Fascism museum plan divides town
The mayor of dictator Benito Mussolini’s home town says he wants to rein in the resurgence of the far right in Italy with a radical project.
"Predappio is the right place to do this ... I want to use culture as a weapon of mass destruction for ignorance."
Giorgio Frassineti, Predappio mayor
Thousands of admirers of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini visit his tiny home town every year. Now, as far-right parties expand their appeal ahead of March elections, the town’s leftist mayor wants to open a museum of fascism on the main square, not as an homage to their cause but as a way to contain it.
The effort has reignited a longrunning debate about Italy’s conflicted relationship with the jut-jawed Mussolini, who seized power in 1922 and held his nation in thrall for more than two decades, building it into an industrial behemoth even as he threw his opponents into prison camps.
Many historians and politicians say Italy has never fully reckoned with its fascist past – and that one result is the modern-day popularity of leaders who cite Mussolini as a model.
The nostalgia has grown even thicker this year in the runup to the March 4 vote, in which insurgent outsiders who say Mussolini is misunderstood are gaining on traditional centrist candidates. One aspiring governor in a prosperous region recently said Italy must protect ‘‘the white race’’. Another politician said Mussolini did ‘‘great things’’ for the country.
Predappio’s centre-left mayor wants to overhaul the town’s crumbling 1937 House of Fascism, an imposing marble and brick edifice with a balcony once used to address cheering crowds, for the proposed Museum of Fascism.
Backers of the plan envision a spiralling display modelled on Dante’s circles of hell, with Mussolini’s pugnacious presence at its centre. Visitors would gaze out at neighbouring hills from the curving, airy ballroom where local fascists held their galas. They would eat in the same spot where Blackshirts once sipped espressos.
If the project’s backers find the additional US$6.2 million (NZ$8.4m) they need for the museum, it would be Italy’s first devoted exclusively to the fascist era, 73 years after Mussolini was executed and then strung up in a public square in Milan.
Shops in Predappio already cater to his fans, selling marble busts of the dictator, hats stitched with fascist icons and collections of his speeches.
‘‘Predappio is the right place to do this, because it’s a fascist symbol,’’ said Giorgio Frassineti, the mayor of the leafy town of 6000 in Italy’s rolling northeast. ‘‘I want to use culture as a weapon of mass destruction for ignorance.’’
Museum advocates already have US$2.5m (NZ$3.4m) in pledges. The town owns the empty property.
Unlike neighbouring Germany, where Adolf Hitler remains a third rail even for far-right parties, Italy has long harboured ambivalent feelings about its fascist leader.
‘‘Mussolini built so many things,’’ Matteo Salvini, the leader of the far-right Northern League party, said. ‘‘But I prefer democracy to dictatorship, dictatorships of any kind.’’
A sense that Mussolini is being rehabilitated unsettles some Italy’s mainstream leaders.
‘‘It is surprising to hear, even today, from some quarters, that fascism had some merits but made two serious mistakes: the racial laws and the entry into the war,’’ said Italian President Sergio Mattarella in a speech last week marking the 80th anniversary of of the signing of Italy’s notorious anti-Semitic racial laws.
Frassineti fears there is a trend on the continent towards a fascist resurgence. ‘‘In Europe, there is a wind blowing in that direction,’’ he said in Predappio’s town hall, where his high-ceilinged office once served as Mussolini’s childhood bedroom.
He blamed a poor understanding of the past. ‘‘This country has given up on a whole generation. Because schools and politicians haven’t done their job.’’
In Predappio, traces of the fascist leader are everywhere. His birthplace, a squat stone structure where the guest book is full of farright slogans, is fronted by a sweeping Fascist-era plaza. Just outside town, the leader’s crypt looms over the cemetery.
On a recent sunny weekday afternoon, a steady stream of visitors walked up to the higharched mausoleum, where a red, white and green Italian flag was tied to a door handle. Some threw the stiff-armed fascist salute. Others praised Mussolini’s leadership.
‘‘This is our Bethlehem. This is a way to pay thanks for what he did for the world,’’ said Antonino Monti, 64, who
said he visited Predappio several times a year from his home in Sicily, where he worked at an air base.
The growing traffic to Predappio – city leaders say it draws more than 50,000 people a year – has upset groups that represent victims of fascism.
‘‘This city is becoming a temple to Mussolini,’’ said Noemi Di Segni, the head of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, who backs the museum.
The museum’s planners, like Di Segni, argue that it is past time for an analytical look at the history.
Italians live ‘‘without the possibility of understanding how Italian society lived during the fascist era’’, said Marcello Flores, a history professor at the University of Siena who heads the academic committee designing the museum. Remedying that, he said, was the museum’s principal aim.
Some civic leaders say Italy has not learned lessons from the past.
‘‘We weren’t able to spread out to young people in the schools how bad a dictatorship is compared to a democracy,’’ said Emanuele Fiano, a centre-left lawmaker in the Italian parliament who recently proposed a bill to outlaw the fascist salute and distribution of Fascist and Nazi party imagery. Current laws ban such materials only if they are being used to recreate the historical Fascist Party, which gives wide leeway to Mussolini’s admirers.
But critics of the museum say that rather than diminishing the town’s appeal as a fascist mecca, it could entrench it by adding yet another place on the far-right Mussolini tour.
Predappio is far from Italy’s established tourist centres, requiring a slow train and a bus from Bologna, the nearest big city. Few people seek it out, other than those with a penchant for Mussolini.
‘‘I’m afraid Predappio might become a place for spreading fascism, not rejecting it,’’ said Anna Foa, an historian of Italian Judaism who has opposed the project.
The head of Italy’s influential anti-fascist partisans association shares the worry.
‘‘A museum of fascism would de facto become a place of pilgrimage for fascists’’ if it were in Predappio, said Carla Nespolo, the group’s president.
Many analysts say that Mussolini nostalgia has helped to fuel the success of Italy’s modernday far right.
The two biggest far-right parties, the Northern League and Brothers of Italy, together capture about 18 per cent in opinion polling and could win power in March in coalition with the larger Forward Italy party of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who has praised aspects of Mussolini’s rule.
In Predappio, anti-fascist activists say they remain shocked that such sentiment is still so visible.
Stores selling Mussolini memorabilia line the main street in proud defiance of laws against ‘‘apologising for fascism’’.
‘‘They’re like sex shops for fascism,’’ said Stefano Ignone, a member of a local foundation that has battled the museum plan. ‘‘But at least in a sex shop they cover the windows. Here it’s all in the open.’’
– Washington Post