The Body of Il Duce (14 page)

The empty grave, a huge crater in the lunar landscape of section 16: the Musocco cemetery, April 23, 1946. (
Foto Publifoto/Olympia
)

For the next hundred days (until the police succeeded in arresting Leccisi and recovering the body), the real and imagined misadventures of Mussolini's corpse occupied the papers' front pages. Il Duce's body seemed to be as ubiquitous as the dictator had been in life, keeping Italians occupied even as the country was counting down to the June 2 referendum. Phone calls kept coming, some from Leccisi and his companions, reporting sightings of Mussolini's body in one place or another. On April 24, on the eve of the first anniversary of the Liberation, the police set up roadblocks on the main access roads to Rome, pursuing a rumor that the corpse was being marched to the capital to be put on show at Palazzo Venezia or perhaps at the Altar of the Nation. In the following weeks Il Duce's body was spotted in a hundred places: on a barge on the Po near Caorso, in an airplane heading toward Rome's Ciampino airport, being ferried across the English Channel on Churchill's orders, in the hull of a ship departing from Genoa, at Brissago on the Lake of Lugano, even in the basket of a balloon being carried westward by the wind. Well-informed sources maintained that after the disinterment the body had been cremated to make it easier to move. Perhaps influenced by such rumors, the Como police questioned the parish priest of Giulino di Mezzegra about reports that an urn containing Il Duce's ashes had been carried around the town in a procession on the first anniversary of his execution.

More than any other, one newspaper, the
Corriere lombardo,
founded by the monarchist Resistance veteran Edgardo Sogno, took the trouble to follow the adventures of Mussolini's stolen corpse and the police investigation. The attention given to the matter by this paper—whose circulation in the greater Milan area was second only to that of the
Corriere della Sera
—reflects its readers' all-too-human curiosity to know what had become of the corpse of a famous dead person. They welcomed the type of detail that the
Corriere lombardo
liberally divulged, drawn from unofficial police reports: the fact that “traces of decomposing human matter” had been found near the fountain of section 16 and along the Musocco cemetery wall, the discovery of “two segments of a human finger” outside the wall, where Mussolini's corpse had been loaded into a car.
25
At the same time, someone, perhaps Sogno himself, had a weak spot for Leccisi's escapades. And possibly Sogno found the adventures of Mussolini's corpse—so embarrassing to Romita, the minister of the interior, an ardent republican—politically congenial. In any case, Leccisi and his companions could hardly have found a better mouthpiece for their efforts than the
Corriere lombardo,
one far more effective than the clandestine
Lotta fascista
.

Even before Il Duce's body was spirited away from the Musocco cemetery, Sogno had written an indulgent editorial about the Democratic Fascist Party, claiming that the neo-Fascists were victims of Communist persecution. Some moderate and right-wing publications agreed after the body disappeared. Why get so alarmed about a handful of Fascist grave robbers when platoons of Communist assassins were circulating freely? Why not demand that the Rome police investigate the many killings of Fascists and collaborators in Emilia-Romagna, rather than spend their time chasing down one lost corpse? Writing in the right-wing paper
Candido,
journalist and humorist Giovanni Guareschi called on Interior Minister Romita to devote less energy to the bones of one dead man and more to the bones of the living in the Communist-dominated Emilia region. But these were the perhaps predictable comments of the most hardened anti-Communists. What did the independent press have to say about the disappearance of Mussolini's body? Here, beyond discussion of the political implications, attention was given to the superstitious aspect, what some saw as the “survival of barbarism,” the toll that archaic Italy, which for centuries had worshipped the bones of saints, continued to exact of the modern nation.
26

This approach implied unspoken questions: Did not an archaic act like the theft of Il Duce's remains prove that this was a very unusual body? Did it not highlight the charismatic nature of the Fascist regime at a time when Italians preferred to forget it? Thus the shrewder journalists used the story of Mussolini's disappearing remains as an occasion for a sermon about the immaterial nature of mourning: “Memory has little to do with physical remains. The corpse displayed in Piazzale Loreto that drew hatred and vengeance from the same crowd that had once applauded him—this was not Mussolini. The corpse the Fascists took from the sacred ground of Musocco and hid who knows where—this was not Mussolini either. Mussolini is a memory—a memory of disaster, of error, of suffering for most and illusory grandeur for a few. The body has nothing to do with that memory, for good or for evil.”
27

