The Cult of the Duce: Mussolini and the Italians 0719088968, 978-0719088964

Table of contents :
Cover
......Page 1
The cult of the Duce......Page 2
Contents......Page 6
List of illustrations
......Page 8
Notes on contributors......Page 10
Introduction: Stephen Gundle, Christopher Duggan and Giuliana Pieri......Page 12
Part I The Origins of a Personality Cult......Page 20
1 Political cults in liberal Italy, 1861–1922: Christopher Duggan......Page 22
2 The propagation of the cult of the Duce, 1925–26: Christopher Duggan......Page 38
3 Margherita Sarfatti and the invention of the Duce: Simona Storchi......Page 52
4 Sanity from a lunatic asylum: Ida Dalser’s threat to Mussolini’s image: Daniela Baratieri......Page 68
5 Mass culture and the cult of personality: Stephen Gundle......Page 83
Part II The Duce and the Fascist Regime......Page 102
6 A town for the cult of the Duce: Predappio as a site of pilgrimage: Sofia Serenelli......Page 104
7 Mussolini’s appearances in the regions: Stephen Gundle......Page 121
8 The internalisation of the cult of the Duce: the evidence of diaries and letters: Christopher Duggan......Page 140
9 Mussolini and the Italian Empire, 1935–41: Giuseppe Finaldi......Page 155
Part III The Iconography of the Duce......Page 170
10 Portraits of the Duce: Giuliana Pieri......Page 172
11 Photographing Mussolini: Alessandra Antola......Page 189
12 Mussolini as monument: the equestrian statue of the Duce at the Littoriale Stadium in Bologna: Simona Storchi......Page 204
13 Mussolini and the city of Rome: Eugene Pooley......Page 220
Part IV After the Fall of Fascism......Page 236
14 The destiny of the art and artefacts: Giuliana Pieri......Page 238
15 The aftermath of the Mussolini cult: history, nostalgia and popular culture: Stephen Gundle......Page 252
16 Mussolini and post-war Italian television: Vanessa Roghi......Page 268
Afterword: R. J. B. Bosworth......Page 281
Index......Page 289

Citation preview

The Cult of the Duce PPC_Layout 1 09/04/2013 11:20 Page 1

THE DUCE

M U S S O L I N I A N D T H E I TA L I A N S

Academics and students with interests in Italian and European history and politics will find the volume indispensable to an understanding of Fascism, Italian society and culture, and modern political leadership.

Stephen Gundle is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick Christopher Duggan is Professor of Modern Italian History at the University of Reading Giuliana Pieri is Reader in Italian and the Visual Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London Cover image: Ernesto Thayaht, Il grande nocchiere (1939), Wolfsoniana – Fondazione regionale per la Cultura e lo Spettacolo, Genova

THE CULT OF

THE DUCE

M U S S O L I N I A N D T H E I TA L I A N S

Gundle, Duggan and Pieri (eds)

Among the contributions is an Afterword by Mussolini’s leading biographer, R. J. B. Bosworth.

THE DUCE

The cult of the Duce is the first book to explore systematically the personality cult of the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. It examines the factors which informed the cult and looks in detail at its many manifestations in the visual arts, architecture, political spectacle and the media. The conviction that Mussolini was an exceptional individual first became dogma among Fascists and then was communicated to the people at large. Intellectuals and artists helped fashion the idea of him as a new Caesar while the modern media of press, photography, cinema and radio aggrandised his every public act. The book considers the way in which Italians experienced the personality cult and analyses its controversial resonances in the postwar period.

THE CULT OF

THE CULT OF

ISBN 978-0-7190-8896-4

Edited by Stephen Gundle, Christopher Duggan and Giuliana Pieri www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

The cult of the Duce

The cult of the Duce Mussolini and the Italians Edited by Stephen Gundle, Christopher Duggan and Giuliana Pieri

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2013 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN  978 07190 8896 4 hardback First published 2013 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in Minion Pro by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Contents

List of illustrations Notes on contributors Introduction Stephen Gundle, Christopher Duggan and Giuliana Pieri

vii ix 1

Part I  THE ORIGINS OF A PERSONALITY CULT   1   2   3   4

Political cults in liberal Italy, 1861–1922 11 Christopher Duggan The propagation of the cult of the Duce, 1925–26 27 Christopher Duggan Margherita Sarfatti and the invention of the Duce 41 Simona Storchi Sanity from a lunatic asylum: Ida Dalser’s threat to Mussolini’s image 57 Daniela Baratieri   5 Mass culture and the cult of personality 72 Stephen Gundle Part II  THE DUCE AND THE FASCIST REGIME   6   7   8

A town for the cult of the Duce: Predappio as a site of pilgrimage 93 Sofia Serenelli Mussolini’s appearances in the regions 110 Stephen Gundle The internalisation of the cult of the Duce: the evidence of diaries and letters 129 Christopher Duggan   9 Mussolini and the Italian Empire, 1935–41 144 Giuseppe Finaldi

vi

Contents

Part III  THE ICONOGRAPHY OF THE DUCE 10 11 12

Portraits of the Duce Giuliana Pieri Photographing Mussolini Alessandra Antola Mussolini as monument: the equestrian statue of the Duce at the Littoriale Stadium in Bologna Simona Storchi 13 Mussolini and the city of Rome Eugene Pooley

161 178 193 209

Part IV  AFTER THE FALL OF FASCISM 14 The destiny of the art and artefacts 227 Giuliana Pieri 15 The aftermath of the Mussolini cult: history, nostalgia and popular culture 241 Stephen Gundle 16 Mussolini and post-war Italian television 257 Vanessa Roghi Afterword R.J.B. Bosworth

270

Index 278

List of illustrations

  1 Ettore di Giorgio, Dux page 163   2 Primo Conti, La prima ondata, 1929–30 168   3 Golia, San Giorgio Benito uccide il mostro delle sanzioni, 1935 (The Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection) 169   4 Thayaht, Condottiero (Dux con pietra miliare), 1929 (Wolfsoniana – Fondazione regionale per la Cultura e lo Spettacolo, Genoa) 171   5 Thayaht, Il grande nocchiere, 1939 (©Archivio fotografico MART) 172   6 Tono Zancanaro, Gibbo I il Grande e la spada dell’Islam, 1944 (Archivio Storico Tono Zancanaro, Padua) 174   7 Adolfo Porry Pastorel (attrib.), unpublished photograph of Mussolini being escorted by plain-clothes policemen, 1915 (Civico Archivio Fotografico, Milan) 181   8 Gianni Caminada, photograph of Mussolini later reproduced as a postcard, 1921 (ETH-Bibliothek Zurich, Image Archive) 183  9 Adolfo Porry Pastorel, photograph of Mussolini sowing seed in the nursery of the Forestry Militia, 1934 (Collezione Cesare Colombo, Milan) 186 10 Unknown, Mussolini threshing the wheat at Aprilia, later reproduced as a postcard in 1938 (Archivio Sturani, Rome) 188 11 Giuseppe Graziosi, equestrian statue of Mussolini at the Littoriale Stadium, Bologna, 1929 (Modena, Museo Civico d’Arte, Archivio Fotografico Giuseppe Graziosi, F.G.F. n. 1590) 195 12 Giuseppe Graziosi, model of Mussolini’s equestrian statue in the sculptor’s studio (Modena, Museo Civico d’Arte, Archivio Fotografico Giuseppe Graziosi, F.G.F. n. 24) 199 13 Luciano Minguzzi, statues of a male and female partisan, 1947 (author’s own photograph) 204 14 The head of Graziosi’s equestrian statue today (author’s own photograph) 205

viii

List of illustrations

15 Renato Bertelli, Profilo continuo del DUCE, 1933 (Massimo & Sonia Cirulli Archive, New York) 232

Notes on contributors

Alessandra Antola recently completed a Ph.D. on Mussolini in photography at Royal Holloway, University of London. Daniela Baratieri is a Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. She has recently published Memory and Silences Haunted by Fascism: Italian Colonialism 1930s–1960s (2010). R.J.B. Bosworth is Senior Research Fellow in History at Jesus College, University of Oxford. He is the author of numerous books, including Mussolini (2002), Mussolini’s Italy (2005) and Whispering City: Rome and Its Histories (2011). Christopher Duggan is Professor of Modern Italian History at the University of Reading. He is the author of many works, including Fascism and the Mafia (1989), Francesco Crispi: from Nation to Nationalism (2002) and The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy since 1796 (2007). Giuseppe Finaldi teaches History at the University of Western Australia. His most recent publication is ‘The Peasants did not Think of Africa: Empire and the Italian State’s Pursuit of Legitimacy, 1871–1945’, in John MacKenzie (ed.), European Empire and the People (2011). Stephen Gundle is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. His most recent books include Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy (2007), Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War (2008, with David Forgacs), Glamour: A History (2008) and Death and the Dolce Vita: The Dark Side of Rome in the 1950s (2011). Giuliana Pieri is Reader in Italian and the Visual Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her main research interests are in the fields of post-war Italian popular fiction, Anglo-Italian cultural relations

x

Notes on contributors

in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and Italian modern art and design. Eugene Pooley recently completed a Ph.D. on Mussolini and Rome at the University of Reading. Vanessa Roghi holds a Ph.D. in Contemporary History and has made historical documentaries for RAI 3. She has published on the relationship between history and the audiovisual media and is currently preparing a book for teachers on media literacy and history. Sofia Serenelli obtained her Ph.D. from UCL in 2008. She specialised in the field of cultural memory and is currently working as teaching fellow in modern Italian History at University College London and the University of Reading. Simona Storchi is Lecturer in Italian at the University of Leicester. She has worked on early twentieth-century literature and art, inter-war periodicals and magazines and contemporary Italian fiction.

Introduction Stephen Gundle, Christopher Duggan and Giuliana Pieri

The aim of this volume is to provide the first multifaceted analysis of the genesis, functioning and decline of the personality cult surrounding Benito Mussolini, the dictator who ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943 and who headed the Nazi-dominated Italian Social Republic between 1943 and 1945. Mussolini was the first European dictator of the inter-war years and many of the forms of leadership embraced by Hitler, Franco and others were inspired by the practices that flourished around the man known at home and abroad as ‘Il Duce’. Mussolini’s biography has been written many times, most recently by Richard Bosworth (Mussolini, Arnold, 2002) and Pierre Milza (Mussolini – published in French and Italian, 2000), but up until now no one has systematically investigated the extraordinary range of practices that sustained the belief that Mussolini was a truly exceptional man in Italian history (a ‘man of providence’, in the words of Pope Pius XI). Although the dictator’s biographers and numerous scholars of Fascism have explored topics including Mussolini’s personal magnetism, his oratory and popular appeal, his physical presence and the regime’s propaganda machine, these have not been subjected to systematic scrutiny. By the same token, newsreels, popular biographies, portraits, postcards and other representations of Mussolini have been topics of selective separate examination without being drawn into an overall interpretation of the nature of the cult of the Duce.1 The cult of Mussolini was vital to the way Fascism became a regime and consolidated itself. It provided a justification for the abolition of democracy and the centralisation of power. It furnished a focal point for the integration of the Italian population into a system of regimented consensus. It offered a personalised channel of communication that was in some ways distinct from Fascism itself. It even enabled the regime to weather the discontent and disaffection caused by the early setbacks of the Second World War and ensuing hardships. The narratives of exceptionality that had been woven around Mussolini meant that he was often personally exempt from criticisms directed at his regime. The cult involved expressions of faith in the powers of Mussolini and the

2

The cult of the Duce

institutionalisation of these in collective rituals and the reorganisation of public spaces. The Fascist Party and state institutions extended the personality cult into the school system, public architecture and the arts. The mass media, which were directly or indirectly controlled by the party or the regime, provided a powerful echo as well as new platforms that the dictator happily exploited. The primary organisers of the cult were the Fascist Party secretaries Augusto Turati, Giovanni Giuriati and Achille Starace, who institutionalised devotion to the Duce and created rituals and practices to formalise it. However, Mussolini was himself heavily complicit in the fostering of the cult and was in some respects its chief initial architect, although in the early 1920s the roles of his mistress and first biographer Margherita Sarfatti and of his brother Arnaldo, editor of the Fascist daily Il Popolo d’Italia, were also crucial. He stage-managed himself, created his own wardrobe and personally checked all uses of his name and image. He also received many visitors, both domestic and foreign, and oversaw a private office that processed the steady stream of letters and requests from ordinary Italians – on average well in excess of a thousand a day in the 1930s. Italians of all ages and backgrounds wrote to Mussolini expressing their loyalty, gratitude and even love. At least up until the later 1930s, and to some degree beyond, there was genuine, spontaneous participation in the cult. Artists, for example, needed no persuasion to paint or sculpt a man who was widely seen as charismatic, and they created a body of works which blurred the boundaries between openly propagandistic visual representations and the domain of the fine arts and design. Mussolini’s personal popularity meant that companies were always keen to use his name or image to market the most varied of goods. The vast majority of the many thousands of postcards featuring the Duce produced under the regime were manufactured by commercial enterprises, not by the party. For many convinced Fascists, Mussolini’s exceptionality was an article of faith that was only shaken (but not always destroyed) by the events of the war. For others, admiration for him was an effect of the way the chief of Fascism came to embody the nation and a project of modernity in a particular historical phase. This identification was achieved most fully between the Lateran Treaty of 1929 and the establishment of the empire in 1935–36. In subsequent years, the alliance with Hitler, the expansion of political control over everyday life, the racial laws, corruption, military defeat and worsening economic conditions eroded the Duce’s popularity. But so concerted and sustained were the efforts to promote belief in Mussolini’s uniqueness as an Italian genius that their effects would be felt for many decades. The Fascists were not slow to invest their politics with messianic zeal, and the template of Catholicism provided, and continues to provide, a ready



Introduction3

means for interpreting the Duce in religious terms. In his influential Il culto del littorio (published in English as The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy) and numerous other writings,2 the historian Emilio Gentile has argued that Fascism is best understood as a political religion with its own belief system, liturgy, rituals, temples and spirituality. Although it did not conflict at every level with Catholicism – indeed, Gentile argues that it complemented Catholicism while seeking to integrate it into its own Roman-centred outlook – the regime did compete with the Church by developing religious elements and practices, including adoration of a secular but godlike figure.3 ‘The myth of Mussolini and the “cult of the Duce” were certainly the most spectacular and popular manifestation of the Fascist religion’, he argues.4 Gentile’s work captures some important aspects of Fascism and helps to explain the devotion of ideologically committed Fascists to Mussolini, but his view hinges on an idea of Fascism as totalitarian that has never been universally accepted by historians.5 It also relies on a methodology that focuses purely on Fascist writings and the activities organised by or through the regime itself. Although he acknowledges that ‘the myth of the Duce as it emerged after the “March on Rome” consisted of multiple elements, some of them external to Fascism’,6 his work does not reflect this important trait. In our view, the dictator’s cult of personality resonated widely with the general public because it was a complex and multifaceted phenomenon to which various factors contributed. These include the tradition of exceptional figures within Italian nationalism and the widespread belief that the nation’s future required a new hero, the nascent cinematic star system, and the persistence of primitive religious practices in large parts of rural Italy. It was the particular combination of the traditional and the modern, of historical motifs and contemporary themes, the organised and the less organised, that produced a cult that manifested itself in many different ways. It did not function in a vacuum but in a society in which people lived, worked and passed time in ways that were only ever partially Fascistised. The cult is best seen as a complex synergy of Italian nationalism, mass politics, visual culture, popular religion, celebrity and consumerism. It arose as a result of a coming together of several different strands in politics, society and culture. Some of these could be controlled from above, while others were more spontaneous. These different elements, combined with what eventually became the particular Fascist attachment to personalised rule,7 mean that the regime can be described as a form of ‘politicised spectacular modernism’ in which the cult of personality was a central, but not always controllable aspect. This definition should not be confused with that of ‘Fascist spectacle’ advanced by Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi.8 In her view, the spectacular aspects of Fascism were crucial to the regime’s battle against a modernity it sought to contrast and combat.9 In our perspective, by contrast, there was – in

4

The cult of the Duce

the realm of the cult of personality – a constant and unavoidable interchange between political anti-modernism, avant-garde artistic practices, technological modernisation, celebrity and consumerism. This ensured that the cult of personality was always a realm rich with inconsistency and contradiction. At times, it was an extraordinarily powerful phenomenon that was the primary structuring element of the public sphere. At others, it wavered or declined, as some of its constitutive elements escaped the official framework of the cult and manifested themselves in ways that were not fully compatible with it. By adopting an ‘open’ view of the cult, this book aims to capture not merely its Fascist content but the broader currents that it harnessed and which bore on it. Four particular features of the volume deserve to be highlighted. First, the cult is related to distinctive features of the Italian nation-state as it had developed since unification in 1861. The weakness of popular patriotism, the low status of parliament, the limited involvement of the masses in public life and the challenge of anti-system forces, notably socialism, made the search for unifying national symbols seem imperative. For a variety of reasons, the monarchy failed to secure a commanding symbolic position at the heart of the state. The nationalist adventurer Giuseppe Garibaldi was certainly popular, though the radical and heterodox aspects of his personality did not always make him a comfortable national icon. The crisis of the institutions after the First World War rendered the need for a unifying symbol all the more urgent. The cult of the Duce is thus seen as fulfilling a critical political and historical function in Italy. Second, significant emphasis is given to the way the cult manifested itself in different contexts. The city of Rome was the primary seat of the Fascist cult. As a city endowed with unique historical and religious resonance, it provided a special setting for Mussolini’s grandiose plans for the nation. This was reflected in the use of public spaces and in various architectural projects that incorporated the cult of personality. But there was also a local dimension to the cult. In addition to Predappio, Mussolini’s birthplace, highly ritualised visits to the Italian regions have been studied. Finally, the attempt to export the cult to the Italian colonies in North Africa following the proclamation of the Empire in 1936 is analysed. Third, the cult is seen as a cultural phenomenon and not simply as the byproduct of a system of rule. The variety of artistic and other visual representations of Mussolini means that the cult is related to currents within Italian and European art. The vast array of representations of the dictator, which included artworks of dubious artistic quality which could easily then and now be dismissed under the category of kitsch, at almost any stage of the life of the regime, also contained artworks by Italy’s most celebrated and talented artists and most notably those associated with the avant-garde. In contrast, say, to



Introduction5

Nazism, Fascism enjoyed a fruitful and creative relationship to the artistic avant-garde, notably Futurism, whose supporters backed it from the start and who furnished it with striking modern imagery. Mussolini was not only depicted conventionally, in figurative art and monumental sculpture, but in a variety of abstract and extra-human guises. These abstractions were taken up in Fascist mass culture, which made ample use of the mass ornament to reinforce the magical quality of the letter ‘M’ and the word ‘Duce’.10 Commercial advertising also contributed, with its extensive applications of abstract motifs, homunculi and machine men that recalled the Futurists’ image of a modernistic Duce. Fourth, special attention is paid to the partial persistence of the cult. In significant ways, its multiform character ensured that Mussolini continued to hold a place in the popular imagination in Italy in the years after his violent death in 1945. Although Fascism was replaced by a democratic republic, the artefacts that had testified to the Duce’s special status (buildings, artworks, sculptures and monuments, photographs and so on) often remained on view in public places or were only partially concealed. Some elements of the legend that flourished around him continued to circulate and occupy a place in popular culture. In the aftermath of the Second World War, it was Mussolini the private man – the father, husband and lover – who remained in the collective consciousness more than the dictator who had led the country to military defeat and civil war. Nonetheless, some political nostalgia for the dictator also flourished in the years after 1945. The case of the artworks which depicted Mussolini is particularly instructive. Their almost total disappearance from public display lasted until the 1980s and has changed considerably since the advent of the digital age, which has created a wider platform and market for the visual paraphernalia of the regime. The renewed interest in and wider public acceptance of the visual imagery of Fascism and its leader is also linked to a postmodern reappropriation and an often seemingly apolitical reflection upon the visual and artistic culture of the regime and the cult of the Duce in particular. It is our hope and expectation that, in addition to providing advances in the understanding of the place of Italian Fascism and its leader in twentiethcentury history and culture, our volume will provide a series of insights that may be employed in the study of other examples of authoritarian and/or charismatic leadership. Mussolini has been called ‘the very model of a modern tyrant’ who ‘pioneered the model of modern dictatorship’.11 As the first of the many dictators who would take power after 1918, he provided a template that many others would imitate or take from. The comparison with Hitler is particularly pertinent. In the public memory of the twentieth century, the Führer is the Ur-dictator, the man whose godlike status was most securely established and whose personalised rule led to the most evil consequences. Mussolini,

6

The cult of the Duce

by contrast, is commonly recalled abroad in comical key or as the man who achieved the minor feat of getting Italian trains to run on time. In fact, Hitler was Mussolini’s greatest admirer and he copied many aspects of Fascism and its dogma of the infallible leader. The two men had widely different styles; Hitler distanced himself from the day-to-day running of government while Mussolini immersed himself in every aspect of policy. Such was the range of the latter’s activities that he projected the impression, to use Milza’s expression, of a ‘human orchestra’.12 Moreover Mussolini’s whole body became crucial to the visualisation of power in a way that Hitler’s never did.13 However, both leaders were men of humble origins who built political movements and careers on the back of the First World War and the extraordinary political, economic and cultural displacements that followed it. Furthermore, many features of the Hitler cult were modelled on Mussolini’s. If Nazi propaganda was often more impressive than Fascist products and the visible aspects of the leadership cult more charged with myth, this was mainly because of the more organised and mediated nature of German society. In the rogues’ gallery of modern dictatorship, Hitler may provide the easiest point of comparison, but it is Mussolini who is the practical model. Figures as apparently distant from him geographically or ideologically as Argentina’s Perón, China’s Chiang Kai-shek, the Romanian Ceauceşcu and Saddam Hussein can be seen as having borrowed different things from the Fascist cult of personality. For this reason, the study of Mussolini and the tools that bolstered his system of personal rule is not a matter solely of interest to historians of Italy or Western Europe. It is crucial to an understanding of the ways in which undemocratic political regimes of whatever ideological bent can establish legitimacy within a national culture and the manner in which political systems with a personalised focus can connect with people in a myriad of ways and on many different levels. Cults are not emanations of personalities so much as useful tools available to dictatorships. Although it surely helps, it is not even necessary for the leader to be a charismatic individual for many of the mechanisms to work. The volume presents the findings of a large research project supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK which ran from 2006 to 2011. The principal investigator was Stephen Gundle and the co-investigators Christopher Duggan and Giuliana Pieri. Six other researchers at different points formed part of the core team, including Simona Storchi, Sofia Serenelli, Vanessa Roghi and Paola Bernasconi. Richard Bosworth and David Forgacs acted as consultants on the project. In addition to the present volume, three documentary films collectively entitled ‘Mussolini: The Story of a Personality Cult’ were made under the auspices of the project by Vanessa Roghi in collaboration with Alessandra Tantillo and Maria Grazia Pandolfo. An exhibi-



Introduction7

tion, ‘Against Mussolini: Art and the Fall of a Dictator’, curated by Gundle, Pieri and Storchi in conjunction with Roberta Cremoncini and Christopher Adams, was held at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in London in 2010. The exhibition website can be viewed at www.mussolinicult.com. The book draws on the research of a complementary project sponsored by the Australian National Research Council led by Giuseppe Finaldi. This second project was concerned with two aspects of the cult and its legacy: the relationship between women and Mussolini, and the cult’s manifestations in the Italian colonies. Thanks to the generosity of the Institute of Advanced Study of the University of Western Australia, a workshop bringing together the lead researchers on both projects was organised by Richard Bosworth in Perth in September 2010. Notes  1 The major works containing samples of the visual products of the personality cult are: R. De Felice and F. L. Goglia, Mussolini: il mito (Rome: Laterza, 1983); G. Di Genova (ed.), “L’uomo della provvidenza”: iconografia del duce 1923–1945 (Bologna: Bora, 1997); E. Sturani, Le cartoline per il duce (Turin: Capricorno, 2003); S. Barisone et al., Under Mussolini: Decorative and Propaganda Arts of the Twenties and Thirties from the Wolfson Collection, Genoa (Milan: Mazzotta, 2002). On biographies see L. Passerini, Mussolini immaginario (Rome: Laterza, 1991) and on newsreels M. Cardillo, Il duce in moviola (Bari: Dedalo, 1983) and E.A. Cicchino, Il duce attraverso il luce (Milan: Mursia, 2010).   2 Il culto del littorio (Rome: Laterza, 1993). English edn Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.   3 Fascismo: storia e interpretazioni (Rome: Laterza, 2002), p. 211.  4 Ibid., p. 219.  5 In 1973, Adrian Lyttelton wrote: ‘Fascism had aspirations to be “totalitarian”; Mussolini virtually invented the term. But, leaving on one side the question of how far the totalitarian nightmare can ever be fully realized, it is clear that Mussolini’s grip on Italian society was not as firm, his influence so pervasive, as that of a Hitler or Stalin. Fascism left huge areas of Italian life practically untouched.’ The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy 1919–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), p. 1. For a more recent rejection, see D. Forgacs and S. Gundle, Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), especially pp. 198–202. Gentile has insisted repeatedly on the need to see Fascism as totalitarian. See for example his introduction to Gentile (ed.), Modernità totalitaria: il fascismo italiano (Rome: Laterza, 2008).   6 Gentile, Il culto del littorio, p. 269.  7 ‘The one essential dogma of his regime’, says D. Mack Smith in Mussolini (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981), p. 103.  8 S. Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

8

The cult of the Duce

 9 A similar view is elaborated by Roger Griffin in Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). He argues for a view of Fascism as a political version of modernism. 10 The idea of the mass ornament is taken from S. Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 11 The two phrases occur on pp. 274 and 262 of R.J.B. Bosworth, ‘Dictators Strong or Weak? The Model of Benito Mussolini’, in Bosworth (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 12 Mussolini (Rome: Carocci, 2000), p. 479. 13 On the importance of Mussolini’s body, see Passerini, Mussolini immaginario, pp. 70–6 and S. Luzzatto, Il corpo del duce (Turin: Einaudi, 1998).

Part I

The Origins of a Personality Cult

1

Political cults in liberal Italy, 1861–1922 Christopher Duggan

The cult of the Duce in Fascist Italy in many respects filled a vacuum. From the time the movement for national unification (the Risorgimento) began in the wake of the French Revolution, a central concern of patriots had been to find a political arrangement that could resonate emotionally with a population of some twenty-five million (largely illiterate) people and bring together an historically fragmented peninsula into a cohesive unit. Giuseppe Mazzini and his democratic followers had looked to create a republic by galvanising popular support around what they hoped would be the propulsive ideals of a ‘Third Rome’ and a God-given mission for Italy. Most patriots, though, recognised that a republic would be too abstract a system for a country with deeply rooted monarchical and absolutist traditions, in both religion as well as politics. Vincenzo Gioberti’s proposal in the early 1840s that Italy could be brought together as a federation under the leadership of the Pope was in many ways the most realistic programme to emerge in the Risorgimento. But Pius IX’s definitive break with the movement for Italian unity in 1848 dashed all hopes that the papacy could be yoked to the national cause. This left a secular monarchy as perhaps the only viable alternative – and indeed this was the arrangement that was introduced in 1860 when, following a series of plebiscites, King Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont-Sardinia became the first king of united Italy. However, as this chapter will examine, the Italian monarchy struggled between 1860 and 1922 to establish itself as a strong and unifying national symbol, despite the efforts of countless politicians, and propagandists who worked to invest the Savoy dynasty with a mythical aura, recognising that charismatic leadership offered the best hope of binding the masses to the state. The view, famously voiced by the former revolutionary, Francesco Crispi, in 1864, that ‘the monarchy unites and a republic would divide us’, was widely shared among the national elites, principally on the grounds that the Italian masses were too immature still, and too conditioned by their history, to accept a kingless state. The extraordinary cult that sprang up around Giuseppe Garibaldi in the 1850s and 1860s was evidence, it seemed, of a popular

12

The cult of the Duce

impulse towards sacralised leadership. As the historian Gioacchino Volpe said in a letter to Mussolini published in Il Popolo d’Italia in the summer of 1921, when there was lingering talk of Fascism’s republican tendencies, the Italian peasantry had been conditioned by Catholicism ‘to conceive of authority solely in monarchical terms … and to have looked for centuries to the monarch – and what else was the State for them? – for protection against the privileged classes’. Italy still had ‘the great shadow of the Vatican’: it could not jettison the idea of regal authority.1 The development of the cult of the Duce owed much to the inability of the liberal state to invest the monarchy with sufficient prestige and charisma for it to serve as a focus for national loyalties. From this perspective, the exaltation of Mussolini can be seen as a form of political surrogate; and the passivity of Victor Emmanuel III in the face of the cult of Mussolini was tantamount to an acceptance of the monarchy’s historic failure to develop as a potent symbol. For many observers the Duce appeared to be encroaching on terrain traditionally occupied by royalty, thus making the monarchy look increasingly otiose. This was especially the case after the conquest of Ethiopia in 1935–36 and the de facto transfer of primacy in military affairs from the king to Mussolini. When Hitler visited Italy in May 1938 he suggested the Duce abolish the monarchy on the grounds that it was now an anachronism; and in the summer of that year Mussolini told his son-in-law Ciano that he would indeed get rid of the Savoys as soon as he could. They were, he confessed, just ‘an encumbrance on the Regime’.2 Italy and the monarchical imperative The need to find a coagulating principle around which to construct national unity had been a central preoccupation of the Risorgimento. The fact that the history of Italy since the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West had been characterised by fragmentation made the search for unification seem both more urgent and elusive. History offered few examples of collective action that could be elevated to mythical status. Episodes such as the Lombard League in the 1160s and 1170s or the revolt of the Sicilian Vespers in 1282 – both of which were heavily milked by historians in the middle of the nineteenth century for their alleged patriotic connotations – struggled to emerge from their obviously municipal or regional contexts. The idea with the greatest emotional power was ‘Rome’ – deployed by Mazzini in the form of the ‘Third Rome’ (though given some corporeity with its gloss as the ‘Rome of the people’) and by Vincenzo Gioberti in the far more potent version of the Pope as the leader of an Italian federation. But, as the ‘national’ euphoria surrounding Pius IX in 1846–48 or Garibaldi in 1860 underlined, it was far easier to link mass support to an exceptional individual than to a concept.



Political cults in liberal Italy, 1861–192213

The critical role of the figure of the monarch for united Italy was discussed by the Neapolitan philosopher and politician Angelo De Meis in a well-known essay entitled Il sovrano published in 1868. Echoing some of the observations made a year or two earlier by the British writer, Walter Bagehot, in his analysis of the ‘dignified’ elements of the English constitution, De Meis argued that in the modern age a monarch was critical for mediating between two classes that were ‘irreconcilably opposed to one another’: the educated elite and the ignorant masses. And in Italy, the natural antagonism between these two groups, he said, was exacerbated on the one hand by the exceptional poverty of the majority and on the other by the fact that the rivalry mapped onto the bitter ideological divide between liberalism and the Catholic Church. If Italy was to avoid a recurrence of the civil war that had marred the first half of the 1860s in the south of Italy, it was vital that ordinary people identified with the king, not in an abstract intellectual fashion (that was the basis of the nexus with the upper classes), but ‘religiously’. And this was the function of ‘a glorious national Dynasty’, which was ‘the religious and conservative instinct of the sentient People made visible to the masses themselves.’3 As De Meis acknowledged, the monarchy of united Italy had struggled from the outset to win popular support, especially in the South where there was a strong tradition of loyalty to the Bourbons among the common people. In large part this failing was due to the reluctance of King Victor Emmanuel II to forgo his Piedmontese past and identify clearly with ‘Italy’. He refused in 1861 to change his dynastic numeral and claimed regal authority using the archaic and contradictory formula, ‘by the grace of God and the will of the nation’. Francesco Crispi – who was to be probably the most astute critic of the monarchy and its role as a national symbol in the last decades of the nineteenth century – suggested he be styled far more unequivocally and patriotically ‘Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy’.4 During the 1860s the king did nothing to prevent the state from assuming a strongly Piedmontese character, and the top echelons of the civil service and the army were populated with Piedmontese officials. Victor Emmanuel also made it clear that his geographical heart lay in Turin and the Alpine valleys where he loved to hunt: even after the capture of Rome in 1870 he refused to spend much time in the new capital, and he left it to his son, Umberto, and above all his daughter-in-law Margherita, to attempt to make the Quirinal Palace a ‘national’ rival of the papal court.5 By shunning his capital after 1870 Victor Emmanuel largely avoided the challenge of Rome. The papacy took full advantage. Pius IX set out to counter Italian nationalism with the triumphant internationalism of his own and the Church’s authority, convening the spectacular Council of 1869–70, declaring papal infallibility, and extracting the maximum propaganda value out of the emotive concept of the ‘prisoner in the Vatican’. The Pope’s simple

14

The cult of the Duce

charm and accessibility, and his sometimes brutally colourful rhetoric, gave him a personal charisma unmatched by any of his predecessors, and pilgrims flocked to the Eternal City on an unprecedented scale. The court of the Crown Prince and Margherita struggled to compete with the Curia; and many of the city’s most illustrious aristocratic families remained doggedly wedded to their ‘black’ traditions. The extraordinary popular appeal and moral authority of Pius struck many commentators forcibly. As one observer noted in 1875: When this Holy Pontiff, this gentle old man, this supreme priest, with the triple crown surrounding his white locks, raises his holy hand, turns his eyes to heaven and invokes the blessing of God on his children, on the Church, on the whole world, how many heads do not bow, how many foreheads are not prostrated, how many knees do not bend to be blessed by Him who has been given by God the power to loose and to bind, to open and to close for men the gates of Heaven! … It is impossible to imagine a greatness superior to this, and all others, however powerful and marvellous they might be, pale into insignificance beside it.6

The effectiveness of the papacy in reaching out to the masses after the loss of the temporal power (and the extraordinary rapport that Pius developed with huge crowds of pilgrims was emblematic of its success) underlined for liberals the critical importance of elevating the monarchy into a rival focus of popular enthusiasm. The fact that the Church had been brilliantly successful in appealing to the popular imagination using, among other things, music, art, architecture, rituals, incense and spectacular vestments, made the challenge seem all the more pressing and was one reason why many politicians opposed measures that might jeopardise the magnificence of the royal family (‘whether republic or monarchy, the head of state should be kept in splendour’, Crispi declared in parliament in 1883, condemning as paltry a rise of 100,000 lire in the civil list for the king’s cousin).7 Aesthetic considerations also induced commentators (particularly of democratic extraction) to wonder in the 1870s and 1880s if liberalism might not be too austere for most Italians. Could it be – as Hippolyte Taine was suggesting at the time in his seminal study of modern France – that a rational and agnostic ‘state’ had been imposed inappropriately on a ‘nation’ whose mental habits and emotional expectations had been profoundly shaped over many centuries by the Church and absolutism?8 Cults of the dead and the living, 1878–90 One particularly important aspect of the aestheticisation of politics lay in the cult of the dead. Crispi played a key role in making Victor Emmanuel II an object of national veneration after the king’s death in January 1878. As Minister of the Interior he was the principal architect of the monarch’s elaborate funeral, and he hoped that mass participation in the event and the



Political cults in liberal Italy, 1861–192215

carefully orchestrated public grief at the time would serve as springboards for a subsequent ‘national’ cult. This was why it was critical in Crispi’s eyes for the monarch to be buried in Rome, not Turin (and he had to resist considerable pressure on this score): the king should demonstrably belong to Italy, not Piedmont. And the choice of the Pantheon was also carefully made: it was a building in the heart of the capital and free of the massive religious freight of so many other shrines in Rome that would inevitably have highlighted the fraught relationship of Church and state.9 According to Crispi’s newspaper La Riforma, the Pantheon had to be developed into a focal point for secular pilgrimages, along with the Staglieno cemetery in Genoa (for Mazzini) and Caprera (for Garibaldi, whom Crispi strove unsuccessfully to have buried in Rome; though he did stop Garibaldi being cremated: he was adamant that a bodily presence was necessary for popular veneration): ‘These are the temples to which henceforward we must, with sincere and dignified solemnities, direct the Italian people.’10 The cult of Victor Emmanuel undoubtedly had considerable success. It was assisted after 1878 by a flood of commemorative literature and popular biographies stressing (in the teeth of a wealth of evidence to the contrary, which, with active official encouragement, was studiously ignored)11 the monarch’s lifelong devotion to the cause of Italian unity and the ‘concord’ of his people. Statues also proliferated, most of them heroically equestrian and martial, and in the centre of Rome work on the colossal monument to the late king (the ‘Vittoriano’) began. In January 1884 a national ‘pilgrimage’ to the Pantheon was organised to mark the sixth anniversary of the king’s death. Victor Emmanuel’s coffin was exhumed and placed on a huge catafalque, and tens of thousands of visitors came to the capital to pay their respects – albeit in controlled batches, much to the annoyance of some on the left who would have preferred the government to have encouraged a more spontaneous outpouring of popular emotion.12 But the efforts of the state to elevate the profile of the Italian monarchy were overshadowed in the main by the parallel endeavours of the Church to magnify the Pope. Massive crowds may have turned out for the funeral of Victor Emmanuel; but perhaps twice as many, some 300,000, paid tribute to Pius IX the following month. Pius’s successor, Leo XIII, was a less charismatic figure than his predecessor, but his long pontificate, studded with jubilees, encyclicals and letters, and the introduction of highly popular devotions (especially to the rosary and the Virgin Mary) saw a marked accentuation of the tendency begun with the declaration of infallibility to exalt the person of the Holy Father. Catholic publishing houses played their part: Leo was the first pope to realise the full potential of the press (he was equally alert to other modern media: he was the first pontiff to be both recorded and filmed). So, too, did the organisation of the Opera dei congressi, with its fast growing

16

The cult of the Duce

network of parish and diocesan committees, and youth, student and workers’ associations. One of the most influential figures in the Opera, the authoritarian and aristocratic Giovanni Battista Paganuzzi, was particularly assiduous in using the movement as a vehicle with which to exalt the figure of the Pope as the true sovereign of the Italian people, describing Leo XIII publicly in 1879 as, ‘not merely the pontiff, but also the Father and supreme Duce of the Italians: the man who alone can save them. Into his hands we entrust the affairs of the Church and of the Fatherland.’13 The response of the state was nothing if not determined, and in the 1880s a huge array of artists and writers – journalists, pamphleteers, biographers, historians, poets and novelists – celebrated the monarchy in one medium or another. Many of the most passionate publicists were (like Crispi) former democrats, who now recognised that one of the best ways to render the masses patriotic and keep them out of the clutches of the Pope (and increasingly the socialists) was to glorify the House of Savoy. The tone of the cult was set by two of the most successful literary figures of the decade, Giosuè Carducci and Edmondo De Amicis. The erstwhile republican Carducci underwent a spectacular ‘conversion’ to the monarchy after meeting Umberto and his young wife Margherita in Bologna in November 1878. A rapturous ode to the queen was followed by an autobiographical essay, Eterno femminino regale, in which the poet described how he was smitten by what he felt was Margherita’s extraordinary dignity and charm. De Amicis placed devotion to the monarchy at the heart of his best-selling sentimental novel Cuore: Victor Emmanuel was portrayed as the ‘father’ of the nation, whose heroic achievements and commitment to Italy deserved the undying gratitude of his subjects (‘you will live in the heart of your people as long as the sun shines on Italy’); Umberto was presented as a high-minded and benevolent king, committed, like his father, to the well-being of the army and the nation, to whom every Italian man should feel proud to sacrifice his blood.14 Queen Margherita was central to the cult of the monarchy during the 1880s. She had been told at the time of her marriage to Umberto that she should work to make herself ‘a Garibaldi of peace … a creature, sometimes real, sometimes fantastic, whom the Italians will invoke to free themselves of all ills and to lift themselves out of the mire’.15 Her success in fulfilling this role was remarkable. Her beauty, her lavish wardrobe (sometimes disparaged by foreign observers as rather garish and provincial), replete with massive quantities of jewellery, her brilliant court circle and her close contacts with many of the country’s leading intellectuals, her grace, her carefully cultivated mannerisms (not least the enigmatic slow bow that so enchanted the young writer Gabriele D’Annunzio), her charitable works, and her determination to tour the country as much as possible and be in direct contact with the people (she famously ordered the carriage to remain uncovered and braved the rain and



Political cults in liberal Italy, 1861–192217

the cold when she went to Rome in 1871), made her astonishingly popular.16 The success of her cult may have owed something to the way in which publicists could map it onto templates of religious cults, and in particular that of the Virgin Mary – not least in the quasi-religious language that was used to describe the queen’s benignity and grace (encapsulated in her smile).17 The downside of the cult of Margherita was that it left Umberto himself exposed. Similar problems were created by the cult of Victor Emmanuel, through the prominence it gave to the late king’s achievements on the battlefield. In contrast to both Umberto appeared a rather bland individual, lacking in moral or intellectual distinction, and publicists struggled to make much of his image: the best they could come up with was the anodyne notion of ‘the good king’. Crispi observed that a weak monarch was not a particular problem in a country such as Britain, where the traditions and institutions were of sufficient strength to counter the genetic lottery that produced ‘a lunatic like George III or a woman like Victoria’.18 But in Italy this was not the case. Moreover, he, like many others, felt that the weakness of the monarch was becoming an increasing liability in the 1880s, as the reputation of parliament plummeted and the challenge of the revolutionary Left accelerated. Calls grew from a number of quarters for the king to set aside his constitutional constraints (which were technically fictive, as the Statuto made it clear that the king, not parliament, was head of the executive) and ‘govern’ rather than simply ‘rule’. In the second edition of his influential study, Governo e governati in Italia, Pasquale Turiello said that since the country’s institutions had failed in 30 years to win the affection of the population, it was vital now for the ‘glorious Italian Monarchy’ to step in and salvage the situation. This is what people expected; and if the king did not act accordingly and make his will felt, he predicted that the House of Savoy would fall.19 A crucial adjunct to the cult of the monarchy from the 1880s and an important further instrument for bolstering the popularity of the liberal state was provided by the cult of Garibaldi. Given the enormous affection and esteem in which Garibaldi had been held in his lifetime, it was not particularly hard to foster such a cult after his death in 1882. But the massive official encouragement it received – comparable to that given to Victor Emmanuel’s cult – was remarkable, with towns up and down the country vying to provide tributes. Some 300 statues and 400 busts and commemorative inscriptions were unveiled in the last two decades of the century.20 As with Victor Emmanuel, a certain doctoring of the historical record was required. The Garibaldi who was celebrated was not the one-time republican and guerrilla leader, nor the disenchanted semi-exile who in 1862 and 1867 had embarrassed the government by endeavouring to march on Rome, but the selfless patriot and loyal subject of the Piedmontese king who in 1860 had set out to unite Italy in the name of Victor Emmanuel II.

