The Body of Il Duce

by Sergio Luzzatto

  Riven by disagreement, Zoli’s coalition with the neo-Fascists was not so novel as it seemed. From the start of the republic’s second legislature in 1953, the Christian Democrats had colluded with the far right. Indeed, it would be only a small stretch to say that the return of Mussolini’s corpse to Predappio was the natural outcome of Christian Democratic politics—always more anti-Communist than anti-Fascist. But politics do not explain everything here. Il Duce’s body was given back to his family not just because there was a right-wing parliamentary majority but also because the Christian Democrats acted on a popular sentiment they shared with most of the electorate. Theirs was an expiatory kind of patriotism, based on a vague yet widely shared feeling of collective guilt. The Christian Democrats favored an apolitical interpretation of history, involving conciliation and shying away from memories of the Resistance and the attendant social tensions; they exalted the figure of the martyr who pays for others’ guilt with his own; and they embraced the Christian notion of forgiveness.

  A March 1956 letter from the great Sardinian jurist Salvatore Satta to Prime Minister Antonio Segni suggests the deep roots of this philosophy. The occasion for the letter was Easter, said Satta, when peace was supposed to settle into the hearts of all good Christians. The issue he wanted to take up was Il Duce’s body. He was writing to persuade Segni that the “beaten, humiliated” body should be returned to the care of Il Duce’s children and his “tender companion.” It was not just Mussolini’s corpse that was in question, wrote Satta. He was concerned about the fate of all the fallen of the Republic of Salò, all those Italians massacred “out of a sadistic hate that hides behind the decorum of partisanship,” all those who lay in mass graves or mountain cemeteries, far from their families. Difficult as it was to make reparations for all the dead, Satta urged Segni to let his Christian charity come to bear at least in the case of Mussolini. Let a stone be laid on the tomb of hatred and bureaucratic inflexibility, let the remains of Il Duce rest in the waiting sarcophagus at Predappio, he pleaded. Whom, after all, were they talking about? About a veteran of World War I, “corporal of the Bersagliere corps Benito Mussolini,” Satta wrote, referring to Il Duce’s wartime assault unit. Invoking the intense solidarity binding those who have fought in the same trenches or shed blood for the same nation, Satta made his appeal not only as a “onetime Blackshirt” but as a “soldier among soldiers.”6

  Satta’s letter is enlightening in its belief that Italy was undergoing “a national death,” a decline of any vestige of national unity and prominence.7 Satta mourned the demise of an Italy that seemed to matter on the world stage, a nation that was baptized at the battle of Vittorio Veneto during World War I and came of age under Mussolini at Piazza Venezia. At the same time, Satta’s letter shows that it was possible to urge the return of Mussolini’s remains to Predappio without being a Fascist. In his view, the act of forgiveness was meant to serve the cause not of any one group but of suffering humanity. As a good Christian would perforce see it, the skirmish over a cemetery was really Italy’s version of Judgment Day. Prime Minister Adone Zoli, despite the tangled circumstances that produced his government, regarded the matter much as Satta did. And Zoli was anything but a Fascist sympathizer. During the Resistance, he had led the Committee of National Liberation in Florence. In 1951 he had helped effect the return to Italy of the Roselli brothers, anti-Fascists murdered in France in 1937. But Zoli was not a man to ask a corpse to show its party membership card.

  * * *

  DURING THE SUMMER of 1957, Il Secolo d’Italia, the Italian Social Movement paper, engaged in a vociferous campaign to restore Il Duce’s remains to Predappio. By the end of July, working through the mediation of a common friend in Predappio, Rachele Mussolini was negotiating the details of the body’s return with Prime Minister Zoli. The government wanted to make the move during the August 15 Ferragosto holiday to take advantage of the fact that Italians would be going on their vacations and the newspapers would not be published the following day. Rachele Mussolini, for her part, said she did not want to bury the body immediately but wished to arrange a funeral ceremony in the little cemetery of San Casciano. On August 30, 1957, fifteen days after the government would have liked and twelve years after his death, the body of Il Duce began the road home. It was escorted by Caio M. Cattabeni, the forensics expert from the University of Milan, who had been called to authenticate the corpse; the former police chief of Milan, Vincenzo Agnesina, whom Zoli had asked to transport the casket to Emilia-Romagna, throwing journalists off the track by using a decoy vehicle; and the Cappuccine monks of the Lombard convent of Cerro Maggiore, where Mussolini’s remains had been hidden since 1946.

