In the long odyssey of Il Duce’s body, the last chapter—the return to Predappio—is of interest for its element of premonition. Tambroni decided to ignore anti-Fascist protests in 1957–58. Three years later, in a historic moment, Tambroni, now prime minister in a government backed by neo-Fascists, defended the Italian Social Movement once more, allowing the party to hold a national congress in Genoa. He did so despite the furious rebellion of that part of Italy which clung to the Resistance. Stones tossed against some buses at San Casciano in September 1957 escalated to war in the streets throughout Italy in July 1960; Tambroni sought to impose his rule—and lost. The anti-Fascist demonstrations were so significant that never again would the Christian Democrats govern with neo-Fascist backing, preferring to seek partners on the left.
It was a moment of dramatic political tensions, and there were fears that Tambroni would attempt a coup d’état. But he was simply a man with an authoritarian vision of the role of the state. His vision was undoubtedly misguided, and he was certainly very stubborn. He had not learned the lesson of the anti-Fascist protests of 1957, which was that Italians were ready to mobilize in the name of a different grief and a different memory from those of the neo-Fascists. In 1958 and 1959, Tambroni had been warned repeatedly not to allow the Resistance to be scorned at the San Casciano cemetery. To those who continued to honor the Resistance, the pilgrimage to Predappio had itself become Fascist mythology. In La Dolce Vita, which came out in 1959, director Federico Fellini and fellow screenwriter Ennio Flaiano depict this mythic quality: “From all over Italy, we all came,” says the spiffily dressed former Fascist official at the party in the Castelli Romani. “And it was a beautiful ceremony, sad and moving. It was the people—really the people—bringing flowers to their beloved captain.”20 As the years went by, the rites at Predappio showed the small scale of hard-core Il Duce worshippers. There was no longer reason to feel that vague sense of guilt which had prompted many Italians (including ex-Fascists) to worry that Mussolini’s body would never find peace. Now the guardians of the flame could be counted, and they were few—unwitting caricatures of distant Fascists. “They’re people living with myths that don’t hold up anymore,” said Fellini of the characters in La Dolce Vita.21
Only a little more than a decade after the civil war, it was still too soon to take the act of mourning lightly. The corpse of Il Duce still had the power to elicit the veneration of the neo-Fascists, but also the hatred of the guardians of the Resistance. Monuments to partisan dead were still all that was needed to remind many Italians that their republic was founded on sacrifice. And the children of Italy’s “economic miracle,” the postwar generation, turned out to be profoundly aware of the sacrifices made by their fathers’ generation. So the riots of the summer of 1960 were steeped in memories of the dead. When, at the end of June, Genoa rose up against the proposed neo-Fascist party congress, Socialist leader and ex-partisan Sandro Pertini watched the crowds go wild when he said their revolt was inspired by “the fallen of Benedicta” and “the martyrs of the Student Residence Hall”—references to the civil war’s Genovese anti-Fascist dead.22 Even before the neo-Fascist delegates arrived in Genoa, scuffles with police began at the Resistance memorial on Via XX Settembre. Try as they might, the police were unable to prevent the anti-Fascist crowds from laying wreaths at the site. For their part, the congress delegates were no less determined to fight this battle. The neo-Fascists insisted on holding their events at the Teatro Margherita, only a few meters from the partisan memorial.
In Rome, too, on July 6, police and anti-Fascists clashed at the plaque to the partisan dead in Porta San Paolo. Next came the Resistance veterans of Reggio Emilia, who turned out at the Piazza della Libertà to demonstrate at the monument to their fallen comrades. The police fired into the crowd and five demonstrators were killed. “Oh, dead of Reggio Emilia / Come from the grave, / Come out and sing with us, / Bandiera Rossa”: the new martyrs of the partisan cause had become the heroes of one of the most powerful political songs of the postwar period.23
Epilogue
The fall of the Tambroni government following the anti-Fascist protests of July 1960 marked a sea change for the Christian Democrats. Those in the party who favored a coalition with the left now had the upper hand over those who preferred an alliance with the extreme right. Simultaneously, Tambroni’s fall marked the failure of Italian Social Movement secretary Arturo Michelini’s attempt to secure a place in the government for the neo-Fascist party and to give it a larger role than that of shadow backer. The events of 1960 created a split within the party, with the radical right bent on subverting democratic institutions and increasingly finding its allies among rogue elements of the secret services ready to engage in terrorist activities. Meanwhile Italian Social Movement leaders sought to “de-Fascistize” the party, eliminating the symbols and the rituals that tied it to the past—black shirts, Fascist flags, and memorial masses for Il Duce. Domenico Leccisi, who had rejoined the party at the end of the 1950s, thought that policy was an attack on the very foundations of neo-Fascist political culture. In 1963, his battle with the leadership came to a head when he was not reelected and was subsequently expelled from the party. In August 1964, Leccisi found himself in Milan’s San Vittore prison for tossing fireworks into a crowd that had assembled in the city to mark the death of Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti.
