Museum of Fascism mooted for Rome
A PROPOSAL last week by three FiveStar Movement (M5S) councillors to build a Museum of Fascism in Rome has sparked uproar in Italy.
Rome’s own M5S mayor, Virginia Raggi, quickly blocked the idea but the debate it generated showed that Italy has not yet put its past behind it.
The M5S proposal was for a “study centre of a high scientific level that would tell the story of the fascist regime and explain it using the latest technologies”. It would, the outline continued, attract schoolchildren from all over Italy and Europe but also anybody interested in the subject, as well as tourists. It would, its advocates suggested, have a cathartic effect.
But Gadi Luzzatto Voghera, historian and director of CDEC (Foundation Jewish Contemporary Documentation Centre) points out that, “A museum should be the result of a cultural project, with the right location chosen and accurate planning put in place. All this was missing from the M5S proposal, which comes across as superficial and lacking in substance.”
The idea itself is not new; Italy has been toying with the possibility of a museum that would tell the story of its fascist past for some time.
One location mooted in the past was Predappio, Mussolini’s hometown, which is already a site of pilgrimage for some of the Duce’s faithful.
The worry, spelt out by Rome’s Jewish
Vcommunity, is that in a country where some still struggle to condemn Fascism’s atrocities and others use anti-Fascism as a political tool, a Fascism museum might itself become a tool, rather than an opportunity to remember what happened.
Luzzatto Voghera believes that Italy is not yet ready for this museum: “It’s not just that there are too many different views on how to approach Fascism,” he explains. “The main problem is that Fascism in Italy is still very much alive and it’s difficult to build a museum on something which is still with us.”
That awareness that the far-right menace is still there, lurking just below the surface, ready to pop up again should the conditions become favourable, is clear in the ANPI’s (National
Association of Italian Partisans) reaction to the M5S proposal, arguing that, “the museum would be established and managed by the next Rome council, whose anti- fascist credentials we cannot forecast”. In other words, what if the museum ended up in the hands of those who believe that “Fascism did some things right” and “Mussolini wasn’t such a bad guy, after all”?