  Unloaded by several monks from a rented car at the San Casciano cemetery, a wooden crate marked “Church Documents.” August 3, 1957. (Foto Publifoto/Olympia)

  Despite the government’s efforts to keep the proceedings quiet, the press was on hand, trailing the body virtually minute by minute, turning the funeral into spectacular entertainment. While the weekly Oggi bargained for exclusive photo rights, the San Casciano cemetery swarmed with photographers from all over. At the Cerro Maggiore convent, the dailies reported, Mussolini’s corpse had been hidden in the space behind an altar until 1950. When the smell from the famous trunk in which the remains were sealed became too evident, the trunk itself was sealed in a wooden crate marked “Church Documents” and moved to a storeroom. This was the crate that several monks unloaded from the rented car at the San Casciano cemetery. Some of the assembled made a point of signing their names on the crate. And then, at the Mussolini family crypt, a small group of men raising their right arms in the Fascist salute succeeded in crowding around the remains of Il Duce and the frail figure of his widow, who had gotten approval to hold a memorial mass before the burial. So on August 31, 1957, the body of Il Duce was finally laid in the simple sarcophagus where it remains today and where the faithful come to sign their names in the guest book.

  August 31, 1957. The Mussolini family crypt, where Rachele Mussolini, surrounded by the neo-Fascist faithful, laid the body of Il Duce to rest. (Foto Publifoto/Olympia)

  No sooner had the burial taken place than the protests began. L’Unità accused Zoli of having “dared to do the unthinkable.”8 By returning the body to the neo-Fascists, were the Christian Democrats laying the basis for a new clerical-Fascist regime? Less polemically, Il Borghese suggested that Zoli had needed to repay the debt of the neo-Fascist votes that had put his government in power. The long postwar rule of the center, it seemed, was finally coming to an end. Meanwhile, the prime minister’s desk was piled high with letters about Mussolini’s return to Predappio. Most were positive. Praising Zoli’s gesture, a farm woman from the province of Mantua wrote that for years she had been tormented by the thought that Il Duce’s corpse had no peace. A worker from Emilia-Romagna approved of the wonderfully Christian act of restoring the body to the widow and promised Zoli that “as a local boss, I can get out the vote for you, at least 200 votes at the next election, all for you.”9 In the chorus of applause there were only a few dissenting voices, one of them a woman who decreed it shameful to have moved remains of Mussolini, “the greatest criminal of our times.”10 The woman, who did not sign her letter, wrote that she had lost four sons in 1944 when they were all deported by the Fascists, never to return home.

  The sarcophagus and guest book at the San Casciano cemetery. (Michele Bella)

  Enzo Biagi, editor in chief of Epoca, took a stern position. Mussolini, he wrote, belonged to the category of dead people who bring votes, and that was why so many had hastened to give a decent burial to the man who had dragged Italy into World War II and why so few had acted to build a memorial to the nameless and blameless, the very victims of that war. But in general the pro-government press tended to be conciliatory toward Zoli. The local correspondent for the Corriere della Sera depicted the town of Predappio as united in its desire to see Il Duce’s body return. An editorialist for the paper called Zoli’s decision a g
esture toward making peace with Italy’s past. The editor of Oggi praised the Italian people for their “noble silence” about Il Duce’s new burial place. Even the editorialists of the left—with the exception of the Communists—refrained from painting the events in too dramatic a light. In Il Ponte, noted intellectual Riccardo Bauer derided the clumsy way the anti-Fascists had protested the tributes at the tomb. Let the faithful stage their lugubrious ceremonies, but meanwhile young people should know something about Italian history and the “paper hero” who had for so many years deceived and poisoned the country, he wrote. Il Mondo offered several modest proposals of Swiftian inspiration. They included a tax on those who wanted to visit the San Casciano cemetery, higher postage for postcards sent from Predappio, and other ways of turning a profit for the public treasury from those who came to worship the remains of Mussolini.