The sixties were hard times for those who worshipped the memory of Mussolini. After the demonstrations of 1960, the Resistance began a process of ideological and moral rehabilitation, and Il Duce ceased to hold an important place in Italian hearts. Not that the illustrated weeklies suddenly ceased publishing their endless stories about the life and death of Mussolini or that writers of popular history books stopped disclosing “revelations” about his last hours, about what happened to the money at Dongo, and about the passions of Claretta. But television was replacing the popular press as the medium that counted. Although state television was cautious when it came to the minefield of contemporary history, the footage that replaced photographs did little for Mussolini’s posthumous reputation.
The films of Il Duce delivering his orations in Piazza Venezia, especially, looked different on TV than in still photographs. Mussolini had learned the art of conducting a rally at the beginning of the century, prior to microphones and film crews, at a time when a loud voice and exaggerated stage gestures were necessary. In the years he held power, Il Duce never changed his method of public speaking, and the crowds that turned out to hear him didn’t seem to mind his artificial style, or at least they didn’t complain on record. In fact, Il Duce’s peculiar oratorical style helped cement the powerful hold his physical person had on his followers. Watched thirty years later on television, however, Mussolini’s rallies in Piazza Venezia look incongruous, even ridiculous.
The TV version deprived Il Duce of his aura of power, reducing his charisma to a series of grotesque postures, theatrical grimaces, and street hawker’s hollering. Unreeling in Italian living rooms like an old comedy, the footage made the dictator look foolish. Who could take seriously that windbag puppet standing on the balcony of Palazzo Venezia? What did his silly theatrics have to say about the malevolent power of a totalitarian regime? In the worried judgment of a young Turinese anti-Fascist writing in 1963, “The laughter distances us from that era, turning it all into pure spectacle … and freeing us of it.”1 Both the weeklies of the 1950s and the television documentaries of the 1960s tended to domesticate the memory of Fascism and its chief, the magazines by moving their readers to compassion, television by making people laugh.
If Mussolini no longer frightened anyone, neither did the Resistance. In the 1960s the popular image of the Resistance was simplified, shorn of its elements of hate and violence and softened with stories of heroism rather than references to the civil war. When it came to contemporary history, Italian schoolbooks offered a prudish version of the past. They had little or nothing to say about Mussolini’s death and the events of Piazzale Lo
reto. The schoolbooks of subsequent decades followed suit. Generations of Italian students saw reproductions in their history books of late-eighteenth-century prints depicting the death of Louis XVI—the guillotine, the executioner, the head of the king separated from his body and waved before the crowd. But how many of them learned anything about the terrible lesson of Piazzale Loreto—the crossbar at the gas station, Il Duce strung up by his feet, the bloodthirsty crowd applauding? In the republic born of the Resistance, Italy’s most tragic piazza was a place of memory to be forgotten. The legendary merchant who supposedly bought the historic crossbar would never see the day when he could resell it as Resistance memorabilia rather than as scrap iron. The memory of Piazzale Loreto was kept alive not by ex-partisans but by neo-Fascists fanning the flames of anger.
