The Body of Il Duce (27 page)

In early 1955, there was a rumor in Predappio that the government was about to return Mussolini's body to his family. Like many other such rumors, this one proved untrue, but it gave the weekly
Il Mondo,
the bible of non-Communist anti-Fascists, a pretext to take up the problem of the wandering corpse. According to the magazine's political editor, the way the government had handled the problem of Mussolini's remains revealed its “inferiority complex” with respect to right- and left-wing oppositions alike. Christian Democratic leaders had never felt strong enough either to allow the remains to be dispersed or to restore the body to the dictator's family without fuss or negotiations, as if the move were standard bureaucratic procedure. As
Il Mondo
saw it, the word that Prime Minister Mario Scelba was considering returning Mussolini's body to Predappio reflected his desire to secure the backing of the extreme right. The prime minister's deliberations also reflected the Christian Democrats' highly ambivalent approach. Scelba wanted the body to be buried at San Casciano during the night; he feared that a daytime burial would be seen by the left as an intolerable provocation. Scelba wanted to “satisfy the neo-Fascists and at the same time avoid the protests of the anti-Fascists,” wrote
Il Mondo;
he wanted to take credit for a gesture of “pacification” and yet ward off scandal—“too many objectives at once, obviously, and we can be sure he won't accomplish any of them.”
1

Il Mondo
's characterization of Scelba's motives apply as well to his Christian Democratic successor Adone Zoli, who became prime minister in May 1957. Zoli, too, saw the gesture of restoring Mussolini's corpse to the family as a chance to satisfy neo-Fascists and thus expand the Christian Democrat hegemony over the extreme right. He, too, sought to evade anti-Fascist protests by keeping the decision to return the body quiet. But unlike Scelba, Zoli really did release Il Duce's body. He did so at a highly thorny political moment: the formula the party had devised to rule from the center was failing; the Christian Democrats were unable to maintain a parliamentary majority in their coalition with several small moderate parties. The party was divided between those who favored an opening to the left, that is, the inclusion of the Socialists in the governing coalition, and those who were bargaining, more or less secretly, to embrace the neo-Fascists. Zoli had to seek a combination of support that would give his government a parliamentary majority. The challenge, which was fought out from the end of May to early July 1957, ended with Zoli calling on the body of Il Duce.

In return for supporting the Christian Democrats, the Italian Social Movement demanded the promise that Mussolini's body would be quickly returned to Predappio. It was a charged request for Zoli personally, as his family had its origins in Predappio and the family tomb in the San Casciano cemetery stood only a few meters from the Mussolinis. In his inaugural address to Parliament, Zoli carefully refrained from mentioning Il Duce's body. He presented his government as one of transition, in anticipation of national elections in 1958. Referring discreetly to his anti-Fascist views, Zoli made it clear that he would not deviate from Christian Democratic precedent and allow the Italian Social Movement to be part of the governing majority. “Our record, in the past and in the present,” said Zoli, “is too well known and too respected for there to be any doubt that we will depart from it.”
2
But the smaller moderate parties and the left failed to endorse his government and Zoli was confirmed with the votes of the monarchist party and the Italian Social Movement. Domenico Leccisi, who had left the neo-Fascists to run as an independent, even spoke up to offer Zoli “the modest vote of a Fascist.”
3
For the first time in the history of the republic, neo-Fascist votes become decisive in forming a government.

Right after Zoli's parliamentary majority was confirmed, the Chamber of Deputies was the stage for one of the most animated scenes in the tale of Mussolini's afterlife. The neo-Fascists, arguing that Zoli governed only thanks to their votes, challenged him to step down, as he had said he would not accept the backing of the Italian Social Movement. However, the Christian Democrats calculated that even without the Italian Social Movement they had 281 votes, or one more vote than the bare majority necessary. Leccisi then insisted on being counted as a member of the Italian Social Movement and not as an independent, because, he said, he was a genuine Fascist: “How else can you define a warrior who has even gone so far as to steal the body of Il Duce to protect it from the depredations of the infidels?”
4
Leccisi's political message could not have been more pointed.

The Communist daily,
l'Unità
, echoed that message with a polemical headline: “Leccisi's Vote … the Deciding One.” The paper offered a scathing description of Christian Democrat ministers trying to deny that Leccisi was a neo-Fascist. Even the
Corriere della Sera
, which usually hewed to a pro-government position, did not try to conceal the embarrassment of the previous day's developments. After some hesitation, Zoli remained as prime minister despite his reliance on the Italian Social Movement—and despite the attacks from the extreme-right press, still angry about the anti-Fascist stance Zoli had taken earlier. Soon the pages of
Il Mondo
were featuring a cartoon by satirist Mino Maccari showing two black boots labeled “the pillars of a right-wing majority.”
5

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
)