  In a more serious vein, Il Mondo observed that the political culture of Fascism had always been based on death. The Fascist path followed a straight line that led from 1919 to 1957, from the earliest militants who gathered in Piazza San Sepolcro in Milan to those clustered around the holy sepulchre of Predappio. It wasn’t by chance, wrote Il Mondo, that in 1946 neo-Fascists made a hero of Domenico Leccisi. Nor was it insignificant that the young neo-Fascist had received twelve thousand votes, thereby defeating illustrious captains of the old Fascist regime: “To the neo-Fascist voters of Milan, the prestige of those who played an august role under Mussolini was nothing compared with the glory attained by an obscure young man who had come to attention for his mortuary high jinks.… It reminds one of the Ishmaelite sect, who pay in solid gold the living weight of the Aga Khan. The Fascists would like to pay the dead weight of their Duce in electoral votes.” The pilgrims who came from all over Italy to assemble at Mussolini’s crypt, observed Il Mondo, were the genuine heirs of Domenico Leccisi, “the most sincere Fascist of all time.”11

  The cemetery quickly became a site of pilgrimage. On Sunday, September 8, 1957, thirty-five hundred Fascist faithful turned up to line the pathways of the little country graveyard. They came from all over but especially from Rome and Milan, the younger Fascists predominating over older veterans. Forty-two were charged with offenses under the Scelba Act, which outlawed neo-Fascist demonstrations, for wearing black shirts or making the Fascist salute. Among those arrested were two young men who would play an important role in the neo-Fascist movement: one, a young attorney from Bergamo, Mirko Tremaglia, would one day be a party leader; the other, a Roman militant, Stefano Delle Chiaie, would be implicated in terrorist activities.

  The minister of the interior, Christian Democrat Fernando Tambroni, had sent an order barring entry to anyone “dressed in a black shirt.”12 But outlawing black shirts did not resolve the problem. A neo-Fascist from Tuscany was charged with having distributed the text of a poem entitled “Piazzale…” The walls of the town were plastered with posters predicting that Il Duce’s spirit would rise again. On Sunday, September 22, some seven thousand neo-Fascists converged on Predappio, arriving in fifty buses and hundreds of private cars. Many wore black shirts and most waved neo-Fascist pennants, raised their arms in the Fascist salute, and chanted songs from Mussolini’s day. The police, following Tambroni’s orders, stopped all those in black shirts at the gates of the cemetery, so that soon the place was crowded with men in their undershirts.

  It was hard to ignore the numbers arriving at Mussolini’s tomb, especially when their rituals were so explicit. Nevertheless, the anti-Fascist press generally avoided using the occasion to denounce the neo-Fascists. Rather than attack head-on, anti-Fascist opinion makers chose to muse ironically on the celebrations at San Casciano. In the long run, maybe the real beneficiaries of Mussolini’s move to Predappio would be the vendors of piadine—a kind of local sandwich—and those who sold Fascist memorabilia, Il Mondo wrote; in that case, Mussolini could finally take credit for having done something for Italy’s humble classes. But comments of this sort—which ultimately proved correct—did not convince everyone. In the fall of 1957, a number of anti-Fascists rallied against the pilgrimages to Predappio, convinced the neo-Fascists were sullying the memory of the Resistance. Their protests were but a tiny ripple in the complicated history of postwar Italy, but these scuffles sowed the seeds for the furious anti-Fascist demonstrations that would erupt all over Italy in 1960 when the government embraced the extreme right. The protests at Predappio were at once spontaneous and organized. On September 29 local Socialist and Communist parties called out their militants to demonstrate at the Predappio cemetery. According to the police, the Communists even went so far as to infiltrate neo-Fascist ranks with provocateurs, hoping to incite trouble. The local Christian Democrats, although they deplored the left-wing militancy, were concerned enough to call for an end to the neo-Fascist reunions.