18

The cult of the Duce

The cult of Garibaldi was deliberately designed to work in tandem with that of Victor Emmanuel, and symbolise (and promote) the fusion of the people with the monarchy – with Garibaldi usually being portrayed in a static or meditative pose (or in a domestic setting) in contrast to the late king’s more energetic and martial roles – suggesting obedience versus command.21 One of the most striking features of the Garibaldi cult was the degree to which the great patriot was invested with saintly, even divine, attributes. This had already been a major aspect of his appeal at a popular level during his lifetime, but after 1882 it was strongly encouraged by exponents of high culture in keeping with the general view that the masses were inherently pious and credulous. Thus when in 1882 Giuseppe Guerzoni issued a serious biography of Garibaldi, his colleague, the republican journalist and deputy Achille Bizzoni, criticised it for being too refined and quickly wrote an alternative short version ‘for the people’, full of fantastic legends, in which Garibaldi featured as a Christlike figure, simple, courageous and just, a martyr to his cause and long-suffering victim of ingratitude, envy and betrayal.22 Another prominent figure of the Left who, like Bizzoni, had known Garibaldi well (and who in private had often been critical of his all too human failings), was Francesco Crispi. He, too, could see the huge political value of a sanctified national hero to help bind the masses to the state, and after 1882 became one of the leading exponents of the Garibaldi cult. As he told a student audience at Bologna university in 1884, the preservation of the cult was a patriotic duty: It would seem there was something divine in the life of this man. He was superior to Heracles and Achilles in the ancient world. If he had been born in Athens or Rome, altars would have been raised to him … [I]n certain periods of history … it happens that Providence causes an exceptional being to arise in the world, whose deeds and qualities are out of the ordinary. His marvellous exploits capture the imagination, and the masses regard him as superhuman. As I have said … if Garibaldi had been born in Athens or in Rome, the people would have made him a demigod and erected temples in his honour. In our times we are more modest: the altar of Garibaldi is in the heart of every patriot, without distinction of party or class. Those who wish Italy to be united from the Alps to the two seas … and those who love the fatherland, strong, great, prosperous and respected – all these hold the hero in veneration and harbour his cult.23

However, the cult of Garibaldi contained within it a kernel of subversion. If the monarchist credentials of Garibaldi were reasonably solid (unlike those of his old friend Giuseppe Mazzini – who had to wait until after the Second World War and the establishment of the Republic before being honoured with a statue in Rome), the fact that the great patriot had been a fierce critic of the way unification had been achieved in 1860 and of many subsequent aspects of the liberal state made him an icon for opponents of the institu-



Political cults in liberal Italy, 1861–192219

tions. Numerous Italian anarchists and socialists saw in Garibaldi a symbol of Italy’s failure to achieve social justice, and identified strongly with him. The socialist leader, Filippo Turati, recalled how as a young man news of the death of Garibaldi had led him to weep: ‘I had not wept in years.’24 The anarchist, Gaetano Bresci, attended the inauguration of a new statue to Garibaldi in Bologna before going to Monza to assassinate King Umberto on 29 July 1900. And many leading Fascists found inspiration for their aversion to liberalism in Garibaldi: Mussolini collected Garibaldi relics – and presented them to the Museo del Risorgimento in 1939.25 The efforts of politicians and publicists to bolster the popularity of the state with cults of the monarchy and Garibaldi were given added urgency by the country’s growing economic problems, the spread of revolutionary socialism, and above all the plummeting reputation of parliament. From the early 1880s the Chamber of Deputies faced a growing tidal wave of criticism. The excoriations of trasformismo and the denunciations of ‘parliamentarism’ by a host of intellectuals and politicians, including Gaetano Mosca, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, Pasquale Turiello, Ruggiero Bonghi and Angelo Majorana, dovetailed with widespread anxieties about the intellectual and moral fitness of the electorate – which had been more than trebled with a law of 1881 – and gave rise to increasingly intense discussions about whether representative government was suited to Italy. The situation worsened dramatically with the outbreak of the Banca Romana scandal: for many observers the unearthing from the end of 1892 of financial irregularities on a massive scale involving dozens of deputies appeared to be the final nail in the coffin, if not of parliament, then at least of the current constitutional system. The crisis of the monarchy As the sense of crisis deepened in 1892–93 it was towards the monarchy that the most authoritative commentators looked for a possible solution. In January 1893 Ruggiero Bonghi called in the Nuova Antologia for the king to assert his constitutional powers over the executive and parliament: if he failed to do so, the masses, he said, would quickly lose faith in the monarchy, which for them was necessarily ‘an ideal’ (‘they will see there the greatest impotence where fantasy had suggested to them the greatest power’).26 The following November the distinguished historian and senator, Pasquale Villari, claimed, also in the Nuova Antologia, that the situation in Italy was critical and that the question ‘where are we heading?’ was on everyone’s lips. He believed the best hope for the country lay in rekindling, through strong leadership, the remarkable surge of moral energy that a generation before had led ‘all parties, all opinions and all provinces to gather spontaneously around the Monarchy and the House of Savoy in a single thought’: after all, the ‘southern character’

20

The cult of the Duce

of Italians made them impressionable. ‘Our very moral existence is at stake … The House of Savoy will certainly not – as it has never done – be found wanting in its role at the head of the people, whenever the people has made its voice heard, and whenever the fatherland has been in danger.’27 The problem with these calls in 1893 for the king to seize the initiative was first, that Umberto lacked the character to pose as an authoritative leader, and second, and probably more important, that the monarchy was itself heavily at risk of being sucked into the Banca Romana scandal. The costs of maintaining an extravagant lifestyle, with dozens of palaces and villas scattered around the country – many of them inherited from Italy’s deposed former rulers – had resulted in the finances of the royal household spiralling out of control under Victor Emmanuel: he was thought to have had debts of more than 35 million lire on his death.28 Umberto’s spending was scarcely less inordinate than his father’s, but despite this the royal finances had somehow been placed on a sound footing in the 1880s by the Secretary General of the Royal Household, Urbano (‘Urbanino’) Rattazzi. However, Rattazzi had relied heavily on ‘loans’ from the Banca Romana; and when it emerged that the Banca Romana had for a number of years been printing money illegally to cover bad debts, and that this fact had been known to ministers for some time, and nothing had been done about it (indeed there had been maladroit manoeuvres just before the scandal broke to make the governor of the bank a senator and secure him immunity from prosecution), it was clear that the crown was perilously exposed. The crisis surrounding the state, with the monarchy vulnerable and its popularity at its lowest ebb, according to most commentators, since 1860,29 parliament’s reputation in shreds, anarchist and socialist subversion rampant in many areas, and widespread concerns that the country was on the verge of bankruptcy, generated remarkable messianic expectations around the principal political figure of the period, Francesco Crispi. Crispi had achieved a massive personal standing in the country as prime minister from 1887–91 thanks mainly to his image as a man of ‘energy’ after the years of irresolute leadership of Agostino Depretis and also to his hugely ambitious foreign policy, which had brought the country to the brink of war with France on more than one occasion. He returned to power at the end of 1893 in an atmosphere of febrile expectation. ‘The eyes of his foes as well as of his supporters are all turned now to Signor Crispi’, the British ambassador in Rome wrote on 6 December, ‘as the one man … possessing sufficient abilities to justify the universal hope that he would succeed.’30 And a leading journalist recalled in 1895 how at this time ‘the name of Crispi erupted from the heart of the Nation – like the cry from the crew of a sinking ship, when a vessel comes into sight offering hope of rescue; and this cry was loud enough to drown out the noise of the storm itself’.31



Political cults in liberal Italy, 1861–192221

The convergence of expectations suited Crispi politically: since the late 1880s he had been toying with the idea of introducing a German-style constitutional system as a possible solution to the crisis of parliamentary government, with himself acting as a Bismarckian chancellor figure. But the sheer scale of the enthusiasm surrounding Crispi struck a number of commentators as exceptional and deserving of analysis. In a study published in 1895 the sociologist Guglielmo Ferrero described the ‘almost regal aura’ surrounding Crispi, and said: The Crispi phenomenon will remain among the strangest and most curious aspects of Italian history this century; and his dictatorship will be one of the problems that will occupy historians in the future. Nobody has been able to impose his own personality on the entire country as he has, or stamp the political life of the nation so forcefully with his character, or arouse such enthusiasm, such hopes, such hatred. Nobody has so completely eclipsed the political world around him.32

Ferrero explained Crispi’s appeal in terms of a number of factors. First there was the prime minister’s extraordinarily complex personality that allowed him to connect, largely on an emotional and irrational plane, with a broad spectrum of political and social categories. Crispi was impulsive, passionate and self-contradictory. He was also radical and authoritarian, and used the machinery of the state as if in a revolution. He pursued politics ‘as a poet writes or a musician composes, through impulses and flashes of inspiration’. Nothing about him was cold: ‘Suffice it to see him when he makes a speech: his face grows bright, his eyes blaze, his gestures become taut, his curt and unadorned language bursts into flashes of true eloquence … Every idea of his is tinged with a sentiment: with enthusiasm, with hatred, with scorn.’ In the second place, Crispi was attractive because he was so unlike most of his fellow countrymen. He was resolute and energetic where a majority of Italians was indifferent and lazy. Above all he was endowed with great ‘will’: the average Italian was ‘listless’. And thirdly, Crispi owed his remarkable grip on Italian society to the country’s ‘immaturity’. Large sections of the population, in Ferrero’s view, had an instinctive preference still for authoritarianism: ‘Italy does not understand [liberty] and has no feeling for it.’ Moreover, Crispi struck a chord with the religious instincts of the masses and appealed to their ‘messianic’ expectations in times of difficulty.33 Crispi’s fall from power following a sustained campaign by his enemies, who accused him of corruption and immorality, and the war in Ethiopia – which ended in the disastrous defeat at the Battle of Adowa in March 1896 – left the image of the Sicilian statesman badly tarnished. But the cult of Crispi did not vanish. For a few years immediately after his death in 1901 he remained somewhat a neglected figure, as Italy under the leadership of Giovanni Giolitti

22

The cult of the Duce

embarked on a new strategy for integrating the masses into the state, using parliament as a vehicle for socioeconomic and political reforms and mediation with the far left. But once the Nationalists began to emerge as a political force from around 1905, Crispi’s reputation rose dramatically again. To the Nationalists, Crispi had divined the correct path for Italy: authoritarianism, anti-parliamentarism, and an aggressive foreign policy. By contrast, they believed Giolitti was weakening the authority of the state through his materialism, his cynicism, and his failure to understand that only through strong ideals and inspirational leadership would the threats to the country’s integrity from socialism and the Church be allayed. The cult of Crispi received an added dimension in the years preceding the outbreak of the First World War from the notion that he had been a ‘martyr’. Crispi was portrayed as a tragic victim of ‘Italietta’, a man whose grandiose dreams of national grandeur had been too much for the paltry ambitions and timidity of his contemporaries. According to Scipio Sighele in 1913, Crispi was ‘too great a minister for the small and humble Italy of the end of the nineteenth century’; but his example had provided an inspiration, he said, for the recent formation of a ‘national consciousness’ that would prevent a return to ‘the cowardly policies of the past’.34 From this angle, the disaster of Adowa – which a number of leading Nationalists claimed as the genesis for their political ideas – could be seen principally as a measure of the moral shortcomings of the country (and above all its parliamentary ruling class) in the 1890s rather than the outcome of a misguided foreign policy. Italy, according to the Nationalists, should have responded to the defeat by redoubling its efforts rather than lamely withdrawing from its ambitions in Africa. The celebration of Crispi under Fascism retained similar political contours. The cult of Crispi by the Nationalists fed on continuing concerns about the efficacy of parliament and the monarchy. Crispi himself had lost almost all faith in both the Chamber of Deputies and the crown by the time he died. ‘This is a kingdom without glory and without honour,’ he wrote in some private jottings, ‘and for those of us who struggled to bring about Italian unity, this is distressing. We had looked to the House of Savoy believing it to be a family of soldiers. Instead we have found it to be a family of bourgeois … We have a monarchy, but no king.’35 In an audience with Queen Margherita in January 1897 he said that his government could have survived if he had had the support of Umberto. Certainly some strong measures would have been needed: he would have had to close the Chamber and ‘arrest a hundred or so people, including a few deputies’. But he did not know if the king would have consented: ‘So I left it to the king to decide. And we fell.’ When the queen asked what else her husband could have done given that the Chamber had accorded a majority to Crispi’s successor, Crispi replied scornfully that those same deputies had also given him a majority in the Chamber – a clear sign, he



Political cults in liberal Italy, 1861–192223

said, ‘that the parliamentary system is not working’. He ended the audience by urging Margherita to inform her husband to ‘act as a king’.36 Crispi’s pessimism about parliament, and his craving for a strong monarch who would promote the interests of the ‘nation’ and thereby draw the masses to the state touched a chord with many of his colleagues. And such was the sense of political desperation in the last years of the century, that some found the courage to be brutally outspoken. At the beginning of 1897 Sidney Sonnino published what became a celebrated article, Torniamo allo Statuto (Let us return to the Statuto), in the Nuova antologia, in which he imagined ‘the Nation’ pleading with the king in the strongest possible terms to resume his constitutional function as head of the executive: Your Majesty … The executive power resides in You alone. You alone have the right to appoint and dismiss ministers … The Nation looks to You and trusts in You … Sire, be vigilant! Your interests are above all our interests, the interests of everyone, the interests of Italy.

Liberalism, said Sonnino, was an individualistic ideology, and without a strong executive operating above factions and parties to promote the interests of the whole nation, the more disciplined forces of the Church and socialism would win in the struggle to rally the masses. It was thus vital for all patriotic Italians to set aside their differences and ‘bind [them]selves tightly to the great civil and liberal idea represented by the Italian monarchy of the House of Savoy’.37 The problem, as both Sonnino and Crispi knew, was that the Savoys historically had never shown much evidence of wanting to identify with ‘Italy’. And there seemed little hope of this changing after the assassination of King Umberto in 1900: the new king, Victor Emmanuel III, was rather more interesting morally and intellectually than his father (he was a distinguished coin collector); but he, too, lacked serious political ambition and was happy to remain in the background and leave the running of the country to parliament and the liberal elites – even though the standing of the Chamber continued to be irredeemably low, as the country’s best known intellectuals repeatedly assailed it for its corruption and lack of moral leadership. As Giuseppe Prezzolini wrote in a characteristic article in the journal La Voce in 1910: Every ideal evaporates. There are no longer any parties, but only clusters and clienteles. And from parliament the evil spreads out across the country … Big ideas are crushed beneath the moral dismemberment and disintegration of every collective body. Today somebody is on the right; tomorrow you find him on the left – but this old political situation is aggravated by the fact that when you investigate, you find filth underneath – made worse in that nobody any longer has the moral sensitivity to be disturbed by it or the judgment to see it for what it is.38

24

The cult of the Duce

Against this backdrop there remained a persistent hope that someone of genius might arise (‘an example and a voice: in other words a man’, as Prezzolini put it in 1904)39 who could furnish Italy with the moral leadership it needed. And that genius, whose character was little more than a vague aspiration, stood in implicit contrast to the man whom the myriad critics of the pre-war political order saw as the embodiment of all that was wrong with Italy: Giovanni Giolitti. Where Giolitti was a politician seemingly devoid of ideals, whose power was rooted in his ability to manipulate parliament rather than in any emotional engagement with the masses, at once cynical, utilitarian, calculating and unscrupulous – the ‘minister of the underworld’ as Gaetano Salvemini famously branded him in 1910 for his willingness to broker electoral deals with criminal elements in the South – the new leader would be inspired by faith and conviction, connect directly with the people, and have as his mission to cleanse the ‘sewers’ and the ‘Augean stables’ of government in Rome.40 It was from this context of simultaneous condemnation and messianic hope that the cult of Mussolini was eventually to emerge. Notes  1 G. Volpe, Guerra, dopoguerra, fascismo (Venice: La Nuova Italia, 1928), pp. 270–1.   2 G. Ciano, Diario 1937–1943, ed. R. De Felice (Milan: Rizzoli, 1980), pp. 149, 159 (18 June 1938, 17 July 1938). Cf. G. Bottai, Diario 1935–1944, ed. G. B. Guerri (Milan: Rizzoli, 2001), p. 124 (12 July 1938).   3 A. C. De Meis, Il sovrano: Saggio di filosofia politica con riferenza all’Italia, ed. B. Croce (Bari: Laterza, 1927), pp. 20, 53, 67.   4 C. Duggan, Francesco Crispi: From Nation to Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 232–3.   5 C. Casalegno, La regina Margherita (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001), pp. 53–60. Cf. La Riforma, 23 July 1873 (‘La capitale del regno’).   6 Avv. G. Casani, Il papato e l’indipendenza d’Italia: considerazioni dell’avvocato Giambattista Casani (Bologna: Istituto tipografica via Galliera 48, 1875), p. 8.   7 Atti parlamentari, Camera dei Deputati, Discussioni, 21 April 1883, p. 2676.   8 For the influence of Taine on Italian thinkers, see L. Mangoni, Una crisi fine secolo: la cultura italiana e la Francia fra Otto e Novecento (Turin: Einaudi, 1985), pp. 96–7, 105.   9 Cf. F. Crispi, Carteggi politici inediti di Francesco Crispi (1860–1900) (Rome: L’Universelte, 1912), letter of Cesare Correnti to Crispi, n.d., but January 1878. 10 La Riforma, 10 June 1882 (‘L’isola sacra’). 11 S. Soldani, ‘Il Risorgimento a scuola: incertezze dello Stato e lenta formazione di un pubblico di lettori’, in E. Dirani (ed.), Alfredo Oriani e la cultura del suo tempo (Ravenna: Longo, 1985), pp. 142–3.



Political cults in liberal Italy, 1861–192225

12 La Riforma, 22 January 1884 (‘A pelegrinaggio compiuto’). 13 G. Miccoli, ‘Chiesa e società in Italia dal Concilio Vaticano I (1870) al pontificato di Giovanni XXIII’, in Storia d’Italia. Vol. V: I documenti (Turin: Einaudi, 1973), pp. 1508–9. 14 ‘Gennaio: i funerali di Vittorio Emanuele’ and ‘Aprile: Re Umberto’, in E. De Amicis, Cuore: libro per ragazzi (Milan: Treves, 1886). 15 Countess Irene della Rocca, quoted in C. Brice, ‘Queen Margherita: “The only man in the House of Savoy” ’, in R. Schulte (ed.), The Body of the Queen: Gender and Rule in the Courtly World, 1500–2000 (Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2006), p. 200. 16 Casalegno, La regina Margherita, pp. 54, 60–1, 74–6. 17 Cf. Duggan, Francesco Crispi, pp. 433–4. 18 F. Crispi, Pensieri e profezie raccolti da T. Palamenghi Crispi (Rome: Tiber, 1920), p. 118. 19 P. Turiello, Governo e governati in Italia: proposte (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1890), pp. 211, 230–5. 20 E. Irace, Itale glorie (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003), p. 184. 21 I. Porciani, ‘Stato e nazione: l’immagine debole dell’Italia’, in S. Soldani and G. Turi (eds.), Fare gli italiani: scuola e cultura nell’Italia contemporanea. Vol. 1: La nascita dello Stato nazionale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993), p. 414. 22 R. Certini, Il mito di Garibaldi: la formazione dell’immaginario popolare nell’Italia unita (Milan: Unicopli, 2000), pp. 99–102, 117–18. 23 F. Crispi, Scritti e discorsi politici di Francesco Crispi (1849–1890) (Rome: Unione cooperativa, 1890), pp. 655–8 (‘Giuseppe Garibaldi’, 1 June 1884). 24 R. Monteleone, Filippo Turati (Turin: UTET, 1987), p. 27. 25 G. Armani, ‘Pace e guerra nelle memorie e nei romanzi di Garibaldi’, in F. Mazzonis (ed.), Garibaldi condottiero: storia, teoria, prassi (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1984), p. 565. 26 R. Bonghi, ‘L’ufficio del principe in uno stato libero’, Nuova antologia, 16 January 1893, p. 351. 27 P. Villari, ‘Dove andiamo?’, Nuova antologia, 1 November 1893, pp. 21–3. 28 D. Mack Smith, Italy and its Monarchy (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 64–5. 29 Ibid., pp. 104–6; N. Colajanni, Banche e parlamentari: fatti, discussioni e commenti (Milan: Treves, 1893), pp. 236–7; A. Labriola, Storia di dieci anni 1899–1909 (Milan: Il Viandante, 1910), pp. 9–11; News International, London, Stillman Papers, Stillman to Wallace, 11 August 1893, 15 February 1894; Public Record Office, Foreign Office 45 700, Edwardes to Rosebery, 6 December 1893. 30 Ibid. 31 L. Fortis, Francesco Crispi (Rome: Voghera, 1895), p. 6. 32 G. Ferrero, La reazione (Turin: Olivetti, 1895), p. 7. 33 Ibid., pp. 12–17, 20, 26–8, 31–5, 37–8, 42–5. 34 S. Sighele, ‘La politica di Francesco Crispi’, Nuova antologia, 16 March 1913, p. 276. 35 U. Levra, U. Fare gli italiani: memoria e celebrazione del Risorgimento (Turin:

26

36 37 38 39 40

The cult of the Duce Comitato di Torino dell’Istituto per la storia del Risorgimento italiano, 1992), p. 336. Museo del Risorgimento, Rome, b. 668, fasc. 5, diary notes of conversation with the queen, 2 January 1897. S. Sonnino (‘Un deputato’), ‘Torniamo allo Statuto’, Nuova antologia, 1 January 1897, pp. 25–7. G. Prezzolini, ‘Che fare?’, La Voce, 23 June 1910, quoted in E. Gentile, Il mito dello Stato nuovo (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 1999), pp. 47–8. A. Asor Rosa, La cultura, in Storia d’Italia. Vol. 4: Dall’unità ad oggi (2) (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), p. 1254 (original emphasis). Cf. C. Duggan, The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy since 1796 (London: Allen Lane, 2007), pp. 305, 378–9.

2

The propagation of the cult of the Duce, 1925–26 Christopher Duggan

The rapid development of the cult of the Duce in 1925–26 was in many respects the cornerstone on which the subsequent regime was built. It did not emerge from nothing: Mussolini had long been regarded by his followers, whether socialist before the war or Fascist from 1919, as an exceptional personality. But the speed with which Mussolini was transformed from the vulnerable and vacillating figure of the Matteotti crisis in the second half of 1924 into the ‘man of providence’, able to survive the intrigues of political opponents and would-be assassins’ bullets and bombs, was remarkable. To what extent was this transition the result of conscious political manipulation by the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF) or, more broadly, by journalists, writers and other supporters, eager to find new sources of legitimacy after the parliamentary pillar had been knocked away? Or was it rather, as Emilio Gentile has argued, a product of Fascism’s intrinsically transcendental character, a spontaneous emanation largely from below of a movement that now found itself free to become a fully-fledged ‘political religion’?1 This chapter will examine some of the political, intellectual and cultural factors behind the cult of the Duce and suggest that its swift growth lay in the capacity of an orchestrated political campaign from ‘above’ to intersect – as an examination of diaries and letters from the time would indicate – with pre-existing popular aspirations and cultural templates. Mussolini and the search for a charismatic leader, c.1900–24 Prior to the war, Mussolini’s reputation had been closely intertwined with the fraught ideological climate surrounding the rise of Nationalism, the invasion of Libya, and the battles within the Socialist Party (PSI) over whether or not to compromise with the liberal state. The young revolutionary’s pugnacious oratory and journalism made him a welcome asset to the maximalists – a role he cemented at the Reggio Emilia congress in July 1912, which he took by storm. One aspect of his appeal at this time lay in the regional tensions underlying the political divisions in the PSI: in contrast to the pragmatic

28

The cult of the Duce

Lombard reformists, Mussolini was portrayed as a quintessential romagnolo, a product of a region celebrated, as one of his early biographers observed, for its ‘condottieri and its mystics’, and an heir of the spiritual fervour of the early socialism of Andrea Costa.2 Mussolini’s capacity to inspire mass audiences was a further dimension of his growing mystique: against a backdrop of writings linking success in modern politics to an ability to sway crowds, his allure as an ‘idol of the crowd’, as a fellow Socialist from the Romagna described him in 1913, was deemed to be an extremely telling attribute.3 Nor was it exclusively the Socialists who singled him out in the pre-war years. The steady erosion of faith in the representative institutions since the 1870s and the failure of the monarchy to respond to calls from the likes of Pasquale Villari, Ruggiero Bonghi and Sidney Sonnino to fill the growing political void by ‘governing’ and not just ‘reigning’, led to a pervasive hope that a man of genius could be found to galvanise the country. The myth of the homo novus was dear to the early Nationalists. In 1904 Giovanni Papini called for a charismatic leader who would ‘light the way and point out the goal … a lynx-eyed pilot with a fist of iron destined to lead his people towards a higher destiny’.4 And the intellectuals around the journal La Voce (who included Mussolini himself) had similar aspirations, encouraged by their elaboration of an antimyth of Giovanni Giolitti, whom they regarded as the epitome of bourgeois cynicism, materialism and corruption. Gaetano Salvemini praised Mussolini in the pages of L’Unità in 1912–14 for his exceptional energy, describing him as ‘a strong and forthright man’, a ‘man of faith’, ‘the man who was needed – and who could not but appear – to represent in this historical moment the need for a genuinely revolutionary movement for our fatherland’.5 Salvemini’s positive assessment of Mussolini was to persist until 1923, if not 1924.6 In the immediate aftermath of the war Mussolini lost the clearly demarcated political space in which any claims to his exceptionality could be trumpeted. For the Socialists he was a traitor; and while his role as a prominent interventionist was certainly well known, his war service was not such as to single him out: others, notably Gabriele D’Annunzio, had far stronger claims to distinction. Nor did the creation of Fascism provide him with a clear platform on which his personality could be paraded unchallenged: the escalation of squadrism from the autumn of 1920 connected a political movement that, up until then, had been largely marginal to a popular base that was developing in an essentially spontaneous fashion around local leaders whose authority rested heavily on their own claims to charisma. Men such as Italo Balbo, Roberto Farinacci and Dino Grandi were reluctant – as the Pacification Pact crisis of the summer of 1921 demonstrated – to hand undisputed control to a man whom they had hitherto been inclined to consider with democratic familiarity as a ‘comrade’, a ‘friend’ or, perhaps with a hint of disparagement, as ‘professor Mussolini’. Even in 1922–24 many Fascists were unwilling to



The propagation of the cult of the Duce, 1925–2629

regard Mussolini and Fascism as inseparable. The London-based Fascist Camillo Pellizzi reminded Mussolini in 1924 that a major political movement or ‘a nation on the march’ are never summed up in ‘a Leader’: ‘Thus Fascism does not begin and end in You.’7 Yet, if political constraints acted to thwart the emergence of a full-blown personality ‘cult’, there are plenty of indications in the years immediately after the war that Mussolini’s distinctive character and style made him a frequent focus for messianic hopes. The atmosphere was propitious: the crisis of credibility surrounding the institutions before 1914 had been exacerbated by political events in 1915–19; and with the country descending into civil war, ‘everyone’, according to the veteran liberal Giustino Fortunato in 1921, ‘[was] calling out, as in times of extreme danger, for the providential intervention of a Man – with a capital M – who would finally know how to restore order to the country’.8 When he first heard Mussolini speak in public in November 1921 the eminent journalist Ugo Ojetti was fascinated by the Fascist leader’s dramatic facial expressions and gestures, and he noted how the audience was enthralled by the air of certainty that Mussolini appeared to exude and by the way in which he reduced ‘the whole world to black and white’. Religious imagery sprang readily to Ojetti’s mind: at the end of the speech, he wrote, Mussolini was seized round the waist ‘and lifted above the crowd like a priest raising aloft the monstrance with the holy Eucharist’. Sitting next to Ojetti were two young Blackshirts with tears in their eyes.9 The attraction of Mussolini was directly related to the intense loathing and anger felt by many towards the liberal leadership, and the no less vehement hatred and fear of the Socialists, experienced above all by war veterans. Mussolini appeared ‘different’: an outsider who offered hope, however vague, of a just solution. A young Florentine bersagliere, of lower-middle-class extraction, Carlo Ciseri was probably typical of many of his generation. After nearly three years serving at the front, in the autumn of 1919 he found himself stationed in Milan, where he was repeatedly vilified and taunted by Socialists. ‘What disillusionment!’, he wrote in his diary. ‘The great Italian family that intervened entirely as one … in the great war, has become horribly divided … I feel completely at sea … I cannot begin to understand how these squalid political ideas can make people who should be brothers hate each other to the point of killing … I no longer believe in anything.’ And he wrote out an oath, underlining it forcefully: In the most solemn manner: I swear I will never have anything to do with politics ever again. I will never belong to any party. My only political party, my only big ideal, will be my family: my father, my mother, my brothers, and, one day, my children … Long live a new Italy of peace and greatness! And in this great hope I direct to God a prayer that in his grace he will send us a man who will overcome everything, conquer all, and rule with true justice.10

30

The cult of the Duce

Carlo, however, did not cut himself off entirely from politics. From time to time he read Mussolini’s newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, and liked its editorials; and in March 1920 he heard Mussolini speak at a reception in Milan. It was a momentous occasion for him: I warmed to him hugely straight away. I liked what he said, I liked his pride, his force, his expression … I have not been wrong in thinking for quite a time that there is something exceptional about this man. Now I am hopeful, really hopeful, that this man has put himself at the head of a movement that will be able to fight back … This movement could be the start of a return to good sense; the beginning of a new and better era than this one. I said I would never talk of politics again; but how can you not rejoice when you see the horizon beginning to clear?