The far-left militants of 1968 and after did, however, appropriate the image of Il Duce’s strung-up body. “We like Almirante better head-down,” the demonstrators sang of Giorgio Almirante, leader of the neo-Fascist party.2 “In the streets and in the squares / All the Fascists with their heads cracked open,” they chanted, appropriating the savagery of Piazzale Loreto. But few anti-Fascists embraced such brutal slogans, especially not during the 1970s, marked as they were by terrorism and political violence. In fact, widespread horror at terrorist brutality in Italy cooled enthusiasm for the violence of the Resistance, and it became more difficult to posit Piazzale Loreto as a supreme example of liberation. Even anti-Fascist radicals found the memory of Piazzale Loreto instructive but hard to commemorate. Italo Calvino, in his magnificent essay “Portraits of Il Duce,” proposed one possibility: “Having brought about so many deaths where there were no pictures, Mussolini left us his last pictures—of his own death. They are not nice to look at or to remember. However, I wish all dictators who are now in power or who aspire to be, whether ‘progressives’ or reactionaries, would keep those pictures framed by their bedsides and study them every night.”3
But between the 1970s and the 1980s, a revisionist trend in Italian historical writing tarnished Resistance rhetoric even further, suggesting that anti-Fascists were poisonously dogmatic and moralistic. The new trend was to see Fascists in an indulgent light, studying their private lives rather than their politics. At the centenary of his birth, in 1983, the former dictator was one of the main beneficiaries of this approach. TV documentaries, newspaper articles, and popular history books revived the cliché of Mussolini as an ardent husband, a devoted father, an affectionate grandfather, not to mention a statesman ready to sacrifice himself for the good of all Italians.
The Resistance point of view was showing signs of wear after years of dominance, in part because the conflicts inherent in Italian democracy after the civil war were now subsiding. Some Resistance veterans began to regret that Mussolini’s summary execution had not allowed them to stage an Italian Nuremberg in which the Fascist regime’s historical responsibilities would have been exposed and condemned with proper argumentation. Other partisan veterans asked themselves what they would have done in the place of Colonel Valerio, had they found themselves on the shores of Lake Como with Il Duce’s life in their hands. One of them was the novelist Luigi Meneghello:
My first impulse would have been to hide him, so as to give myself time to reflect and then to talk to him. This “talk to him” was something that was always in the planning but never actually took place. In truth I didn’t have anything concrete to communicate to Il Duce, and I didn’t want to know anything from him. Still, the idea of directing his last hours in captivity—of coming to agreement on the details with him, so as to guarantee the seriousness of what was going to happen—was something that burned bright in me. I wanted his and my acts and words to be thoughtful, to be about what I would call the essence of his life and ours. In short, I wanted to prepare myself well for his death.4
Meneghello is torn between competing sentiments. On the one hand, there is the certainty that the body of Il Duce strung from the crossbar of the gas station, his arms spread in a kind of dive as if to plow into the earth, represented poetic justice, bore the seal of a punishment deserved. On the other hand, he feels regret about the hastiness of the ceremony in Piazzale Loreto, when truth was simplified. “That scarecrow turned upside down,” Meneghello writes, “didn’t he too quickly become our scapegoat?”5 In the half century since April 29, 1945, few Italians have pondered the uneasy legacy of Piazzale Loreto as deeply as Meneghello, who dissects the uneasiness of a scene more theatrical than serious, an execution without comment, a sort of Greek tragedy without a chorus.
Revived, the ardent husband, devoted father, affectionate grandfather (a photomontage from 1942). (Istituto Luce)
* * *
THE PARTISAN STRUGGLE was in fact made up of radical volunteers, although that was a truth the left had trouble admitting, not wanting to challenge the notion that the Resistance had been a great collective uprising of the Italian people. Hence the Communist Party’s caution celebrating Walter Audisio, hence the reticence of partisan literature on the historical problem of Mussolini’s execution. Just after Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right coalition won the 1994 elections, footage of the scene at Piazzale Loreto filmed by American photographers was broadcast on Italian TV. Furious about the electoral results, editorialists of the center-left attacked those responsible for broadcasting “Combat Film,” as the transmission was called. The program’s presenter, Vittorio Zucconi, who had commented that “kicking the corpses of Mussolini and Petacci was a stain on Italy’s first republic,” was attacked by the center-left press as a tool of the new government (which included Alleanza Nazionale, the National Alliance, successor to the Italian Social Movement and heir to the neo-Fascist legacy) and for having “lobotomized the memory” of Italians.6 Watching “Combat Film,” anti-Fascists recognized, unhappily, that times had changed. Three decades after their crowning moment in July 1960, it had once again become possible to claim anything, even that Fascism and the Resistance were moral equivalents, even that Piazzale Loreto and the Nazi murders of 335 civilians at the Fosse Ardeatine were comparable events.