Il Duce was no longer a body, merely a memory—an easy assertion to make in postwar Italy but difficult to believe. Hence the Communists' sense of disturbance when the corpse disappeared. On May 1, Labor Day, an unsigned editorial in the party daily,
l'Unità,
linked the theft of Il Duce's body to negotiations for a peace treaty that Prime Minister De Gasperi was conducting in Paris. Fascism was not dead, warned the Communist paper, and the world should be aware. For
l'Unità
the theft was “doubly criminal” because it betrayed Italy's national interests.
28
At the same time the editorial was published, the Communist Party was engaged in secret negotiations with clandestine neo-Fascists, hoping to gain consensus for the republican cause prior to the referendum and perhaps even to enroll new party members. But these overtures to the “Blackshirt brothers” posed no contradiction to the party's condemnation of the grave robbers. Both derived from the party's fear of the subversive power of the right. The efforts at reconciliation were part of the same political calculation that resulted in an amnesty for former Fascists granted by Justice Minister Palmiro Togliatti, secretary of the Communist Party. The Communist executive, aware that the Resistance creed had limited appeal and that the republican ideal was not universally shared, was afraid of Fascists, even when they came in the guise of undertakers.

*   *   *

IN THE SEARCH
for Mussolini's body, Interior Minister Romita appointed several of the highest-ranking police officials. The investigation was headed by a Dr. Marrocco, chief of Rome police units, assisted by Dr. Emilio Santillo, deputy inspector, who would later oversee the capital's most crime-ridden districts. Dr. Ugo Sorrentino, director of Rome's Special Investigations Unit, produced the report on the actual theft, while Dr. Mario De Cesare, deputy chief of police, presented a report on the concurrent events in Milan (the riot at San Vittore prison). At first, the investigation results seemed to justify deployment of top police officers. Sorrentino affirmed that the body had been stolen by “several people accustomed to contact with corpses—undertakers or technicians from the coroner's staff.” He based his judgment, which we know was flawed, on the inherent difficulties in extracting a body from a casket and a grave, not to mention the skill required to handle a body “in an advanced state of putrefaction.” The presence of “small slivers of organic matter” on the cemetery wall over which the body was pushed, as well as the discovery in the cart that was used to transport the body of two small bones that appeared to be from fingers, failed to persuade Sorrentino that the perpetrators were amateurs. On the contrary, he concluded that the crime had required “significant expenditures,” enough to warrant a search for clandestine financial backers.
29

A week or so after this first report, Deputy Police Chief De Cesare gave Interior Minister Romita a considerably less alarming assessment, concluding that in any case, the Mussolini family had not been involved and that the theft of the body appeared to have had little impact on public opinion in Milan. “The word … is that the corpse ‘isn't even good for soap,'” he reported.
30
Such was the cruel popular view of Mussolini's remains, evidence that people had a lively memory of making soap at home during the war and of the “soapmaker of Correggio,” a famous female serial killer at the time. De Cesare believed that the persons responsible for the theft were officials of the old Fascist regime, not underground neo-Fascists. Their aim, he thought, was to push the new government into passing the widest possible amnesty. Some small-time veterans of the Social Republic were probably working for them, people who had been fired after the Liberation and were reduced to criminality to survive. “I would rule out any concern they represent even the least danger,” the deputy chief of police summed up his report.
31

The view that secret neo-Fascism was a world of petty criminals motivated by economic necessity as much as by politics was shared by others besides the police investigators. The left-wing press portrayed the Democratic Fascist Party alternately as a group of bloodthirsty bomb throwers and as mere pamphlet distributors, men who would rob people's apartments but also scrawl slogans on walls, who traded in black market Swiss francs but also begged for handouts. Neorealist literature, ideologically inspired by the Communist Party, also portrayed the neo-Fascists in minor hues—not as dangerous counterrevolutionaries but as petty crooks engaged in negligible exploits. Sandrino, the main character in Vasco Pratolini's novel
A Hero of Our Time,
the orphan son of a Fascist soldier killed in Abyssinia, takes advantage of the mad passion of a middle-aged widow, Virginia, to extract money from her. But far from a mere gigolo, Sandrino intends to use the money to buy arms for a neo-Fascist insurrection and give meaning to the sacrifice of his father's generation. Unfortunately, Sandrino falls victim to three Milanese comrades who gain his trust by pretending to be the thieves who stole Mussolini's body. After pocketing the money, the three neo-Fascists disappear. As Sandrino travels to Milan to take his revenge, he is more pathetic than evil:

They had told him to show up that evening, at a house where he was supposed to meet his assistants, 34 Noname Street. But was there really a Noname Street? Even the widow would never have believed those three had stolen Mussolini's body. In exchange for the 300,000 lire, they'd given him a small black rag: a piece of the shirt Mussolini had worn on the day of his martyrdom! There it was, the little black rag he was going to stuff down the throat of thief number one, after he had flattened him.
32

For the real thieves, problems began just a few days after their adventure. By April 29, the police had arrested Mauro Rana, one of Leccisi's two assistants in the theft. On May 17, the Carabinieri broke up an executive committee meeting of the Democratic Fascist Party, rounding up twelve men and four women, who quickly confessed to involvement in the crime. The group was a representative sample of clandestine neo-Fascism: young, with an average age of just over thirty and a background of military experience in the Republic of Salò. All the men had served in the Republican National Guard or other military branches of the Nazi-Fascist regime, and one of the women had served in the auxiliary. There were five white-collar workers, two unemployed people, one factory owner, one teacher, one barman, one political science graduate, one landlord, one woman who made a living ironing. The party's activities ranged from providing economic aid to comrades in difficulty to organizing armed attacks on left-wing parties to minting 200 million lire in counterfeit banknotes. The archives don't tell us whether this roundup was connected to an anonymous letter sent to the authorities a few days earlier that identified the apartment that served as the Democratic Fascist Party's usual meeting place. The letter also contained information about the theft of Il Duce's body that would turn out to be very close to the facts. The perpetrators, it said, were “three young individuals” and the body had been hidden “about 50 kilometers from Milan.”
33

As the weeks went by the papers reported the arrest of dozens of neo-Fascists in Milan, Turin, and Rome. Each report suggested a link between the arrests and the corpse's disappearance. In the meantime, Italy had turned an important page in its history, having voted in the referendum to abolish the monarchy and establish a republic. The change of system did not, however, lessen people's appetite for news of Mussolini's body. At the end of July, the investigative noose began to tighten. A police inspector posing as a factory owner interested in financing the neo-Fascists succeeded in arresting Fausto Gasparini and Giorgio Muggiani, two men close to Leccisi who had helped him with the theft. Gasparini was already sought by the police, following an arrest warrant issued for crimes perpetrated in 1944 as commander of the local Republican National Guard. Muggiani was an art student who the police thought was involved in the Democratic Fascist Party “more for love of novelty and in a spirit of adventure than out of political conviction.”
34
Muggiani did not wait long to tell the police everything he knew. He told them, among other things, that his first meeting with Leccisi and his initiation into neo-Fascism had been arranged by a Franciscan friar well known in Milan, Enrico Zucca, abbot of the convent of Sant'Angelo. Gasparini gave the police the address of Leccisi's wife and mother-in-law.

A search of their apartment proved fruitful. The police found counterfeit banknotes left to dry after being soaked in coffee to enrich their color. More important, they found a key to a bank safety-deposit box where trousers and boots taken from Mussolini's casket had been stored. Now a hunted man, Leccisi did not even have time to get out of Milan. He was arrested on July 31 as he was leaving a neo-Fascist meeting. The next day the police also arrested Leccisi's second assistant, twenty-year-old Antonio Parozzi, a member of the Muti, a ferocious militia band active during the Social Republic. Still, their capture did not lead the authorities to Mussolini's body. Leccisi took an approach the police described as “boastful and provocative,” refusing to admit any involvement. It would be up to Parozzi and Gasparini to recount the adventures of Il Duce's corpse. After taking the body from the cemetery, Leccisi, Parozzi, and Rana had hidden it in the village of Madesimo, in the Valtellina mountains, in a house that belonged to Rana. When Rana was arrested, Leccisi and Gasparini, concerned that he might reveal the location under police questioning, took the body from Madesimo and brought it to Milan, where Father Zucca concealed it in Sant'Angelo.