Carlo was to remain a passionate supporter of Mussolini (though not a party member) until the end of the Second World War. And much of his admiration was underpinned by a rather contradictory feeling, as he wrote in an entry in October 1923, that ‘this man is the superior being sent by God to restore peace to us and perhaps the splendour and glories of ancient Rome’.11 Numerous other diaries and memoirs attest to the projection of messianic, or at the very least intense, hopes onto the figure of Mussolini during the chaotic years after the end of the war. Very often it was Mussolini’s physical attributes – his blazing eyes, strong jaw, curt, theatrical gestures and pallid complexion – suggestive of a primordial energy and will battling against the demands of ceaseless work, that triggered excitement and longing in those who encountered him. For Paolo Orano it was the ‘light-devouring’ eyes that struck him most at his first meeting with Mussolini in November 1922 and caused him to say to himself: ‘You, you are the one I have been awaiting for the Fatherland … You are the one: I recognise and obey you. Command, lead, govern.’12 Giuseppe Bastianini had a pleasant sensation of being examined intensely as if he were an object and penetrated by a ‘magnetic fluid’ at his initial meeting with the Fascist leader in March 1921.13 Giorgio Pini first heard Mussolini speak in April 1921 and immediately felt he was ‘a truly new figure compared to the other politicians of the time’; and when he met him in October 1923 the experience was ‘truly electrifying’: what remained impressed on his mind ‘was the benevolent and piercing look he gave me that day’.14 The messianic expectations found intellectual underpinning in a variety of sources. Many prominent Fascists pointed to Mazzini’s unfulfilled dreams of national regeneration and greatness, and his longing for the ‘Third Rome’, as a significant influence on their hopes for Mussolini and his movement. Sometimes Dante was invoked: Giovanni Giuriati told the Fascist leader in March 1923 that he had ‘the most resolute faith that you are the Veltro prophesied by Dante’. And years later, after the regime had collapsed, Giuriati said



The propagation of the cult of the Duce, 1925–2631

that he had indeed sincerely believed that Mussolini ‘was the man predestined to link together the two sacred symbols of the Cross and the Eagle, as Dante had indicated, and chase … from the surface of the earth moral and civil disorder, heresy and war’.15 The writer Alfredo Oriani was pointed to as a formative inspiration, especially by Romagna Fascists (‘In Oriani’, wrote Dino Grandi, ‘my generation found its anxieties, its feelings, its contradictions, its aspirations and its instincts confirmed, and above all explained and clarified.’)16 Carlo Pisacane, Andrea Costa and Francesco Crispi were also cited as men who in their different ways – through faith in an ideal of social justice or else of national grandeur – had striven to tackle the fundamental problem, left unresolved by the Risorgimento, of how to connect the Italian masses to the state. ‘Faith’ as a political tool However spontaneous the sense of enthusiasm was for Mussolini among disenchanted – and usually young – middle-class people, there was also a strong element of deliberate political calculation on the part of the Fascist leadership in relation to the concept of ‘faith’. Central to many of the criticisms of the liberal state from the 1860s had been its alleged failure to sustain the idealism of the Risorgimento: heady ‘poetry’ had yielded all too quickly to dull ‘prose’. The result, according in particular to those whose roots lay in the democratic and anti-clerical left, like Giosuè Carducci and Francesco Crispi, was to leave most ordinary Italians – who were historically attuned, it was claimed, to the sensual language, imagery and rituals of the Catholic Church – disillusioned with the new state. ‘Passion’ and ‘faith’ needed to be injected into national politics. As an article in Crispi’s newspaper La Riforma said in 1882: We need to make [the] religion of the Fatherland, which must be our principal if not only religion, as solemn and as popular as possible. We all of us, servants of Progress, have gradually destroyed a faith that for centuries sufficed our people, precisely because through the ritualised forms of its displays it appealed to the visual senses, and through the visual senses to the minds of the masses, who are impressionable, imaginative, and artistic, eager for shapes, colours and sounds to feed their fantasies. What have we substituted for this faith? As far as the masses are concerned, nothing … We must address this, as the character of a people is not changed from one day to the next.17

This line of thought, which owed much to Giuseppe Mazzini’s view that the national question needed to be formulated in religious terms if the masses were ever to become engaged, received a powerful fillip from the anti-rationalist doctrines that emerged in Europe around the turn of the century. The writings of Georges Sorel and Gustave Le Bon, with their emphasis on the mobilising power of myth, fell on receptive soil in Italy – both on the left and

32

The cult of the Duce

the right. Further intellectual support for the opponents of positivism came from the neo-idealism of Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile. Within the Socialist Party the critics of reformism latched onto the revolutionary potential of violence and extreme emotions as intellectual justification for their dissent, while the numerous enemies of Giovanni Giolitti, stretching from the intellectuals around the journal La Voce to the Nationalists, couched their antagonism in terms of the liberal leader’s failure to offer inspirational leadership and ideals to counter the disenchantment that the masses felt with the sordid practices of parliamentary government. The instrumental role of ‘faith’ for the Fascist leadership and its supposed suitability for a society steeped in Catholicism is well illustrated in the account given by Tullio Cianetti of his ‘conversion’ to Fascism at the hands of the former Socialist and ardito, Piero Bolzon. Bolzon, a prominent early Fascist, came to Cianetti’s home town of Assisi in the summer of 1922 in an attempt to persuade the young man to set up a Fascist union in Terni. Cianetti hesitated, pleading inexperience and concerns about the strength of the Socialist opposition that he would face. Bolzon talked to him of how the masses in Italy had to be ‘educated’ and ‘guided towards the attainment of national cohesion’, and of how important ‘faith’ was in this process: Love, love is needed, my boy, to guide the masses. Faith and love will quickly make up for any shortage you may have of experience. For men to believe in you, you must make them feel you believe in them … How many exceptional men have failed because they have been unable to understand the psychology of the masses and have looked down on them as if they … were wretched beings? You come from the ordinary people and must be in a position to understand how much wisdom there is in the poor, who may lack money but certainly don’t lack brains and feeling … Here in your Franciscan Assisi, every street, every church, every monastery, every stone speaks of the great Christian ethic that came down from Heaven to teach men about the true brotherhood that comes from understanding … Many people mistakenly think that Fascism is simply an anti-Bolshevik reaction. No, Fascism will be a revolution and Mussolini is the new man … I see in Mussolini the future Leader of a great European democracy spreading out from Rome …18

Cianetti, who was to have a distinguished career in Fascist trade unionism, appears – at least from his memoirs he wrote following his arrest in the autumn of 1943 for having voted against Mussolini in the Grand Council meeting of 24–25 July – to have experienced, or at the very least understood, the regime through a filter of religious enthusiasm. When he first encountered Mussolini at a review in the Piazzale Flaminio following the March on Rome, he said: ‘I never took my eyes off him, as if a need of my spirit forced me to imprint in my brain the image of the man whom I wanted to know, understand and love.’ In September 1924, in the middle of the Matteotti crisis, he



The propagation of the cult of the Duce, 1925–2633

recalled meeting Mussolini with a group of unionists in Palazzo Chigi: ‘His face was tired and unshaven … He spoke to us in a calm voice: he seemed to me a saint.’ And in the years that followed, he, like millions of others, he claimed, was swept up in a huge tidal wave of enthusiasm that led to the rapid ‘deification of the dictator’: ‘Dictatorships have their priests, and they start by building an altar and placing on it the idol to be adored.’ With hindsight he could see how intoxicating and morally numbing such adulation was, he said: ‘Only in the second half of my political career did I begin to open my eyes (I say begin, because in reality only at the last moment were my eyes opened) and notice all the problems. In the first half, instead, I could not see them completely because my faith, the allure of the man … and my temperament, which always led me to view things in the best possible light, prevented me from making a full and serious assessment of the man and his system.’19 Cianetti was not inclined to hold Mussolini responsible for the emergence of the cult of the Duce – though like many prominent Fascists looking back on the regime amid the wreckage of the Second World War he saw the adulation of the leader as principally to blame for a process of growing intellectual torpor whereby ‘the beautiful sincerity and honesty of a young ruling class became replaced by a dangerous conformism’.20 In Cianetti’s view, the Fascist leader had done what he could before 1925 to resist the impulses from within his party towards his personal deification. And this was probably true: as prime minister in a coalition government that needed the support of other parties it would have been politically unwise for Mussolini to have presented himself as anything other than primus inter pares (‘I was simply terrified’, he said in a letter to the newspaper L’Impero in September 1923, by an article ‘beseeching me to consider myself “sacred” … I urge you, dear friends, not to raise this question again and to leave me with my profaneness entirely intact.’21 But after the resolution of the Matteotti crisis, according to Cianetti, Mussolini was raised aloft largely against his will through a combination of ‘ideal, political and personal interests’. Thereafter, there was only one problem to be resolved: pleasing the dictator. You put together a speech to please him. You published an article for him to read. You did something unusual to get a prize from him. Few would be able to resist the great temptation and act in accordance with their conscience: these few would appear irritating and isolated and be called bores; they would be viewed with suspicion and pitied because they had not understood how … sublime it was to annihilate oneself at the feet of the God come down to earth.22

The PNF and the political context of the cult The development of the cult of the Duce was in part a reflex response to the crisis of the second half of 1924. In the wake of the murder of Matteotti,

34

The cult of the Duce

Mussolini looked increasingly fallible and exposed. Public opinion began to swing rapidly against him; cabinet colleagues resigned; and in the face of escalating pressure he appeared to be incapable of taking decisive action. Many within his own party sensed that the days of the government were numbered and abandoned what Gabriele D’Annunzio described as a ‘stinking ruin’.23 Somewhat ironically, given their erstwhile reluctance to accord him an exalted status within the movement or the party, it was the hardline provincial ras who felt most keenly that he was now indispensable. They criticised his prevarication and threatened to desert him if he made too many concessions to the opposition; and at the end of 1924 there was serious talk of staging a coup against him. But this was the language and counsel of desperation. They knew that if Mussolini fell, they would be finished too, with many of them ending up in prison. As Roberto Farinacci said, Mussolini had to be supported: his was the ‘only myth’ tenable in Italy.24 Once the crisis was resolved with Mussolini’s speech of 3 January 1925, much of the impulse to rehabilitate the Fascist leader in the eyes of the country and institute a cult around him came from within the PNF. One important political reason for this initiative lay in the need to put clear daylight between the party and the Duce and thereby enable any blame for what had recently gone wrong to be deflected towards the unruly rank-and-file elements. Mussolini could thus in effect be transformed from a culprit into a victim – a man who had been racked both by scheming liberal parliamentarians eager to regain power after using him opportunistically to slay the dragon of Bolshevism, and by his own followers. The exaltation of the Duce by the PNF (highlighted from the outset with Farinacci’s attendance at a ceremony in Mussolini’s home town of Predappio on 16 January 1925) thus became not only an affirmation of the party’s triumph over its enemies but also a means whereby the image of Mussolini could float free of the insalubrious landscape below him. This mechanism was to have effective results throughout the regime: as countless diaries and letters testified in the 1930s and well into the Second World War, blame for the failings of Fascism was regularly imputed to the Duce’s incompetent, corrupt or treacherous entourage, with Mussolini himself viewed as ignorant of the sins of those around him or otherwise magnanimously forgiving of them. The rapid development of the cult in 1925–26 owed much, of course, to the systematic elimination of the residual areas of opposition. The often brutal silencing of individual critics, the dissolution of the opposition parties and the introduction of increased press censorship all made it possible for the figure of Mussolini to assume, unchallenged, an exalted position. But the relative ease with which the vestiges of liberalism were crushed and the near-spontaneous fashion in which the leading newspapers ceded editorial control to Fascism indicated that the success of Mussolini owed less to any imposition than to



The propagation of the cult of the Duce, 1925–2635

the strength of the unwillingness to resist. Carlo Sforza’s prescient warning in the Corriere della Sera on 21 January 1925 about the dangers of creating a climate of uncritical adulation had an air of anachronistic sobriety. Dictators were inclined to surround themselves with flatterers, he said; and flatterers were often ‘the first to become credulous victims of the fantasies that they have invented’. It was the climate of heightened unreality that brought disaster to France in 1812–15 and 1870: ‘Among the most serious dangers of the loss of press freedom is … the risk that enterprises, wholly damaging to a great country, are undertaken, even though the uninformed people might for a moment delude itself into thinking it had gained, or would gain, some moral or material advantage.’25 Much of the momentum for the development of the cult from early 1925 came from leading party members, who helped make public professions of the Duce’s uniqueness items of Fascist faith. Giuseppe Bottai, who had confided enigmatically to his diary in May 1924 that Mussolini was ‘ever more a deep mystery in my life’,26 wrote in Critica Fascista on 15 January 1925 of how he disapproved strongly of excessive adulation but had no difficulty in affirming that Mussolini was altogether an exceptional being.27 Roberto Farinacci, who became party Secretary in February, was particularly assiduous in promoting the cult, and he strongly supported plans to develop Mussolini’s birthplace into a site of popular pilgrimage. On 30 August 1925 he and Italo Balbo came to the Romagna to inaugurate Predappio Nuova, unveiling a bronze inscription on the house where Mussolini had been born and laying the foundation stone of the nearby church of Santa Rosa of Lima (in honour of Mussolini’s mother, Rosa Maltoni). In his speech Farinacci spoke of how the Fascist party was ‘a religion’ and of how ‘its comrades in faith’ would send out from Predappio a ‘renewed oath of loyalty and devotion’: ‘And let this be the oath: “Duce, we are always at your command, in both spirit and body. Our lives are at your disposition. With you we seek only to know glory or death.” ’28 A crucial political dimension of the cult – and an important reason why Farinacci and other senior party figures were keen to promote it – was that it provided an element of cohesion for a movement that had from the outset been characterised by ideological eclecticism and uncertainty. A number of observers in the second half of 1924 felt that Fascism was as likely to collapse from internal conflicts within the PNF as from the external pressures generated by the Matteotti crisis. And Mussolini’s victory in January 1925 made the problem potentially more acute: in the absence of a common enemy to instil a measure of discipline, there was a danger that the different tendencies and currents in the party – syndicalist, Nationalist, republican, Catholic, anti-clerical, conservative, intransigent – would start vying for supremacy and cause chaos. An authoritative Duce was needed to maintain order; and simultaneously the cult of the Duce became a necessary common denominator in

36

The cult of the Duce

the regime, permitting Fascism to remain as a broad church without any fixed ideological matrix. This combination of a leader as a focus for generic ‘faith’ amidst ideological diversity – which many saw as having parallels with Christianity (according to Mario Giampaoli in 1929, Fascism was ‘a dogma in perpetual development, like the Christian idea’, while in 1932 the Minister of National Education, Balbino Giuliano, explained Fascism’s syncretism in terms of its being a ‘religion and not a theology’)29 – was important for both enabling and containing debate within the regime, and many intellectuals were to take advantage of it to promote their own variants of Fascist doctrine. The philosopher Rosario Assunto recalled how when he was a student in the mid-1930s everybody was a Fascist ‘in his own way’: ‘Some felt they were republican Fascists, some monarchist Fascists, some Catholic Fascists, some anti-clerical Fascists … There were some pro-Bolsheviks among those on the left … Everyone wanted to change [Fascism] from within, and hoped to do so.’30 For the Sardinian Giuseppe Melis Bassu, Fascism was essentially ‘a receptacle’ into which almost anything could be placed, ideologically, provided due devotion was displayed to the Duce, while the journalist Ugo Indrio wrote of his time as a party member in the 1930s: ‘There were various Fascisms, various currents, within Fascism, and I realised that even if I aspired to something monolithic – my form, perhaps – the only monolithic part was the myth of the leader and his supposed infallibility.’31 ‘Man of providence’: the cult and the masses If the cult of the Duce served important functions within the party, its main political purpose was as a tool for the mobilisation of those for whom ideology was of little relevance. Echoing the ideas of the pre-war crowd theorists, Margherita Sarfatti claimed in her best-selling biography of Mussolini, first published in 1925, that the masses had a natural propensity in times of uncertainty to adopt a heightened ‘religious sense of life’ and invoke a strong leader; and she gave examples of ordinary people wanting to touch Mussolini or kneel before him as if he were a miracle worker. ‘The stature of a man’, she added, ‘is measured both by the myth that he projects of himself and the devotion he is able to arouse.’32 Using a similarly religious frame of interpretation, the historian Gioacchino Volpe wrote in August 1925 of how Fascism had revolved around Mussolini ever since it had become a mass movement in 1920: All mass movements have this characteristic: they gather around a man, and give themselves, abandon themselves, to him. Their religion is anthropomorphic: take away the man and the religion declines. To four-fifths of Fascists, Fascism is Mussolini, or rather a complex of somewhat vague aspirations that acquire meaning, substance and vital force only in as much as they are incar-



The propagation of the cult of the Duce, 1925–2637 nated in him. His is a sublime and terrible position that cannot fail to cause him to tremble: not for his own person but for the all the sincere and enthusiastic young men who see in him their guide, their infallible master, the word made flesh.33

The idea of the Duce as a ‘providential’ figure had already achieved some currency in 1923–24 (including among a number of leading clerics who happily spoke of the Fascist leader as ‘sent’ by God to save Italy from the ravages both of Bolshevism and liberalism),34 but it was the series of attempts on Mussolini’s life between the autumn of 1925 and the autumn of 1926 that allowed the concept to be widely disseminated, using the twin notions of Mussolini as victim and potential martyr, and Mussolini as divinely protected. Once again it was senior party figures who took the lead, followed by the press, the Church, and a plethora of PNF and local government bodies. In the wake of the unearthing of the Zaniboni and Cappello plot in November 1925, Mussolini received a standing ovation in a packed parliament, with the Vice-President of the Chamber declaring that ‘without the rapid and lightning intervention of the police, you would have been nailed, like Christ on the cross, to the railings of your balcony in Palazzo Chigi’.35 The following April the assassination attempt by Violet Gibson – when a bullet grazed Mussolini’s nose – led to a flurry of newspaper headlines with phrases such as ‘God has saved him’ and ‘God has protected the Fatherland’.36 Church bells were rung, Te Deums sung, and public demonstrations staged in protest and thanksgiving throughout the country. But it was the response to the attacks by the anarchists Gino Lucetti and Anteo Zamboni in September and October 1926 that showed just how extensive the cult of the Duce had become in less than two years since the nadir of Mussolini’s fortunes during the Matteotti crisis. After the Lucetti episode, when a bomb bounced off Mussolini’s car at Porta Pia in Rome and exploded, injuring eight bystanders but leaving Mussolini completely unscathed, demonstrations were staged up and down the country, with prefects and party secretaries addressing mass rallies. In Venice the cardinal had the bells of St Mark’s rung in celebration of the Duce’s escape, while in Pisa the cardinal archbishop sent a telegram of congratulations and ordered the singing of a Te Deum. In Milan all cinemas and theatres suspended their screenings and performances so as to allow audiences to attend a rally in the Piazza del Duomo.37 Seven weeks later, the response to the attack by Zamboni in Bologna, when a bullet fired from a crowd passed through a sash Mussolini was wearing, was even more effusive. The party Secretary, Augusto Turati, implored the Duce in a mass rally in Piazza Colonna to recognise that his life was ‘indissolubly tied to the life of the Nation’: ‘We would beg you, Duce, to heed the anguished heart of the people who now recognise themselves solely in the light of your

38

The cult of the Duce

life!’ The Minister of Public Instruction ordered all schools to display the national flag ‘as a sign of exaltation for the safety of the Duce, who has once again been visibly protected by God’. The distinguished war hero, Carlo Delcroix, urged an audience in the Politeama Nazionale to ‘raise once more their devout and grateful thoughts to Divine providence, who has acted as a shield to our Leader’. And he added: ‘As long as [the Duce] continues to represent – as he is now representing – the spirit and the needs of our people, as long as he remains loved by us, he cannot fall: if it is true that the Fatherland cannot die, he will be able to pass through the fire and will not die.’ The Pope was reported as saying, ‘the Honourable Mussolini is truly protected by God’ and as requesting that he take greater care of his personal safety. And up and down the country it was senior clergy who led the local celebrations. In a sermon in Naples cathedral, the archbishop said that ‘Providence’ had for the fourth time saved the life of Mussolini, and that ‘therefore there is some high destiny that must be fulfilled through his work for the greater good of our Italy and perhaps of the whole world’.38 Conclusion The cult of the Duce, which in the years after 1926 became institutionally embedded in the Fascist state and remained the main political focus and emotional bedrock of the regime, was the product of various contributory factors. The unfulfilled expectations of the Risorgimento, the pervasive disillusionment with the liberal state, the discrediting of key institutions (notably parliament), the alienation of the masses from the state, and fashionable theories about myth and crowd psychology, had produced a widespread feeling that the best prospect of salvaging the fortunes of Italy might lie with a ‘man of genius’. From an early stage in his career Mussolini’s personality and rhetorical and journalistic skills attracted the attention, and with it the hopes, of those (on both left and right) who aspired to decisive political change. Between 1919 and 1924 political constraints within the Fascist party and the liberal state acted as brakes on the formal development of a personality cult; but after 3 January 1925 the PNF in particular looked to develop the cult both as a necessary source of authority for a regime that from the start had lacked ideological clarity and coherence and as tool for mobilising ‘the masses’. That the masses responded positively and seemingly spontaneously to the cult can be looked at from a variety of angles. The impact of the myths surrounding the Duce owed much to the absence after 1924 of any significant sources of information or ideology that could counter them. Mussolini’s humble origins, assiduously stressed in numerous biographies and through the development of Predappio as a site of pilgrimage, enabled his image to be infused with a potent combination, also evident in many other personality



The propagation of the cult of the Duce, 1925–2639

cults, of ordinariness and exceptionality. The great efforts Mussolini made to maintain direct contact with common people through audiences, tours around the country, emotive speeches and the institution of the Segreteria Particolare del Duce – which allowed millions of Italians to send gifts to the prime minister or write to him, often in very intimate terms, and receive in reply sums of money or a signed photograph – was a further significant factor in his personal appeal.39 The endorsement of Mussolini by many priests and senior clergy long before the conciliation of 1929 unquestionably strengthened both his popularity and the idea that he was remarkable. But perhaps most importantly, the cult of the Duce operated within a self-consciously fideistic system, whose formal, linguistic and emotional contours were deeply familiar from Catholicism. This is not to say that ‘faith’ was transferred wholesale to Mussolini and his regime in such a way as to make it particularly meaningful or comfortable to talk of a ‘political religion’, but it does suggest that much of the popular appeal of Fascism derived from its capacity to intersect with pre-existing templates of expectation, thought and feeling. Notes  1 E. Gentile, Il culto del littorio: la sacralizzazione della politica nell’Italia fascista (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 1993), pp. 263–4.   2 A. Beltramelli, L’uomo nuovo (Benito Mussolini) (1st edn 1923, Milan: Mondadori, 1926), p. 57.   3 T. Nanni, Benito Mussolini (Florence: Libreria della Voce, 1915), p. 18.   4 G. Papini, ‘Crispi’, Il Regno, 29 May 1904.   5 E. Gentile, Il mito dello Stato nuovo (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 1999), pp. 124–5.   6 Cf. Dove va il mondo? Inchiesta tra scrittori italiani con una conclusione di Arcangelo Ghisleri (Rome: Libreria politica moderna, 1923), pp. 67–9.   7 Gentile, Il culto del littorio, pp. 266–7.   8 G. Fortunato, Dopo la guerra sovvertitrice (Bari: Laterza, 1921), pp. 47–8.   9 U. Ojetti, Cose viste 1921–1943 (Florence: Sansoni, 1960), p. 17. 10 Archivio Diaristico Nazionale (Pieve Santo Stefano) (henceforth ADN), diary of Carlo Ciseri (DP/99) (‘Milano, ottobre 1919’). 11 Ibid., ‘marzo 1920’, 28 ottobre 1923. 12 P. Orano, Mussolini da vicino (Rome: Casa editrice pinciana, 1928), pp. 57–8. 13 G. Bastianini, Uomini cose fatti: memorie di un ambasciatore (Milan: Vitagliano, 1959), p. 6. 14 G. Pini, Filo diretto con Palazzo Venezia (Bologna: Cappelli, 1950), pp. 20, 23. 15 Gentile, Il culto del littorio, p. 277. 16 D. Grandi, Il mio paese: ricordi autobiografici (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1985), p. 41. 17 La Riforma, 10 June 1882 (‘L’isola sacra’). 18 T. Cianetti, Memorie dal carcere di Verona, ed. R. De Felice (Milan: Rizzoli, 1983), pp. 78–80. 19 Ibid., pp. 95, 113–14, 134, 136.

40

The cult of the Duce

20 Ibid., p. 178. 21 L. Santoro, Roberto Farinacci e il Partito nazionale fascista, 1923–1926 (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2008), p. 149 (L’Impero, 28 September 1923). 22 Cianetti, Memorie dal carcere di Verona, p. 135. 23 N. Valeri, D’Annunzio davanti al fascismo: con documenti inediti (Florence, 1963), p. 117. 24 R.J.B. Bosworth, Mussolini (London: Arnold, 2002), p. 202. 25 C. Sforza, ‘La libertà di stampa e gli insegnamenti della storia’, Il Corriere della Sera, 21 January 1925. 26 Fondazione Mondadori, Archivio Bottai, b. 41, f. 10, 22 May 1924. 27 Bosworth, Mussolini, p. 466. 28 Santoro, Roberto Farinacci, p. 204. 29 Gentile, Il culto del littorio, pp. 118–19, 122–4. 30 A. Grandi, I giovani di Mussolini: fascisti convinti, fascisti pentiti, antifascisti (Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 2001), p. 85. 31 Ibid., pp. 72, 117. 32 M. Sarfatti, Dux (Milan: Mondadori, 1926), pp. 295, 298. 33 G. Volpe, Guerra, dopoguerra, fascismo (Venice: La Nuova Italia, 1928), p. 388 (‘Ripensando al congresso fascista’, Gerarchia, August 1925). 34 M. Franzinelli, Il clero del duce il duce del clero: il consenso ecclesiastico nelle lettere a Mussolini (1922–1945) (Ragusa: La Fiaccola, 1998), pp. 31–2. 35 Il Corriere della Sera, 19 November 1925. 36 Franzinelli, Il clero del duce, p. 91. 37 Il Corriere della Sera, 12 September 1926. 38 Ibid., 2 November 1926. 39 Cf. T. Mazzatosta and C. Volpi, L’italietta fascista (lettere al potere 1936–1943) (Bologna: Cappelli, 1980).

3

Margherita Sarfatti and the invention of the Duce Simona Storchi

Margherita Sarfatti’s biography of Mussolini is widely acknowledged as the first life of Mussolini written with a clear propagandistic intent. It initially came out in England in 1925 under the title of The Life of Benito Mussolini. The Italian edition followed shortly afterwards. It was entitled Dux and was published by Mondadori in 1926. Sarfatti’s biography was not the first. Several accounts of Mussolini’s life had appeared before his rise to power, and the first after the March on Rome was published in 1923 by the journalist and writer Antonio Beltramelli.1 It was entitled L’uomo nuovo, and placed a particular emphasis on Mussolini’s region of origin, Romagna, on his political insight, his complex personality and his formidable energy. Beltramelli’s sources were mainly secondary, or derived from Mussolini’s own diaries, articles and speeches, as well as oral testimonies. Its claim to legitimacy was not so much based on Beltramelli’s personal acquaintance with the Duce, but rather on his being from the same region as Mussolini, which gave the biographer an alleged privileged knowledge of his subject. Sarfatti’s biography shares with Beltramelli’s a mythical account of Mussolini’s origins, with a strong emphasis on his birth region and its earthy character and supposed primitiveness, which produced passionate, violent, generous and melancholic people.2 In their authoritative biography of Sarfatti, Philip Cannistraro and Brian Sullivan declare that Dux was the first step in what became the regime’s most enduring and systematic propaganda campaign: to make a myth of Mussolini’.3 They acknowledge Sarfatti’s contribution to the cult of Mussolini’s personality and report that when Curzio Malaparte asked Sarfatti why she had fabricated an event narrated in Dux, she replied: ‘To create a legend’.4 Nicola Tranfaglia states that Dux stands at the origin of the cult of Mussolini in Fascist Italy. He argues that it was probably the first work of propaganda for Mussolini carried out according to unrefined yet modern and effective criteria, and that Sarfatti’s main aim was to create a myth for the masses based on the idea that Mussolini embodied the archetype of an ‘Italian race’ stretching back to the glory of the Renaissance, before foreign invasions caused the decadence of the Italian peninsula.5 Karin

42

The cult of the Duce

Wieland claims that, with Dux, Sarfatti invented Mussolini as a historically significant figure, by linking his life inextricably with the development of Fascism, so that one would not be conceivable without the other.6 According to Cannistraro and Sullivan, Mussolini was enthusiastic about the project. He provided Sarfatti with papers and helped her to locate documents, which she used together with quotations from Mussolini’s speeches and articles. The historians also add that ‘for much of the story, of course, Margherita needed no written documents’.7 Indeed, as they put it, ‘popular interest in Italy was sparked by the fact that the book’s author was generally known as an “intimate friend” of the Duce’.8 When she published Dux, Sarfatti had been having a long-standing affair with Mussolini (whom she had met in the Milanese Socialist circles) which probably dated back as early as 1913.9 She was a prominent journalist and art critic and had a weekly column in the Fascist newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia, in which she dealt mainly with artistic and cultural matters. She was the editor of Gerarchia (Il Popolo­ ­d’Italia’s monthly magazine) and was also an art manager and promoter. In 1922 she had founded Novecento, an artistic movement which promoted a modernised version of classicism and included such prominent painters as Mario Sironi and Achille Funi.10 The 1926 exhibition of Novecento included a large number of Italian artists, among them Giorgio De Chirico and Carlo Carrà.11 Sarfatti held a powerful salon which hosted all the best-known writers, artists and intellectuals of the time, and functioned as an intermediary space between the antiquated ivory-tower existence of Italian intellectuals and their envisaged new identity as nation builders.12 She believed that art should function as the moral guide for society. She was interested in a symbolic art, whose power resided in its capacity not so much to describe but to evoke, that is, to appeal to the emotional and instinctive side of man.13 It has been argued that the pursuit of power was the strongest bond that linked her to Mussolini.14 Sarfatti exercised her influence as the Duce’s mistress to shape the direction of Italian art and transform Italian culture according to her aesthetic vision.15 As Cannistraro and Sullivan observe, ‘Sarfatti’s biography helped to legitimise Mussolini’s dictatorship, a process that was especially crucial in the wake of the Matteotti crisis’.16 When she wrote Dux she was responding to the need to give the Fascist state a legitimation beyond violence and adventurism. In Dux she credited Mussolini with a specific ideology and attempted to justify Mussolini’s power on the basis of a newly formulated concept of the state, centred on its leader, who was surrounded with a mythical and symbolic apparatus which validated his power. Such symbolism incorporated the myth of Rome, the Christian legacy and the religion of the fatherland.17 It also created a close connection between the leader and his people, while emphasising his exceptionality and charismatic qualities. In order to redefine Mussolini’s image, she did not hesitate to mobilise and modify existing nar-



Margherita Sarfatti and the invention of the Duce43

ratives, discourses and idioms, from religion, to literature, to popular culture and the new media. It was a combination of these discourses that constituted the template for the creation of the cult of the Duce.18 This chapter will examine how, by presenting an image of the leader imbued with mythical culture, Sarfatti attempted to redefine the notions of the state, the leader and his relationship with the people. Focusing in particular on Mussolini’s image and on his corporeality as presented in the biography, it will demonstrate how in Dux Mussolini was portrayed as embodying the qualities of romanità and modernity, which were seen as essential both to Fascism and its leader. The analysis of the image of Mussolini presented in Dux will shed light on some issues related to the construction of the cult of personality and the manufacturing of charismatic leadership both within the Fascist project and, more in general, in the age of mass culture. Dux: Mussolini’s image and the construction of his charisma Sarfatti’s contribution to the presentation of Mussolini as a myth was born from her perceived need to construct his image as that of a charismatic leader. As she explained in Dux, she was convinced that the Italians were not capable of following abstract political concepts, but could be fanatical followers of those whom they perceived as real leaders: The Italians are not abstractionists. As a people of an ancient historical civilisation they believe only in men, not in cerebral things. Consequently they are excellent soldiers and faithful followers provided they find a true Leader: whom they will support fanatically, and make any sacrifice for. Even the criminal degenerations of mafia, camorra and omertà are evidence of this idolatrous instinct – which can produce heroes.19

As Stephen Gundle has noted, the nineteenth century witnessed the birth of new forms of charisma, which differed from previous notions of charisma based on the almost divine model of the great man of energy and vision, who set his stamp on history by means of heroic actions and conquests combined with innate leadership. The circumstances of modern politics and culture reduced or eliminated the opportunities for individual heroism, which had shaped the figure of the charismatic man in the nineteenth century, yet the yearning for it remained, as Sarfatti pointed out in Dux. Consequently, there was an incentive to create artificially a magical aura, in which the staging of personality was central. As Gundle puts it, charisma required an act, as its substance had become a visual performance. Charisma itself had to be an act of mass communication.20 In this context, the visual component was fundamental in the process of manufacturing charisma and the leader’s corporeality became central.21

44

The cult of the Duce

Dux is characterised by an abundance of corporeal images, which reiterate the centrality acquired by Mussolini’s body and by his physical image since the war years. Mussolini’s body acquired a symbolic value in the early years of the regime and before the extensively formalised cult of the Duce was promoted and choreographed by the Fascist Party.22 Many scholars agree on the fact that even in Mussolini’s Socialist years, his charisma centred on his body, which was widely used, both by himself and his acolytes, in the construction of his myth. Indeed, it has been argued that his participation in, and wounding during, the First World War were presented as symbolic moments in the making of Mussolini’s public persona as both common soldier and saviour of the nation. His wounded and subsequently healed body came to represent a sort of symbolic process of redeeming death and resurrection, or of ultimate self-sacrificial rite in which he had donated his blood to the nation.23 It is significant in this respect that after Mussolini was wounded in 1917 Il Popolo d’Italia, the newspaper he founded in 1914, reported daily on his recovery, placing particular emphasis on his physical appearance and on the description of his wounds.24 In Dux, Sarfatti reports in detail the description of Mussolini’s wounded body, using graphic and visually strong language, together with an imagery which could be immediately associated with Christian images of martyrdom and sainthood:25 Forty-two wounds, totalling more than eighty centimetres. The body entirely scarified and scorched. A mass of shrapnel fragments lodged in the flesh, like Saint Sebastian’s arrows. Two hours of painful treatment every day. Clefts wide enough to put a fist in, infective complications, the threat of gangrene, suppuration, fever, pain and delirium, and finally phlegmon. How could he be saved?26

As Sergio Luzzatto has argued, the First World War placed the bodies of the dead and wounded at the centre of the political discourse. In Italy this process took a particular form when Fascism chose to base its legitimation and political programme on the tragedy of the war. Such a process of politicisation of the body explains the variety of meanings assumed by Mussolini’s body before he became the Duce. According to Luzzatto, Mussolini’s healed body was testimony to the legitimacy of the interventionist cause and to the validity of the war fought in the trenches, and it was a symbol of the revenge of a whole generation now ready to be organised into a militia-party that was prepared to march on Rome. For those who opposed Fascism, on the other hand, Mussolini’s body was envisaged as preferably dead, as the symbol of a world that had to be ditched.27 In his book Il corpo del capo Marco Belpoliti reiterates the notion of Mussolini’s body as ‘corpo moltitudine’, ‘corpo icona’, which represents on the one hand the existing continuum between the leader and his people and on the other an ideal model which encompasses and expresses



Margherita Sarfatti and the invention of the Duce45

not only physical but also aesthetic and moral values.28 Indeed, according to Cristina Bianchi, the leader’s body was soon identified with that of his followers, becoming itself the symbol of the regime.29 With reference to Mussolini’s body Mario Isnenghi talks about ‘corpo-corpus’, that is, a complex articulation involving the Duce’s physical body as well as the corpus of his images and words as they were presented by their endless repetition in the media.30 This was a media product that simultaneously retained the symbolic spiritual value of a body offered for consumption, as in the Catholic Holy Communion. Gigliola Gori has stressed the importance of the cult of Mussolini’s body as a particular Italian phenomenon, rooted in the culture of a mainly rural country.31 Luisa Passerini observes that in his biographies Mussolini is often presented as an embodiment of the vicissitudes of the Italian people. This was the basis for the identification of Mussolini with Italy and for the promise of a regeneration of the Italians. Passerini notes the symbolic character of these proposed images and stresses that they were successful precisely because they were not realistic but placed themselves in the sphere of the imaginary; and within that sphere they configured a relationship between the leader and Italy. In particular such a system favoured an idea of the leader who was above and beyond the political system in which he was placed. As Richard Bosworth has noted, ‘despite the modernity of its propaganda means, the personality cult confirmed the ancient lore of the good king, waylaid by bad counsellors, guilty of the world’s continuing injustice’.32 According to Passerini, the degeneration of the public sphere under Fascism caused by the abolition of parliamentary rule and the tightening of censorship brought about a pre-modern representational public sphere in which the leader presented himself as the incarnation of a superior power. However, the superior power he embodied could no longer be claimed to have a divine origin. It therefore had to be anchored in mass consciousness through ‘confused and populistic mythologies’. The power represented was no longer transcendental, as in the pre-bourgeois epoch, but, as Passerini calls it, a ‘short circuit’ between power and masses. She also sees an indication of the return to the pre-modern representative public sphere in the increasing importance attributed to the physical image of Mussolini and the almost sacred aura surrounding it, as though it embodied something otherwise invisible.33 Luzzatto observes that while the principle of the dynasty – that is, the continuity of the monarchy beyond the corporeal life of the individual kings – had been one of the foundations of monarchic power in medieval and early modern Europe, the power of charismatic leaders in the twentieth century was founded on the uniqueness of the leader. The leader’s body became therefore a resource, as his corporeality embodied the essence of his authority.34 In Dux, Mussolini’s body is used as a metaphor of the new Italy that had

46

The cult of the Duce

emerged from the trenches of the First World War in opposition to the old Italy. In a significant passage recounting a speech given by the socialist leader Leonida Bissolati in Milan in 1919, attended by Mussolini, Bissolati’s and Mussolini’s bodies are used to illustrate two different attitudes towards life and politics: Tall, thin, and bony, with an air that was part chivalric, part Bertoldo, a shambling manner like Don Quixote, an immensely long nose surmounted by notary’s glasses, and a milky blue gaze – Leonida Bissolati had the appearance of someone of honest study and determined abstraction, far removed from the world, whose complex vital forces were expended on pure and sterile theories. Stocky and intense, with broad shoulders and the slightly rounded back of a weight-lifter, and fierce eyes set in a square Roman face, the man of action rose for the third time … in front of the good Bissolati.35

Sarfatti presented a variety of descriptions of Mussolini, which were intended to locate his image both in the popular imagination and in the notion of race and lineage which the Duce was meant to encapsulate. The body of the Duce was turned into a series of ideological icons, that could reinforce the concepts that the biographer intended to convey through tangible, visually viable images. The emphasis on Mussolini’s physical appearance is therefore constant in Dux, as the Duce’s body became a vehicle of ideological content. In particular, Sarfatti verbalised a process of transformation of the image of Mussolini that began in the 1920s and reached its climax in the 1930s, whereby many of the Duce’s portraits became increasingly stylised and less realistic, thanks mainly to the appropriation of Mussolini’s image by avant-garde art. This process contributed to the mutation of the Duce’s image into an icon.36 As a stylised, highly recognisable image, the icon could be used as a medium of propaganda, as it transcended the image itself and functioned as a conveyor of symbolic meaning. While the portrait was anchored in the reality of the sitter, the icon rewrote his narrative. It was timeless, often decontextualised, and easily associated with an abstract concept or a symbol. It also related to the contemporary theories about crowd psychology and control that had been elaborated at the end of the nineteenth century by such writers as Gustave Le Bon, whose essay on the subject was known by Sarfatti.37 According to Le Bon, the crowd is swayed by subjective feelings and reacts most strongly to images, not concrete ideas. Images, in his view, are not always readily available, but can be evoked by words or formulas.38 Significantly, such principles were used by theorists of advertising in the early years of the twentieth century, and also by propaganda artists, and they could also be applied by those engaging in genres such as biography, which straddled high and low culture.39 The cult of personality which Sarfatti’s book aimed to create was also in tune with the growing culture of personality in those years. As Simonetta



Margherita Sarfatti and the invention of the Duce47

Falasca-Zamponi has noted, a shift occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century from character to personality as the modal type of self felt to be essential for the maintenance of society. While character was based on the link between the social and the moral and responded to nineteenth-century preoccupations with the mastering of the self and its moral development, the notion of personality emerged in the twentieth century in conjunction with new notions of self and self-presentation in society which were less based on moral qualities and more on individual needs. The attributes now valued were attraction, magnetism, presence, creativity, domination and forcefulness. These qualities were meant to stress the individual’s uniqueness, a characteristic that was deemed of fundamental importance in the age of the masses. Success in the cultivation of one’s personality depended on the ability to show uniqueness – in order to stand out from the crowd – and also to impress and make oneself pleasing to others.40 Falasca-Zamponi also stresses how motion-picture stardom started to take place at around the same time as the culture of personality emerged. She notes that film actors became converted into images and were marketed as personalities to be admired: ‘in a society slowly moving from production to consumption, actors and entertainers, along with politicians and businessmen, became the main protagonists of a new popular column in magazines and weeklies: biographies’.41 The success of biographies in Europe after the First World War reflected a growing interest in personalities: distinctiveness was marketable. As far as Dux is concerned, Cannistraro and Sullivan note that part of the popular appeal of Sarfatti’s portrait of Mussolini was precisely ‘the web of contradictions that she said marked Mussolini’s personality’.42 In Sarfatti’s book the construction of the image of the Duce is conducted through a series of strongly defined yet stylised images that aim to depict Mussolini as a charismatic leader who has – almost as an innate quality or as a destiny – the power to unify the Italian people, virtually through his physical presence alone. Dux presented Mussolini as an element of unification from the point of view of lineage, heritage, race and cultural tradition, as he possessed charisma, a powerful personality and an ability to dominate the crowd, and could surround himself with legends, like a saint, a warrior king or a folk hero. The Duce embodied the fortunes, tribulations and successes of Italians of all classes. In Dux three areas of Mussolini’s image and personality emerge as the main purveyors of ideological content: Mussolini as Homo Romanus, the bearer of a legacy of power and of racial continuity; the born leader, destined to realise the Fascist ideal through his innate charisma and extraordinary personality; and the aristocratico-plebeo, the ‘plebeian aristocrat’, the man who emerges from crowd thanks to exceptional qualities but who at the same time retains a very strong link with his people.

