In the autumn of 1951 De Monticelli was invited to visit the Certosa di Pavia. He wanted to investigate why large crowds were converging on the sanctuary during the mild October weekends—many more visitors than normal. A few weeks earlier, Father Enrico Zucca, who had played a role in the theft of Mussolini’s body from the Musocco cemetery, had told a newspaper that Il Duce was buried in the Certosa di Pavia’s little cemetery, just where the Franciscan brothers had relinquished the corpse to the Milan police in August 1946. Father Zucca, now in Brazil, had given this information to a French weekly and it immediately struck a chord in the Italian papers, which explained the crowds flocking to the convent.
Once on the scene, Di Monticelli found it impossible to extract any information from Father Casimiro, priest of the Discalced Carmelites, who went so far as to pretend to have lost the key to the door behind the altar where the relics were stored. But another informant turned out to be more forthcoming: this was Dr. Maddalena, the owner of the pharmacy that sold the liqueurs distilled in the convent. Maddalena knew nothing about Mussolini’s burial place; still, he was happy to share his memories. He had been the podestà of the little town at the gates of the Certosa for fifteen years. It was he—sporting a blue scarf around his neck and a dagger in his belt—who had received Mussolini when he made an official visit on October 31, 1932, and asked the prior to pray for him. Could anyone deny that request twenty years later, asked Maddalena, when Mussolini “had died in the way we all know”?3 The pharmacist was not the only one troubled by the unhappy fate of the Fascist chief. De Monticelli paints a picture of a whole district where, if not nostalgic, people were at least sympathetic, referring not to “Mussolini” but to “Il Duce” and speaking of the mystery of the hidden body “as a sort of local curiosity or privilege.”4
In Predappio, Mussolini’s birthplace, the honor of having produced Il Duce had turned into a heavy burden. According to neo-Fascist journalists of the 1950s, it was “the poorest, most neglected city in Italy, the saddest and most miserable.”5 While that was an exaggeration, it remained true that Predappio, a place of pilgrimage during the Fascist years, had suffered when the regime came to an end. Politically, the town had sought to free itself from its place in Fascist history by rediscovering a left-wing past that predated the March on Rome and had never been entirely wiped out. Thus, when, after the war, it seemed that Mussolini’s body might be returned to his family and buried in the Predappio cemetery, the local Socialists and Communists were indignant. “Look,” they said, “they want to give him to us as a prize even though he is dead.”6 But even a left-wing local government brought no peace to Predappio. Whether loved or hated, Il Duce lived deep in the hearts of the people there. As late as 1952, photographs of Mussolini still decorated the houses in the town, De Monticelli noted.
De Monticelli knew that the story of Mussolini’s dead body had more to do with the living than with mortal remains. Among those living was Mario Proli, a marble cutter at work on a singular sarcophagus. True, the local anti-Fascists had sworn that Il Duce’s body would never be buried in the Predappio cemetery, but that hadn’t stopped Proli from carving a big slab of tufa stone that would serve as the tomb’s cover, and from engraving the fasces that would decorate the corners—pieces the marble cutter proudly showed off to Epoca’s photographer. Another local who caught De Monticelli’s eye was Don Pietro Zoli, parish priest of the village of San Cassiano, where the Predappio cemetery was located. Eighty years old and not afraid to speak his mind, Father Zoli had been a pupil of Mussolini’s mother. “Let Togliatti, Nenni, and Longo say what they will, the point is to bring Il Duce’s body back here,” he said. “The sarcophagus is ready.”7
Then there was Giacomo Fabbri, the cemetery custodian. In better times he had been one of the most popular men in Predappio as he took visitors on a guided tour to see the graves of Mussolini’s parents. Now he was a “sad, fat man” who reminded De Monticelli of a reformed alcoholic living in a place thick with cheerful vineyards. Fabbri had his theory about when the body of Mussolini would return to its native soil: it all depended on when the powers in Rome would decide the time had come.
