Margherita Sarfatti

Italian journalist, art critic, patron, collector, socialite, a prominent propaganda adviser of the National Fascist Party. She was Benito Mussolini's biographer as well as one of his mistresses.

Born as born Margherita Grassini, in Venice, the daughter of Amedeo Grassini and Emma Levi. Amedeo was a wealthy Jewish lawyer and businessman. He was a fiscal attorney for the Venetian government and a close friend of Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto, later Pope Pius X. He would later be made a Knight of the Order of the Crown of Italy.

Sarfatti grew up in a house situated at the Canal Grande in Venice and was educated by private tutors. However, she was soon attracted by socialist ideas and escaped her parents' home at age 18 to marry Cesare Sarfatti, a Jewish lawyer from Padua. He was 13 years her senior, but shared her socialist beliefs. In 1902, the couple moved to Milan. There, they became prominent in the city's artistic life, hosting weekly Salons that became the centre of the Futurist and Novecento Italiano artistic movements. They had several children. Their eldest son, Robert, enlisted in the Italian army during World War I, and was killed in action on Monte Baldo in January 1918, aged 18.

In 1911, Margherita Sarfatti met Benito Mussolini (three years her junior) and started a relationship with him. After losing her husband in 1924, she wrote a biography of Mussolini. This first published in 1925 in Britain under the title The Life of Benito Mussolini; it was published the following year in Italy with the title Dux. Because of the fame of Mussolini and the author's familiarity with the dictator, the book was a success. Seventeen editions were printed and it was translated into 18 languages.

Until 1938, when Mussolini bowed to German pressure and after the Manifesto of Race enacted a racial legislation, the fascist government's politics were not anti-semitic, and the party's membership rolls were open to Jews.