48

The cult of the Duce

Mussolini: Homo Romanus, born leader, ‘plebeian aristocrat’ Sarfatti was obsessed with the idea of romanità, which for her encompassed notions of heritage, tradition, power, race, civilisation and art. She did not approve of the Roman-inspired paraphernalia with which Fascism came to surround itself, but she endorsed the absorption of the Roman heritage in a new form of modern classicism that expressed the values of a society – the new society created by Fascism – based on hierarchy and social order and the fostering of respect for discipline and control.43 In Dux Mussolini is recurrently characterised as ‘Roman’. The first chapter, which introduces the idea of the First World War as the tragedy from which emerged two heroes, Lenin and Mussolini, representing the ‘eastern and western elements of European civilization’, describes Mussolini as the descendant of a ‘pure italic race’ rooted in Roman civilisation: ‘Roman in spirit and appearance, Benito Mussolini is a resurrection of the pure Italic type, coming back to life after many centuries’. Lenin, by contrast, looks like an ‘Asian demi-god’.44 Roman and Italian were made to coincide, and the Roman heritage was associated with the idea of racial superiority, which produced physical excellence – another feature reiterated in the biography. The notion of Romanness – particularly of republican Rome – was also extended to such aspects of Mussolini’s character as his courage, sobriety, genuineness and work ethic.45 Sarfatti’s support for classicism and its translation into a rhetoric of the leader’s body and personality not only responded to an appropriation of the classical in nationalist terms, but was also in tune with the general return in post-war Europe to classicism and its agenda of promoting a classically inspired version of the masculine body. As Ana Carden-Coyne has argued, the celebration of the classical body as a western symbol was integral to postwar reconstruction. She notes that despite the impact of mechanised warfare, the temptation to retreat to a lost pre-war world was rejected, and the relationship between the classical and modern was instead reconfigured in order to reconstruct civilisation.46 The image of Mussolini as Homo Romanus was elaborated within a multiple discourse that on the one hand referred to the Roman past as a key founding myth in the Fascist nation-building project, and on the other used the classical past and imagery to capture and catalyse high culture into a credible cultural discourse.47 At the same time the mass appeal of the myth was retained,48 as classical beauty was increasingly associated with notions of legibility, comprehensibility and social order.49 Also, the association with classical imagery alluded to an established representation of masculinity – rooted in classical culture – which aimed at reinforcing notions of energy, strength and stability. This had been appropriated in the shaping of national consciousness throughout Europe.50 Finally, the classical as an



Margherita Sarfatti and the invention of the Duce49

aesthetic concept acquired a political connotation that placed artists and intellectuals at the centre of the narrative of the nation, through the creation of a symbolical apparatus that was deemed key to the forging of the political myth of the nation.51 In Sarfatti’s description of Mussolini as Homo Romanus the notion of heritage is mediated by the artistic tradition. Art and concepts such as stirpe (stock) and razza (race) are so inextricably linked, according to Sarfatti, that the artistic heritage can almost physically forge a people: I have never walked around a museum or a city in Italy without being amazed at finding the race faithfully stamped in every form, from the clays of Veio to the marbles of Rome, from the lofty bronzes of Gattamelata in Padua and Colleoni in Venice – the condottiero who resembles the Duce as if he were a brother – to the youth of today. As a result of a phenomenon of atavistic and psychological mimesis, much of this Italian youth has remodelled itself in accordance with this resolute warrior type through the hard anvil of war and the discipline of Fascism.52

Significant in this respect is Sarfatti’s use in Dux of Adolfo Wildt’s white marble bust of Mussolini, also entitled Dux. The bust was commissioned by Sarfatti in 1923 for the new Casa del Fascio in Milan, to commemorate the anniversary of the March on Rome. It was exhibited at the 14th Venice Biennale in 1924 and then in the Italian pavilion at the International Exhibition of the Decorative Arts in Paris in 1925. The use of Wildt’s bust on the frontispiece of the Italian edition of her book is noteworthy: the English edition opened with a reassuring photo of Mussolini as the new prime minister, smiling at the camera and holding papers. Wildt’s portrait, on the other hand, modelled as it was on Roman portrait busts and wearing the infula – the Roman headband symbolising consecration by the gods – presented Mussolini as bearer of the Roman legacy of power.53 To an extent, it was the sculptural equivalent of the portrait that Sarfatti intended to offer the reader (and of course both works had the same title). Yet Wildt’s marble bust was not entirely the visual correlative of Sarfatti’s work. Her written portrait was much more faceted, ideologically complex and modern. But the marble bust had an iconic value for Sarfatti, as it provided an image to be simultaneously utilised and deconstructed (it is worth remembering that Adolfo Wildt was one of Sarfatti’s protégés, so the use of one his works had the additional function of reminding the reader of the power she held in the art world). The choice of a marble bust, instead of a photograph, to open her biography, was also an implicit reference to the power and importance she attributed to art. Furthermore, it indicated the distinctive role of art in the creation of the myths of the new nation, and underlined the privileged role that high culture had in shaping both nation and society.54 No photograph could have

50

The cult of the Duce

conveyed so synthetically the notion of leadership, lineage, heritage and tradition, as this severe, classically inspired and altogether rather disquieting white marble bust. The sculpture cast the biographer in the role of mediator between the image and the reader, in a way that the immediacy of a photograph would not have allowed – and implicitly credited the biographer with the invention of the image it conveyed. Significantly, a reproduction of Wildt’s Dux also opened Sarfatti’s 1925 monograph Segni colori e luci and Francesco Sapori’s L’arte e il duce (1932), thereby consolidating Dux almost as Mussolini’s official sculpted portrait, and linking inextricably the image of Mussolini to its artistic representation.55 In Dux Sarfatti presents Mussolini as a ‘born leader’, somebody who is destined to leadership through superhuman qualities while also retaining a strong link with his people. She was endorsing what Emilio Gentile has called ‘the myth of the mission’, according to which the guidance of a charismatic leader is accepted by his followers because they acknowledge he has been invested with a mission, that of realising the ‘Idea’.56 The section of the biography devoted to the Duce’s childhood and youth is full of episodes of prediction or suggested destiny, and indications of a magical aura. Mussolini’s popularity is described specifically as deriving from the fascination exercised by his innate enigmatic qualities, even as a young man: ‘he was always able to surround himself with that enigmatic halo, which is a gift of nature and a reason for his popularity’.57 As the account of Mussolini’s youth progresses, such images are integrated with the myth of the passionate Romantic hero, impulsive and contradictory, who has to dominate himself as well as the crowds, a man whose innate fiery character is at the same time tempered and enhanced by qualities which show the nobility of his soul, such as magnanimity, indulgence and chivalry. Another quality that Sarfatti attributes to Mussolini as a sign that he was destined to leadership is that of being different, standing out of the crowd. Mussolini is presented in Sarfatti’s book as a ‘ “type” ’: a ‘type’, one of those who are not forgotten; and there are many anecdotes about him: forced marches in the severe Friuli winter from the main town to the hamlet where he taught, always without a hat or coat, and always immersed in some book or newspaper.58

The narration of Sarfatti’s first encounter with Mussolini is pervaded by the sense of destiny that she attributes to Mussolini’s leadership. She emphasises Mussolini’s physical appearance not only as the exterior manifestation of his qualities, but also as having the ability to ignite the imagination and to reconnect both to imaginary heroes and charismatic leaders of the past. Mussolini, she says, had been described to her as ‘a marvellous lean young man, with an impulsive, dry, fiery, and original eloquence; a man with a great future’.59 She had imagined him as the forceful and solitary warrior from an epic poem,



Margherita Sarfatti and the invention of the Duce51

powerful and mysterious; but when she finally met him, he immediately reminded her of the fierce fifteenth-century preacher Girolamo Savonarola, ‘with his fanatical eyes and imperious nose’.60 Once again, Sarfatti focuses on physical appearance to convey the leader’s personality traits, in this case fanaticism and determination. The reference to Savonarola inscribes the Duce in a tradition of preachers, men with dialectical power and the ability to connect with the crowds. It also suggests willpower and the sense of someone fighting the Establishment and the status quo; and it reinforces the idea of the Duce as a ‘solitary individual’, the man alone against the crowd in his visionary, forward-looking role. Sarfatti devotes the final two chapters of her biography to ‘the rebirth of the Leader’ and to Mussolini’s personality. In the first she looks at the reinvention of the idea of the leader as established by Mussolini. The ‘rebirth’ of the chief entails both a renewal of the idea of the leader for the Italian nation and a celebration of Mussolini himself as the designated leader of the people. In Sarfatti’s reading, Fascism is presented as a religion, born of a spiritual need that the experience of war had reinforced.61 Such a religious sense of life expressed itself in the veneration of the charismatic leader. She portrays Mussolini in her book as somebody endowed with the ‘magnetism of a superior spirit’ and capable of triggering fanatical reactions in the crowd: The fetishism of those early days reached absurd levels; grotesque in some, moving in the humble, where it was accompanied by ingenuous superstition … When he travelled among them, the women of the Abruzzo, above all the widows and mothers of those killed in the war, wanted ‘to touch him’, in the same way as they do in that ancient land with fetishes and relics.62

The final chapter on Mussolini’s personality is only apparently aimed at describing Mussolini’s character from the point of view of somebody who is closely acquainted with the Duce. In fact, the main purpose of the chapter is to reinforce the legendary aura that pervades Sarfatti’s biography, establish the basis of a personality cult and confirm Mussolini’s credentials as a leader – thereby legitimating his power, and applying the conceptual move from chance to destiny, fatality to continuity, which, according to Benedict Anderson, is central in elaboration of nationalist ideologies.63 The Duce’s character is described as unique in its embodiment of many different and often contrasting qualities. His background as a journalist has given him rapidity, the ability to express a thought in a quick and clever phrase, a polemical and often caustic attitude, a down-to-earth approach, a lack of interest in traditional diplomacy, clarity and straightforwardness and resilience and discipline. His character is presented as a series of opposites: he is thoughtful and impulsive, realistic and idealistic, fanatical and astute,

52

The cult of the Duce

romantic in his ­aspirations and ‘classically concrete’ in his achievements. He is also ­extraordinarily energetic, courageous and profoundly ‘young’. His youth is not just chronological, but is also a political principle and embedded in his lifestyle. It manifests itself in Mussolini’s appearance, an appearance which reinforces his bond with the people, as Sarfatti underlines with stories showing his physical impact on the Italians. One distinctive quality that Sarfatti uses to indicate Mussolini’s capacity as a leader able to unite the Italian people across class divisions is that of the ‘aristocratico plebeo’. This oxymoronic concept combines the notion of a superman and of a man anchored to his roots and indicates how Mussolini’s personality is central to his leadership: he has the ability simultaneously to detach himself from and be part of the people. The idea of Mussolini as an aristocratic plebeian is introduced in Dux in the chapter describing the time Mussolini spent in Switzerland as a young man: Mussolini is, to put it bluntly, a plebeian aristocrat. As a soldier, he could be seen nonchalantly finishing his ration after pulling out of his mess tin by its long tail a hapless boiled mouse; but in an upmarket restaurant he turns his nose up in disgust if a glass is greasy.64

Sarfatti uses Mussolini’s time in Switzerland, spent, among other jobs, as a builder, to underline his background as a man of the people and to emphasise how this background had given him a sense of the value and importance of constructive physical work. This was in contrast to the ‘paper work’ which characterised his time as a journalist.65 Mussolini is presented – in words attributed to him – as a man of the people, but above all, as an Italian, encompassing the potential virtues and faults of his people: ‘greeting the mineworkers fraternally, he feels himself “a man like you, with your qualities and faults, with all that goes to make up the essential elements of that special human nature that is the nature of Italians” ’.66 However, despite the almost physical relationship between Mussolini and the Italian people, the Duce is described as having a fundamental lack of trust in human beings. This is denoted by his permanent frown. He is portrayed as instinctively anti-social, individualistic and anti-convivial, and disinclined to get close to people. And yet Sarfatti notes how, despite his detachment, people are instinctively attracted to him, something that manifests itself in spontaneous demonstrations of physical affection. The descriptions of these demonstrations engendered a discourse which became commonplace during the regime, that of Mussolini as an equal, a brother and also a father, who by extension was the father of the nation. In Sarfatti this rhetorical construction of the figure of the Duce appears to be generated from below rather than above, and ties in with the idea of the figure of the Duce as the product of a dialectic with the people:



Margherita Sarfatti and the invention of the Duce53 Many times I have seen people throw themselves at him, to kiss and embrace him rapturously. For example in October 1924 he happened to be investing in person a number of old workers of a Lombard factory with the order of the Star of Labour, and the protocol kiss on both cheeks between himself and the first elderly and nervous man occurred in a formal fashion, like something artificial on a stage. But when it came to the second and the third a swelling wave of emotion took hold of those fine and enthusiastic people, turning the ritual into an expression of resounding affection. It seemed they had found a brother in that young man; or someone older, their father.67

Yet Sarfatti reiterates how Mussolini is not friendly with anyone, despite being loyal, self-sacrificing, sympathetic and close to his people. He inspires respect rather than comradeship, which makes him a natural leader, and displays a ‘contemptuous tolerance’, deriving from an awareness of human inadequacy. He is presented as a man of vast and profound culture, whose preferences are for genres of art that have intrinsically political qualities, such as historical writing, architecture, theatre and music. Yet, he is fundamentally a man of action. He is individualistic and self-reliant and has no fear of isolation. He is indulgent towards human imperfection and his personality is dominated by ambition, greatness and contempt for fellow humans. Conclusion According to Simona Urso, Sarfatti’s biography created the transition from the notion of homo novus, which had been central to previous biographies of Mussolini – especially Beltramelli’s – to that of Dux, a highly symbolically charged image of the leader of Fascism.68 Cannistraro and Sullivan note that Dux had the effect of depersonalising Mussolini, removing him from immediate events and placing him in the broad context of Italian history. Sarfatti’s purpose when depicting Mussolini was not to offer an exact and objective representation of reality, but to convey Mussolini’s personality as she experienced it. She orchestrated the promotion of the biography, making sure that it was given ample exposure in the press and that it was reviewed by prominent Fascists. Dux was a best-seller: it was translated into 18 languages and went through 17 editions in Italy between 1926 and 1938, despite the fact that, much to Sarfatti’s annoyance, a new biography of Mussolini intended for a less literate audience was published by the journalist Giorgio Pini in 1926 soon after the appearance of Dux.69 Despite her influence in the 1920s, Sarfatti lost favour in the 1930s, and in 1938 she was forced to leave Italy following the introduction of racial laws. To an extent, as Cannistraro and Sullivan suggest, she merited her own downfall, in as much as she had played a major role in developing Fascism and establishing Mussolini’s dictatorship.70 In 1943 while she was abroad she started

54

The cult of the Duce

writing a memoir entitled My Fault: Mussolini as I Knew Him, intended for publication in the USA. Her ‘fault’ had been that of believing in Fascism and of writing Dux. The memoir was never published, but it was conceived as a counterportrait of the Mussolini presented in Dux, depicting him not as a charismatic leader, but as a man ‘shaped entirely by the desires of other people’.71 Just as images of the Duce were being destroyed throughout Italy, she attempted to destroy the image of Mussolini that she had constructed. She was aware that she was partly responsible for the invention of the Duce, and that Dux was the monument she had erected to him. Notes  1 On Margherita Sarfatti’s Dux see L. Passerini, Mussolini immaginario (Rome– Bari: Laterza, 1991), pp. 15–42; P. Cannistraro and B. Sullivan, Il Duce’s Other Woman (New York: Morrow, 1993), pp. 303–8; Simona Urso, Margherita Sarfatti: dal mito del Dux al mito americano (Venice: Marsilio, 2003), pp. 160–77; K. Wieland, Margherita Sarfatti: l’amante del Duce (Turin: UTET, 2010), pp. 242–58.   2 Passerini, Mussolini immaginario, p. 44.   3 Cannistraro and Sullivan, Il Duce’s Other Woman, p. 303.   4 Ibid.   5 N. Tranfaglia, ‘Il Duce e Margherita’, La Repubblica, 3 August 1982.   6 K. Wieland, Margherita Sarfatti, p. 257.   7 Cannistraro and Sullivan, Il Duce’s Other Woman, p. 299.   8 Ibid., p. 305.   9 Ibid., p. 108. 10 See E. Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 90–112. 11 See R. Bossaglia, Il Novecento Italiano (Milan: Charta, 1995); S. Salvagnini, Il sistema delle arti in Italia 1919–1943 (Bologna: Minerva, 2000). 12 E. Bilski and E. Braun, ‘Margherita Sarfatti: The Antechamber of Power’, in Jewish Women and their Salons: The Power of Conversation (New York: The Jewish Museum and New Haven, CT–London: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 99–112; E. Pontiggia, ‘ “Novecento” Milanese, Novecento Italiano’, in E. Pontiggia et al. (eds.), Il “Novecento” Milanese: da Sironi ad Arturo Martini (Milan: Mazzotta), pp. 9–30. 13 See E. Pontiggia, ‘Alle origini del Novecento Italiano (1919–1923)’, in Pontiggia (ed.), Il Novecento Italiano (Milan: Abscondita, 2003), pp. 157–75. 14 Cannistraro and Sullivan, Il Duce’s Other Woman, p. 277. 15 On Sarfatti as a cultural promoter see A. Nozzoli, ‘Margherita Sarfatti organizzatrice di cultura: “Il popolo d’Italia” ’, in M. Addis Saba (ed.), La corporazione delle donne (Florence: Vallecchi, 1988), pp. 227–72. 16 Cannistraro and Sullivan, Il Duce’s Other Woman, p. 305. 17 Urso, Margherita Sarfatti, pp. 160–77.



Margherita Sarfatti and the invention of the Duce55

18 See C. Duggan, The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy since 1796 (London: Allen Lane, 2007), pp. 475–83. 19 M. Sarfatti, Dux (Milan: Mondadori, 1926), p. 173. 20 S. Gundle, ‘The death (and re-birth) of the hero: charisma and manufactured ­charisma in modern Italy’, Modern Italy, 3:2 (1998), 173–89. 21 See L. Malvano, Fascismo e politica dell’immagine (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri), p. 63. 22 See E. Gentile, Il culto del littorio (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 1993), pp. 269–74. 23 See S. Luzzatto, Il corpo del duce (Turin: Einaudi, 1998), p. 4; Passerini, Mussolini immaginario, p. 28. 24 Passerini, Mussolini immaginario, pp. 28–32. 25 See Duggan, The Force of Destiny, pp. 478–9. 26 Sarfatti, Dux, p. 185. 27 Luzzatto, Il corpo del duce, p. 5. 28 M. Belpoliti, Il corpo del capo (Parma: Guanda, 2009), pp. 25–6. 29 C. Bianchi, ‘Il nudo eroico del Fascismo’, in S. Bertelli and C. Grottanelli (eds.), Gli occhi di Alessandro: potere sovrano e sacralità del corpo da Alessandro Magno a Ceaucescu (Florence: Ponte alle Grazie, 1990), pp. 154–69 (pp. 165–6). 30 M. Isnenghi, ‘Il corpo del Duce’, in Bertelli and Grottanelli, Gli occhi di Alessandro, pp. 170–83 (p. 175). 31 G. Gori, Italian Fascism and the Female Body: Sport, Submissive Women and Strong Mothers (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 22–3. 32 R. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy (London: Allen Lane, 2005), p. 315. 33 Passerini, Mussolini immaginario, pp. 69–70. 34 Luzzatto, Il corpo del duce, p. 16. 35 Sarfatti, Dux, p. 199. 36 See G. Di Genova (ed.), “L’uomo della provvidenza”: Iconografia del duce 1923– 1945 (Bologna: Bora, 1997), p. 15. See also Malvano, Fascismo, pp. 67–70 and Urso, Margherita Sarfatti, p. 168. 37 Urso, Margherita Sarfatti, p. 35. 38 G. Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, ed. Robert Merton (New York: The Viking Press, 1960). 39 See C. Poggi, ‘Mass, Pack, and Mob: Art in the Age of the Crowd’, in J. Schnapp and M. Tiews (eds.), Crowds (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), pp. 159–202; M. McLendon, L’arte di far manifesti: The Evolution of the Italian Futurist Manifesto, Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 2004, pp. 200–34. 40 S. Falasca Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley–Los Angeles–London: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 45–6. 41 Ibid., p. 47. 42 Cannistraro and Sullivan, The Duce’s Other Woman, p. 303. 43 Ibid., p. 267. 44 Sarfatti Dux, p. 10. 45 Ibid., pp. 226, 264. 46 A. Carden-Coyne, Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism, and the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 52–3. See also

56

The cult of the Duce

E. Pontiggia, Modernità e classicità: il ritorno all’ordine in Europa, dal primo dopoguerra agli anni trenta (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2008), pp. 53–67. 47 See C. Lazzaro, ‘Forging a Visible Fascist Nation: Strategies for Fusing Past: and Present’, in C. Lazzaro and R. Crum (eds.), Donatello among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy (Ithaca, NY–London: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 13–31. See also Malvano, Fascismo, pp. 151–3. 48 E. Braun, ‘L’arte dell’Italia fascista: il totalitarismo fra teoria e pratica’, in E. Gentile (ed.), Modernità totalitaria: il fascismo italiano (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 2008), pp. 85–99. 49 G. L. Mosse, Masses and Man: Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions of Reality (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), p. 94. See also Simona Storchi, Valori Plastici 1918–1922: le inquietudini del nuovo classico, supplement to The Italianist, 26 (2006), 155–6. 50 See G. L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 51 Ibid., p. 15. See also E. Gentile, La grande Italia: ascesa e declino del mito della nazione nel ventesimo secolo (Milan: Mondadori, 1997), p. 155; Gentile, ‘Introduzione’, in Modernità totalitaria, pp. xv–xii; E. Braun, ‘L’arte dell’Italia fascista’. 52 Sarfatti, Dux, p. 118. 53 Di Genova, “L’uomo della provvidenza”, p. 15. 54 Braun, ‘L’arte dell’Italia fascista’, p. 94. 55 The iconic value of Adolfo Wildt’s Dux became so significant as to become, as Elena Pontiggia puts it, a Fascist ‘logo’, replicated in innumerable public institutions and manifestations. E. Pontiggia, ‘Nota biografica’, in Pontiggia (ed.), Adolfo Wildt, ‘L’arte del marmo’ (Milan: Abscondita, 2002), pp. 77–111 (p. 102). 56 E. Gentile, ‘Mussolini’s charisma’, Modern Italy, 3:2 (1998), 219–35 (p. 220). 57 Sarfatti, Dux, p. 145. 58 Ibid., p. 96. 59 Ibid., p. 137. 60 Ibid., p. 138. 61 See Urso, Margherita Sarfatti, pp. 169–73. 62 Sarfatti, Dux, pp. 297–8. 63 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities (London and New York: Verso, 2006), pp. 11–12. 64 Sarfatti, Dux, p. 63. 65 Ibid., p. 68. 66 Ibid., p. 305. 67 Ibid., p. 306. 68 Urso, Margherita Sarfatti, p. 162. 69 See Cannistraro and Sullivan, Il Duce’s Other Woman, pp. 302–6. 70 Ibid., p. 512. 71 Ibid., p. 542. See also R. Festorazzi, Margherita Sarfatti: la donna che inventò Mussolini (Vicenza: Angelo Colla, 2010), pp. 387–8.

4

Sanity from a lunatic asylum: Ida Dalser’s threat to Mussolini’s image Daniela Baratieri

My play in three acts, The Lightless Lamp, is ready; I only have to write it. Benito Mussolini, 19191

Just released from jail where he had been held for joining some arditi (former elite combat troops) in an anti-socialist demonstration that had turned violent, and downcast by the disastrous performance of the Fascists in the November 1919 elections, the future Duce Benito Mussolini announced to his associates that he was ready to change jobs.2 He boasted of having already talked to Virgilio Talli, the well-known theatre impresario, about becoming an actor and playwright. His drama was ready. According to Margherita Sarfatti, The Lightless Lamp was to tell the story of a man who did not want his child to be born because he had already had a son from another undisclosed relationship. Eventually yielding to his spouse, a daughter is born, but is incurably blind. This tragedy strains the couple’s relationship and regrets, blame and recriminations shroud their suffering with darkness.3 Mussolini never wrote the play and later made sure that even the faintest traces of what it would have been about were erased to avoid others recognising the plot. What better way, indeed, than having his wife diagnosed as affected by ‘paranoid syndrome in neuropathic subject’4 by professionals in white shirts and his son deprived of the Mussolini surname? The play, as Mussolini declared in his speech, ‘was ready’, but it unfolded on the real flesh of Ida Irene Dalser and their son, Albino Benito Mussolini. This chapter explores one of the ways in which Mussolini suppressed aspects of his personal life to suit the image that he sought to forge as he made his bid for power and then set about creating the Fascist regime. It examines the use of psychiatric institutions to confine and silence one woman and her son who potentially could do him great damage. Mussolini’s other wife: the evidence To Benito Mussolini.

58

The cult of the Duce

… While I am far away, imprisoned in a common lunatic asylum, subjected to hunger … torture … and unheard of humiliations, in fits of desperation, you remain silent. Life in this asylum has become completely intolerable. I would like to know who the barbarous despot who keeps me here is … He thinks he can do what he likes, at his pleasure … and for how long?! Do you think I am witless, or have lost my sanity?! … No! Excellency no! … A thousand times no! … For the powerful and the tyrannical the future remains uncertain and like a cold shower can be devastating. Ida, 1 March 1936 Your Majesty! … My son was in the bath and they took him away, like that, naked. His innocent blood will cry vengeance, that poor body, struck from behind, will take away his Father’s peace of mind. … There is no mystery here?! For no one [?] There has never been a crime like this in history. Ida Irene Dalser, 22 March 19365

After ten years of captivity, a woman, Ida Irene Dalser addressed the Duce and Vittorio Emanuele III in letters that were never sent. From within the walls of Venice’s San Clemente lunatic asylum, where she was confined, the letters had been scribbled in pencil on big pieces of paper not intended for correspondence. Ida Dalser had been born in 1880 in Sopramonte, then part of the AustroHungarian Empire. In 1918 Sopramonte was occupied by Italian troops and with the post-war Treaty of Saint-Germain annexed to Italy as a municipality, later becoming a suburb of the city of Trento. The bases on which Dalser was declared insane in 1926 were her persistent ‘delusions’ of having borne Mussolini a son and of being his lawful wife. The first ‘delusion’ is easily shown to have been nothing of the sort by a statutory certification dated 11 January 1916, in which Mussolini put his signature to the paternity of the 2– month-old Albino Benito in the legal offices of Guido Gatti. This document was transcribed on Albino’s birth certificate issued in Milan a few days later and would provide the basis for Ida Dalser’s litigation against Mussolini in May 1916, where it was ruled that the father was obliged to pay the mother a monthly allowance of 200 lire ‘in order to maintain and bring up Benito Mussolini Dalser’. In the litigation proceedings Ida’s lawyer, on the basis of the documentation about a ‘promise to marry’ (a legally binding declaration), had requested the restitution of the capital she had invested in Mussolini’s newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia. The Court rejected Dalser’s appeal.6 The second ‘delusion’ is not so easily dismissed. Attached to the abovementioned statutory certification of Albino’s paternity was a declaration signed by Mussolini stating that he was ‘not married to any woman when the child was born and that on that date the mother, Miss. Ida Irene Dalser,



Ida Dalser’s threat to Mussolini’s image59

had with [him] no kinship ties or any relationship whatsoever’. Furthermore, no documents directly relating to a marriage between Mussolini and Dalser have been found. However, some documents on which the couple appears as married do exist: a marital status certificate7 released by the Milan police, a residence permit issued by the Milanese authorities dated 29 September 1916,8 and a declaration released by the mayor of Milan in October 1916. The mayor’s declaration reads as follows: The Mayor of the aforementioned Municipality attests that the family of the soldier Mussolini consists of his wife Ida Dalser and 1 offspring, and has the right from the first Monday of the month to the overall payment of 7.70 lire and for every successive Monday of 2.45 lire.9

The same day the Municipality of Milan dispatched to ‘Mrs. Dalser, Ida, wife of the serving soldier Mussolini Benito’ in 3, Via Calimero, ‘the Paper of identification detached from the appropriate register transmitted here by the Military District’. This paper would allow Ida to collect Mussolini’s army pay as she was listed as his lawful wife. The War Welfare Board communication releasing the first indemnity with arrears was posted to the Via Calimero address and was signed by yet another authority, the board’s President Fiaberti.10 Dalser figured in the Ministry of Defence and the Interior’s mailing register as the lawful spouse of Mussolini, and the telegram General Cantù sent from Treviglio hospital notifying her that Mussolini had entered the hospital in December 1915 corroborates Dalser’s status in Mussolini’s military records. At this point it is necessary to recount what eventually became the only officially accepted version of Mussolini’s marital history. At three o’clock on 16 December 1915, a month and five days after his son Benito Albino’s birth, Benito Mussolini married Rachele Guidi by proxy while a patient at Treviglio hospital. Edda Mussolini, born in Predappio on 1 September 1910, was legally recognised by both parties as their offspring. In order to ensure that no legal issues arose over the celebration of a (possibly) bigamous marriage – bearing in mind that the Italian bureaucracy was not known for its lightning speed or efficiency – one might surmise that Mussolini was careful not to make claims from the same bureaucratic authorities. For Rachele’s upkeep, he reserved 500 lire a month from a special fund of Il Popolo d’Italia, administered by the newspaper’s director, Manlio Morgani.11 Still, that Mussolini could marry twice and in such a short time remains puzzling. In 1958 the local historian Antonio Zieger was the first to posit the existence of an ‘apparently’ religious marriage celebrated between Mussolini and Dalser in Milan in the autumn of 1914.12 He points to the oral testimony of the parish priest of Sopramonte, Don Luigi Pedrolli,13 who asserted that the documentary transcription from the Milanese Marriage Register of 21

60

The cult of the Duce

October 1916 (which was sent to Sopramonte) was removed in 1925 by ‘interested hands’.14 Recently, another local historian, Marco Zeni, has resurrected the religious marriage hypothesis, citing as evidence the fact that the archives of Sopramonte parish, the deanery of Trento and the Archbishop’s Office all lack birth, marriage and death certificates not only for Ida Dalser but for all Sopramonte parishioners for the period from 1880 (when Ida was born) to 1930, the date when she was removed from circulation and could no longer receive visits from her relatives in the mental hospital. Until 1918 these birth, death and marriage certificates were held by the Austro-Hungarian Civil Registry which, for security purposes, normally triplicated the documentation and stored it in different locations (parish, deanery, archbishop’s office). The information relating to Dalser is missing from all three archives.15 In Italy, before the Lateran Pacts of 1929, religious marriage was not recognised as valid by the State. In Austria, however, it was. This fact could well explain why Dalser, who was still ‘Austrian’ in 1915, felt no need to certify her marital status until the birth of her son. It would also suggest that Mussolini had some room for manoeuvre in 1915, enabling him to marry someone else and declare recognition of ‘the one illegitimate child he acknowledged as his own’.16 Zeni quotes Ida’s niece, Ester Cimadon, as saying: ‘The Church marriage record existed. My aunt always carried it in her handbag to present to those who would not believe that she was Mussolini’s wife.’17 Whether or not this is true, it does seem clear that, notwithstanding later attempts to conceal the fact, a marriage, be it legally binding or just religious, did actually take place between Mussolini and Ida Dalser. The 1929 letter of a close friend of Mussolini, an ‘old guard’ and Under-secretary of Public Instruction, Dario Lupi, adds further evidence to the wilful concealment of documentation. The missive was sent via the personal secretary of the now fully-fledged Duce,18 to the Chief of Police (Arturo Bocchini). Lupi wrote to the Duce’s personal secretary Alessandro Chiavolini: Some time ago, while in Trent, the prefect, His Excellency Vaccari, managed to get hold of a number of documents that were in possession of a certain Dalser, who, as a result of an intimate relationship with the Duce, had had a son who is now seventeen years old [Albino was actually 13 at the time of Lupi’s writing]. His Excellency Vaccari is accustomed to show great pride in having performed this service. It seems, however, that Dalser did not at that time hand over all the documents she possessed and some are still extant. There could be ways to recover them. Action must be taken on this.

Chiavolini’s memo on the letter noted: ‘Conferred with H.E. Bocchini’.19 In the light of the documentation that is available, as well as absent, concerning Mussolini’s ‘marriage’ to Ida Dalser, two periods in particular stand out as critically important. In both Dalser was violently coerced into silence,



Ida Dalser’s threat to Mussolini’s image61

the second time permanently. The first coincided with Mussolini’s transformation from socialist radical to ‘super-patriot’ between July 1914 and the end of 1919; the second with the establishment of the Fascist regime between the Matteotti crisis in the second half of 1924 and the Lateran Treaty of February 1929. As will become apparent, Mussolini’s public persona changed dramatically in these two phases and the possibility that Dalser’s former involvement with Mussolini might be made public became critically threatening to the Duce. The brutality with which Dalser was expunged might be seen as testifying either to the objective weakness of Mussolini’s image at these times or to Mussolini’s perception of the fragility of that image. Ida Dalser as the outcast fanatic ex-lover and Austrian spy, 1914–19 With the 22 May 1917 prefectural order [Ida Dalser] was expelled from Milan and its province and sent to Florence. This action was necessary because her presence in Milan posed a serious threat to public order due to her provocative demeanour towards Professor Mussolini’s family, her vindictive intentions, the people she was frequenting and subterfuges she resorted to to live.20 The quotation above is taken from a report on the ‘Origin of the Fasci di Combattimento’ written by General Inspector of Public Security Giovanni Gasti. It was compiled in June 1919, and brought to the attention of the Prime Minister, the Under-secretary of the Interior and the Director of Public Security. Just before referring to the ruling against Ida, Gasti felt the need to make it quite clear that ‘Dalser had been anonymously denounced as a possible spy,21 but, notwithstanding surveillance, nothing had been found that might have given rise to this suspicion’.22 Yet, between the anonymous charge and the expulsion order, Milan’s Prefect busily provided the Ministry of the Interior with all the tittle-tattle from Milan that would show Mussolini in a positive light and, more importantly, help frame Ida Dalser.23 In the wake of Mussolini’s civil marriage with Rachele the first period of persecution towards Dalser began. On 30 May 1917 the expulsion order came into force, and both she and her son were abused and maltreated. They were moved from Milan to Bologna prison, before being forcibly transferred to Florence. From there Dalser wrote to the Prime Minister: Excellency Minister Orlando! I am the unfortunate partner of Benito Mussolini, editor and proprietor of Il Popolo d’Italia. With the title of qualified beautician and as a citizen of Trento, I humbly ask Your Excellency to free me immediately.