The marble cutter, the parish priest, and the cemetery custodian might have been among the living, but they were people who had outlived their time. In telling the story of Mussolini’s afterlife, De Monticelli casts them in the role of minor actors, as if they were pathetic players on a stage:
They have a certain melancholy in common; there is a certain quality of being undone that makes these figures similar. They are typical secondary characters in a drama played out years ago. History left them behind like a fast train passing an insignificant and forgettable stationmaster. They stayed in place, for what else could they do? What is left for secondary characters when the protagonists have been overwhelmed by catastrophe?8
It was not out of ideological sympathy for Fascism that De Monticelli wondered about the fate of Predappio’s minor characters or drew eloquent portraits of Fascist bosses who had survived the ruins of the regime, men whose time had run out, who invariably had a bust of Il Duce on their shelves and a drawer full of letters from other men whose time had run out and whose days were too long. Neither was De Monticelli influenced by the conservative press, which urged “pacification” of Fascism’s remnants, amounting to something close to amnesia regarding the recent past. Far from wanting readers to forget, De Monticelli felt that his job in reporting on post-Fascist Italy was to conserve memory. From his origins in the Action Party he had retained, like many fellow Resistance members, the belief that the new Italy could not flourish without having expressed grief for the old. But De Monticelli thought that compassion must be extended to all. The Italian soldiers who died at El Alamein deserved the same attention as the partisans who lost their lives in the Apennines, he thought. The corpses of Fascists buried in the Musocco cemetery seemed just as human to him as the bodies of slain Resistance heroes.
* * *
FOR THE MOST part, the Italian left, especially when it came to the Resistance, had difficulty freeing itself from the black-and-white logic expressed by Elio Vittorini in his novel Men and Not Men, discussed earlier. Playing and replaying the civil war, the literature of the left, even the most sophisticated, reserved grief mainly for the fallen partisans, depicting any compassion for the dead of the Republic of Salò as absurd or degrading. In the Resistance novel par excellence, Agnese Goes to Die by Renata Viganò, a partisan’s death represents the fountain of life (“The more they die, the more others come”), while the death of a Salò Fascist opened a sinkhole (“the dead carry away even the living”).9 Just as Manichean was much of novelist Beppe Fenoglio’s early writing, in which the dead enemy was condemned to an animal existence in the hereafter, “a beast that disgusts even the God of mercy.”10 Italo Calvino granted the Salò Fascists the status of human beings but denied their dead any pity: it was pointless to bow one’s head over the grave of a Blackshirt, for he had been on the wrong side of history. The first important leftist to propose a less brutal dichotomy was Cesare Pavese, an anti-Fascist but one who had not taken to the hills with his gun. His novel The House on the Hill concludes with the following memorable words:
I saw the unknown dead, the dead of the Republic of Salò. They are the ones that woke me. If a man who is not one of us, an enemy, becomes something like this when he dies, if he stops us in our tracks and we are afraid to step over him, it means that even in defeat, the enemy is a person. Where the dead man lies we too could lie.… There would be no difference, and if we are alive, we owe that fact to the battered corpse. So every war is a civil war; every dead body resembles someone alive and demands a reason why.11
In Fenoglio’s later works, the novelist learned to look his Fascist enemies in the face and see their “fleshly and human” attributes. When, in Johnny the Partisan, Fenoglio drops the historical dimension in favor of epic fiction, he finds dignity in the sacrifices of both sides in the civil war. “Remember that without the d
ead—theirs as well as ours—none of this would have meaning,” says Johnny. While Pavese and Fenoglio were widely acknowledged for their literary talents, anti-Fascists felt uneasy with the way the writers seemed to put Fascists and partisans on the same plane, as if they were distant antagonists—ancient Greeks and Persians at war.
