7 NOVEMBER 1992, Page 10

GRANDFATHER'S FOOTSTEPS

Matt Frei visits Mussolini's

birthplace, on the 70th anniversary of Ii Duce's march on Rome

Predappio PROFESSOR Franco Ferrarotti has one outstanding recollection of Mussolini. As a young boy he and thousands of others crammed into the main piazza of Trent, in the foothills of the Tyrolean Alps. It was May 1936. Fascist Italy had invaded Abyssinia. Mussolini was declaring the rebirth of the Roman Empire. His histrion- ic voice echoed through the piazza from the balcony, which had become the pre- requisite stage for any public address given by Ii Duce. The audience, Professor Fer- rarotti recalls, was mesmerised, then stirred into a jubilant frenzy. Women cried hysteri- cally and held up their babies, men wept and shouted 'Duce! Duce!' up to the large balcony of the town hall. There, the munic- ipal authorities had set up a bulky wireless. From the crackly loudspeaker, the voice of the 'sublime redeemer in the Roman heav- ens', `whose creative force has no limit in time or space' — as the propaganda of the day would have it — rang out as if from the depths of history. The memory of Mussolini fills many Ital- ians with a mixture of embarrassment at how easily almost the entire nation was duped by this ham actor, and mirth at the heights of absurdity reached by him. Because the Duce was only a murderer, and not, like Hitler, a mass murderer, the Italians have a much less troubled relation- ship with their past than the Germans. This is reflected in the continued existence of the neo-fascist party. Although fascist parties are banned by law, that law was never enforced on the MSI, or Movimento Sociale Italiano, main- ly because it strived hard to appear respectable. A motley coalition of mothball blackshirts, skinheads, small shopkeepers, royalists and a sprinkling of disgruntled sol- ders and policemen, the party has always polled around 5 per cent at national elec- tions. In Naples, it is the strongest partY after the Christian Democrats. In Rome, it received around 10 per cent of the vote in the last general election. But despite these relatively impressive showings, the MSI iS essentially a mutual-aid society for sur- vivors, which came into its own during the festive season, organised by the party last week to commemorate the 70th anniver- sary of the march on Rome. One of these ceremonies took place in Predappio, the Duce's birthplace. A small village in the hills of Emilia Romagna above Forli, Predappio was embellished by Mussolini in the 1930s. A large brutal'st church at the end of a broad avenue lined with sturdy lamp-posts still dwarfs the vil- lage. Busloads of neo-fascists, mainly in their sixties and older, were disgorged on to the car-park of the municipal cemeterY. Banners were hoisted, black berets adjust- ed and off they marched, medals clanking, to the Mussolini family crypt, where the signed their name in a book and saluted the large marble head of the Duce, sitting above his granite tomb. Bernardo CiapPo, who described himself as a Fiat companY director from Turin, had travelled down to Predappio for the weekend with his wife and their two daughters. All of them, including the 14-year-old daughter, wore black shirts. Was he embarrassed to cal,71 himself a fascist in front of his colleagues• I asked. 'Why should I be? My father was a fascist.' It is hard to imagine such a reply from German neo-nazis — the aging ones that is — who tend to be more taciturn, especially in the company of journalists, but then they have more to be embarrassed about.