She openly denounced Mussolini, ‘the famous Patriot’: With the help of the police and his friends Mussolini persecutes and tortures me … without pity for Benito Albino Mussolini Dalser, his and my 19–month-old son … Mussolini does not pay his child’s upkeep as decided by the tribunal, but

62

The cult of the Duce

in order to get rid of me and his son he has turned to the police, who are real dispensers of iniquity and dishonesty … .24

This letter also asked for a return of the capital she had invested in Il Popolo d’Italia.25 However, it was only in February 1918, when she was imprisoned as an ‘enemy subject’ at Piedimonte d’Alife near Caserta and with Benito Albino seriously ill, that she gave signed evidence in front of the police that Mussolini had sold himself to France, stating that on 17 January 1914 (the date was actually 13 November 1914) a meeting had taken place in Geneva between Mussolini, Filippo Naldi (editor of Resto del Carlino and later Il Popolo d’Italia’s technical assistant) and the former French prime minister Joseph Caillaux that resulted in Caillaux paying Mussolini and two of his colleagues one million lire, which was deposited at the Jarah Bank in Milan. She also mentioned that she was present at the initial negotiations to set up Il Popolo d’Italia, which had taken place at the Milanese hotel Bella Venezia between Naldi, Mussolini and Elio Jona (a Jew, and one of the founders and early financial backers of the Fascist movement). Dalser stressed that on this occasion she had herself contributed a substantial sum to support Mussolini’s project.26 A little over a year later, Gasti confirmed Dalser’s accusations, with some minor corrections. He made sure, however, that no credit was given to Dalser, whom he described as ‘a neurasthenic and a hysteric, inflamed by her desire for vengeance against Mussolini’.27 The last months of 1914 were a major turning point in Mussolini’s career, with his decision to campaign for Italy’s entry into the world war, his expulsion from the Socialist Party and the editorship of Avanti! and his setting-up of Il Popolo d’Italia. Luisa Passerini has suggested that these changed political circumstances resulted in a comprehensive transformation of Mussolini’s public image: ‘In 1915, with his pro-war propaganda and subsequent direct participation in the conflict, the phase of constructing a new image begins in earnest. An image that struggles to exorcize his preceding one.’28 Mussolini’s ambivalent relationship with Dalser, and the energy he devoted to disentangling himself from sentimental choices made in the past, shows how this new image impacted even on the fringes of his private and political self. The potentially explosive information presented to the police by Dalser at Caserta (that Mussolini had been paid by the French to found Il Popolo d’Italia), defined by George Seldes in the mid-1930s as ‘the most important charge against Mussolini’s probity’,29 was considerably defused by the framework in which Dalser was set: an ‘Austrian spy’, ‘evidently a fanatic’,30 ‘inflamed by desires of vengeance against Mussolini’.31 When in 1914 Mussolini was accused by his old colleagues at Avanti! of having been paid to become an interventionist, he rebutted the allegations by placing his ‘sin’ of support for the interventionist cause in the realm of



Ida Dalser’s threat to Mussolini’s image63

the sacred: ‘I am proud of the beauty, of the holiness of my sin and will kneel before no Jesus Christ to beg forgiveness.’32 The story of his venality did not disappear with the end of the First World War. On 3 May 1919 the recently founded newspaper Italia del Popolo picked up the issue. With Italy being ‘betrayed’ by France at the Paris Peace Conference (Orlando had left the conference in anger at the paltriness of Italian gains there), the question of French money being at the root of Il Popolo d’Italia risked becoming a national scandal: ‘Mussolini accepted cheques from the French government; we have the proof; we defy him to sue us for libel.’33 On this occasion Mussolini remained silent. In 1925, Sarfatti’s biography set out to exonerate the lofty mythical origins of Fascism from any suggestion of base financial calculations. Strange rumours were set afloat during the agitated days which followed. The ex-editor of the Avanti was declared to have accepted money from France in order to start a paper of his own … We knew him, of course to be incapable of taking a sou for himself; but a man a-fire with a great project and with the sense of an imperative call to fulfil it! who could say but that in a moment of excitement he might feel justified in availing himself of any means to his hand for the purpose? It was decided to acquaint him with what was being said for the slanders were calculated to damage seriously both Mussolini himself and the cause dear to us all. What was my surprise when I saw the two tiny rooms furnished with only four tumble-down chairs and a rickety table.…34

Fundamental to this prose’s logic was the quality of the accusations. These allegations were ‘floating’, ‘strange rumours’, ‘slanders’. Once ‘My little Ida’, as Mussolini had addressed Dalser in his love letters, was rejected, she became a thorn in his side for multiple reasons. Seducing and impregnating a woman, taking her money and then abandoning her did not fit with the persona that he was creating in his Diario (episodically published in Il Popolo d’Italia from 28 December 1915 to 13 February 1917) and in that of his early biographies. Among some of the characteristics Passerini singled out as crucial to Mussolini’s new image are those of the romantic solitary man, ‘an uncompromising aristocratic plebeian’, common but at the same time extraordinary.35 Not even Sarfatti could have justified Mussolini’s behaviour to Dalser in the name of diplomatic cunning as she did in the case of his furberia (wiliness) towards the French. She ascribed to Mussolini the ‘instinct strongest in the strong, for protecting all that needs protection, plants, animals, children, women-above all, women, [the instinct] that has lain at the basis of all great orders of chivalry known to history down to the latest of them, Fascism’.36 Dalser had had a stroke of luck in her career when, a simple nurse employed as governess, she had been left a part of the inheritance of her patroness which allowed her to further her training in Paris and become a businesswoman. The fact that she remained penniless after having

64

The cult of the Duce

sold her cosmetic parlour in Milan in order to give the proceeds to Mussolini did not confirm the Sarfattian myth of the Dux as a natural protector of the weak. As Passerini argues: ‘Women were excluded from the pact of refoundation [Mussolini’s switch to interventionism], and that they should have been is truly telling … The exclusion of women was symbolic … and was underpinned by an allegoric feminine image’, that of the madrepatria mediated by figure of Mussolini’s mother (Rosa Maltoni). In a mother–fatherland whose children are all equally loved, ‘the vicissitudes of the husband and the father are not object of the myth’.37 Mussolini legally inserted Rachele Guidi outside this imaginary space as the wife and the mother of his children at the end of 1915 – although, as mentioned before, it took the authorities quite some time to identify Rachele as his wife. It is to this foundational phase of Mussolini’s new image that the metamorphosis between two aspects of fatherhood belongs – expressed in Roman law in terms of the genitor (procreator) and the pater (father). It did not take long for Mussolini the husband and father to become available for readers’ consumption. In the mid-1920s, for instance, one of his biographers, Margherita Fazzini, presented sketches of Mussolini’s family life in Aneddoti e giudizi su Mussolini.38 However, it was only in the 1930s that the Duce’s family attained the status of stardom and his wife earned the name of donna (woman) Rachele.39 But why did Mussolini actually marry Rachele, considering that in his first autobiography La Mia Vita (written between December 1911 and February 1912 in Forli prison) the ex-socialist had proudly spoken of a ‘self-made’ union: ‘on 17 September 1910 I joined, without official civil or religious bonds, Rachele Guidi’.40 His prison diary had ended with the words: ‘I have loved many women … Now I love my Rachele and she also deeply loves me. Where will the future take me?’41 The fact is that in 1915 Mussolini’s audience changed: he was no longer the most radical of the socialists, but a man whom any liberal, or even any ‘Italian’, might have trusted. Catholicism, though, was still excluded and only much later would Mussolini walk down the aisle with Rachele. His previously declared ‘self-made’ union with Rachele was anarchic in that it recognised neither State nor Church authority; and it needed to be addressed, at least with a wedding in the registry office, in order for Mussolini to survive the transition into his new persona. Yet the idea of Mussolini as ‘seducer’ persisted. Passerini sees no contradiction between his being described as a womaniser and a married man: these were both aspects of the traditional ‘latin masculine stereotype in which the part of the seducer is compatible with the devotion for the mother and with the roles of good husband and father’.42 In reality, though, the new Mussolini image needed a far more meticulous construction. Maria Pia Di Bella has recently suggested that Mussolini consistently ‘favoured the role of genitor’.43 But the ‘latin-lover’ stereotype, which may well have allowed for



Ida Dalser’s threat to Mussolini’s image65

the ‘family-man’ seducer, was a delicate and precarious construction with iron rules, paramount among which was discretion. This balancing exercise implied different audiences (a circle of people ‘in the know’ was permissible); and the vague nature of the love affair was essential. Furthermore, in the first biographies of Mussolini, the quality of the seducer was based very much on his irresistible magnetism for women rather than on his frantic need for sex and capacity to manipulate. Most importantly, all his adventures were tidy, concluded episodes: in the past. None of Mussolini’s lovers ever made it to the big screen next to him. As wife, donna Rachele did. Back from the war and in hospital in 1917, Mussolini made sure that the police would stop Dalser from visiting him44 after the public scenes that she and Rachele had caused during his previous hospitalisations, when both had claimed to be his wife. Ida’s ban was consistent with Il Popolo d’Italia’s contemporary portrayal of Rachele as being always at his bedside.45 Why Mussolini should have preferred Rachele as opposed to Dalser is unclear. The fact is he chose Rachele. As the journalist Neera Fallaci said, in Milan Dalser must have been ‘a great pain in the ass … very intelligent, a fighter with no fear of anyone or anything’.46 Marriage did not control Mussolini’s life below his belt (the list of ‘lovers’ continued to mount), but it did determine the loyalties of his public persona and consigned his amours to the private sphere and rumour. And any traces of the past that did not fit the newly emerging image needed to be covered. Seduction was one thing; betrayal, abandonment, abuse and theft, another. The ‘free love’47 espoused by the old Mussolini was no more. He was now a husband and father. And for Dalser this transformation spelled danger. Ida Dalser as the confined paranoid, 1925–32 By the mid-1920s Mussolini, the editor of a Milan newspaper, surrounded by a group of cronies, seemed to belong to the distant past. With the 1922 March on Rome and the hand shake of the king he had become Prime Minister – albeit with the support of many non-Fascist ‘allies’. Just over two years later, in the wake of the Matteotti crisis of 1924, he defied parliament and took full control of the state apparatus in a gamble that paid off. He maintained the trust of the king, and in the next few years the elements of a dictatorial regime were rapidly set in place. All parties other than the Fascist Party were abolished, the apparatus of repression was strengthened, and state control over the media was established. However, it was to be some time before Mussolini became the permanent linchpin of the new Italian political order. Nor did the creation of a dictatorship mean that Italians had become ‘Fascist’. The regime faced rival claims still for hearts and minds, above all from the Catholic Church, which always remained an alternative pole of allegiance to the Italian

66

The cult of the Duce

State. As John Pollard has said: ‘The Papacy was [an] institution with which Mussolini could not seriously hope to compete.’48 Notwithstanding his anticlericalism, Mussolini chose not to take on the juggernaut directly, preferring instead to negotiate and co-opt. For example, the penal sanction against the advocacy of artificial contraception, introduced as early as 1924, was justified in terms of the Fascist goal of strengthening the Italian stirpe,49 something the Church had long sought for other reasons. In her analysis of biographical material on Mussolini, Passerini stated: ‘The recovering of religiosity will be one of the most difficult operations in the restructuring of the image from Mussolini the Socialist to Mussolini the Fascist.’50 Already in 1915 Mussolini had felt the need to communicate with all Italian soldiers – most of whom were, after all, strong Catholics – ‘as one of them’; and though he still called himself a ‘heretic’ in his Diary, ‘he showed a softening attitude towards the Catholic Church’.51 Not that any real conversion was required; and Mussolini made sure never to be portrayed kneeling in front of a priest. As Rachele Mussolini stated in her memoirs: ‘I do not think he was motivated by clericalism. My husband remained basically irreligious …’52 Nonetheless, in 1929 he succeeded in getting himself described by Pope Pius XI as the ‘man whom Providence has sent us’.53 In order to facilitate this accommodation between State and Church, culminating in the Lateran Pacts in 1929,54 there had to be some adjustment to the image of the Duce at the personal–private level. Mussolini had his children baptised in 1923 and then regularised his family status by a religious marriage with Rachele55 in December 1925.56 With the move to Villa Torlonia at end of 1926, Mussolini was joined by Rachele and their children on a permanent basis under the same roof for the first time.57 As the letter of the Jesuit Pietro Tacchi Venturi to the Duce in September 1925 shows, the religious wedding was seen as important by the Vatican. Venturi reminded Mussolini of a promise he had made in July to wed Rachele in church, an act which would ‘bring special solace to the Holy Father and to quite a number of eminent personalities [who hope for] copious blessings from God on H.E. and his dearest, to comfort him amid the pressure of the huge burden he is sustaining for the fatherland and for religion’.58 Mussolini obliged, and thereafter could pass himself off as a plausible Catholic. Whether from a sense of necessity, or as a precaution, or because he simply now had the power to do so, it was at this point that the Duce intervened to sweep away once and for all two skeletons in his cupboard that threatened his new public image: Ida Dalser and Albino Benito. The period that followed Ida Dalser’s return to Trent after the war appeared to signal a truce between her and Mussolini. But the conflict remained latent. On 15 February 1920, in answer to the query of an official (who happened also to be a childhood friend) employed by the Trent Inspectorate, about a woman



Ida Dalser’s threat to Mussolini’s image67

using the surname Dalser-Mussolini on her calling card, the editor of Il Popolo d’Italia said: ‘The woman you are talking about is dangerously deranged … Let me know what she does, where and how she lives. At the same time watch her closely and throw her in jail, which is where she belongs. …’59 After this, surveillance and police checks on Dalser and her relatives became more insistent. For her part, Ida continued to meet and write to politicians, journalists, policemen and priests. Her sister- and brother-in-law, the Paichers, helped Ida to solicit Mussolini for maintenance and eventually gained custody of Benito Albino from ‘uncle’ Arnaldo Mussolini, who from the beginning of the 1920s had been taking care of things while Benito Albino was living under the Paichers’ roof. Arnaldo appears to have been asked by his elder brother ‘to get rid of her [Ida]’.60 In May 1924 Arnaldo proposed that Mario Verdiani, an official of the Trent Fascist Party, should be nominated as guardian of Benito Albino. The Trent courts attempted to carry this through, but failed under pressure from another local magistrate summoned by Ida and the Paichers.61 This failure indicated a certain weakness of the dictatorship. But the battle was far from over, and on 19 June 1926 Dalser’s drama began in earnest.62 As she told her brother-in-law, she was going that day to meet Pietro Fedele, then Minister of Public Instruction, who was visiting Trent: ‘I was stopped, violently seized on the public road, thrown on the floor, imprisoned in a straitjacket, beaten.’ She was brought to the police headquarters where Tullio Banfichi, a doctor (an ear, nose and throat specialist) and Centurion of the Fascist Militia, signed the paper for Ida’s immediate confinement in a mental hospital, ‘because in her present state of over-excitement the insane could cause harm to others’.63 The confinement order was countersigned by a general practitioner, who almost immediately withdrew his approval.64 Ida was imprisoned in the Pergine lunatic asylum in Trent, and her brother-in-law was called upon to sign over the tutelage of Albino to a regional official, Giulio Bernardi. For the first time Dalser’s son appears on a document as ‘Benito Dalser, child of unknown parentage’. When Paicher refused to hand over his nephew, Prefect Guadagnini gave precise orders to the Police Superintendent Amato and Marshal Miramonti to take the child by force.65 On 25 June 1926, the 10-year-old was brutally snatched from the Paichers’ home and doped by several police officers under the supervision of his new guardian, Bernardi. He was brought to the St Ilario Shelter for the Destitute. A Ministry of Justice decree dated 14 July 1932 authorised a change of surname; Benito Albino Mussolini officially became Benito Albino Bernardi.66 Ten years later Benito Albino was to die in Mombello lunatic asylum at Limbiate, near Milan, and was buried in an unmarked grave numbered 931 in the area reserved for the insane in the local cemetery.67 For Ida Dalser the confinement in Pergine in June 1926 was to be the beginning of the end. Apart from some very short spells and an intrepid escape on 16 July 193568 which ended in her rapid

68

The cult of the Duce

recapture, she was to be enclosed in the walls of institutions for the insane (in Pergine and on the islands of San Clemente and San Servolo in Venice69) until her death on 3 December 1937.70 She continued to petition Mussolini and the authorities throughout this period, but her voice was now officially that of a clinically insane patient. Mussolini’s public persona could rest at ease. The mental institution emerges as a facet of the Fascist regime that is distressingly under-studied. To Dalser and her son can be added the celebrated case of Violet Gibson71 or the less well-known one of Agnese Castaldi.72 There was also the failed attempt to section the dissident Maria Rygier, an exSocialist and interventionist who for a time was part of the editorial staff of Il Popolo d’Italia. After being arrested and subjected to psychiatric assessment at the Policlinico in Rome, she was released under pressure from the neuropsychiatrist Giovanni Mingazzini and managed to escape to France, where she wrote about her ordeal.73 The emphasis of this chapter has been on the threats posed by Dalser and her son to Mussolini’s persona at two very distinct points in his career: the Duce to be and the Duce. In 1938, Claretta Petacci noted one of Mussolini’s outbursts in her diary: La Fantini, that pro who would sleep with anyone. She still talks, the whore. It is true I’ve made a lot of mistakes. You would be the exception. Yes, Dalser went crazy, and so died. No, [her son is] not my son at all. Too many have been attributed to me. But now think a little of me.74

These words, pronounced in intimacy, raise the question of how far the man Benito was also a victim of the Duce. The final say, though, should be given to Dalser, one of his victims, who fortunately for posterity was a graph-maniac, like Mussolini himself.75 On the cold floor of her cell, she wrote to him: ‘But come on, you are an ordinary little man!’76 Notes  1 M. Sarfatti, Dux (Milan: Mondadori, 1926), p. 230.   2 V. De Georgi, Mussolini: glorie e disonori del primo Novecento Italiano (Milan: Hoepli, 2004), pp. 90–1.   3 Sarfatti, Dux, p. 232. This play is also mentioned as The Unlit Lamp in E. Ludwig, Talks with Mussolini (Boston: Little, Brown, 1933), p. 211.   4 Admission 19 June 1926. Ospedale Psichiatrico di Pergine, Cartella Clinica, Ida Dalser, Prot. N. 3640. Archivio dell’ex-Ospedale Psichiatrico di Pergine, Trento.   5 Archivio dell’ex-ospedale di San Servolo e San Clemente, busta: Ida Dalser.   6 M. Zeni, La moglie di Mussolini (Trent: Edizioni Effe Erre, 2005), p. 60.   7 Ibid., p. 56.   8 Soggiorno degli stranieri in Italia, Prot. N. 2099, 29 September 1916. Archivio Centrale dello Stato (henceforth ACS), Ministero dell’Interno e di Pubblica Sicurezza (henceforth MI), A1, b. Dalser Ida.



Ida Dalser’s threat to Mussolini’s image69

  9 Prot. N. 15961, 21 October 1916, quoted in Zeni, La moglie, p. 63; F. Olàsz, Benito Mussolini a Trento 1909 (Milan: Santo Bavetta, 1958), p. 36. 10 Prot. N. 31635, October 25, 1916 quoted in Zeni, La moglie, p. 63. 11 Zeni, La moglie, p. 78. 12 Antonio Zieger wrote under the pseudonym of F. Olàsz in 1958. Olàsz, Benito Mussolini, p. 33. 13 Don Luigi Pedrolli (1887–1958) was priest in Sopramonte for 40 years, becoming the parish priest on 11 July 1924. See Zeni, La moglie, pp. 52–3. 14 Olàsz, Benito Mussolini, p. 36. 15 Zeni, La moglie, pp. 19–20. 16 D. Mack Smith, Mussolini (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982), p. 20. 17 Zeni, La moglie, p. 56. 18 Leda Rafanelli lamented that when Mussolini ‘became dictator he had her harassed by the police and her letters from him were confiscated’. See Mack Smith, Mussolini, p. 21. 19 ACS, MI, Divisione Affari Generali e Riservati (henceforth DAGR), catalogo: A1, b. Dalser Ida. 20 G. Gasti, ‘Rapporto: Origine dei Fasci di combattimento’ (4 June 1919); reproduced in full in R. De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario 1883–1920 (Turin: Einaudi, 1965), pp. 725–37. 21 It seems plausible that such accusations were made just before Mussolini’s civil marriage to Rachele. A Prefettizia, Prefect Carlo Panizzardi to MI, DAGR, Rome, 23 January 1915, Prot. N. 355. This report had caused Dalser to be included in the list of espionage suspects and was sent ten days after Mussolini’s marriage to Rachele. Letter mentioned in R. Prefettura di Milano, Prefect Filiberto Olgiati’s letter to MI, Direzione Generale Pubblica Sicurezza Rome (16 April 1917), Prot. N. 4021. 22 Gasti, ‘Rapporto,’ in De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, p. 731. 23 Olgiati’s Prefettizia to Dir. Gen. P.S. Roma (16 April 1917), Prot. N. 4021. Interestingly, in this letter other Prefettizie, or prefect’s letters, are mentioned to support his report. Olgiati’s request is transparent: ‘given the very hot-headed and impulsive character of Dalser, I would suggest proposing to the Ministry her urgent removal from Milan, confining her in a place where her rancour towards her former lover would have neither space nor opportunity to express itself. I think it would be good to explain to the man that Dalser’s background and Austrian nationality, as well as the above-mentioned reasons, would justify the measure.’ 24 Ida Dalser’s letter to Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando (Florence: 29 July 1919), ACS, MI, DAGR, catalogo: A1 (1935), b. Dalser Ida. 25 Dalser already contacted Orlando, in the context of the Milan court trial, in the summer of 1916, while living at Piazza Calimero 3 (later renamed Via Gaetano Pini), asserting that ‘influential people’ whom she trusted ‘took from me compromising documents regarding the setting up of the newspaper’. ACS, MI, DAGR, catalogo: A1 (1935), b. Dalser Ida. 26 Report from Questura di Napoli to MI, Dir. Gen. P.S., Ufficio Centrale

70

The cult of the Duce

­ ’investigazione, Prot. N. 2104 (9 February 1918) ACS, MI, DAGR, catalogo: A1, d busta: Dalser Ida. 27 Gasti, ‘Rapporto’, in De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, pp. 732–3. 28 L. Passerini, Mussolini immaginario (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 1991), p. 6. 29 G. Seldes, Sawdust Caesar: the Untold History of Mussolini and Fascism (NewYork– London: Harper, 1935), p. 394. 30 In the handwritten endnote signed D. Report from the Questura di Napoli to MI, Dir. Gen. P.S., Ufficio Centrale d’investigazione, Prot. N. 2104 (9 February 1918) ACS, MI, DAGR, catalogo: A1 (1935), b. Dalser Ida. 31 Gasti, ‘Rapporto’, in De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, p. 732. 32 Mussolini, quoted in Seldes, Sawdust Caesar, p. 394. 33 Italia del Popolo, 3 May 1919. 34 M. Sarfatti, The Life of Benito Mussolini (1st edn 1925, New York: Stoke, 1927), p. 203. 35 Passerini, Mussolini immaginario, pp. 18, 39, 46, 56–8. 36 Sarfatti, The Life, p. 67. 37 Passerini, Mussolini immaginario, p. 23. 38 Marga (M. Fazzini), Aneddoti e giudizi su Mussolini (Florence: Bemporad, 1925). 39 Passerini, Mussolini immaginario, p. 93. 40 E. and D. Susmel (eds.), Opera Omnia di Benito Mussolini, Vol. 33 (Florence: La Fenice, 1973), p. 267. 41 Ibid. p. 269. 42 Passerini, Mussolini immaginario, p. 36. 43 M. Di Bella, ‘From Future to Past: A Duce’s Trajectory’, in J. Borneman (ed.), Death of the Father: An Anthropology of the End in Political Authority (Oxford: Berghahn, 2004), p. 39. 44 Milan Prefect letter to MI, Dir. Gen. P.S. (16 April 1917) Prot. N. 4021. 45 Il Popolo d’Italia, 6 April 1917. 46 N. Fallaci, ‘Così il duce si sbarazzò di Albino figlio scomodo’, Oggi, 12 November 1983. 47 What the old image of Mussolini stood for was still alive among the Futurists in 1918: ‘Gradual devaluation of marriage because of incoming free love and State offspring’, Futurist political party’s Manifesto-programme (September 1918). See De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, p. 739. 48 J.F. Pollard, ‘Mussolini’s rivals: the limits of the personality cult in Fascist Italy’, New Perspective, 4:2 (December 1998). 49 Mack Smith, Mussolini, pp. 159–60. 50 Ibid. 51 Passerini, Mussolini immaginario, p. 6. 52 R. Mussolini, Mussolini: An Intimate Biography by His Widow, ed. A. Zarca (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977), p. 131. 53 L’Osservatore Romano, 12 February 1929, front page. 54 J.F. Pollard, The Vatican and Italian Fascism, 1929–32: A Study in Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 55 Mack Smith, Mussolini, p. 159.



Ida Dalser’s threat to Mussolini’s image71

56 Zeni, La moglie, p. 23. 57 R. De Felice, Mussolini il fascista: La conquista del potere 1921–1925, Vol. 1 (Turin: Einaudi, 1966), p. 466. According to Giorgio Pini and Duilio Susmel, in 1912 ‘Mussolini was together with his family [Rachele and Edda] in Milan … but he was not a man to restrict himself to the narrow circle of domestic life.’ Opera Omnia, Vol. 33, p. 262. De Felice confirms: ‘Only several months after Mussolini’s nomination as Avanti!’s editor [8–10 November 1912] did Rachele and Edda join him in Milan, and it seems they left Forlì without Mussolini’s knowledge.’ Mussolini il fascista, p. 136. 58 ACS, Segreteria Particolare del Duce, Carteggio Riservato (1922–43); catalogo: FP/R, Mussolini Benito; b. 7, Matrimonio. 59 A. Pieroni, Il figlio segreto del Duce (Milan: Garzanti, 2006), p. 48. 60 A. Pieroni, ‘Elzeviro Mussolini ed Ida Dalser, la vera storia del bigamo Benito’, Corriere della Sera, 10 May 2001, p. 3. 61 Zeni, La moglie, pp. 118–25. 62 R. Paicher, ‘All’ombra fosca delle dittature: La tragica fine di Benito Mussolini (junior) 2: Entra in scena il prefetto Guadagnini’, L’Azione, 24 September 1945, front page. 63 Banfichi, Tullio and Vittorio Stenico Referral to Mental Hospital (19 June 1926). Archivio dell’Ex-Ospedale Psychiatrico di Pergine. 64 Zeni, La moglie, p. 128. 65 Ibid. 66 Regia Prefettura di Trento, Foglio Annunzi Legali 1932–33 (20 July 1932), p. 117. 67 Fallaci, ‘Così il duce’, Oggi, 12 November 1983. 68 Diario Clinico, Ida Dalser, entry 16 June 1935, Prot. N. 3741. Archivio dell’exOspedale Psichiatrico di Pergine, Trento. 69 Pergine 19 June 1926; San Clemente (I class) 17 August 1926; Pergine 23 December 1926; San Servolo 19 July 1935. Cartelle Cliniche, Ida Dalser, Prot. N. 3640, 152, 3741. Archivio dell’ex-Ospedale Psichiatrico di Pergine, Trento. 70 Registro. Archivio dell’ex-Ospedale di San Servolo e San Clemente, Venice. 71 R.O. Collin, La donna che sparò a Mussolini (Milan: Rusconi, 1988). 72 E. Sturani, Otto milioni di cartoline per il Duce (Turin: Centro Scientifico Editore, 1995), p. 55. 73 A. Borghi, Mussolini: Red and Black (London: Wishart, 1935), p. 72. 74 M. Suttora, Claretta Petacci, Mussolini segreto: diari 1932–1938 (Milan: Rizzoli, 2009), p. 475. 75 Graph-maniac is one of the conditions psychiatrics ascribed to Dalser in her mental hospital records. 76 Ida Dalser’s letter to Benito Mussolini (December 1927) quoted in A. Pieroni, ‘Il figlio segreto di Mussolini’, La Settimana Incom, 7, 14, 21, 28 January 1950.

5

Mass culture and the cult of personality Stephen Gundle

This chapter examines the way in which modern innovations in communications, transport and the sensory environment assisted the rise and development of the cult of Mussolini. The 1910s and 1920s witnessed the emergence of new forms of fame in various spheres including politics. Mussolini emerged as a new man in an age that witnessed the rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, Charles Lindbergh, and – in the Italian context – the Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the cinematic strongman Maciste, the diva Francesca Bertini and the magnetic stage performer Ettore Petrolini. Thus he can in some ways be compared to them, and the trajectory of his career as a public personality understood in part in terms of the transformations that brought extraordinary fame and acclaim to a limited number of people. These changes occurred in the early phase of mass society, and they bore witness to the erosion of the near-monopoly on visual representation enjoyed by royalty and the conventionally prominent. For most of the 1920s and a large part of the following decade, Mussolini developed a repertoire of theatrical poses and attitudes (all of which required appropriate costumes) that were captured and amplified in the domestic and international media. As a political outsider whose youth and vitality were unusual, he traded heavily on his physical presence and energy. He appeared frequently in foreign magazines and newspapers, newsreels and even one documentary film produced by Columbia Pictures. Like Chaplin with his tramp’s costume and funny walk, or Fairbanks with his euphoric smile and irrepressible spirit, Mussolini was an instantly recognisable figure whose appearance and mannerisms were easy to capture and to reproduce in shorthand form. As some telling caricatures reveal, sometimes even a line or two indicating a jaw and a piercing stare were sufficient to sum him up. By focusing on Mussolini as a star or celebrity, the intention is not to trivialise his role as a dictator or to shift the focus of analysis of the personality cult on to a terrain that ignores the political and underplays the specificity of the Fascist system of organised acclamation of the Duce. Rather it is to add elements or layers to the analysis which assist in understanding some of the



Mass culture and the cult of personality73

forms the cult took in the specific period in which it flourished. In highlighting these aspects, however, there is an intention to criticise approaches which, by contrast, focus entirely on the political machine and on Fascist ritual. The ‘sacralization of politics’, to use Emilio Gentile’s expression,1 was not a unique or special phenomenon but rather an aspect of a broader tendency by which the processes of secularisation of the modern era led to the attachment of sacred attributes to practices that were not strictly religious. This tendency did not just affect politics, since department stores, elegance, women’s magazines, art and sport, as well as film stardom, have all been seen as having religious properties in the modern age. Underlying the emergence of all these activities and institutions were rapid developments in commercial culture, communications technologies and the forms of urban life. In consequence, the elevation of Mussolini cannot be interpreted solely in relation to a political religion’s need for a god. It needs to be seen as a modern phenomenon that flowed as much from needs and forces that were extraneous to Fascism as from the movement itself. The aim here is to focus on three aspects of this: Mussolini’s vestimentary practices, his publicity stunts and the merchandising of his image. First, however, some broader considerations will be advanced on modern fame and on Italian star culture. Fame and acclaim in the mass age Some studies treat fame as a timeless phenomenon that first manifested itself in the ancient world,2 when it acquired forms that are still apparent today. Others relate it more specifically to the early modern period,3 while yet more focus exclusively on the nineteenth or twentieth centuries.4 Here it will be assumed that there was a significant quantitative, and hence often a qualitative, difference between fame in the pre-mass era and the period that saw the rise of the mass circulation press, the birth of modern advertising, the development and expansion of cinema and the invention of radio. All of these factors created a mass audience that sought idols. This modern public was not satisfied with kings and queens, high-society figures and others associated with the court or its equivalent, even if these conserved a good measure of their appeal. It wanted heroes and heroines of its own, people who captured the spirit of the modern age or who emerged from the lower reaches of society and possessed some of the qualities that the mass of people understood and valued. In politics, it is possible to trace the emergence from the nineteenth century of colourful figures with a capacity to rouse emotions and touch popular chords. Figures as diverse as Disraeli and Garibaldi constructed theatrical personalities that broke through established social barriers and political

74

The cult of the Duce

c­ onventions. Men like Gladstone and Theodore Roosevelt, too, exercised an influence on the popular imagination and were astute manipulators of the media of their time.5 The opportunities for such manipulations expanded dramatically in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. The period not only witnessed political turbulence but also a series of changes in the relationship between the upper classes and the press, between the older and younger generations and between the public and the communications media. After the war, the popular press began to cater more to mass audiences. It aimed to shape events as much as to report them. Entrepreneurs like Lord Beaverbrook in Britain, the founder of the Daily Express, grasped that there was a widespread desire for heroes and celebrities. Alongside the sporting hero, the beauty queen and the great criminal, there was also a place in the papers for an eye-catching debutante. All of these personalities were treated not with the deference of a hierarchical order but with the curiosity of a fastmoving, mass society. At the same time, photography and the movies altered perception by expanding the realm of the visible. In the large cities, advertising hoardings, neon signs and places of entertainment including dance halls and cinema all aimed at an undifferentiated audience. The word ‘glamour’ entered common usage at precisely this time, a fact that by itself shows how images of wealth, luxury and beauty were more widely deployed than ever before and were consumed by an eager audience.6 The paradox of magical allure in an age widely seen as marked by increasing homogenisation and declining individuality lay in the fact that it was constructed and moulded in a systematic way and sold to people on the basis that it was indeed imitable.7 Even when it was applied to members of the titled aristocracy, as it sometimes was, glamour referred not to their inherited qualities or natural leadership but to their newsworthiness, physical beauty, material ease and leisure. In the 1920s the manipulation of perceptions became a profession and the period saw the birth of public relations as a business.8 In 1922, the American journalist Walter Lippmann published his influential book Public Opinion in which he stressed the importance of fictions and narratives in contemporary life.9 In the past, he observed, it was mainly monarchs who were presented as constructed personalities, now it was public figures in general who employed assistants to mix the real with fictions, thereby substituting actual reality with ‘a counterfeit of reality’.10 Writing 40 years later, Daniel Boorstin would use a similar concept, that of ‘pseudo-events’, to describe how specially staged events became a key feature of advertising, showbusiness and the movie industry.11 In the noisy, fast-moving world of the present, Lippmann argued, leaders needed to understand that symbols, stereotypes and general ideas were crucial to the way the public perceived people and events (most leaders in fact knew this ‘by experience’, he admitted).12 He did not refer to film stars, that



Mass culture and the cult of personality75

is, commodities geared entirely to display and consumption, who Boorstin dubbed ‘human pseudo-events’,13 but his observations took account of their existence. Far from declining with the advent of universal male suffrage, the manipulation of consent had become stronger and was based on analysis and on new means of communication. Persuasion, Lippmann noted, had turned into a ‘self-conscious art’ and ‘an organ of popular government’.14 One factor in this was the increasing influence of the visual. ‘Photographs have the kind of authority over the imagination today, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real’, he remarked, adding that moving images were even more persuasive because the construct was so rich and complete that ‘the imagining has been accomplished for you’.15 Such a view would not now be universally accepted, but what is interesting is the perception of moving and still images as being possessed of a special role in the formation of modern public opinion. This aided those who traded in images and were able to make a strong visual impression. Mussolini and the Italian ‘star system’ Despite the backwardness of parts of the country and the relatively low level of economic growth, the public sphere in Italy was subject to change no less than in the USA, especially in urban areas. There was, however, one important difference. The political was a more significant factor in Italy as the expansion of the franchise occurred relatively late.16 Whereas in the USA modernity was driven by consumption, in Europe politics was often the propulsive element. This meant that, in certain circumstances, politics could absorb appeals and motifs of a consumerist type. For this reason, it is possible to read the emergence of Mussolini in relation to a series of factors extraneous to the conventional political realm. Mussolini’s most significant precursor is often taken to be the poet–­ adventurer Gabriele D’Annunzio, particularly during the occupation of Fiume in 1919–20,17 but Filippo Maria Marinetti was no less important, and not simply because Fascism absorbed Futurism’s nationalism, bellicosity and misogyny. Marinetti founded his movement in Milan, a city that in the early years of the twentieth century was undergoing major cultural changes, including the development of new communications and cultural industries.18 Newspapers, magazines, book publishing, department stores, professional sports and commercial leisure all expanded rapidly at a time when the city’s population was also growing fast. Marinetti rejected the option of simply joining the commercial sphere of entertainment to get his message across but he also recoiled from seeking to preserve a pure realm of high art. Instead he found a way of exploiting the opportunities that commodification brought for his own ends. As the critic Walter Adamson has observed, ‘More than any

76

The cult of the Duce

other intellectual personality of his era, Marinetti sensed how the commodity form had remade human identity and human relations. He shaped and continuously reshaped his persona for the mystique, aura, and symbolic associations he wanted to project, in precisely the same way as the manufacturer of a product does to attract buyers. Marinetti was himself and a representation of himself, a mediatised self-idealization, a kind of walking (or galloping) ­trademark – the “caffeine of Europe”.’19 Mussolini’s background was quite different from the wealthy Marinetti’s. His emergence as the head of Fascism owed everything to his political journey from socialism via interventionism to nationalism. But Fascism created a space for itself not only through violence and intimidation, or through eclectic and ambiguous appeals, but by manipulating traditional images and myths on a mass scale.20 Communication was central. Mussolini was a journalist and Galeazzo Ciano once privately observed that he always remained ‘a man of the eight-column headline’.21 His public image, though, was highly theatrical. It was also intensely visual in a modern way, to the extent that Malaparte (in the text Muss, begun in 1931 and completed in stages over the following years) asserted: ‘You can see that Mussolini sees himself and other politicians solely as heroes of the silver screen.’22 For Bottai, one of the most intense believers in the charisma of the Duce at the highest levels of the regime, it was entirely natural that, in the mass age, politicians should avail themselves of new means of advertising and communication. In a diary entry from 1936, he wrote: The advent of the masses in political life … produces the same requirements in terms of publicity and advertising as it does in the industrial and commercial sphere. The fame and the power of a politician among restricted elites, in the clubs, committees, circles, lodges, and cabals, used to be built up in relation to values – regardless of whether these were false or not – that were laboriously established, day by day, through a patient work of skill and cunning, with a refinement and an awareness that brought a certain nobility even to lowly wiliness. In mass politics, great leaders can only make an impression in general terms through the means of communication that shape the fantasies and sentiments of millions. It is necessary to propose a physiognomy, gestures and words with the sort of reiteration that is typical of photography and cinema. Repeat, repeat, repeat – just like with commercial advertising. The politician who thinks he can get himself noticed with a book, a newspaper article, a speech or through his learning and diligent preparation is deceiving himself. In this delusion he will be consoled by the high regard of the few. Even the man of high principle must find the stomach to ‘make an impression’ otherwise he will be condemned to silence and impotence.23

Fascists took ideas and techniques from commercial advertising in order to manipulate and direct public opinion. They also reconfigured many of the mobilising techniques pioneered by political forces in the nineteenth century



