In response to the many brilliant and insightful comments left on the previous post, I asked Renato to weigh in. What did he think of Rudy's behavior that night when Pola slapped his face, when Rudy slipped up and had one too many girlfriends in the same place at the same time? Etc.?
Renato writes:
“ When considering the sexual customs of about a century ago, in Italy one must be very careful not to use current morality as a term of comparison.
In Italy, as indeed in much of the Western world, the image of the woman had a double connotation. This is why the mother, sister and wife were automatically considered saints, women similar to angelic women as described since the end of the 13th century by the poets of the Dolce Stil Novo.
These descriptions of women contrasted with those of others, who were considered available prey for sexual relations both as complacent lovers and as prostitutes.
The wives, mothers and sisters silently endured the ill-concealed adventures of their husbands, sons and brothers as the woman was considered the exclusive sexual property of the husband to whom she had to obey. This was while the husband allowed himself ample freedom to flutter from flower to flower.
Valentino certainly had no qualms about having extra marital sexual relations because as a male he had appropriated total sexual freedom.
To all this we must add that Valentino had an undisguised passion for the representatives of the fair sex, so much so that we have proof of it above all in reading two letters which in 1910, at the age of fifteen, he sent to a former friend in the boarding school in Perugia.
In the first letter of June 22, 1910, he writes: "Now I'm at home, sick with a disease that I caught from prostitutes, and I'm suffering so much that I don't want to continue the kind of idle and useless life that I've led up till now."
While in the second letter his ailments from the brothel seem forgotten and on August 29, 1910, he wrote to his friend: “A little while ago there was a singer seventeen years old, here in Taranto, and I had great time with her. So now I'm going out with these singers and, at the same time, I make love with prostitutes, leaving one and then taking up with another."
There is no doubt that what is written in the aforementioned letters is a mirror of Rodolfo's reality as they are handwritten letters actually sent to his friend Bruno. They have nothing to do with the subsequent imaginative reality invented by the copywriters of the studios and by the delusions of scandals mongers.
Valentino felt free, like most Italians of the time, to have purely sexual relationships and for this he did not feel guilty. Frequenting brothels or having extramarital affairs was very common in Italy at that time, while the wives consoled themselves saying: "Yes, yes, he can go ahead but, really, he only loves me!"
The same logic also applied to Natacha when she wrote to Douglas Gerrard, “ One woman or a hundred it makes no difference anymore!”
