with the groom in tuxedo and black tie and the bride in white lace, with a long train.

June of Year IV of the Fascist Era could not have offered more propitious timing for this event. It had been close to four years now since Mussolini had threatened to occupy Rome with his army of 20,000 Blackshirts, and King Victor Emmanuel III had capitulated to this show of force by inviting him to form a new governing coalition. But it was only over the previous year, 1925, that Mussolinistruggling to recover from the political crisis caused by the kidnapping and killing of the socialist Giacomo Matteotti, chief of the parliamentary oppositionhad pushed full throttle to turn his government into a dictatorship of unlimited power and duration.

The bridal party, from left to right, Isaac Weinman, Maestro Tullio Serafin, Rose Weinman, Benito Mussolini, Ambassador Henry Prather Fletcher, Lilliana Weinman, Attilio Teruzzi, Amelia Teruzzi, and Celestina Teruzzi

Alinari Archives / Getty Images

With the first unruly years behind him, normalization was now the byword. Instead of unleashing bands of squadristi to break the opposition, Mussolini used the law to muzzle the press, issued emergency legislation to establish a one-party state, took steps to turn the Fascist Militia into a national guard, and set up special military tribunals with provisions for capital punishment to silence dangerous political opponents.

Normalization meant that Italy would return to the international capital markets by settling on a schedule for paying its war debts to the United States, outlawing opposition unions, imposing budget austerity, and slashing workers wages. It also meant that Mussolini hoped to gain the respect of bourgeois society by embracing good values like Church marriage, licensing brothels to get prostitutes off the street, and imposing a bachelor tax on celibate men so that they would do their duty to the nation, marry, and have children. The fact that Attilio Teruzzi, the notorious rowdy, was settling down with a bride of such uncommon talent was a wholly positive sign, from the perspective of the many women who had welcomed fascism and so far gotten nothing for it.