Mass culture and the cult of personality77

by concentrating on colours, exterior appearances, outdoor rallies and the use of artificial light to rouse emotional responses.24 In the early days, they also deployed publicity stunts of the type that the English suffragettes had used to capture the headlines. One commentator, F.C. Bartlett, observed that Fascist propaganda in Italy not only had a ‘more or less religious character’, it drew amply on the sensational images and optical effects that were features of c­ ommodity culture.25 Mussolini’s own persona can be read as a compendium of the elements present in the star culture of the age. Maciste,26 the Herculean strongman played by Bartolomeo Pagano, who appeared in some thirty films produced between 1914 and 1929, is one figure from the universe of mass culture who has often been cited as having influenced perceptions of Mussolini. From his first appearance in Cabiria in 1913, Maciste was a character whose brute strength in the service of good could be harnessed to right wrongs in any historical period or location. Born in the ancient world, in his films he moved from the Risorgimento to the First World War. In his modern-dress incarnations, he embodied patriotism, order and common sense.27 Mussolini too was hailed as patriotic strongman who defeated the threat posed by the left and who firmly restored order. He also had the compelling personality of Za la Mort, a fascinating criminal played in several films by Emilio Ghione.28 Writing in the 1970s, Dino Bondi reprised a view common in the 1920s that he had filled the space left by the decline of Italian cinema and the consequent disappearance of familiar stars.29 Commentators interpreted Mussolini in relation to a variety of other film stars and entertainers. The French journalist Maurice Bedel, writing in 1929, saw the Duce of Fascism as a seducer, equally capable of capturing the imagination of crowds and of charming a French visitor with his fine manners.30 He likened his smile to that of the singer and actor Maurice Chevalier. Certainly Mussolini invaded the collective consciousness. Another French observer, Henri Béraud, also writing in the late 1920s, noted that Mussolini was a celebrity whose image was to be found everywhere, on postcards, in magazines, even on shop counters and at stations: ‘The image of the Duce forms part of everyone’s existence; he watches over every aspect of Italian life.’31 For a Chicago Evening American correspondent, writing in 1926, Mussolini had all the features of a movie star; by this the paper meant youth, vigour, optimism, determination and modernity.32 Other later commentators, notably Renzo Renzi, situated Mussolini in relation to a variety of figures, including Fairbanks, who had given shape to an imaginative realm that thirsted for fantasies of heroism.33 Younger scholars have taken up these observations, some of them highlighting the way Mussolini became a sort of composite projection of current types and ideas.34 Victoria De Grazia referred to Mussolini as being ‘as vain as any matinee idol pandering to his “female” publics’,35 while

78

The cult of the Duce

Giorgio Bertellini has explored Hollywood’s interest in him and equated the acclaim he received among Italian Americans in New York to that enjoyed by Rudolph Valentino.36 This daring comparison was not in fact totally new. Camillo Berneri, writing in the mid-1930s, had already referred to Mussolini as ‘the Rudolph Valentino of politics’.37 The dictator’s wardrobe Descriptions of Mussolini’s appearance, of which there were many, invariably focused on his head or body.38 This emphasis has carried over into more recent historical studies.39 However, the issue of Mussolini’s wardrobe is no less deserving of attention, for it was a key part of his image. In his Socialist days, the future Duce had been known for his scruffiness. His close collaborator in the early Fascist years, Cesare Rossi, described his look as being ‘something between the poor proletarian, the scruffy intellectual and the outand-out tramp’.40 A dramatic change took place after he founded Fascism and was obliged to attend a variety of formal functions. At first he simply borrowed clothes,41 but, with his appointment as prime minister, a qualitative shift was called for. Between late October and early November 1922, he attended a number of public events for which the photographic record shows him correctly if not impeccably attired in morning dress (the garments do not fit perfectly; shirt cuffs are visible beyond his coat sleeves).42 During the months that followed, when he took up residence at Rome’s Grand Hotel, many images show Mussolini dressed appropriately in formal wear. Tails were regularly worn by senior Fascists. Alongside these images, numerous photographs – which have remained more famous – show him attired in a more eccentric, unusual or even démodé way. He was particularly attached to spats and his bowler hat (even joking with his wife at one point that only three people in the world still wore one: Laurel and Hardy and himself).43 He was also seen in two-tone shoes, a beret and jodhpurs, sometimes with a double-breasted dark jacket and tie, a pullover with a belt around the waist, and a great variety of hats.44 His habit of mixing elements was regarded by arbiters of elegance as gauche or strange, while even those who cared little for rectitude in dress had their doubts. Ernest Hemingway once remarked that there was something odd about a man who wore spats with a black shirt.45 Mussolini was advised about his dress for formal and ceremonial occasions by diplomatic experts from the Foreign Ministry. But there were many occasions, mainly of a less formal nature, when, wittingly or unwittingly, he broke the conventional rules of dress. The usual reading of this situation is that Mussolini lacked breeding or refinement and behaved in the manner of a parvenu.46 However, this is not the only possible interpretation. The 1920s



Mass culture and the cult of personality79

was from one point of view a time of strict conventions in male dress and the ceremonial duties of the prime minister in a city that hosted a king and the Pope were considerable. But it was also a time of innovation and modernisation in both menswear and womenswear. The expansion of leisure and sport, as well as the wider adoption of novel means of transport such as the automobile, produced a demand for ease of movement and more flexibility. The illustrated press also provided an encouragement to individuality among the famous. Mussolini’s departures from sartorial norms can be compared to those of Edward, the Prince of Wales and the future Edward VIII. In Britain and more widely, he was the leading example of a young man who stood out against those who regarded conservatism and continuity as always best. The first heir to the throne of the era of publicity, Edward adopted an affected accent, used American slang and displayed a taste for ostentatious leisure wear that led him to be seen as the world’s fashion plate.47 He helped popularise skiing and, later, air travel, showing an open-mindedness that led the hostess and heiress Emerald Cunard to tell him that he was ‘the most modernistic man in England’.48 He wore generously cut suits in colourful tweeds and was amused at the anger of courtiers and the King when he was photographed walking in the street with an open umbrella. The prince revelled in the spotlight and he mixed mainly with people, including entertainers and film stars, who shared his tastes. Unlike Mussolini, whose curious outfits were privately criticised or ridiculed by the elite, Edward was hailed as an innovator. This was because fashion innovation was class-based. According to Simmel’s theory of fashion,49 a trickle-down effect operated whereby innovation began with the elite, which then innovated again at the point when its practices ‘trickled down’ to wider groups. Distinction was its prerogative and differentiation the means necessary to maintain this. Thus the Prince of Wales was entitled to innovate, while Mussolini, as a man of lower-class origins – whatever the prominence he had achieved – was not. Unlike Edward, the Duce was not a conscious sartorial pioneer and in some respects his behaviour can be likened to that of a snob. Snobbery has a number of applications, but both a recent history of the phenomenon and an Italian guide to it regard the snob as a social climber who seeks to imitate and win acceptance by the elite.50 In some way, the snob will often fail, either because he cannot fully understand the unwritten codes of the elite and commits some faux pas or because his brashness and novelty make him stand out. Mussolini’s unusual outfits could be described as snobbish because they seemed to be worn almost as costumes. Not always did the sporting air they conveyed correspond to substantive endeavour. Nevertheless, while this interpretation has some merits, it does not seem entirely to account for Mussolini’s sartorial habits. Rather, three elements can be identified as contributing to them.

80

The cult of the Duce

First of all, there was an element of dandyism. This was present in the early phase of Fascism, mainly via the influence of D’Annunzio. The Naples gathering of Fascists on the eve of the March on Rome, recorded for posterity in the documentary film A Noi, offers a gallery of vanities. It shows a wide variety of beards and moustaches, as well as many personal interpretations of the Fascist black shirt. Some senior Fascists, notably Michele Bianchi and Augusto Turati, the party secretary between 1926 and 1930, never liked uniforms and cultivated a personal style which in the case of the latter included bow ties and black-and-white shoes. Mussolini was not immune to the lure of dandyism; in the 1920s he evidently enjoyed having a wardrobe that included many more items than he had previously possessed. Secondly, there was an element of modernism that reflected the Fascists’ impatience with the slow rituals of official Italy. A critical part of Mussolini’s appeal rested on his being a ‘new man’, a young man in a hurry with energy and a great desire to get things done. Some at least of the mixing and matching in his attire derived from his passing swiftly from one activity to another without undergoing a complete change of outfit. This especially applies to the frequently seen combination of formal black jacket and jodhpurs and riding boots. The Duce was accustomed to going horse riding in the morning before attending to his duties and meeting visitors, with whom he would often be photographed still wearing his jodhpurs. Other combinations juxtaposed the civilian and the military, and country and town wear. Thirdly, Mussolini seems to have desired, from quite early on, to be visually memorable. He was aware that writers, artists and some politicians (notably Garibaldi but also, in a different way, Francesco Crispi) used clothes to project a personality. He did not wear clothes as the expression of a lifestyle, like D’Annunzio, nor did he have any particular affinity for beautiful things, but he was keen to make an impact. The combination of physical vigour, sartorial elegance and personal magnetism was commonly found in entertainers, most especially film stars, the leading example of whom was the athletic and charming Douglas Fairbanks. In this respect Mussolini’s outfits can be likened to those of a star. Many such people had trademark visual tropes or affected an eccentricity to be noticed and remembered. The actor and singer Alberto Rabagliati, for example, wore evening wear during the daytime, while Maurice Chevalier wore a panama hat with a dinner jacket.51 Undoubtedly, there was an awkwardness to some of Mussolini’s odder combinations, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that most of these were deliberate. It is quite possible also that advisers like the diplomat Mario Pansa involuntarily provided Mussolini with something to kick up against. It is known that on one occasion Pansa went to collect the Duce prior to a gala event and found him wearing a black tie instead of a white one with a tailcoat.52 When he tried to remonstrate, Mussolini told him to put on a black



Mass culture and the cult of personality81

tie too so that he would not be alone in breaking the dress code. It should not be forgotten that he was not just trying to win the approval of the social elite – although this was more important to him early in his rule than it would be later – but to communicate an image to the people. He was at once trying to reassure the bourgeoisie by offering a semblance of continuity and to mark a break with the old political class. Appearances were important to him, to the extent that his one-time collaborator Cesare Rossi, writing soon after his demise, dubbed him ‘maniacal in his concern with exteriorities’.53 Mussolini first appeared in the uniform of Honorary Corporal of the Fascist Volontary Militia in 1923, following its incorporation into the army. From the late 1920s, he was seen ever more frequently in uniform. This coincided with a shift towards the martial and the totalitarian within the regime. The Duce was no longer just a man of energy and authority but a dictator whose person was increasingly surrounded by ritual. However, he did not necessarily wear uniforms with more élan than civilian dress. Among senior Fascists, Italo Balbo, Achille Starace, Dino Alfieri, Alessandro Pavolini and Galeazzo Ciano all cut more stylish and dashing figures than their leader. But at least the uniforms, which were all designed specifically for Mussolini, were uniquely his. By this time no observer would in any event have dared voice anything but private criticism of his dress. The shift to uniform deprived would-be pundits of any frame of reference outside Fascism itself. Situated beyond acknowledged style, Mussolini could more effectively develop his individuality in a way that was closely tied to his political project. The dictator’s gestures Mussolini had a sense of the need to hold the attention of the masses that went beyond matters of wardrobe. Various observers saw him as a great actor who ‘has always had a sense of the stage and of choreography’.54 He was a relatively assiduous theatregoer first in Milan and then in Rome. He admired certain actors, notably the Roman artiste Ettore Petrolini, who recorded in his memoirs that Mussolini received him three times and regularly attended his performances, even sending notes of apology when he unexpectedly could not come.55 Mussolini was most at ease in his use of the press. As a journalist, he understood the press more than any other medium. He pored over newspapers, spoke daily to the editor of the Fascist party paper Il Popolo d’Italia,56 fired off missives to other editors and journalists and personally oversaw the briefing documents and censoring instructions that were emitted by the press office of the presidency of the council of ministers. He also granted audiences to large numbers of foreign writers and journalists. However, although he was born in the age of the newspaper, the train and the theatre, Mussolini became prime minister in a period in which, while all of these things were still

82

The cult of the Duce

important, other forms of transport and communication were fast gaining importance. Cars and planes captured the headlines, illustrated magazines distilled events into images, photographs and postcards made the physical appearance of the famous familiar and newsreels and radio brought current events to life. As a young prime minister who was determined to impress a new style on government and impose a new direction on the country, he saw the opportunity that these developments offered for making himself and his daily activities more visible, for capturing the attention of the masses and for presenting himself in a multi-faceted way. He was, as John Diggins has observed, ‘a master of showmanship and propaganda’.57 While the Fascist party secretaries Augusto Turati and then Starace took the lead in building up a set of rituals around the Duce and fostering a personality cult, Mussolini himself was more active in cultivating a more informal imagery and a personalised style that marked him out as modern and dynamic on the one hand, and, rather less frequently, a fairly traditional family man with conventional tastes on the other. The press office under Ciano’s direction was a formidable tool in achieving this, as was the Istituto Luce with its official photographs and newsreels.58 Mussolini personally intervened in shaping his image; for example, he reviewed many of the Luce photographs and newsreels in which he featured and did not hesitate to censor those which failed, for various reasons, to win his approval.59 These included images in which he appeared physically awkward, tired or was in the company of the wrong sort of person (usually too many officials). Late in the life of the regime, the press would have to be instructed to provide ample coverage of Mussolini’s doings, but in the early years he was a publicity magnet who always boosted sales. Cinema and the press, and later radio, all carried news of his visits, speeches and foreign and domestic initiatives far and wide. Among Mussolini’s gestures that were staged entirely for media consumption, and which can be classified as ‘pseudo-events’ according to Boorstin’s definition, were several of his sporting activities.60 He went riding most mornings in the Villa Borghese and he had a long-standing passion for planes and for motor cars. He also fenced and swam. However, there is little evidence that the Duce ever rode a motorcycle except for the cameras or that he was a genuine tennis player or a serious skier, despite documented trips to the slopes of Terminillo outside Rome. Various witnesses attest to the staged nature of his tennis matches, which were laid on for the foreign as well as the domestic press.61 The only photographs that exist of him skiing in fact do not show him actually engaged in this activity, but rather standing in the snow bare-chested as though he were about to set off down the slopes. The physique he displayed, unlike the topless harvesting that featured in a celebrated newsreel (Il Duce trebbia il grano, 1938), did not signal his peasant origins and tireless capacity for hard work so much as a generic toughness and indiffer-



Mass culture and the cult of personality83

ence to matters of comfort. By the same token, the motorcycle was adopted as a vehicle suited for local party officials and it acquired specifically Fascist connotations. Mussolini’s use of the vehicle wearing goggles and beret does not appear to have extended to the open road, but it nonetheless sent a message that if a Moto Guzzi was good enough for the Duce then it was good enough for everyone. In this way an image of Mussolini was forged and disseminated that was made up of a mixture of fact and fiction. Events and pseudo-events formed the manner in which his place at the centre of public consciousness was perpetuated. In the USA, news-hungry reporters recognised in him a readymade machine for producing stories. ‘The press gives the public what it wants and Mussolini was an irresistible “human pseudo-event” who captivated Americans simply because so much interest had been generated about him’, Diggins observes.62 The multifaceted Duce took shape in a specific context, namely that in which there was a need to overcome the image of menace that had characterised him in the early 1920s and which was counter-productive in the aftermath of the Matteotti affair. Showing him in a variety of contexts and guises served both to humanise the Duce and to establish his exceptionality and ubiquity. He emerged as a man of limitless vigour and energy, with the physical as well as the intellectual and political qualities to lead Italy to a new dawn. In the same way a family narrative was developed that brought his children (although not, except on rare occasions, his wife Rachele) into the public eye. Illustrated magazines occasionally published images of the Mussolini family at Villa Torlonia; the marriage of his daughter Edda to Galeazzo Ciano, and the military experiences of the older males, Bruno and Vittorio, were widely publicised. When Mussolini’s brother Arnaldo died in 1931, and when Bruno was killed in 1941, public sympathy was widespread and this deepened when he published book-length appreciations of the deceased.63 Among the visual tropes that came to characterise the image of Mussolini, one involved the use of animals as props. The best-known of these show him toying with the lion cub Italia that was given to him by an admirer and which he kept first at home and then used to visit at the zoo, entering her cage cautiously equipped with leather gloves. He was frequently photographed with her and even travelled with her in his car. Born under the sign of Leo, Mussolini felt an affinity with these majestic beasts, which also, on the symbolic plane, evoked Garibaldi (‘the lion of Caprera’). Tigers and cats were unbiddable and this indifference to authority appealed to him. He liked to think that he had ‘a beast’s intuition’,64 and saw himself as a political animal with an unrivalled instinct. Over the years he was associated with, or likened to, many animals. Cats and birds of prey were the favourites (one observer referred to his ‘eaglelike eyes, full of flames and of sweetness’).65 He ­sometimes received gifts of

84

The cult of the Duce

horses as well as other animals, including parrots from South America. Emilio Lussu noted that Mussolini seemed like a horse when he walked, while he toyed with adversaries like a cat with a mouse.66 Animal associations highlighted the primitive, wild element of Mussolini’s personality, an aspect of which he was proud. But they could also be turned against him; one hostile senator described him as ‘a lion of cardboard’ who was easily led,67 while anti-fascist and foreign cartoonists drew him in various guises, as a dog, a snake, a sea monster, a toad and other unappealing members of the animal kingdom. Something of Mussolini’s polyvalent appeal can be seen in the number and variety of requests for his presence or for autographed photographs that reached his office. In each relevant case the local prefect provided information on the background of the person making the request. Aristocrats, senior military officers, foreign diplomats and the like stood far more chance than anyone else both on account of their prominence and their awareness of the appropriate channels to go through. Many institutions and associations wanted to have Mussolini as an honorary member or honorary president. There was also a constant demand from organisations of every type, as well as individuals, for autographed photographs of the Duce.68 Ordinary people in their droves also felt an urge to inform him, and also his family members, of personal events like weddings, births or deaths, sometimes including photographs or small objects with their message. The dictator’s postbag included drawings, poems and musical compositions sent by admirers.69 All of these bore witness to the way that Mussolini was adored like a star. ‘The love for a star’, Edgar Morin wrote, ‘is without jealousy, can be shared and is not very sexual, in other words, it is adoring.’70 Fans, he added, want to be acknowledged and loved in return, even though they know that their adoration is not reciprocal. What they hope for is ‘consolation or advice, help or protection’.71 The commercial sphere The fascination with Mussolini became a feature of commercial culture. This phenomenon was not wholly separate from the regime’s own propaganda efforts, but it was not entirely reducible to these. Magazines and postcard manufacturers were among those who exploited Mussolini’s popularity for commercial ends by using his image on the covers or in endless series of postcards. As Enrico Sturani has shown, the majority of the eight million postcards of Mussolini that entered circulation during the life of the regime were not produced by the Partido Nazionale Fascista (PNF) or official organisations; they were made and sold by private companies.72 As early as 1922, vendors of toiletries were selling a soap bar in the shape of Mussolini’s head while shop-



Mass culture and the cult of personality85

keepers up and down the peninsula employed busts and p ­ hotographs in their 73 window displays. The central state archive in Rome conserves all the requests that were submitted by artists, designers, photographers, entrepreneurs and others to commercialise Mussolini’s name or image. These were all brought to the Duce’s attention and received from him either approval or denial of permission. The sheer variety of proposals conveys something of the extent to which Mussolini became a centre of commercial activity. Among them were several from factories of ceramics to reproduce and sell terracotta busts and medallions of Mussolini, for a leather wallet featuring his image, a car radiator-grille cover in Mussolinian profile, drinking glasses featuring the teetotal Mussolini’s image (and bearing the legend ‘Toast your Duce with the fine wine of Italy’).74 In all cases, prefects submitted reports on the morality and political standing of the applicant. By no means all requests were accepted and where (as in the case of the glasses) the sole end appeared to be financial speculation, rejection was usual.75 A continuous battle was fought between commercial enterprises seeking to exploit Mussolini’s fame and popularity and close collaborators of the Duce engaged in efforts to avoid trivialisation and banalisation of Fascism’s greatest asset. The regime itself invaded city centres with its parades and spectacles, its watchwords and slogans; busts and photographs of Mussolini appeared in shop windows, magazines were filled with news of the Duce and posters decorated city walls. Much of this was orchestrated from above, but some of it was simply the product of a movement generated by popular expectations and the enthusiastic participation of individuals and businesses. What gave rise to a demand for effigies of the Duce was a huge fan base. All this created mixes and overlaps between political and commercial culture. A regime that aimed to shape and condition clothing, leisure and domestic life inevitably entered the very realms in which consumer culture and modern communication were active. Some have compared Mussolini to the promoter Barnum or to the director of big-budget cinematic spectaculars, Cecil B. de Mille,76 while Richard Bosworth has written of the simultaneous ‘sacralisation and commercialisation of political life’.77 The juxtaposition of the would-be-sacred and the profane is evident in photographs of Mussolini addressing crowds in squares adorned with large advertisements for Martini and Cinzano.78 Despite efforts to conceptualise Fascism as an all-consuming religion, the people who gathered to hear and see the Duce were people who also went to the cinema, read magazines, took an interest in fashion and looked at advertisements and shop windows.79 ‘The star-as-god and the star-as-merchandise, which are two facets of the same reality, refer, in the first case, to a fundamental anthropology and, in the second, to the sociology of the twentieth century’, Morin noted.80

86

The cult of the Duce

Conclusion Mussolini was more than a political leader or dictator. For a long period he was a suggestive figure who occupied a space in the universe of the international media as well as the domestic one. Between 1923 and 1943 he appeared on the cover of Time no fewer than eight times (Hitler managed one cover, Stalin two). In this period commodification spilled over into fields including religion and art as well as politics. This trend provoked considerable opposition in Italy, as elsewhere, from those who championed spirituality against materialism. Fascists railed against the spirit of the age and fervently championed their own austere alternative vision of modernity. But their propagandists neither disdained modern techniques nor rejected new types of communication. Indeed, the very eclecticism and opportunism of their movement meant that they often made the most of them. In any event, in a dictatorship contaminations and overlaps are unavoidable as distinctions between politics and entertainment are abolished. Mussolini, ultimately, was not a big star because he was an extraordinary being but because democracy had been quashed. Notes  1 See E. Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).  2 See for example L. Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), which begins with Alexander the Great, and Tom Payne, Fame (London: Vintage, 2009), which draws on the classic world and its myths to analyse contemporary fame.  3 J. Roach, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007) focuses on the English Restoration period.  4 R. Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) focuses on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while the books which focus entirely on the twentieth are too numerous to cite.  5 For more on this, see S. Gundle, ‘Le origini della spettacolarità nella politica di massa’, in M. Ridolfi (ed.), Propaganda e comunicazione politica (Milan: Mondadori, 2004), pp. 1–24.  6 See S. Gundle, Glamour: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Ch. 5.  7 Charisma, too, became a manufactured quality at this time. See S. Gundle, ‘The death (and re-birth) of the hero: charisma and manufactured charisma in modern Italy’, Modern Italy, 3:2 (1998), 173–89.  8 See S. Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin (New York: Basic Books, 1996).  9 W. Lippmann, Public Opinion (1st edn 1922, New York: The Free Press, 1949). 10 Ibid., p. 9. 11 D. Boorstin, The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream (London: Penguin, 1962).



Mass culture and the cult of personality87

12 Lippmann, Public Opinion, p. 150. 13 Boorstin, The Image, p. 55 14 Lippmann, Public Opinion, p. 158. 15 Ibid., p. 61. 16 On the roles of consumption and politics in the modernisation of Europe and the USA, see L. Paggi, Americanismo e riformismo: la socialdemocrazia europea nell’­ economia mondiale aperta (Turin: Einaudi, 1989), pp. 5–6. 17 See for example M. Ledeen, The First Duce: D’Annunzio at Fiume (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). 18 See W. L. Adamson, Embattled Avantgardes: Modernism’s Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, pp. 81–2. 19 Ibid., p. 81. 20 L. Passerini, Mussolini immaginario (Rome–Bari, Laterza, 1990), p. 5. 21 Quoted in G. Bottai, Diario 1935–1944, ed. G.B. Guerri (Milan: Rizzoli, 1982), p. 215. 22 C. Malaparte, Muss. Il grande imbecille (Milan: Luni, 1999), p. 33. 23 Bottai, Diario, p. 112. 24 A. Blanco White, The New Propaganda (London: Gollancz, 1939), pp. 11–12. 25 F. C. Bartlett, Political Propaganda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), pp. 39–40. 26 P. Sorlin, Italian National Cinema, 1896–1996 (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 48–9 and G. Bertellini and J. Reich, ‘Maciste, cosi simile al Duce’, La Gazzetta di Parma, 7 July 2007, p. 7. 27 See J. Reich, ‘Slave to Fashion: Masculinity, Suits, and the Maciste Films of Italian Silent Cinema’, in A. Munch (ed.), Fashion in Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). 28 See D. Lotti, Emilio Ghione l’ultimo apache: vita e film di un divo italiano (Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna, 2008). 29 D. Biondi, La fabbrica del duce (Bologna: Cappelli, 1973), pp. 88–9. 30 M. Bedel, Fascisme an VII (Paris: Gallimard, 1930), p. 20. 31 H. Béraud, Ce que j’ai vu à Rome (Paris: Éditions de France, 1929), p. 38. 32 Cited in G. Bertellini, ‘Duce/divo: masculinity, racial identity, and politics among Italian Americans in 1920s New York City’, Journal of Urban History, 31:5 (2005), 685–726 (p. 695). 33 R. Renzi, ‘Il Duce ultimo divo’, in Renzi (ed.), Sperduti nel buio: il cinema muto italiano e il suo tempo (1905–1930) (Bologna: Cappelli, 1991), p. 131. See also Renzi, ‘Il cinema, una regione’, in R. Finzi (ed.), L’Emilia Romagna (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), pp. 821–2. 34 See G. Bernagozzi, Il mito dell’immagine (Bologna: Clueb, 1983), pp. 113–14; E.G. Laura, Le stagioni dell’aquila: storia dell’Istituto Luce (Rome: Ente dello spettacolo, 2000), p. 103. 35 V. De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 205. See also D. Mack Smith, Mussolini (1st edn 1981, London: Phoenix 1994), p. 114.

88

The cult of the Duce

36 Bertellini, ‘Duce/divo’. 37 C. Berneri, Mussolini: psicologia di un dittatore (1st edn 1937, Milan: Edizioni Azione Comune, 1966), p. 49. 38 The numerous bodily descriptions in biographies of the inter-war period are cited and reviewed in Passerini, Mussolini immaginario, pp. 70–6, 122–3. 39 See for example Biondi, La fabbrica del duce; S. Luzzatto, Il corpo del duce (Turin: Einaudi, 1998); D.G. Horn, Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction and Italian Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); S. Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 40 C. Rossi, Mussolini com’era (Rome: Ruffolo, 1947), p. 54. 41 Ibid., p. 76. According to Rossi, Manlio Morgagni loaned him various garments. 42 It has been suggested that his mistress Margherita Sarfatti provided sartorial advice in this period. However, she was not present in Rome in the period immediately following his appointment as prime minister. 43 R. Mussolini, La mia vita con Benito (Milan: Mondadori, 1948), p. 74; Biondi, La fabbrica del duce, p. 95. 44 For some brief reflections on Mussolini’s wardrobe at this time, see E. G. Laura (ed.), Immagine del fascismo. Vol. 1: La conquista del potere (Milan: Longanesi, 1973), p. 9. 45 Anecdote cited, without source, in S. Bertoldi, Camicia nera (Milan: Rizzoli, 1994), p. 67. 46 See A. De Ambris in R. De Felice (ed.), Benito Mussolini: Quattro testimonianze (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1976), p. 53. See also L. Passerini, ‘Mussolini’, in M. Isnenghi (ed.), I luoghi della memoria: personaggi e date dell’Italia unita (Rome: Laterza, 1997), p. 169. 47 S. Margetson, The Long Party: High Society in the Twenties and Thirties (Farnborough: Saxon House, 1974), p. 230. See also D. J. Taylor, Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation, 1918–1940 (London: Chatto & Windus, 2007), pp. 29–30. 48 See Gundle, Glamour, pp. 151–2. 49 G. Simmel, ‘Fashion’, International Quarterly, 10 (1904), 130–50. 50 F. Rouvillois, Histoire du snobisme (Paris: Flammarion, 2008), p. 18; A. Spinosa, L’ABC dello snobismo (Milan: Rizzoli, 1981), p. 15. 51 On stars and their bypassing of conventional fashion rules, see E. Morin, Les stars (1st edn 1957, Paris: Seuil, 1972), pp. 47–8. 52 P. Monelli, Mussolini piccolo borghese (1st edn 1950, Milan: Vallardi, 1983), p. 109. 53 Rossi, Mussolini com’era, p. 245. 54 Berneri, Mussolini, p. 45. 55 E. Petrolini, Un po’ per celia e un po’ per non morir… (Rome: Signorelli, 1936), pp. 190–2. On Mussolini’s appreciation of Petrolini, see Mussolini, La mia vita con Benito, pp. 103–4. 56 For an account of these daily calls by the man who was on the receiving end, see G. Pini, Filo diretto con Palazzo Venezia (Bologna: Cappelli, 1950).



Mass culture and the cult of personality89

57 J. P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 56. 58 See P. V. Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso: fascismo e mass media (Rome: Laterza, 1975), pp. 101–7, 279–313. 59 M. Franzinelli and E. V. Marino, Il duce proibito (Milan: Mondadori, 2003), pp. xiv–xxxvi, esp. xxv–xxviii. 60 Diggins in fact entitled a section of his Mussolini and Fascism ‘Mussolini: the “Human Pseudo-Event” ’ (pp. 55–6). 61 Monelli, Mussolini piccolo borghese, p. 151. 62 Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, p. 56. 63 B. Mussolini, Vita di Arnaldo (Milan: Popolo d’Italia, 1932) and Parlo con Bruno (Milan: Hoepli, 1942). 64 Bottai, Diario, p. 99. 65 See A. Cerri, Il duce nei pensieri di undicimila baresi (Bari: Laterza, 1926), p. 11. 66 E. Lussu, Marcia su Roma e dintorni (1st edn 1945, Turin: Einaudi, 2002), pp. 87–8. 67 Mack Smith, Mussolini, p. 130. 68 After a period in which they were quite often granted, most of these requests were declined, on the grounds of the physical impossibility of satisfying all of them. Mussolini’s secretaries responded negatively, ‘in view of the general decision not to accept any more requests of this type’, sometimes making reference to their being too numerous. See for example the response to the Commandante del distretto militare di Pistoia, April 1931, Archivio Centrale dello Stato (henceforth ACS), Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri (henceforth PCM), 1931–33, f. 20, sotto-f. 1, p. 816. 69 See for some examples ACS, Segreteria Particolare del Duce, CO ‘Udienze’, 1.B. 3086 – Lettera A, 1. B. 3087 – Lettera B, 1. B. 3088 – Lettera C. 70 Morin, Les stars, p. 68. 71 Ibid., p. 77. 72 E. Sturani, Le cartoline per il duce (Turin: Edizioni del Capricorno, 2003), p. 43. 73 Biondi, La fabbrica del duce, p. 94. 74 ACS, PCM, 1937–39, b. 20. f. 1, various sub-folders. 75 ACS, PCM 1937–39, b. 20. f. 1, sub-folder 8404, 18 August 1939 contains a letter from G. Malagola to Rachele Mussolini, in which the writer, frustrated by the refusal of the competent authorities to allow him to sue the image of the Duce on drinking glasses, begged Mussolini’s wife to give a ‘a word of support’ so that ‘permission will be given automatically by direct concession’. 76 M. Cardillo, Il duce in moviola: politica e divismo nei cinegiornali e documentari “Luce” (Bari: Dedalo, 1983) p. 91. 77 R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini (London: Arnold, 2002), p. 211. 78 See S. Gundle, ‘Un Martini per il Duce: l’immaginario del consumismo in Italia negli anni Venti e Trenta’, in A. Villari (ed.), L’arte della pubblicità: il manifesto italiano e le avanguardie 1920–1940 (Milan: Silvana editoriale, 2008) for some reflections on this type of curious juxtaposition.

90

The cult of the Duce

79 These issues are explored at length in D. Forgacs and S. Gundle, Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). 80 Morin, Les stars, p. 9.