  More daunting than their organized protest was the spontaneous anger of the anti-Fascists at Predappio. Lining the road to the cemetery, local Resistance veterans and left-wing activists had greeted the buses of arriving neo-Fascists with a hail of stones. The effect was such that the local secretary of the Italian Social Movement sent out a letter to neo-Fascists all over Italy advising them how to get to the cemetery without incident—and, above all, how to keep up a vigil rather than running away after fifteen minutes. “Otherwise our visits to places of Mussolini memory will appear hasty and elicit the usual unflattering comments about us,” the neo-Fascist party secretary wrote.13

  The prefect of Forlì, responsible for Predappio, banned anti-Fascist demonstrations planned for September 29 “because of the heated atmosphere created by activists, extremists, and provocateurs of the left.”14 That Sunday, some three thousand Fascists turned up to pay homage at Mussolini’s tomb, and the police were mostly able to keep order. In his telegraph to the interior minister, the prefect was able to claim a victory for democratic freedom over the machinations of “Communists and their satellites,” who were determined to disturb “the influx of visitors to the famous tomb.”15 For the pilgrims of San Casciano, the prefect of Forlì was the perfect defender, for like other prefects of the 1950s he saw his role as defending Italy from the Communists. When several Communist deputies asked Interior Minister Tambroni why he had not charged Predappio’s neo-Fascist visitors with violating the law against forming military associations, the prefect of Forlì offered a helping hand:

  It would be useful to point out that because of the small number (155) who have so far come wearing black shirts, representing just 6 percent of the visitors (a total of 25,510) in the period from August 31 to September 29, and because of the variety of styles of clothing worn and the absence of pins and buttons, it cannot be said that conditions have been met to apply the aforementioned law.”16

  The battles of San Casciano, with stones hurled and legal codes brandished, was not fought only in the province of Forlì. All of Italy had an opinion on the matter and the telegrams flew. Fascists sent Rachele Mussolini a deluge of condolences, as if Il Duce had just died. Anti-Fascists directed their missives to Tambroni, urging him to apply the spirit and the letter of the constitution and stop the pilgrimages to Predappio.

  The clash was also played out on Italy’s walls, in the form of political posters. Il Duce, who had controlled the walls for years with Fascist slogans, was back with the controversy over his afterlife. The most violent exchanges took place in Terni, in central Italy. Posters celebrating Mussolini’s burial at Predappio were covered with fresh bulletins from the Communists, deploring the “macabre” collusion between Christian Democrats and Fascist followers. The neo-Fascists accused the Communists of wanting to rekindle the civil war “in the name of an anti-Fascism that is by now dead and buried.”17 Each side claimed to smell decay in the other. In Verona, Christian Democrat ex-partisans promised to fight anyone seeking to “draw putrid breath from a corpse to infect the conscience of Italians.”18 Local neo-Fascists replied that Catholics should not forget that the Church commanded mercy, including burial of the dead.


  Clearly the Italian Social Movement intended to prolong the Predappio pilgrimages right through the spring, thus putting Il Duce’s body to work in the 1958 election campaign. Interior Minister Tambroni decided it was time to intervene. Appealing to the transportation minister, Armando Angelini, he said that he did not want to take extraordinary measures, but urged him to move quickly to stop bus companies from facilitating trips to Predappio. So Tambroni appeared to guarantee freedom of travel around Italy, including freedom to travel to Predappio, while behind the scenes he was maneuvering to stop the visits to Mussolini’s grave. On Sunday, October 6, only three buses arrived at San Casciano, but many visitors came in automobiles, so there were still eighteen hundred of them. Still, the number of visitors dropped as the weeks wore, which may well have been due to dropping temperatures rather than to Tambroni’s cleverness.

  As Il Mondo had suggested, the Christian Democrats who laid Mussolini to rest did not get the far right’s full approval, nor did they escape the left’s furious protests. The neo-Fascists were unhappy about the sneaky, semi-clandestine way the body had been returned to Predappio. The left was convinced that Zoli and especially Tambroni were overriding the constitution and hence were dangerous enemies of the Resistance’s achievements. A letter from the National Association of Partisans of Parma to Tambroni seemed to anticipate resentments that would, by 1960, trigger far more significant anti-Fascist uprisings. The veterans of Parma did not protest Mussolini’s burial in Predappio. Rather, they challenged the Fascist license to travel across Italy wearing black shirts and singing “Giovinezza,” the Fascist hymn. The ex-partisans urged Tambroni to heed the constitution, including the rule forbidding the reconstitution of the Fascist Party. If the police, always ready to block “legal, peaceful, and harmless democratic demonstrations,” continued to stand by while the neo-Fascists carried on, the National Association of Partisans would gladly take on the job of “enforcing respect for the constitution and the law.”19