The procession of over 1,000 mourners then wove its way to the church, a romanesque chapel that was architecturally brutalised in 1938. During the remem- brance mass, eagle-headed banners had been hoisted above the altar, a group of skinheads had crowded into the pulpit, from where they listened to a virulent ser- mon by the priest, peppered with anti- Semitism, frequent attacks on Italian democracy, the British and the 'Anglo- Saxon conspiracy'. During Communion, Verdi's La Traviata was played on the sound system. Signora Vicci, an elegant, elderly lady who ran a pastry shop in Forli, was humming along to Verdi when she noticed an unsavoury-looking skinhead With a ripped leather jacket and dirty jack- boots. 'Is he one of us?' she whispered to me. `I'm afraid so,' I replied. I later asked the skinhead, whose name was Alex, Whether he knew that Mussolini introduced the fascist salute, not only because it was Roman but because he thought it was more hygenic than shaking hands. Alex was dumbfounded and instinctively looked at his saluting hand, before glaring at me. There is as little cohesion in the fascist movement today as there was 70 years ago. The party's biggest problem is the threat of Physical extinction facing most of its sup- porters. That is largely why the MSI's lead- er, Gianfranco Fini, a shrewd politician With the bespectacled face of a family den- tist, has tried to rejuvenate the image of the party with the help of the 29-year-old Alessandra Mussolini. She is the daughter of Romano Mussolini, the jazz musician, grand-daughter of II Duce and, as it hap- pens, the niece of the actress Sophia Loren, some of whose pouting good looks she shares. She exchanged an eclectic career in modelling and acting to become a politi- cian. At the general elections in April, she was number two on the MSI's list in Naples, a sure winner.

Miss Mussolini follows in her grand- father's footsteps in more ways than one. It was recently discovered that she had allegedly lied about her medical degree, Just as II Duce once lied about a law degree. That was about the only time that the Italian media showed any lasting inter- est in her. She and her party are on the Whole dismissed as an embarrassing irrele- vance.

This says more about the Italian media than about the MSI. Although the Italians have, by and large, exorcised their fascist Past, dismissing it as an aberration, they have, according to Professor Ferrarotti, not confronted the dark thread that runs through Italian history: 'an infatuation with authority, a willingness to compromise'. One of the facts rarely mentioned these days is how easily Mussolini was able to suspend democracy once he had been appointed Prime Minister in 1922.

Nowadays, Italians are far more confi- dent in their democratic institutions, not because they have been particularly demo- cratic but because in the last four decades Italy has experienced unprecedented wealth. The current economic problems notwithstanding, the Italians have never had it so good. The MSI does not have the dynamism of Franz Schonhuber's Repub- likaners in Germany. There is no Le Pen here to set the political agenda. Racism towards foreign immigrants — called extra- comunitari — has been diluted by strident regionalism. A poster recently appeared in Turin telling all Sicilians and Calabrians to 'go home'. Indeed, Italy's considerable ple- beian anger with the system is being chan- nelled into Umberto Bossi's secessionist Northern Leagues and anti-corruption par- ties like La Rete in Sicily. In many ways, the MSI has had the useful function of a safety valve, a therapeutic playgroup for Mussolini look-alikes and those who still entertain fascist fantasies. This is not to say that Italy hasn't had its share of old ghosts from the past. A recent survey in the week- ly L'Espresso, indicating that one in ten Italians was a self declared anti-Semite, shocked many who had assumed that Italy was tolerant towards minorities.

Perhaps the most pernicious legacy of fascism in Italy today can be found in the legal system. The corrosion of public morality stems, to a large extent, from the fact that Italy's judiciary has never been able to live up to the provisions for political independence set out in the post-war con- stitution. The legacy of political 'interfer- ence, established under fascism, persists today. For instance, the five judges on the country's highest judicial body, the Consti- tutional Court, are uncontested political appointees, agreed upon by the ruling par- ties. Although articles 13 to 28 of the con- stitution set out all the classic civil liberties, large chunks of the 1931 fascist penal code are still in operation. For example, under a provision punishing vilipendio, or con- tempt, one can go to prison for insulting the national flag, the Italian nation, the armed forces or prominent public figures.

Another institution of fascist vintage is the civil service, which was enlarged under Mussolini to promote clientelism and accommodate the swelling number of potentially unruly graduates from the poor south. The size and privileges of the civil service are haunting today's government in its attempts to slash public spending. Simi- larly, the vast state enterprises, the ente pubblicci which the government is now try- ing to privatise, were created by Mussolini as monsters of political patronage. In these areas little has changed in 60 years. Fas- cism in Italy does not pose a threat to sta- bility and democracy today, but, according to the traditions of continuity in this coun- try, some of its strands are still deeply woven into the nation's fibre.

Matt Frei is southern Europe correspondent for BBC Television and Radio.