Could one show compassion for the Fascist dead without becoming a Fascist sympathizer? Would not compassion for the Fascist dead—Mussolini among them—chip away at the foundations of a democracy attained by the blood of the Resistance? Where did intellectual considerations about Il Duce’s remains end and “obscene speculation” about a “dishonorable corpse” begin?12 In 1950s Italy, the sensitive anti-Fascist conscience was troubled by such questions. “Mother, tell me, is it really evil / To take and string up a general? / Just one of them, hanging head down / I won’t ask for anything more, this time around,” sang the Cantacronache (“the reporters”), forerunners of the left-wing singer-songwriters of the 1960s. Addressing the fraught issue in song, they treated the moral legitimacy of a republic founded at Piazzale Loreto in a lighter vein.13 More seriously, the well-known Sicilian poet and Nobel Laureate Salvatore Quasimodo wrote about the same theme in his “Laude, 29 April, 1945.” The poem also opens with a son questioning his mother:
And why, mother, do you spit on a body
that hangs head down, feet tied
to the crossbar? Aren’t you just as disgusted by the others
that hang by its side? Oh, that woman,
her stockings worthy of a crazy can-can,
her mouth and throat like flowers trod underfoot.
No, mother, stop: shout at the crowd
to go away. They are not mourning, they are revelling,
rejoicing: the horseflies are already buzzing
at the veins. You fired
at that face, now: mother, mother, mother.14
In the decade after Mussolini and Claretta Petacci were strung up in Piazzale Loreto, no Italian poet—and certainly none on the left, where Quasimodo remained although he distanced himself from the Communists—looked so unflinchingly at the unsavory spectacle of April 29, 1945. No one else wrote about the ferocity of the crowd in Piazzale Loreto with such frankness. As the poem goes on, we learn that the son is questioning his mother from the grave: “You are dead, son / And because you are dead / you can forgive.” Quasimodo seems to suggest that the civil war was so terrible as to make pardon possible only for the dead, not for the survivors. And so the son comes to agree with his mother, replying that “the fat green flies / collect in bunches on the meat hooks: rage and blood / rightly flow.” Along with this poem, Quasimodo dedicated another, “To the Fifteen of Piazzale Loreto,” to the Resistance fighters shot and dumped in the piazza on August 10, 1944. In the memory of the postwar left, that heap of bodies thrown in the square seemed to provide some, if not sufficient, reason for the bodies strung up on the crossbar on the day of the Liberation.
Like Quasimodo, Gaetano Salvemini was one of the few anti-Fascists who dared to lift the taboo from Piazzale Loreto and consider it as one of the keystones of the Italian republic. Even before returning to Italy from exile in America, the aging historian of modern Italy freely crowed over the insult the Resistance had delivered to the ox of the nation: “They hung him up by his feet like a butchered ox in front of the meat shop.” Many thought Salvemini’s words scandalous, revealing a moral laxity especially unpardonable in a Harvard professor. Scandalous or not, Salvemini’s view of Piazzale Loreto was anything but superficial. A longtime anti-Fascist, he had relished the fantasy of Mussolini dead and supported attempts to bring his death about long before April 29, 1945. And after Il Duce’s exposure in the piazza, Salvemini did more than simply write a few approving sentences; he searched his conscience, questioning his old attitude toward assassinating Mussolini, a move that during the years of the regime he had considered pointless and risky. “I did not believe that liberty and justice were more sacred than life itself,” he wrote after the Liberation, noting that he had trembled with fear in April 1945, to think that the life of Mussolini might continue to be considered sacred.15
Salvemini also searched for a justification for the display of Mussolini’s body. His quest reminded him of Anteo Zamboni, murdered by a gang of Fascists in Bologna in 1926 after the sixteen-year-old supposedly tried to kill Il Duce. The historian was seeking to respond to the Jesuit publication Civiltà cattolica, which had annoyed him by expressing concern for Mussolini’s fate at Piazzale Loreto but none for the victims of Fascist violence. Zamboni’s body, he maintained, had been “strung up and exhibited in Bologna for a week.”16 Salvemini was too serious a scholar not to grasp the gravity of this claim. If the young Zamboni’s corpse was indeed displayed in Bologna in 1926, then the Fascist practice of exhibiting the bodies of the dead would have in fact begun at least a decade earlier than was generally believed. As it happened, though, the event never took place. The plan to string the body up was nixed by Fascist boss Italo Balbo and the corpse was hastily transported to the Bologna cemetery. Besides, this was not Salvemini’s first encounter with Zamboni’s body. As early as 1930, in an anti-Fascist tract written with the historian’s encouragement, Emilio Lussu referred to the cruel treatment of Zamboni, saying that the body was “dragged through the streets and left for eleven days before it was buried.”17 When Salvemini took up the story after the war, the dragging had become hanging and the delay in burial had become public exhibition of the corpse. The appeal of these charges was obvious: why should the anti-Fascists be ashamed of displaying the body of a war criminal when twenty years earlier the Fascists had done the same to an innocent boy?
