The Body of Il Duce (30 page)

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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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 exist; the only thing that exists is what television allows us to see,” wrote Bocca, a former partisan.
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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.”
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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.

Meanwhile, the news from Predappio has been mixed. With the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement defunct, replaced by the “post-Fascist” National Alliance, it might have been thought that there was no reason for anyone to make the annual pilgrimage to Mussolini's tomb. Why show up in Predappio on the appointed days—Mussolini's birthday, the anniversary of the March on Rome—if the party no longer identified with the founder of Fascism? To avoid mingling with the repudiators from the National Alliance, the hard-core faithful decided to stop visiting the San Casciano cemetery. “I'm not going to Predappio this year,” said Domenico Leccisi in 1995. “I don't want to meet the hypocrites who, having betrayed that great man, still dare to present themselves at his grave.”
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Leccisi's disdain was not enough, however, to keep the faithful from coming to Predappio. Some 100,000 visitors travel to the cemetery every year, in fact. Following the abolition in 1983 of an ordinance forbidding the sale of Fascist memorabilia, there are now several local shops specializing in Duce paraphernalia—not just postcards and reproductions of period photos of Mussolini but metal busts, tapes of his most famous speeches, and belt buckles, pins, T-shirts, watches, necklaces, and key chains decorated with portraits of Il Duce. If the shop owners' word is anything to go by, the body of Il Duce is still selling briskly.

Predappio, 1997. From postcards to metal busts, tapes of speeches, belts, T-shirts, watches, necklaces, and key chains, the body of Il Duce is still selling briskly. (
Michele Bella
)

But a look at the guest book in the Mussolini crypt at San Casciano cemetery suggests that those sales may mean less than they seem. The visitors to Predappio, many of them very young, know nothing about Mussolini, nothing about the Fascist past, which for them points mainly to their own desire for transgression. A typical inscription brings Mussolini magically up to the political present: “Oh, Duce,” it reads, “may your enlightened spirit guide us to free our nation from the filthy Communist sewer of the Ulivo that is oppressing us,”
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referring to the Ulivo, the Olive Tree, the center-left coalition of Italian politics. Messages in adolescent handwriting say things like “I love you,” as if the tomb of the Fascist boss belongs to a rock star. Today, the body of Il Duce stirs mostly apolitical dreams.

In the 1990s the same atmosphere suffused
www.mussolini.it
, a now-defunct Web site. As the home page opened to the sound of a beating heart—suggesting that Mussolini still lived?—viewers saw a starry sky, a virtual heaven of tranquillity from which Il Duce sent out his messages of peace. But anyone who joined this forum of cyber-Fascists found comments no more pointed than those written in the Predappio guest book. The site's creators did little to stir things up, asking such tame questions as, “Who believes that the government will bring back the Eurotax?”—a onetime levy designed to improve Italy's finances before the launch of the euro. The site is no longer accessible; in the twenty-first century, even Mussolini's virtual afterlife is fading.

Notes

These notes have been substantially abridged from the Italian edition.

Prologue

Chapter One: Tough to Eradicate