The reaction to “Combat Film” was alarmed and emphatic: historians warned of the danger of translating compassion for the losers into a full-blown revisionist history of Italy. Even a terrible death, wrote one of the most acute historians of neo-Fascism, did not make a wrong cause right.7 A journalist made fun of the revisionist logic, likening it to Ionesco’s syllogism of the absurd (“All cats are mortal; Socrates is mortal; therefore Socrates is a cat”). “Fascists and anti-Fascists are mortal,” she continued. “Therefore Mussolini and the Resistance are the same thing. They are both cats.”8
An intellectual of Jewish origins criticized “Combat Film” not so much for its lionizing of the Blackshirts as for the excuses it made for the great silent middle. Presenting the past as a problem of deaths rather than as a problem of moral choices excused all those who made no choices, those who refused to take sides, he said.9 A well-known commentator, Guido Ceronetti, suggested that the program showed the crazy power that the death exerted over the living, for the corpse of Mussolini, seen on the TV screen, emanated a disturbing “death energy”: “It is strange, the posthumous recognition Mussolini has achieved—there is almost something of an invisible vendetta about it.… Mussolini’s ghost can only laugh at the secret necro-sadism of several million pairs of eyes fascinated by the gruesome stringing up of two corpses. For his part, he has forgotten the insults and cruelty of Piazzale Loreto, but he enjoys seeing himself as the center of attention, and even of the passions, of his Italians.”10
It was journalist Giorgio Bocca who put things back in perspective. The passion with which Italians had watched “Combat Film,” he suggested, should not be seen only as a symptom of an infectious historical revisionism that humanized Mussolini and granted a historical identity and moral dignity to followers of the Republic of Salò. The dispute needed to be seen in the context of a society dominated by television. “What is and what was do not exis
t; the only thing that exists is what television allows us to see,” wrote Bocca, a former partisan.11 Half a century after Mussolini’s death, the body of Il Duce could come to life only on television.
* * *
IS IT REALLY true that in Italy today, Mussolini lives only within the frame of a television screen? The enthusiasm for programs that show footage from Istituto Luce, the historical archive, would suggest that he does. Such footage is often dominated by the figure of Il Duce, by his words and body language. The images split the generations on the question of Mussolini’s charisma. Younger viewers are incredulous that the puffed-up haranguer of Piazza Venezia could have so excited their grandparents or parents, while those who were young during the Fascist era seek to explain the strange air one breathed back then. “Anyone who did not experience the atmosphere of Mussolini firsthand,” writes journalist Eugenio Scalfari, “probably cannot understand what it was.”12
At times, though, Il Duce shows signs of life even outside Italian television. A woman claiming to be Mussolini’s “secret daughter” went to court in 1998 to ask that Il Duce’s body be dug up for DNA testing. Two books dedicated to the last part of Mussolini’s life and his death sold many copies in 1996–97. One was the final volume of historian Renzo De Felice’s monumental biography, the other, Mussolini’s Last Five Seconds, an account by neo-Fascist journalist Giorgio Pisanò. There have also been several novels in which Mussolini returns to Italy. In the best of these, Swamp, the ghost of Il Duce haunts the city of Latina, which he founded in the 1930s and which remains half faithful to the Fascist chief, half absorbed in its own narrow concerns. Astride his roaring Motoguzzi motorcycle, Mussolini wanders the streets and along the canals, where he stops to fish out the old toilets and bidets that people throw in the water. But Il Duce was not allowed to rise again in the town of Seravezza, near Lucca, where a planned exhibit of art about him drew protests in the summer of 1997. Paintings of Il Duce made during the Fascist era should not be put on display, said the anti-Fascists, especially since Seravezza stands near the town of Sant’ Anna di Stazzema, where the Nazis carried out a brutal reprisal in 1944.
The Body of Il Duce Page 21