When, in a meeting in 1954, Salvemini casually referred to Mussolini “with his feet in the air in Piazzale Loreto,” a onetime admirer of the professor, journalist Giovanni Ansaldo, became enraged. In an open letter, Ansaldo published a long list of accusations against him. “What is the point of studying so much, dear professor, what is the point of having seen so many sunrises and so many sunsets,” he asked, if historical scholarship and long experience do not produce in the soul “a higher sense of mercy”?18 True, Mussolini’s body had been strung up by the feet. But that was something Italians should never say, or put in print, or even remember; they should “pretend not to know,” because what had been done to Mussolini had dishonored Italy in the eyes of the world. Even among the Resistance, no one wanted to take credit for Piazzale Loreto; the perpetrators had vanished into anonymity. And now, ten years later, “for no good reason,” Salvemini reminded people of the barbarous act in gleeful tones, as if in his twenty-two years of opposing Fascism, and in the ten years after the Liberation, he had dreamed of nothing else, as if the insult to the corpse were the great event that lit up his life. Salvemini’s behavior was enough to make Ansaldo doubt not only the professor’s good taste but the worth of his thought:
If you are still capable of such one-sided cruelty, laughing because Mussolini’s corpse was hung up by the feet, one can only wonder about the moral value of your opposition, which endured for so long and appeared so honorable.… If you do not understand the damage caused to our country by the memory of that outrage, one can only ask what you could possibly understand about what would really be to Italy’s benefit.19
More than any other postwar journalist, Ansaldo had thought deeply about the symbolic consequences of Piazzale Loreto. He had begun writing about it in his diary while a military prisoner in Germany and had continued over the years, speaking freely in part because he did not share much of the Resistance ideology. When the company that owned the Piazzale Loreto gas station decided to dismantle the notorious crossbar, Ansaldo wrote a memorable article about the proceedings. Published in L’Illustrazione italiana, his story showed how that piece of the piazza had come back to life. After the bodies were taken down, the crossbar remained with its macabre ghosts, since the names of the Fascist dead had been painted on the metal bar. The gas station reopened after the war and people s
topping to refuel would “discuss how much gas and at what price where once dark blood had been spilled.” The famous crossbar also stirred fantasies of many would-be executioners, who were always ready to taunt their political adversaries with the threat of hanging them in Piazzale Loreto. Political and union marches filed by the gas station. The terrible crossbar, shameful symbol of the civil war, “risked becoming a monument,” according to Ansaldo.20
While Salvemini refused to treat Piazzale Loreto as an event to be repressed by the Resistance, Ansaldo feared that the famous square would become sacred. Their disagreement over Mussolini with his feet in the air pointed to two radically different kinds of grief. Salvemini’s response—a Jacobin version of grief—involved so unforgiving an approach to Fascism that no room was left for compassion for the people who had brought the country to the brink of ruin. Ansaldo’s Thermidor variety of grief was too conscious of the moral ambiguities of the civil war to allow for outbursts of hate. Mourning for the partisan dead had hardened anti-Fascist hearts until they felt indifferently or even pleased about Mussolini’s posthumous treatment, while anyone whose grief extended to the Salò dead tended to feel compassion for Il Duce as well. “Historically, everyone has some merit, even the losers, those who were killed and those who were strung up by their feet,” Ansaldo wrote.21 Downplaying the conflict between Fascism and anti-Fascism, Ansaldo’s historical relativism fit nicely with the line espoused by Christian Democratic prime minister De Gasperi. But Ansaldo’s position annoyed those anti-Fascists who saw the centrist government as a Thermidor takeover of the Italian revolution. Thus Il Duce’s story also involved competing versions of grief, one sort of sorrow pitched against another.
The Body of Il Duce Page 17