Part II

The Duce and the Fascist Regime

6

A town for the cult of the Duce: Predappio as a site of pilgrimage Sofia Serenelli

First among the European dictators, Mussolini transformed his place of birth, the village of Predappio, into a site for the celebration of his own political cult. At the heart of the so-called ‘Red Romagna’, on the hilly road in the Rabbi valley leading to Tuscany from the town of Forlì, Predappio was built to accommodate a traditional Catholic religious ritual: pilgrimage. Before 1925, the year of the town’s foundation, Predappio was not where it is today. In its place, at the bottom of the medieval village of Predappio, stood the hamlet of Dovìa, a cluster of simple buildings at the crossing of two mule tracks (one linking the Romagna region to Tuscany along the Rabbi valley, the other leading to other little villages and ruins on the local Apennines, such as Meldola and Rocca delle Caminate). The community was so small that it did not even have a church.1 Here in Dovìa were the two houses where Mussolini was born and spent his youth. Not far along the Rabbi valley, in the local cemetery of San Cassiano, Mussolini’s mother was buried in a mass grave. In the space of a few years, these three places (the two houses and the cemetery) became the epicentres of the new town of ‘Predappio’: a town that was literally invented and built from scratch according to the symbolic and practical needs associated with the ritual of mass pilgrimages. In the 1930s, the pilgrimage to Predappio developed into a huge social and political phenomenon. Thanks to the regime’s propaganda efforts to mobilise ever-increasing numbers in political tourism, the visit to Mussolini’s place of origin was considered proof of loyalty to the Duce and Fascism. The symbolic value attached to Mussolini’s birthplace became so strong that it did not die with the end of the regime. After the war, the San Cassiano cemetery remained the site of pilgrimages to the tomb of the Mussolini family, where the Duce’s own body was finally buried in 1957.2 Since the return of Mussolini’s body to Predappio, the qualitative and quantitative nature of the cult of pilgrimages has varied in relation to a number of factors. Transformations have occurred within the neo-fascist movements and, more recently, the historical ‘revisionism’ and ‘rehabilitation’ of Fascism have led to further developments in neofascist tourism. As a consequence, private businesses and marketing strategies

94

The cult of the Duce

have exerted increasing influence over the form and content of the political cult. Yet, the changing features of the cult of the Duce have also been related to the national dialogue with the legacy of Fascism. In the case of Predappio, which has been firmly left-wing since the end of the war, this has meant a dayby-day mediation with its ‘embarrassing inheritance’.3 The history of Predappio, from its origins to the present day, can be divided into three phases. The first, under Fascism, is that of its birth and development as the ‘Holy Land’ and ‘ideal destination of every Italian.’4 The second phase runs from 1957 to 1983 when, with the return of the Duce’s body and the reemergence of the ritual of pilgrimages, Predappio became the object of a ‘contested’ identity: between a site of (neo-fascist) memory on the one hand and a site of public repression of the Fascist past on the other. The third phase, from 1983 to the present day, began with the celebration of the centenary of the Duce’s birth and is characterised by a resurgence of neo-fascist pilgrimages. This phase, set against the backdrop of the new ideological framework created by the fall of the Berlin Wall, has also been marked by a new relationship of the local authorities with the subjects (and the object) of the cult. In each phase, both the symbolic meanings of the ritual of pilgrimages and the underlying myth of the Duce have undergone significant changes. This chapter examines the first of the three phases of the cult of Predappio. It focuses first on the construction of the town in relation to the myths behind the cult of the Duce, using local memories and documents.5 Secondly, it analyses the quantitative and qualitative evolution of the rite of mass pilgrimages. The origins of Predappio as a ‘site’ of the cult Places and myths In the San Cassiano cemetery, outside the ancient parish, less than two miles from Dovìa, the grave of Mussolini’s mother, Rosa Maltoni, became the object of isolated pilgrimages soon after the foundation of the Fasci di Combattimento in 1919, as militants of the new political movement sought to demonstrate respect and homage to their leader.6 Perhaps this was the reason why, when the time came for the exhumation of the remains, the priest Don Pietro Zoli wrote to Benito and his brother Arnaldo in Milan in June 1921 to suggest that they be reburied in a ‘proper grave’.7 In a few years, the little cemetery became the centre of a ritual of political ‘pilgrimage’, which was at the root of the self-celebrating reinvention of Mussolini’s home town. This development went hand in hand with the emergence of the myths and images of Mussolini created by the first public biographies following the rise of Fascism.8 A few months after the March on Rome, postcards were issued portraying Mussolini’s return to his ‘land of origin’ on Sunday 15 April 1923, when he visited Dovìa for the first time since he had abjured socialism. These



A town for the cult of the Duce95

postcards constituted a form of initial propaganda for the ‘land of origin’ and its accompanying myths (i.e. the myth of romagnolità [Romagna-ness] and, within it, the anti-bourgeois myth of the Duce’s popular origins). They also indicated which places would become the principal sites of pilgrimage and the fulcrums of the urban development of ‘Predappio Nuova’.9 In one postcard Mussolini was shown visiting the ‘humble’ grave of his mother in the San Cassiano cemetery; in another he was photographed surrounded by his ‘own people’ in front of the house where he was born, and which, according to the local press, was publicly donated to him on the same day. The same year, 1923, was also when the influential biography of Mussolini, L’uomo nuovo by Antonio Bertramelli, insisted on the ‘goodness’, ‘simplicity’, ‘passion’ and ‘force of sacrifice’ distinguishing the ‘race’ which gave birth to Mussolini. Reference was made to the ‘sacred’ figure of the mother, ‘life mistress and mistress of the house’.10 The mother figure accordingly gained substantial importance within the orchestration of the myth. It is not by chance that the first building of Predappio Nuova was a church dedicated to Rosa Maltoni (the Church of Santa Rosa). Indeed, the cult of the Duce in Predappio was deeply related to the images and rituals of the Catholic religion, with the mother of the Duce being progressively associated with the image of the Virgin Mary.11 Both ‘daughter’ and ‘rearer’ of the people, she was regarded as the woman who gave the Italian nation a new ‘Messiah’. The construction of Predappio Nuova Plans for the construction of Predappio Nuova on the site of Dovìa were started in 1923. A pretext was found in the ‘impending’ risk of landslides, which, according to a scientific commission created ad hoc, made it necessary to move the medieval town of Predappio from the mountainside above the hamlet of Dovìa. At the same time, by royal decree, the territory under the administration of Predappio was enlarged by suppressing and including other local communes, among them Fiumana. Significant enlargement and administrative reorganisation of the local territory was taking place across the whole province of Forlì, which was allowed to incorporate such highly symbolic sites as the source of the River Tiber on Mt Fumaiolo. Both the town and the province of the Duce were taking shape in direct and explicit reference to the myth of Rome.12 This highly complex administrative reorganisation had long-lasting social and cultural consequences due, in no small part, to the traditionally strong and separate political identities of each town. The republican Fiumana, for example, neither welcomed the suppression of its administrative status of commune nor appreciated its unification with the socialist Predappio. Nor did the people of the old Predappio willingly agree to be moved to Dovìa, as the mayor of Predappio’s repeated communications with Mussolini indicate. In a letter to the Prime Minister, he pointed out that

96

The cult of the Duce

‘the local people in no way intended to leave Predappio’, due to the ‘rooted antagonism between Predappio and the socialists from Dovìa’.13 It is not by chance that in these first years the local newspapers were full of references to the economic advantages brought by the displacement of the old Predappio and the construction of a new town. In this way, it was argued, the traditional scourge of unemployment would be erased from the local countryside.14 However, this operation had a profound impact on the sociocultural identities of the local people. Anna, from a peasant and ‘traditionally communist’ family (born in 1934), remembers that in Predappio Alta, after the war, the woman who owned the tobacconist had refused to pass through [the new] Predappio … because she had been deprived of her own municipality. When she needed to go to Forlì, she made use of alternative roads (Dovadola, Castrocaro, etc…), but she would never go through the new Predappio. This is because many people from the old Predappio had been as shocked as she was by the displacement of their own municipality.15

Although the authority in charge of the displacement of the old Predappio, the Genio Civile in Forlì, identified the best place to rebuild the commune in an area called Baccanello, close to the San Cassiano cemetery on the road running along the Rabbi valley,16 it was Mussolini who decided the location of the new town. Predappio Nuova was to be built on the site of Dovìa and organised around the two most significant buildings: the casa natale, where Mussolini had been born, and the house in Varano di Costa where Rosa Maltoni had had her school and where the Mussolini family had moved to live on the upper floor. The first building of Predappio Nuova was the church, dedicated to Santa Rosa (in honour of Rosa Maltoni), near to the casa natale, followed by a block of council houses known as Becker (see below) built for the people moving from the old Predappio. The construction of council houses was conceived as a socially minded operation to help justify the displacement of the old town. At that time, Fascism and Mussolini’s leadership were still in a somewhat delicate phase, particularly in the province that Mussolini intended to transform into the geographical reference point for his personal cult.17 The Duce therefore had to be prudent, which is why, in order to avoid accusations of favouritism towards ‘his’ new town, he did not participate in the ceremonies for the foundation of Predappio Nuova on 30 August 1925.18 The postcard produced on that occasion showed, instead, his wife Rachele, his brother Arnaldo (anticipating the crucial role of the Duce’s family both within the myth and the political–administrative life of Predappio) and the PNF secretary Roberto Farinacci, whose presence served the dual purpose of winning over the local Fascist factions and guaranteeing some publicity for the birth of the new town. Indeed, in his speech held significantly from the stairs of the casa natale, Farinacci stressed the ‘importance of the political faith’ and the ‘social rank of



A town for the cult of the Duce97

Fascism, … which is proletarian and, above all, rural’.19 This was the principal characteristic that Mussolini, who strictly supervised the quantity, quality and location of the new buildings, intended to give to his home town. The construction of Predappio Nuova took place in a not always coherent fashion over more than fifteen years under the supervision of a series of urban planners and architects chosen directly by the Duce.20 The image of the new town was decided by the propagandistic need to adhere to the myths at the heart of Fascism (those of the nation, ruralism and modernity). It was also influenced by the changing architectural styles relating to the evolution of the image of Mussolini and the ways of representing his political power. The urban form of Predappio was established by the symbolic and practical needs of the ritual of pilgrimage. The first territorial arrangement was approved during a second visit of Mussolini to his home town in May 1926, when the casa natale, Palazzo Varano (the house where Mussolini had lived), and the cemetery of San Cassiano were made the three epicentres for the new development. The casa natale was refurbished with its reassembled ‘original’ furniture thanks to the initiative of the mayor (Mussolini’s only criticism was that the mattresses on the beds should have their wool stuffing replaced with more humble corn leaves).21 The Palazzo Varano, which in 1927 became the new town hall of Predappio Nuova, was decorated with 11 cases full of ceramics sent by Mussolini himself.22 The cemetery was enlarged in 1929 and reconstructed around the new chapel built for the Mussolini family, whose crypt from 1932 accommodated the remains of both Mussolini’s parents (his father Alessandro, whose socialist militancy led him to occupy a secondary role in the Fascist mythology, was now moved to the cemetery of Predappio in symbolic affirmation of the new centrality of family values).23 Around these epicentres, Predappio Nuova was conceived as a showcase for the myths and also the efficiency of the regime. The ‘town of the Duce’ was destined, as the local press predicted, for an ‘agricultural, industrial and commercial future’.24 From 1926, when Predappio Nuova welcomed the first mass pilgrimages, these symbolic places of cult complemented the propaganda function of the buildings built for everyday life in the developing town. The latter were given particular prominence in the first tourist guides. In addition to the Santa Rosa church, whose main function was to promote the myth of Mussolini’s mother, there were the first council houses along the wide and long avenue, Viale Benito Mussolini. Running from the casa natale to the square at the foot of the hill where the new town hall, Palazzo Varano, was located, the Viale Benito Mussolini was in fact the axis around which the town developed into a form of showcase of Fascism. Particular attention was focused on the Becker council houses, both as a social legitimation for moving the old town and as an indication of the international appeal of Fascism (they were built thanks to a private English donation). Most attention, however, was concentrated on the

98

The cult of the Duce

new school. In one of the guides it was defined as ‘the best example of modern school construction’25 and a symbol of the vital importance of educating the new generations in Fascist doctrine. The building of schools in most of the hamlets of the province, very often funded by Mussolini himself through special subventions,26 is underlined in local memories. References to the possibility of attending a school are frequently associated with a sense of the social and material privilege that accompanied living in Mussolini’s home town: Predappio was my home town. It was new, there was everything: there was the GIL house [Gioventù Italiana del Littorio], we used to go to the cinema, there was the football pitch, there was everything! All things that people from other places did not have. I was one of the first boys to go to the primary school. And it was later at school that you could see what difference it made. We villagers from Predappio, we already knew how to hold a pencil, while the kids from the countryside, they didn’t. (Piersante, middle-class family from Predappio, Catholic, born 1930).27

After 1932, with the launch at a national level of Predappio and the province of Forlì as the ‘Duce’s homeland’, the town acquired the monumental architecture associated with the ‘cult of the littorio’. The buildings were no longer eclectic in style but rationalist: the Casa del Fascio, towering over one side of Piazza XXVIII Ottobre at the end of Viale Mussolini, and the GIL headquarters, slightly back on the other side. Facing the Casa del Fascio in the main square, there was also a new monumental parish church. This, however, was still constructed in the eclectic style.28 In the same period, Mussolini’s desire to make his home town an example of modernity – and, perhaps more importantly, the need to create a more substantial economic base than that linked to popular tourism – led to the foundation of a local branch of the Caproni aircraft company (1935). The factory, whose construction was linked in propaganda to the Fascist myth of aviation, was built on the hillside on the way to Predappio Vecchia, exactly where, only 12 years earlier, the threat of landslide had caused the medieval hamlet to be moved from its original site. The arrival of the Caproni factory stimulated migration to the new town of both local peasants and technical personnel from the branch in Milan. The population rapidly grew from around 600 to 10,000 and Predappio was transformed into ‘a town of a certain importance’ (Valdes, social democrat from socialist family, born 1924).29 In local memory, as well as in letters sent to Mussolini by pupils from the elementary school in Predappio, the wealth and employment provided by the construction of the new town and later, by the Caproni factory, are frequently stressed.30 But local memory also refers to the new lack of homogeneity in the town’s sociocultural composition, which made it very different to – and politically more malleable than – the other hamlets in the locality. Predappio was therefore a sort of



A town for the cult of the Duce99

‘cathedral in the desert’ compared to the surrounding local territory, not only because of its urban features, but also for its sociocultural profile. By 1937, when the mass influx of pilgrims made it necessary for Piazza 28 Ottobre to be paved to avoid ‘mud in wintertime and dust in summertime during the mass gatherings’,31 Predappio was already provided with all the symbols for the ritual for which it was conceived and the structures needed for its civil and social life. Sometimes it was necessary to curb the excessive zeal of wealthy admirers making personal donations or promoting subscriptions to finance celebrative constructions in the town of the Duce. Indeed Mussolini was eager to maintain the sense of the humble peasant origins that had ‘fortified the soul and muscles of the prodigious child’ and accompanied his ‘saint Mother in her apostolate of child-bearer and educator’.32 In 1938, for example, just before the visit to Predappio of King Victor Emmanuel, he ordered the removal of the huge arch over the access steps to the casa natale from the market square below (the square, surrounded by an elliptic exedra cut in two halves by the monumental entrance to the casa natale, was completely separated from the house above, which was accessible only by a simple winding path). On the eve of Italy’s entry into the Second World War, and the onset with it of the slow decline of the town provoked by the crisis of the myth of Mussolini, Predappio was described as a disappointingly ‘messy village desecrated by postcard shops’33 now fully given over to the symbolic and practical demands of the cult. It was an oblong settlement running from the casa natale to Piazza XXVIII Ottobre along Viale Benito Mussolini, surrounded by monumental buildings showcasing the efficiency of the regime. On the hill above the square was the town hall – where Mussolini had grown up. It was accessed from the square via a monumental staircase facing the Rocca delle Caminate (a medieval castle about seven miles from Predappio donated to Mussolini in 1927 and from then on his local residence).34 Instead of being a place for the town’s social life, the main square was conceived as a mass assembly point. The road leading from the square to the cemetery was named after Arnaldo Mussolini. In the square itself, the antique style of the new parish church clashed with the Casa del Fascio’s abstract and rational lines. With its library, restaurant, dance hall, souvenir shop (the only one officially licensed) and the reception room for visitors, the Casa also functioned as a polyvalent centre for the promotion of the cult and town of the Duce. Predappio, the cult and the pilgrims ‘Predappio’ – as Valdes (born 1924) recalls – was always full of visitors, groups, and such like, especially on Sundays. It was always like a celebration, with all these people coming. As lads we particularly

100

The cult of the Duce

joined in with these things. There was a friend of mine, who’s now dead, and he and I used to go around and sell postcards of the casa natale. We used to make money! We used to buy them at the shop and then sell them again. But then our parents stopped us … It was a sort of party for us lads, but we did not have any critical understanding.

The quantitative and qualitative development of the pilgrimages, and their collective meaning, followed a course parallel to the growth of the town of the Duce. The beginning of mass pilgrimages in 1926 was fostered by central government through state institutions and organisations. From 1932, however, the promotion of the pilgrimages was replaced by a need to regulate the increasing (and now also spontaneous) arrival of pilgrims. The growing political and sociocultural significance of the cult was paralleled – and in this case successfully promoted – by the efforts of the tourist propaganda machine. At the end of 1926 the priest of San Cassiano, Don Pietro Zoli, who informally administered the cult of Rosa Maltoni within the cemetery and kept the registers with the visitors’ signatures, could notify Mussolini directly that there was ‘a continuous and increasing influx of many admirers and visitors … from every part of Italy’ and ‘from every sort of social background’.35 With the Matteotti crisis overcome, and the myth of Mussolini bolstered by the first biographies, Predappio was physically ready for much more than the simple ‘homage’ of leading officials to the tomb of Rosa Maltoni – as had occurred between 1919 and 1925. From 1926, the local Fascist newspaper, the Popolo di Romagna, reported visits not only from such senior figures as Ezio Maria Gray, Giuseppe Belluzzo and the PNF Secretary Augusto Turati, but also from the local army and, most importantly, from the workers’ leisure organisation the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (OND) and from schools in the province.36 (It did not yet give the daily tally of pilgrims, however.) It was indeed through the involvement of public institutions and organisations that Predappio initially developed into a site of pilgrimage. At the end of the 1920s, with the passage from secular to markedly more religious attitudes towards the Duce and the other figures encompassed by his myth, Rosa Maltoni became exalted mainly for her role of ‘teacher’ and ‘educator’: it was said to be important to make the San Cassiano cemetery a ‘destination for a continuous flow of school pupils of every age and social class’.37 At the same time the rituals of the pilgrimage were formally modified. Once the casa natale was refurbished and the sala del Duce [Hall of the Duce] in the town hall furnished in 1927, the ‘solemn pilgrimage’ was no longer limited to ‘the sacred place where His Mother sleeps serenely Her eternal rest’, in the San Cassiano cemetery (in the words of a poster from the commune of Forlì inviting the population to take part in the foundation of the new town of Predappio Nuova in 1925).38 There were now stops at the casa natale, the town hall (Palazzo Varano), the Becker council houses and the new school,



A town for the cult of the Duce101

and also, in the case of dignitaries, at the Rocca delle Caminate. The central moment within the ritual was the ‘deed of love’ performed with the visit to the ‘altar’ (as the tomb of Rosa Maltoni was generally called) of the Duce’s mother. For the people who came to Predappio in official groups, either by coach or, from 1927, by train and then by bus from the new train station in Forlì, the promotion of the ‘myth of origins’ and the identification of the Duce with his homeland stimulated the psychological ‘need’ to see his birthplace (beside constituting one of the rare occasions of leisure and mobility). Officially, and sometimes also privately, a visit had the religious status of a ‘vow’.39 It was perceived as a mark of faith in the nation identified with the Fascist leader (and his mother). Additionally, it was seen in propaganda as a means to ‘fortify the spirits’ through the explicit reference to such values as land, family, faith and nation emanating from the ritual and the symbols (and rhetoric) associated with the town. Devotion was also often manifested in the sending of funeral wreaths, plaques and votive gifts (such as the famous iron lamp brought by the Federazione Agricoltori Fascisti from the province of Mantua), and even in the sending of money to celebrate masses for the mother’s soul or goods for the local people.40 From the later 1920s a network of propaganda and marketing developed specifically to promote Mussolini’s ‘homeland’. In 1928 the first stage of the Giro d’Italia cycle race from Predappio to Arezzo inaugurated a series of major sportive events focusing on the province of the Duce. In 1927 Predappio hosted the first National Meeting of Artists and two years later the National Conference of Agriculture. In 1932 the Second Decade of the Fascist Era was opened in Forlì. From 1930 the new Grand Tourism line from Venice to Florence, while ‘offering the tourist the comforts of a pleasurable journey’, provided a 20–minute stop in Predappio Nuova ‘to let the passengers visit the casa natale’.41 The short-term effects of the pilgrimages on Predappio’s economy were remarkable: My father also did good business. My dad, my mum, and me, too – all with a pushcart! I used to sell fizzy drinks and postcards. Many people used to sell postcards. It was like manna from heaven at the time. In the biggest pilgrimages my dad used to use a big hut because more services were needed: drinks, ice-creams … There was the Grattachecca, no alcoholic drinks, but mint drinks, orange juice, ice-cream. … Here, look at this picture: the Marchigiani! There were 10,000 of them. … We could not get out of the main door [facing the main road, Viale Mussolini] with our ice-cream pushcart. So we made a hole in the gate and kept selling ice-cream: ‘Five cents an ice-cream! Five cents an ice-cream!’ we were screaming. We could not even get out! (Piersante, born 1930)

The turning point for the ritual, in both qualitative and quantitative terms, came in 1932. This coincided with the new building programme which

102

The cult of the Duce

­ rovided Predappio with the monumental buildings that symbolised the close p meshing between Fascism and the state. It also marked the beginning of a new phase of ‘exaltation’ of the Duce’s image as a result of the increasing number of Mussolini’s biographies and,42 most importantly, the social impulse given by the new PNF secretary Achille Starace to the myth and cult of the Duce. The rituals remained substantially the same – the main difference was the increased volume of pilgrims, which left Don Pietro Zoli at the cemetery and the town’s mayor, Pietro Baccanelli, at the town hall in Palazzo Varano increasingly ‘breathless’: ‘If you take care of one person, hundreds of others have to wait, and if I guide one group, another seven call!’; ‘I’d like to welcome everyone as is our custom, but our home is much smaller than our heart’, they each said, respectively, in 1934.43 At the centre of the ritual there was still the homage to the Duce’s parents, whose bodies had been reunited in 1932 in the crypt of the new monumental chapel of the Mussolini family around which the San Cassiano cemetery had been reorganised during the previous four years. The town’s mayor continued to welcome groups of visitors to Palazzo Varano – although visits here became more and more selective and reserved for representatives of the most significant groups only. The casa natale accordingly remained the second most important stage of the pilgrimage. However, the tourist guidebooks, which became ever more numerous (and available in different languages) from 1932,44 revealed an increase in the number of sites of the cult, usually described with extracts from Mussolini’s works, most notably his biography of his brother, the Vita di Arnaldo. One reason for this extension was the growth of the cult of the family of the Duce as a consequence of the affirmation of family values within the ideological framework of the regime. After the death of Mussolini’s nephew Sandrino and his brother Arnaldo, the cemetery where they were buried in Paderno, a few miles from Predappio, also became a site of pilgrimage. In 1935 Mussolini personally inaugurated a plaque on the house where his father Alessandro had been born on the Collina farm/estate in the hills above Predappio. The plaque said that, while ‘surrounding with new light the cult of family virtues’ and ‘explaining what is meant by austerity of life’, the site gave the people a further place ‘for its pilgrimages of devotion towards their Leader’.45 Another qualitative change in the cult of the Duce in Predappio was an increased emphasis on choreography, reflecting PNF Secretary Starace’s growing concern with mass orchestration and ritualised spectacle. People in the town, indeed, tended to remember the cult as a repetitive sequence of ‘popular festivals’, with ‘peasants from the country lined up along the route’ and ‘serried ranks of young people in the Gioventù del Littorio uniform, rural housewives, young fascists from the Militia, old Blackshirts, volunteers and war veterans’. This was particularly evident on the most important occasions, such as the visit of the king in June 1938.46



A town for the cult of the Duce103 We were all organised. It was also good fun because, for example, at school they used to say: ‘kids, tomorrow morning you have to come in uniform’. We all had the Balilla or the Figli della Lupa uniforms. And then we were happy because we didn’t have to go to school. We all had to parade with German or Japanese flags. That’s because the Japanese Foreign Minister also came. The king came, and the prince … When the king came, since he was short, they put a grape box on the town hall balcony covered in a cloth to raise him up! And I was down there, dressed in the Balilla uniform. The king came in 1938 and I was eight. (Piersante, born 1930)

In the 1930s it was no longer necessary to promote the Duce’s homeland (which anyway remained an object of propaganda until the end of the regime, with, for example, prestigious conferences and meetings held in the Casa del Fascio in Predappio).47 Instead, the increasing flow of pilgrimages had simply to be controlled. From 1934 the Fascist newspaper Il Popolo di Romagna started to report the figures for daily visitors, which had now risen from hundreds to thousands. At the same time Don Pietro Zoli became zealous with statistics, providing the Duce each month with the number, social class and geographical origin of the pilgrims.48 The same procedure was followed by the provincial Prefecture in Forlì in the case of major meetings.49 The same year a tourist office was created on the site of the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (OND, National After-Work Organisation) in Forlì with the task of regulating the ‘exceptional, rising tide of pilgrims’ that ‘often come together, causing … profound difficulties’, and whose visits resemble more the ‘character of a Sunday outing than trips made to a sacred place with composure and discipline’.50 From the various lists of pilgrims sent to the Duce in Rome, among which were the lists of OND visits made by the Tourist Office in Forlì every three months,51 it is possible to see that the pilgrimages had a largely popular character and also that the OND played a fundamental promotional role. This is confirmed by oral testimonies: We were building an extension on our house. At the old Casa del Fascio [close to Piersante’s house, opposite the market square, below the casa natale on the other side of Viale Mussolini] they organised something like mess rations, with a sort of packed lunch, with a bottle of water and two or three sandwiches. Pilgrims could not afford to go to the restaurant! They were poor people who brought food from home or else had those packed lunches. (Piersante, born 1930)

This also explains why Mussolini never wanted any hotel, unless it was a very modest one, to be built in Predappio.52 Visits should be kept short and therefore cheap, as a letter from the President of the Dopolavoro in Rome made clear, announcing a visit to Predappio to the Prefect of Forlì: ‘The programme [of the visit] is organised so as to keep the stay in Predappio to a minimum in

104

The cult of the Duce

order to reduce expenses and facilitate the participation of the poorest people. This is to ensure that the initiative will achieve its principal aim’ (the widespread diffusion of the cult of the Duce). 53 The largest numbers of pilgrims between 1937 and 1938 were indeed achieved through the OND – as with the 15,000 Blackshirts from Pesaro whom Mussolini exceptionally received at the Rocca delle Caminate.54 However, pilgrims also now came individually, sometimes by bicycle, sometimes on foot, and sometimes as part of long journeys from Turin, Udine or Florence.55 They often combined their trip with a visit to the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution in Rome. The aim was frequently to involve an element of hardship and suffering traditionally associated with the pilgrimage. The most extreme pilgrim was Loreto Starace, cousin of the PNF Secretary, who was transported dead inside a coffin to Predappio Nuova.56 Predappio also became a site of pilgrimage for foreign visitors and dignitaries, especially after the conquest of Ethiopia and the Steel Pact with Germany. These foreign pilgrimages could be official or spontaneous, driven by touristic curiosity or a desire to pay ‘homage’. In January 1933, for example, a visit was paid by the Japanese Minister Yousuke Matsouka – frequently cited in local memories as an indication of the diffusion of Predappio’s fame. Officers of the British Navy came ‘spontaneously to honour’ – so the local press said – ‘the dearest memories of the man admired and followed by the entire world’.57 Visits were paid by Fascists from Dalmatia and Alexandria; by the Hitler Youth in 1937 (marching on foot from Rimini); and by the Prime Minister, the Orthodox Mission, and a newly married couple, from Albania. The highest official acknowledgment was the visit of the king on 6 June 1938 (followed shortly by the rest of the royal family). On that occasion Mussolini, who did not meet the king in Predappio but waited for him at the Rocca delle Caminate, granted the mayor of the town a special fund of 50,000 lire to ‘provide decent uniforms for the local people (youth organisations, volunteers, rural housewives, militia, etc.)’.58 Moreover, exceptional measures of public order made it necessary to take into custody an even ‘greater number of people than on the occasion of the visit of the Führer’ – an indication of persistent marginal resistance towards Fascism in the Romagna region.59 At this stage, the devotional pilgrimage to Predappio amounted to a ‘sacred duty’, both for the average visitor and for the highest state official.60 For ordinary people, whose longing to ‘see’ the Duce was perhaps enhanced by the growing dehumanisation and abstraction of Mussolini’s figure in the later 1930s, the visit to the ‘Duce’s homeland’ became a sort of surrogate for his visual image (in 1939 the Casa del Fascio acquired a Tourist Office, dispensing material on the Duce’s homeland, and a Propaganda Office to serve as an ‘official selling point’ for brochures and postcards). The attraction of Predappio was possibly also encouraged by newsreels, which from the mid-1930s were



A town for the cult of the Duce105

used to promote Mussolini’s home town, investing it always with the ‘rhetoric of religious fervour and faith’, and presenting it in terms of its symbolic value and of the rituals of pilgrimage.61 People who visited the casa natale after the ‘act of devotion’ at San Cassiano cemetery (Mussolini’s parents were by this time referred to as ‘cornerstones of the resurrected Latinity’)62 were sometimes caught by the warden ‘writing something base on the walls’.63 Alternatively, as Piersante (born 1930) humorously recalls: visitors tried to dodge the warden’s control and pick up some of the corn leaf stuffing from the mattress. They thought it was the bed Mussolini used to sleep on, while in fact it was all fake! So the mattresses had to be stuffed again from time to time to keep them in shape. This is the cult of personality: but we were not interested, we were interested in playing.

The collecting of ‘relics’ seems to confirm how the cult of Predappio involved the symbolic transfer and emotional overlapping of lay and religious values. Indeed at the end of the 1930s Predappio was often subjectively described and experienced in the devotional terms that the cult had aimed to encourage. In the casa natale, for example, the ‘humble’ interior and external stairs were sometimes observed ‘in silence’ and ‘with true religion’, as if they were those of ‘a church’.64 Conclusion After the outbreak of the Second World War, logistical difficulties (and in due course, too, the growing crisis surrounding the myth of Mussolini) brought an end to mass pilgrimages, and official visits to Predappio were only paid by dignitaries loyal to the regime. As the carabinieri of the province and the local administration reported in 1943, the interruption of pilgrimages damaged the socioeconomic situation of Predappio, which, in contrast to the surrounding rural area, was characterised by a mixed industrial economy (the Caproni factory was taken over by the Germans in 1943).65 As the journalist Alessandro Schiavi wrote in 1946 in the resuscitated periodical La Piè: ‘For two decades the enlarged, straightened, tree-lined and asphalted road from Forlì had seen a continuous coming and going of remotely controlled pilgrimages.’ In his view Predappio had been a smallscale version of Mussolini’s Italy: ‘Beneath all that stone and marble had been created an artificial and expensive economy with no roots either in the natural conditions of the country or in the normal habits of its people. All this was accordingly bound to fail once its empty and vainglorious author fell.’66 There was much more, however, than simply the material dimensions to the development of Predappio; and the symbolic associations of the town were

106

The cult of the Duce

to be surprisingly long-lasting. Even the liberation army tellingly waited until 28 October (1944) to enter the ‘Mecca of Fascism’, as Predappio was referred to in the diary of a Polish soldier from the allied forces.67 Contrary to most expectations, the cult of Predappio outlived its ‘vainglorious author’ in the post-war period, and, once his body was returned in 1957, it re-emerged in a new guise and competed, on a symbolic level, with the alternative identity that the day of liberation had intended to give the town. Notes  1 M. Proli,‘ “Meta ideale di ogni italiano”: la costruzione della “terra del duce” vista attraverso cronache e immagini’, in M. Ludovici (ed.), Fascismi in Emilia Romagna (Cesena: Il Ponte Vecchio, 1998), p. 103.   2 Cf. S. Luzzatto, Il corpo del duce (Turin: Einaudi, 1998), pp. 214–15. The first postwar re-emergence of the cult of the Duce in Predappio dates back to 1946. Cf. Archivio Stato Forlì, Prefettura di Gabinetto, B. 442, f. 28 and B. 462, ff. ‘Scioperi’ and ‘Ordine Pubblico’.   3 M. Baglioni, ‘Predappio’, in M. Isnenghi (ed.), I luoghi della memoria: simboli e miti dell’Italia unita (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 1996), pp. 507–11.   4 See Proli, ‘ “Meta ideale” ’, pp. 103–28.   5 L. Passerini, Torino operaia e fascismo: una storia orale (Rome: Laterza, 1984) stands as a rare and still unrivalled example of micro-historical and oral-history study on the popular reception of Fascism.   6 See U. Tramonti, Itinerari d’architettura moderna: Forlì, Cesenatico, Predappio (Florence: Alinea, 1997), p. 248.   7 Don Pietro Zoli, letter (18 April 1928), in Archivio Centrale dello Stato (henceforth ACS), Segreteria Particolare del Duce (henceforth SPD), C. O., B. 1263, F. 509.820.   8 Cf. L. Passerini, Mussolini immaginario (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 1998).   9 The name ‘New Predappio’ was given to the new town in order to distinguish it from the old Predappio, which was then renamed Predappio Vecchia. In 1927 ‘Predappio Nuova’ was renamed ‘Predappio’ and ‘Predappio Vecchia’, ‘Predappio Alta’. See Tramonti, Itinerari d’ architettura moderna. 10 A. Bertramelli, L’uomo nuovo (Milan: Mondadori, 1923), pp. 44–5. 11 P. Dogliani, ‘Predappio’, in V. De Grazia and S. Luzzatto (eds.), Dizionario del fascismo, Vol. 2 (Turin: Einaudi, 2003), p. 415. 12 On the enlargement of Predappio’s territory see S. Farolfi, La religione civile nella politica del novecento: Predappio nella biografia mussoliniana e nel mito fascista, Dott. Lett. dissertation, University of Bologna, 1997 and U. Tramonti, ‘Predappio nuova: da borgata rurale a terra di culto’, Memoria e Ricerca, Vol. 2 (1993), pp. 103–13. See also E. Ceccarelli (ed.), Predappio e dintorni: guida illustrata (Forlì: Valbonesi, 1937) and ‘Una parola definitiva sull’origine del nome di Predappio’, Popolo di Romagna, 15 May 1937 (XV, 19). 13 Letter from the Minister of Public Works, 6 May 1925 and telegram



14

15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22

23

24 25 26 27 28

29 30

A town for the cult of the Duce107 from the Podestà of Forlì, 4 June 1925, ACS, SPD, C. O., B. 937, F. 51028. II-2. ‘Fugace visita di S. E. Mussolini a San Cassiano di Predappio’, Popolo di Romagna, 6 June 1925; ‘I riti della Rinascita nella Nuova Predappio’, Il Lavoro di Romagna, 29 June 1925; L. Conti, ‘Egli è qui, nella sua Romagna’, Forum Livii, 1 (1929), 211–15. Interview with the author, 29 October 2008. See letter from the Minister of Public Works, 16 May 1925. ‘Finché Forlì e la sua provincia continuerà ad essere fascisticamente la settantaquattresima provincia d’Italia non venite tra noi, Presidente’, Il Popolo di Romagna, 30 August 1925. On the characters of local fascism cf. M. Palla, ‘Il fascismo’, in R. Finzi (ed.), L’Emilia Romagna (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), pp. 579–98 and Istituto mantovano di storia contemporanea (ed.), Fascismo e antifascismo nella Val Padana (Bologna: Clueb, 2007). Mussolini was the ‘hidden hand’ behind the event. Cf. ACS, SPD, C. O., B. 1164. F. 509.547/1. See ‘Il discorso di Farinacci’, Popolo di Romagna, 6 September 1925 and Proli, ‘ “Meta ideale” ’, p. 109. Specifically the Roman architects Florestano di Fausto from the Genio Civile di Forlì and Cesare Bazzani and Arnaldo Fuzzi, directly chosen by Mussolini in Rome. I.G. Fini, ‘Piccola guida della Valle del Rabbi. La Chiesa e le case del Duce’, Il Rubicone, 3–7 (1934), 12–16. The rich decoration of Palazzo Varano was in contrast to the myth of the ‘aristocratic plebeian’ included within Mussolini’s iconography and contributed to the secondary importance of Palazzo Varano as a site of the cult. Cf. Farolfi, La religione civile. Alessandro Mussolini, who, after the death of his wife Rosa Maltoni, moved to Forlì with another woman, Rachele Guidi’s mother, was buried in the cemetery of San Martino in Strada, close to Forlì. His tomb was sometimes visited by pilgrims on their way to Predappio. See ‘I riti della Rinascita nella Nuova Predappio’. Comune di Predappio, Predappio Nuova, 1928. ACS, SPD, C. O., B. 1197. F. 509.637/1 and B. 1164. F. 509.547/1. Interview with the author, 23 August 2008. The reference is to the primary school established within the Church of Santa Rosa, run by the Orsoline nuns since 1927. The failure of a popular fund-raising effort for the building of the Casa del Fascio in 1926 postponed its construction to the 1930s. The parish church of Sant’Antonio (1931–34) was built under the direct control of the Duce, who wanted it to be named after the evangeliser of the Romagna and run by the Franciscan friars. The Pope often showed interest in how the building works were proceeding, and in 1937 even proclaimed a plenary indulgence for pilgrims to Predappio (see Farolfi, La religione civile). Interview with the author, 25 October 2008. ACS, SPD, C. O., B. 264, F. 11807/1–2.

108

The cult of the Duce

31 ACS, SPD, C. O., B. 937, F. 51028/II–7. 32 See ‘Alunne delle Scuole di Roma a Forlì e a Predappio’, Popolo di Romagna, 7 July 1928. As for the proposal, which Mussolini declined, of a triumphal arch which a private admirer wanted to build for him in Predappio, cf. AS of Forlì, B. 340, f. 34. 33 See the report by the architect Gudo Giovannoni, quoted in Tramonti, ‘Itinerari’, p. 108. 34 Dogliani, ‘Predappio’, p. 414. 35 Don Pietro Zoli, letter (5 August 1927), ACS, SPD, C. O., B. 1031, F. 509.138.1 and letter (18 April 1928), ACS, SPD, C. O., B. 1263, F. 509.820. 36 See Popolo di Romagna, 4 April 1926, 27 June 1926, 5 September 1926, 7 November 1926. 37 Popolo di Romagna, 12 June 1927. 38 See Fondo Piancastelli, Biblioteca Comunale Aurelio Saffi, Forlì, B. 702.78/90. 39 See letter to Mussolini from a pilgrim from Aosta, 1928, ACS, SPD, C. O., B. 1164. F. 509.547/1. 40 See Popolo di Romagna, 3 May 1928 and ‘Alunne di Monferrato a seguito dello scampato pericolo del Duce’, Popolo di Romagna, 14 November 1926. The sending of money collected by pupils to Predappio on specific dates, such as the anniversary of the death of Rosa Maltoni, became a habit within some female schools. See also ‘Predappio Nuova: pellegrinaggi alla Terra del Duce’, Popolo di Romagna, 21 October 1933. Two tons of fresh fish were brought as a present by the seamen from Fano. 41 ‘Predappio Nuova: linea di Gran Turismo’, Popolo di Romagna, 7 April 1930. 42 Passerini, Mussolini immaginario. 43 See Fini, ‘Piccola guida della Valle del Rabbi’, pp. 12–16. 44 Beside the already quoted tourist guides Predappio Nuova (1928) and Predappio e dintorni (1937), at the end of the 1930s some guides appeared in French, German and Albanian. Cf. G. Faure, Au Pays du Duce (Forlì: ENIT, 1934) and A. Marcu, Predappio-Mussolini (Bucharest, 1940). See also Predappio (Forlì: La poligrafia romagnola, 1932); G. Massani, La sua terra (Bergamo: Istituto italiano d’arti grafiche, 1936); R. Buscaroli, Forlì: Predappio, Rocca delle Caminate, Forno, Pieve Quinta, Pieve Acquedotto (Bergamo: Istituto italiano d’arti grafiche, 1938); Predappio (Predappio: Ufficio Propaganda, 1940); La terra del duce (Rome: Capriotti, 1941). 45 ‘Il Duce nella sua terra’, Popolo di Romagna, 31 July 1935. The rehabilitation of Alessandro is highlighted by the transfer of his body to Predappio and the issue of his first biography promoted by Arnaldo. See G. Scanga, Alle fonti del fascismo: commemorazione di Alessandro Mussolini a Predappio Nuova (Rome: Ritir, 1934). 46 ‘Il sovrano a Predappio’, Popolo di Romagna, 11 June 1938. 47 See for example the national meeting of ‘artists and professionals’ and of ‘pharmacists’ in 1933. Popolo di Romagna, 16 September 1933. 48 The correspondence between Don Zoli and Mussolini goes from 1926 to 1938. The number of visitors after 1932 ranges from hundreds per month in winter to an average of five thousand in the summer. ACS, SPD, C. O., B. 1031. F. 509. 138/2.



A town for the cult of the Duce109

49 Letter to Mussolini from the Prefect of Forlì, 11 June 1938, communicating the list of visits to Predappio for the following day. ACS, SPD, C. O., F. 501.028/I.1. 50 ‘Pellegrinaggi ai luoghi mussoliniani. Ufficio Turistico del Dopolavoro’, Popolo di Romagna, 3 April 1934 and letter from the Prefect of Forlì to Partido Nazionale Fascista (PNF) Secretary Starace, June 1938. AS of Forlì, B. 340, 34. 51 AS of Forlì, B. 336.21. 52 Telegram from Mussolini to the mayor of town Baccanelli, 28 February 1934. ACS, SPD, C. O., B. 404, F.150.904 (‘Albergo a Predappio’). 53 Letter to the Prefect of Forlì from the President of the OND from Rome, 16 September 1938. AS of Forlì, B. 340, 34. 54 ‘L’omaggio del fascismo di Pesaro alla tomba dei genitori del Duce’, Popolo di Romagna, 5 June 1937. 55 ‘Da Torino a Predappio a piedi per un omaggio ai luoghi Mussoliniani’, Popolo di Romagna, 15 July 1933; ‘Omaggio ai Luoghi mussoliniani di due giovani Camicie Nere’, Popolo di Romagna, 3 February 1934; ‘Predappio Nuova: omaggi ai luoghi Mussoliniani’, Popolo di Romagna, 29 April 1933. 56 ‘Le spoglie di Loreto Starace, cugino del Segretario del Partito, sostano a Predappio Nuova’, Popolo di Romagna, 21 April 1933. 57 ‘Ufficiali della Marina Britannica ai luoghi mussoliniani’, Popolo di Romagna, 27 July 1933. 58 ‘Predappio. Visita di S.E. il Re Imperatore’, ACS, SPD, C. O., B. 479. F. 184867. 59 ‘Disposizioni di ordine pubblico per visita Re Imperatore’, 24 May 1938, AS of Forlì, B. 336. 23, 1938. See M. Proli, ‘Consenso e dissenso nella “terra del duce”: La provincia di Forlì 1922–1940’, in Istituto Mantovano di Storia contemporanea, Fascismo e antifascismo nella Valle Padana, pp. 233–50. 60 ‘I pellegrinaggi a Predappio’, Popolo di Romagna, 4 December 1934. 61 Passerini, Mussolini immaginario, pp. 210, 212. 62 ‘Pellegrinaggi a Predappio’, Popolo di Romagna, 15 May 1934. 63 Fini, ‘Piccola guida della Valle del Rabbi’, p. 15. 64 Quoted in Passerini, Mussolini immaginario, p. 212. 65 Comando Carabinieri di Bologna, ‘Relazione sull’approvvigionamento alimentare nel Comune di Predappio nel 1943’, AS of Forlì, B. 369. 57. 66 A. Schiavi, ‘Predappio Nuova’, La Piè, 2 (February 1946). 67 Proli, ‘Consenso e dissenso’.

7

Mussolini’s appearances in the regions Stephen Gundle

Mussolini travelled more widely than any previous Italian prime minister. He made a point of visiting the country’s regions and cities to inaugurate public works, address public rallies and to give as many people as possible the chance to see him personally. The Duce’s visits were meticulously prepared and were promoted as magical moments of communion between the national leader and the inhabitants of a particular place. In some respects these were standardised occasions, highly choreographed according to an established ritual. However, visits served different purposes at different times and, beyond them, the wider relationships the Duce enjoyed with the cities and regions of the peninsula were variable in both intensity and content. While D’Annunzio had developed the practice of consecrating the cities and towns of Italy in speeches that turned a local artistic and cultural heritage into a mystical blessing, a part of Italy’s unique cultural tapestry, Mussolini conferred by his presence visibility and a sense of importance on places that required some direct experience of the Duce’s will to feel relevant to the project of creating a new Italy. His visits were intended to galvanise enthusiasm and make the regime a real factor in the life of the towns and cities of the country’s regions. Propaganda and political practice were inseparable on such occasions. The visits occurred in the age of the media and thus they were turned into narratives and images, for the consumption both of those who were present and for a wider audience that was not. The press provided very detailed accounts of the visits, which themselves were prepared in advance in every particular. Descriptions were formulaic, following a vocabulary of words and concepts that became canonical.1 Photographs, too, followed strict rules concerning the representation of the Duce; they alternated between an emphasis on his unique person and juxtapositions of images of adoring crowds, sometimes composed of members of specific categories or organisations. A speciality of the Fascist Party’s own press was the fold-out photomontage of ‘oceanic crowds’; the regime required constant evidence of mass support throughout the peninsula to sustain the dogma that the Italian people was united behind it.2 Most important of all, given the size of the audience for



Mussolini’s appearances in the regions111

them, were the newsreels and documentaries of the Istituto Luce. Much criticised in the 1920s, these were subject to constant refinement. From the early 1930s, public events including rallies in public squares were conceived more in terms of the screen images they would give rise to than the needs of a given occasion.3 The same applied to the gatherings of young people in sports stadia formed into mass ornaments reading ‘Duce’ or making the letter ‘M’. In their narration and projection the standardised nature of the visits was reinforced. Nevertheless, there was never any question of the Duce abandoning his visits in favour of studio recordings. Mussolini always needed the contact and the exchange with crowds as these ‘electrified’ him, creating the psychological condition necessary for the performance of his charisma.4 This chapter considers four of Mussolini’s relationships with places. It focuses on the close identification of the Duce with Milan, the city where he cut his political teeth; the affinity between Mussolini and his home region of Emilia-Romagna; the semi-clientelistic special relationship that was sought and to some extent obtained by Bari; and, finally, the visit the Duce undertook to Sardinia in 1942, at a time when mass support was rapidly ebbing. The Duce and place All the biographies of Mussolini published under the regime stressed his humble roots in the Romagna region. The author of the most official text, Giorgio Pini, stated that he ‘hailed from one of the most proletarian provinces in Italy, where the life of the people consists of hard, tenacious, productive work’.5 To assert the national relevance of these early experiences, Pini proceeded to describe Romagna as the southern part of a much wider region, the Padanian plain, which stretched from the Alps to the Adriatic and the Apennines. He argued that this wider area had witnessed important historical episodes, including Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon and Dante’s death, and had also contributed to the Renaissance and to the Risorgimento. The purpose of statements of this sort was to make the out-of-the-way village of Predappio somehow seem a place pregnant with associations and meanings for the whole history of the peninsula. However, Pini acknowledged that other experiences were necessary to render Mussolini more national. His role as a socialist activist and migrant worker contributed to broaden his experience, but his time as a combatant in the First World War was crucial. Being part of the melting pot of men of all regions who were fighting and dying for the fatherland served to deprovincialise Mussolini and prepare him for the political role he would play after the conflict. His role in the war qualified him to claim a purchase on the idea of the fatherland and a special right to speak on behalf of those who had perished. Mussolini’s early experiences in Milan, where he launched the Fascist

112

The cult of the Duce

movement in 1919, placed him at the heart of the most dynamic and modern Italian city. If Rome stood for history and tradition, Milan was endowed with a more contemporary European dimension. Since the 1840s, the city had been seen as a laboratory of modernity, while its battle against foreign domination under the Austrians gave it a patriotic primacy.6 The Fascist movement, especially in the violent conflicts with the left that marked the 1921–22 period, put down roots throughout much of rural Italy. The early Fascists were strongly conditioned by local and provincial circumstances but they also moved readily from place to place. ‘For the Fascists, Italy by now is a drawing room that they traverse from one corner to another; look how easily they go on the move at the slightest call’, Mussolini proudly stated in early 1922.7 They had a view of the nation as sacred and therefore had little difficulty in thinking of themselves in relation to the whole peninsula, even if this identification was more ideological than geographical. Mussolini was their only leader of national standing and it was through him that a movement which took different forms in the urban and rural contexts in which it garnered support became a factor of importance in national politics. Mussolini established his intention to be different from previous prime ministers by undertaking an extensive tour of the country in 1923. It was not the first time he had visited the South but his decision to travel there was relatively novel and signalled his desire to make the presence of the state more widely felt. This tour was the precursor of all Mussolini’s later travels in the peninsula. Fascist propagandists aimed to achieve a difficult synthesis between their leader’s rootedness and his deracination. In the idea of Fascism, Mussolini was not a local figure or even a purely national one. In his book of hyperbolic adulation and pro-Mussolinian aphorisms, Uno e molti: interpretazioni spirituali di Mussolini, the Fascist writer Asvero Gravelli alluded to the simultaneous Italianness and universality of the Duce. ‘Mussolini is the Universal Man in the sublime sense of the word because he is profoundly Italian’, he asserted,8 adding, ‘Mussolini is the first new Italian’ and ‘We are at last a people thanks to the work of Mussolini.’9 The Duce was a unique creative force who was refashioning the nation for new times. Modern communications helped in the process of presenting Mussolini as the first new Italian. The illustrated press and newsreels served both to narrow distances by bringing pictures of the Duce to everyone, no matter where they were and where he was, and to sustain the image of a modern, active leader who was forever starting building projects, inaugurating buildings and using modern means of travel to reach all areas of the country. Places which had been remote from the large cities, and which in many instances were mere names to many Italians, became more familiar due to the regime’s policy of making the population aware of the whole peninsula. This communitybuilding exercise, which fed into the promotion of national awareness, was



Mussolini’s appearances in the regions113

not solely tied to the person of the Duce, but the highly publicised travels of the Duce were a key part of it. In contrast to Hitler, who addressed crowds in sports stadia and specially constructed arenas, Mussolini preferred to hold his rallies in the historic squares that for centuries had been the focus of civic life. Indeed, Mario Isnenghi notes in his history of the Italian piazza: ‘the itinerant practice and the success of these periodic encounters between the Duce and the crowd in canonical places of civic sociability owe much to the culture of the piazza’.10 ‘The ubiquitous oratory of Mussolini’, he adds elsewhere, ‘was rooted in the deep texture and in the specific character of many urban histories and town squares.’11 By occupying squares, Mussolini distanced himself from the elitist practices of Italy’s liberal leaders and took up a custom favoured by Garibaldi, by the Socialists and by the Church. The engagements with crowds were vital to him. Whereas German newsreels and press photographs showed Hitler in a variety of roles and contexts, including society events and semi-private settings, where he mingled with others apparently as an equal, the official image of the Duce was of one type. ‘The cinematic Mussolini has one face only: he is portrayed solely as the charismatic figure of the great public rallies’, Ernesto G. Laura asserts.12 The Duce’s pilgrimages throughout the piazzas of the peninsula had a counterpart in the pilgrimages that many Italians made to Rome to see Piazza Venezia, where his office was located, and the famous balcony from which he made many important pronouncements. It was the powerful encounters between leader and crowd that took place here, in the most prominent piazza in the national imagination of the period, which set the tone for the re-enactments that occurred in the provinces.13 The Fascists aimed to promote among the Italians a sense of their belonging to a political community in which Fascism and the nation were one and the same thing. Thus the regime sought to make its impact felt in all corners of the country by harnessing symbols and traditions and undertaking public initiatives. This effort was facilitated by the eagerness of localities, and especially of local officials and dignitaries, to feel included in the building of a new Italy. Requests for funds were accompanied by pleas for a visit from the Duce, which was inevitably desired ardently by all towns, cities and regions seeking to win favour. In the meantime many delegations sought audiences with the Duce at Palazzo Venezia, an experience that was rendered complete by a commemorative photograph. Of course, there was a straightforward power aspect to both sides of this equation. By making the regime’s presence evident and organising regular visits by national officials, and above all the Duce, the strength and authority of the state were emphasised. On the other hand, the yearning for a direct line to the Duce was a reflection a timeless desire to win resources, investment and prestige. By the 1930s, journeys were lengthy and articulated, sometimes lasting over

114

The cult of the Duce

a week and involving short stops in numerous towns and cities. Preparation for them was meticulous.14 Public rallies were only a part of a visit (that would also have included visits to factories, schools, Fascist buildings and organisations, meetings with local officials and prominent citizens, and so on) but they were usually the centrepiece, the occasion when most people would have had chance to see and hear the Duce. Normally schools and shops were closed for the day, Fascist youth and Dopolavoro (after-work) groups were mobilised and their members brought in by bus from surrounding areas. Ordinary citizens flocked to these occasions but it was the activists who set the tone, shouting encouragement to the speaker and leading applause. Crowds were partly spontaneous and partly organised, with party members often being instructed to attend and police mingling with the people to ensure nothing untoward was said or done. The enthusiasm that was so apparent in representations of these moments of communion between leader and people was facilitated by choreography and constraint. Visits to single centres were short-lived but everything was done to render them memorable and significant. They were written up in the press, following strict official guidelines, as triumphant exercises marked by mass adoration.15 Mussolini was also fond of making impromptu appearances and stopovers; he showed himself whenever possible, even leaning from the window whenever his train passed people. Newsreels and press photographs kept up a constant flow of images of his activities, movements, meetings and promotion of public-works projects. All of this, combined with other propaganda resources and word-of-mouth communication, turned him into a ubiquitous presence. In his Mussolini immaginario of 1933, Franco Ciarlantini observed that, especially among Italian emigrants, a fantasy Mussolini ‘was operating in the mind and the heart of the people’ no less than the real facts of Mussolini’s achievements.16 The fantasy Mussolini could be manipulated at will to fit the idea of him that people had. One of the main qualities of this imaginary projection was approachability. Many people lived, Ciarlantini observed, ‘with the conviction that sooner or later they would pay Mussolini a visit’.17 In contrast to the physical man, the geographical origins of the fantasy Duce could be modified and claimed by the natives of many regions and cities. ‘Everyone, even those who declare themselves indifferent to Fascism or even are opposed to it, would be happy if Mussolini or, failing that, some ancestor of his, were to hail from his province’, Ciarlantini claimed.18 In California, the journalist found emigrants from Genoa eager for news of all the improvements that they had heard had been effected in their city. Astonished by such changes, one old man said to him in dialect: ‘But he must be Genovese, this Mussolini who does all these things, surely?’19



Mussolini’s appearances in the regions115

Milan: the modern political leader Mussolini’s relationship with Milan was based on the fact that several of the most significant turning points in his political career happened there. After establishing himself as a leading socialist and winning the editorship of the party newspaper, L’Avantì, he won a new following as a nationalist convert and founded the Fascist movement there in 1919; he was elected a deputy in the city in 1921; he waited there during the March on Rome in October 1922; the city was briefly the seat of the government of the Italian Social Republic, and he made his final public speech there in December 1944. As his government collapsed, he left the city secretly hoping to make his way to Switzerland. After he was summarily executed on 28 April 1945, his body was brought back to Milan and exposed to public opprobrium in Piazzale Loreto.20 Milan was the city that Mussolini regarded as the most dynamic politically and it was where he made his political home. As editor of Il Popolo d’Italia, he was a public figure who was fast building a reputation. He wrote in all sorts of locations, and ‘his articles were as likely to be composed at the theatre or at the coffee shop, amid gossiping friends, as at the office’.21 There were constant physical dangers, and Mussolini was always armed at this time, but according to Fascist legend he was careless about his safety. ‘There was a time in Milan, the triumphant moment of the reds, when Mussolini’s life was in constant peril’, wrote the author of a volume of Mussolinian anecdotes. ‘Leaving the offices of the newspaper could mean facing death. Yet every night, at a late hour, Mussolini went down the staircase of the paper and stepped out into Via Nazionale heading calmly for home. He would not allow any friend to accompany him. … He did not want anyone to risk his life for him.’22 Rome might have been an idea, a beacon of civilisation and history, but Milan was a pragmatic centre. The Socialists had been at their strongest there and so too was the avant-garde. But the city’s nationalist credentials were undercut in the First World War, when Rome became the principal stage of new aggressive mass rituals in which D’Annunzio took a leading part, while Milan was known for the neutralist stance of some of its political forces. Thus Mussolini in political terms was in some respects both a Milanese and an anti-Milanese, a man who was both of the city’s political milieu and decisively against it. A similar ambivalence would later mark his relationship with Rome, a city whose past he embraced while rejecting its notorious indolence. In the course of the regime, Mussolini travelled to the city on numerous occasions. He undertook official visits in March 1923, May 1930, October 1934 and October 1937 and also made appearances on the occasion of significant anniversaries such as those of the founding of the Fasci and the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome. The city was clearly very important for the Fascists but nevertheless, the Duce did not accord it a special place in the

116

The cult of the Duce

mythology of the regime. ‘In the years of success’, Giorgio Galli writes, ‘Milan was far from the thoughts of Mussolini, despite the fact that it was the city that prepared him for those successes (first as a Socialist, then as a Fascist) even though it also offered many signals of a negative nature. The Duce banned the newspapers from calling Milan the “moral capital”, as it had been defined up to that moment; there was just Rome, the imperial capital.’23 Rome was possessed of a legendary aura; it evoked military might and universal civilisation. In the specific context of the inter-war period it also offered a promise of resurgence. Yet Milan remained the city of the party. The Fasci had been founded in Piazza San Sepolcro, the early Fascist gathering point in the socalled covo [den] of Via Paolo da Cannobio remained highly symbolic and the Popolo d’Italia newspaper continued to be published from there throughout the regime. Mussolini’s Milan speeches were innovative in their form and settings. The city witnessed the first use of the huge stage sets that would quite regularly be employed in the 1930s to underline the momentous nature of the occasion and to satisfy the party Secretary Starace’s desire to elevate the Duce into a ritual realm. The most striking construction was the one built in Piazza Duomo for Mussolini’s speech on the tenth anniversary of the revolution. Dressed in a black shirt and positioned at the top of a black monumental structure temporarily erected in front of the cathedral, with the fasces symbol towering over the proceedings, Mussolini spoke from within a scenography that took account of the needs of the screen. The setting ensured that the whole event was marked off from the banality of everyday life. It also asserted the domineering presence of a force that had tamed rather than converted the organised working class. The atmosphere was always crucial on the occasion of Mussolini’s speeches. People were often kept waiting at length, while trumpets and shouted slogans helped build the tension and expectation. When he finally appeared, he was greeted with guided enthusiasm. His early speaking style made ample use of physical and facial gestures; this diminished in the 1930s as he adopted a more measured manner that was further enhanced by the editing of the Luce newsreels. He was a master of the question and answer with the crowd and knew perfectly how to solicit the response he wanted. Nevertheless, crowd responses were usually orchestrated from the stage itself. During his Milan speech of 1932, Starace and Balbo stood on either side of the speaker, while other officials behind them acted as cheerleaders, gesticulating to the square to encourage responses to the rhetorical questions put by the Duce.24 Isnenghi has observed that the piazza historically had many functions. Alongside its political role, it has been a location of religious functions, of commerce and of entertainment.25 In Milan, Piazza Duomo had from the 1920s witnessed the use of neon lighting in advertising. Alert to the potential



Mussolini’s appearances in the regions117

role of technical effects in enhancing the spectacular nature of party rallies, the Fascists also latched on to it. Night-time rallies were increasingly held and were accompanied by illuminated fasces, neon letters of the word DUX or outlines of Mussolini’s head. Such illuminations were used on the evening of the tenth anniversary speech. There was considerable experimentation with Mussolini’s features in images projected on the Duomo or large hoardings urging a Yes vote in the plebiscite of 1934. The wide use of the letter M had the air of a brand symbol; indeed it was subsequently adopted by at least one advertising campaign.26 The five days Mussolini passed in the city in 1937 were treated as a return home and written up as a magical experience for a population that ‘was eager to wrap itself around its leader’.27 He often laced his Milan speeches with personal recollections; he knew he was addressing an audience that was well aware of his personal political history and he often cited specific places and names linking his own development to that of the people listening to him.28 His final public speech at the Lirico Theatre in December 1944, which saw him deliver a passionate defence of the achievements of the Italian Social Republic, was also charged with memories. Although, by this time, there could be no pretence that Italians were united behind their Duce, newsreel footage shows that enthusiastic crowds could still be mobilised to applaud Mussolini in the street. Tens of letters intercepted by censors following this event also testified to the regenerating effect the sight of the Duce could have. One woman wrote of feeling ‘the same faith that I have always had in our great DUCE who yesterday my eyes saw again; with great joy I heard the people of Milan shout in chorus with me: Viva il DUCE!’,29 while a man wrote to a female friend: ‘With great joy I saw once more our great DUCE, a bit older but still the same masculine figure as ever. He passed through an immense adoring crowd; he was firm, unbending and smiling as he stood on top of a vehicle. He seemed almost moved to see once more after so much time the city that first gave an impulse to his original ideals.’30 Emilia-Romagna: the man of the people The aura of Mussolini’s regional origins was developed in the first biography to be published after he became prime minister, Antonio Beltramelli’s L’uomo nuovo. As a Romagnole himself, Beltramelli was well placed to sing the praises of Mussolini’s home territory as a ‘passionate region of extremes’,31 ‘unique land of effort and of battle, of joy and of violence, of dramatic loves and hatreds, of formidable apathies and activities’.32 Among the qualities Beltramelli identified with the ‘robust race’ of the region were simplicity, goodness and spirit of sacrifice. A turbulent region of revolutionaries and rebels, Romagna served throughout the regime as a palimpsest, an ­explanatory

118

The cult of the Duce

frame for Mussolini’s character and spirit. The Duce’s most human aspects, the elements that allowed him to be seen as somehow typical and representative of the Italian people, were traced to his early life experiences and to the history of his family and his people. Mussolini the blacksmith’s son, the badly behaved schoolboy, the peasant and the unvarnished man of the people were all reducible to this root. Because many people had known Mussolini as a young man, and even more knew of his reputation, it was more difficult, in Romagna at least, if not Emilia, to turn him into the monumental Duce figure favoured by Starace. He continued to be seen in terms of his background. Members of his family continued to live in the area, including his wife and children before their transfer to Villa Torlonia in Rome. Mussolini regularly spent time at the Rocca delle Caminate, a castle that was restored and presented to him for his personal use by the local authorities. Indeed, he stored there – in a room dubbed the ‘chamber of horrors’ – many of the unsolicited adulatory sculptures and portraits that were sent to him by amateur artists. It was to the Rocca that Rachele Mussolini vainly urged her husband to retire following the Ethiopian war and the proclamation of the Empire.33 The family also enjoyed holidays at the coastal resort of Riccione. Mussolini’s ‘love of greatness’, his ‘sense of assurance, between the fatalistic and the predestined,’ were traceable, in De Felice’s view, ‘back to his childhood’.34 Under the influence of his father, he first encountered left-wing ideas and absorbed the political atmosphere of his home area. Mussolini was fundamentally an orator in the tradition of the rabble-rousers of Romagna.35 His Italian pronunciation always bore the inflections typical of the region. Even after refining and perfecting a more contained style composed of simple phrases and clear affirmations, he still believed in the underlying power of persuasive conviction. This belief combined with a superiority complex to translate itself into an instrumental view of the role of rallies and mass gatherings. ‘Music and flags are needed to enthuse people’, he informed an interviewer in 1937; ‘the crowd is as fragmented and dispersed as a flock of animals until such time as it is disciplined and led. It does not need knowledge; rather it is a sense of faith which can move mountains, and this, unleashed from the spirit of the orator and merging with that of the crowd, can, like radio, excite the world with a grandiose idea.’36 Underlying this outlook was an early belief in the irrational power of words as sounds rather than meanings.37 Not all Mussolini’s relations with his home region were easy. The party boss in Bologna until his fall from grace in 1930, Leandro Arpinati, was a notorious free spirit who disdained uniforms and refused to appoint Rachele Mussolini’s favoured candidates to local positions. Moreover Bologna was in October 1926 the site of one of several assassination attempts on the Duce, an event that occurred in the course of an otherwise triumphant visit to the city to inaugurate the Littoriale Stadium.



Mussolini’s appearances in the regions119

Several northern cities imitated the Milan example and built massive temporary balconies and Fascist symbols to welcome the Duce. For example, enormous papier-mâché Roman eagles greeted him on his arrival in Verona in 1938.38 Bologna and the smaller cities of Emilia-Romagna did not go to such lengths. Nor did they make the sort of artificial claims about the Duce’s supposed predilection for them that marked some of his visits to other cities.39 By the same token comparatively little was done to record visits in glossy booklets and photographic albums. But the sort of preparation that occurred elsewhere was no less present and the same efforts were made to turn the Duce’s speeches in Piazza Maggiore into memorable events. Panels featuring expressions of devotion and Fascist slogans were erected on the buildings round the square while giant paper Italian flags were attached too. In his speeches, Mussolini accentuated his local accent and refurbished the gestures that his audience knew and loved. In popular memory in the city, it is the visit of 1936 that has survived longest. Held in the wake of the proclamation of the empire, it occurred at the height of the so-called period of consensus.40 When Mussolini undertook a later visit during the war, more effort had to be made to construct the story and condition the memory of the occasion. The Ministry of Popular Culture issued, as always, specific indications regarding press coverage. The following guidelines were published on 7 October 1941: ‘For the Bologna rallies, besides the “Stefani” [the official news agency] material, reports from correspondents can also be published. Remember that accounts of rallies of this type must be enthusiastic but measured, avoiding stylistic flourishes and excessive use of adjectives’; ‘The newspapers that have photographs of the Bologna rallies additional to those that will be issued by the Luce Institute can publish them so long as the following criteria are observed: 1) Publish only photographs of the Duce with the crowd or of the crowd only; 2) Do not publish any photograph showing the Duce alone or with public officials.’41 The Ducati factory in the Borgo Panigale area of the city produced a booklet in which workers offered their personal testimonies of Mussolini’s visit. Solicited rather than spontaneous, the comments followed a set pattern, highlighting aspects of his appearance or manner that had been evoked many times before. Repeated references were made, for example, to ‘that gaze, those energetic and Roman flashing eyes’, ‘those eyes and that sure, penetrating look’ and to the fact that ‘in his eyes were clear his decisiveness and power’.42 It is worth noting that there were also many references to his smile. ‘He walked among us with a delightful sincere and loyal smile on his face; it was his customary smile to be sure, but it seemed as though it was especially for us and for our factory. It was a smile of encouragement and sympathy that I fully understood’, wrote one woman worker.43 Mussolini’s smile was not part of his official image in the 1930s.44 It was only in the war years, as support was

120

The cult of the Duce

ebbing, that photographs of a smiling Duce once more appeared in publications. Nevertheless, there were occasions when Mussolini’s smile appeared to be genuine and many of these were when he was in semi-off-duty mode. While pictures of Mussolini relaxing or engaging in leisure pursuits elsewhere were banned, some shots of him swimming, jogging or socialising in his home region were allowed. Bari: the man of power One of the biggest challenges facing Fascism was to bring the South more decisively into the state and make its citizens feel a sense of belonging to the national community. As a result, it invested heavily in the creation of new institutions, bridge and road building and land reclamation. As a large southern city with some half a million inhabitants, Bari had some reason to hope that Mussolini would favour its development. He had paid a visit to the city in 1912 and included it in his celebratory tour of 1923. On that occasion he defined it, ‘in its new part, the Turin of Puglia’. In fact things did move quite quickly. The Court of Appeal was soon transferred there and was housed in a new Palace of Justice and the intention was announced to create a new university. When a delegation of Apulian workers visited him at Palazzo Chigi in 1924 they also called for the redevelopment of the port. Mussolini expressed his support, adding that Bari should become, with Naples, the metropolis of the South. ‘Bari è il mio flirt’ [Bari is my passion], Mussolini is said to have concluded, adding, ‘We will make it into a great and beautiful city.’45 In order to capitalise on this pledge, local dignitaries decided that a display of gratitude was called for, that would establish the city’s Fascist credentials in the eyes of Rome.46 A highly public expression of devotion to Mussolini was deemed to be necessary. The result was the opening in 1925 of three enormous registers in which the population was invited to write its thoughts about Mussolini. The opening inscription was by the archbishop of Bari, Augusto Curi, who praised Mussolini for having saved Italy from Bolshevism. The archbishop also blessed the three completed volumes at a grand ceremony held at the Teatro Petruzelli. Looming over the authorities gathered on the stage was an enormous clay head of Mussolini.47 Of the three volumes, which bore the collective title Thoughts of Eleven Thousand Citizens of Bari on Mussolini – gathered on the initiative of Emanuele Messeni-Petruzzelli, only one has survived and it is kept at the central state archives in Rome.48 It gathers approximately one-third of the handwritten ‘thoughts’ expressed by those who signed the register. The inscriptions vary greatly in length from brief phrases to entire pages. While some address Mussolini formally, others use the tu form. Most reproduce rhetorical formulae which were well established by the mid-1920s, which hailed Mussolini as a



Mussolini’s appearances in the regions121

genius, a saviour of the Patria, a man of destiny, an exemplary Italian and the incarnation of order. He was compared to Dante and Napoleon, to Cavour and to Caesar. Surprisingly few make explicit mention of what the Duce had done for Bari. Nicola Pende, alleged future author of the notorious ‘Manifesto of Racist Scientists’, mentioned the recently founded Adriatic University (one of few institutions to be named after Benito Mussolini), of which he was the first Rector, while one other mentioned the Appeal Court and the port. A certain Sebastiano De Luca expressed gratitude that Puglia, a region long-forgotten by the powers that be, had seen its aspirations satisfied at last. The appearance in a cluster of expressions similar to De Luca’s indicates that perhaps someone intervened to suggest that inscriptions might take this form. Some of the thoughts engage in a hyperbole that seems so forced as to border on banality: ‘Mussolini the greatest of the great’, ‘the greatest contemporary genius’, ‘the world hero’, etc. In such cases, normal handwriting occasionally gives way to outsize capitals. Unsurprisingly, negative expressions are entirely absent from the volume, although one or two sound warnings. ‘He has lots of points in common with the great Italian of Ajaccio [Napoleon]’, wrote Alfredo Ruggieri. ‘Let us hope that he does not want, like him, to drag our fatherland into useless wars but will rather persevere on the road already undertaken of wise reforms, thereby putting off the downward spiral that every powerful person must undergo.’ What Mussolini made of this unusual homage is not known, although he was accustomed to receiving all manner of gifts and expressions of devotion. In general, he did not favour excessive obsequiousness. When a Turin newspaper proposed a similar collection of personal reflections, the initiative was quashed on his orders. What is certain is that Bari prospered under the regime; so at some level the homage was appreciated. It grew significantly as an administrative centre, acquiring more importance as Naples declined. It underwent expansion and acquired many new public buildings as well as witnessing extensive house building. Parts of the old town were demolished to improve access to the sea. The profile of the city increased due to its enhanced representative and service functions.49 The desire to hold on to a perceived special place in the affections of the Duce alimented demands for a visit among local Fascists who were keen to keep themselves and their region in the leader’s eye and heart. ‘There was not a ceremony when the cry “Il Duce in Bari! Il Duce in Puglia” was not raised’, noted one observer.50 In fact Mussolini did not visit Puglia until September 1934. When he finally undertook a journey to the region, he inaugurated the latest representative project in Bari, the Fiera del Levante (Southern trade fair), a commercial exhibition space designed to reinforce the city’s historic role as a centre of trade with the East. Proud of the progress their city had made under the regime, officials made no effort to create in Bari the sort of

122

The cult of the Duce

grandiose stage sets that other cities indulged in on such occasions. They preferred to show off the city (‘already as beautiful as the Duce himself’) as ‘vast, productive, modern, and dynamic’. ‘Bari today is a source of pride for all the people of Puglia’, boasted a local author.51 ‘It is the Fascist city par excellence in its appearance and spirit, a luminous and dynamic product of this ardent Mussolinian atmosphere.’ Everything was done to create the appropriate climate of enthusiasm. The build-up was tremendous and people duly prepared to greet the city’s benefactor. By all accounts the visit to Bari and the tour of the cities of Brindisi, Lecce and Taranto was a notable success; much material was filmed and edited as the documentary La visita del Duce in terra di Puglia, one of the most powerful testimonies of the first half of the 1930s to the attachment to Mussolini in the South. Nonetheless, the attitude of the local political elite was decidedly clientelistic. Puglia was one of few Southern regions to have experienced squadrism and to have given rise to an authentic Fascist movement, and this title of honour was regularly used, along with displays of devotion, to win resources. Although the party Secretary Starace hailed from the region, it was to positions in the government machine that local political leaders aspired. Giuseppe Caradonna told Mussolini that any Italian government had to include representatives from the South. He readily accepted the ostensibly humble post of Under-Secretary to the Post Office. This was not an office that carried political kudos, but it was a traditional site of power since monies and contracts regularly passed through it.52 Sardinia: the demi-god By the late 1930s, the journeys of the Duce were regular events that were prepared and executed according to a predictable plan, but with enough flexibility to take account of the specificity of the city or region to be visited. Their representation in the media had also undergone constant refinement. This especially applies to the quality and content of the Luce documentaries. While newsreels were sometimes deemed repetitive and boring, the documentaries, with voiceover commentary, soundtracks and editing that underscored the events portrayed and enhanced the passion of the moment, were more effective. Luce staff knew that one of the great appeals of their work lay in the close-up shots of the man most live spectators could only glimpse. According to Philip Cannistraro, the 1937 documentary Il viaggio del Duce in Sicilia was the first to make deliberate and effective use of the crowd as the central motif of the film.53 ‘The film aimed to show on the one hand the Duce’s interest in the South, and on the other his popularity among the southern population’, Cannistraro notes; ‘The camera operator shot the Sicilian crowds from different angles and positions so that sometimes the spectator saw Mussolini with



Mussolini’s appearances in the regions123

the eyes of someone who was in the midst of a cheering crowd and at others watched from above as the crowd formed around the Duce.’54 Mussolini always had to be pictured in the presence of large numbers of people. The people alone, the crowds acclaiming the Duce, however, could also be represented. The Sicilian documentary was an experiment in this sense that built on the fold-out photographic montages favoured by the Fascist illustrated press. It also keyed in with the efforts of Fascist architects to design party and state buildings that evoked the guiding presence of Mussolini even in his physical absence.55 The material and physical environment of Italy in the Fascist era, like the mental world of its citizens, was deemed to have been so shaped by the dynamic example of the Duce that his influence could be represented through its effects. Southern crowds were in some respects better suited to this sort of representation than Northern ones. In the first place the images of male and female peasants, with their expressions of wonder and simple joy, keyed in with the ruralist emphasis of the regime. Second, they were not accustomed to gathering in large crowds and the effect on them of the artfully built atmosphere of expectation and devotion was more dramatic. Whereas Northerners were delighted to see finally in the flesh the person who they had seen hundreds of times before at the cinema and in magazines and newspapers,56 Southern peasants experienced the Duce more in terms of religion and folklore. As the Calabrian writer Corrado Alvaro observed of a crowd gathered to see the Duce: ‘The Italian people has incarnated in him [sic] an old ideal of justice that it has in the course of its history entrusted to the most diverse personalities’;57 he had ‘in the eyes of the spectators the special appeal of great figures who are imagined to be remote but who, in reality, are there, speaking, just a step away’. Pictures of such people were powerful because they had not been educated to the camera lens and did not pose in predictable ways. The custom of constructing stage sets and partially choreographing crowds was not adopted in most of the South. ‘Stripped of the ostentatious solemnity of the great gatherings’,58 the rallies that Mussolini held in the periphery were more spontaneous and less repetitive in form. Mussolini visited Sardinia on four occasions: once in 1923, following the forced pacification of the island,59 twice in the course of the following decade (1934 and 1938), and once during the war (1942). The visits of the 1930s followed the pattern established elsewhere. The visit of May 1942 is of particular interest, however, because of the moment it occurred and the use that was made of it. With its remoteness from the impact of the war and precious contributions to autarky, Sardinia was the ideal site for the regime to organise a display of the unflagging support for Mussolini in deepest Italy at a time when setbacks were taking place. Lasting a week, the visit took in all the major centres on the island as well as new towns and areas of r­ eclamation.

124

The cult of the Duce

He inspected troops and examined coastal defences. For the second time, Mussolini also paid homage at the grave of Garibaldi. As usual on these ­occasions, the visit was marked by the distribution of monies to worthy hospitals, organisations, schools and needy families with numerous children. The moving and still images of the visit show that the Duce everywhere encountered cheering, excited crowds.60 Indeed the visit was intended to provide just this evidence to a demoralised mainland public opinion. Accounts of the visit, as always, were furnished to the press by the Stefani agency and allowed to be published only after Mussolini had returned to Rome. The cover of the illustrated weekly La Domenica del Corriere mostly featured war episodes in 1942–43, but Mussolini’s extended stay in Sardinia provided the occasion for a rare depiction by an artist of the encounter of peasant women with the – for them – mythical figure of the Duce. Drawn, as nearly all the covers had been since 1899, by Achille Beltrame, it depicted a middleaged woman who had recently been rehoused making to hug a uniformed, smiling Mussolini. The two figures are surrounded by happy inhabitants and just one official in Fascist uniform. The image was designed also to show gratitude for the efforts Fascism had made to repair the neglect the island had suffered at the hands of previous governments. It had dedicated resources to the building of roads and bridges, and to the reclamation of land. A new city, named Mussolinia (today called Arborea), was also built. Government officials visited regularly, although, as elsewhere, certain individuals did well out of the regime.61 The image supported Mussolini’s conviction that here at least he would find ‘people he could rely on, patriotic people who really believed in victory’.62 Mussolini’s charisma required constant charges that could only be supplied by crowd contact. The Sardinian sojourn of 1942 achieved this effect at a difficult time, even if some observers later stated that the enthusiasm displayed was less than that of the previous visit.63 Writing in his diary of the meeting of the party directorate of 18 May 1942, Giuseppe Bottai recorded his observation of Mussolini: He has returned from his journey plainly intoxicated. He refers to the crowds who flocked to see him ‘without – he says with pleasure – too much police intervention.’ He says of the Sardinians that ‘they are a population that has not changed. The conformism of the twentieth century has not ruined them. Unlike for example the people of the Po valley, they did not ask me for either peace or bread. Now I understand why Garibaldi chose to go among them for his withdrawals and periods of repose.’64

Photographs of Mussolini smiling, laughing, greeting crowds and – unusually – listening to peasant women were widely diffused in 1942, several of them originating from the Sardinian trip. One volume, entitled Duce e popolo,65



Mussolini’s appearances in the regions125

contained several that were published in illustrated magazines, often under the same title.66 They were intended to show that Mussolini was capable, even as the war turned people against him and his regime, of finding crowds willing to acclaim and hail him. In reality, this was ever less likely to occur spontaneously in the large cities where he had once commanded genuine enthusiastic support. Crowds could still be worked, but they mostly needed to be conscripted. Conclusion Mussolini’s travels served to render his rule familiar and to establish the sense of a direct relationship between people and leader that was crucial to the perpetuation of mass support. Even as backing for the regime ebbed, the leader attracted personal devotion. It is not easy to date the beginning of this process, but De Felice found that as early as 1932-34 ‘the regime began its downward arc’.67 The elements of repression and constraint that once were a background aspect of the ‘formation and organisation of consent’ thus gradually reacquired importance.68 Nevertheless, the mass rallies that were held in city squares were often festive occasions as much as they were political ones.69 Despite having emerged in the age of the public orator, Mussolini understood that it was the visual impact of his presence and of the surrounding ceremonial that was likely to last. The travels were also important aspects of political communication and were the occasion for notable experiments in this area. As live experiences, they served to root Mussolini in the civic textures of Italian society and to tie him into the traditions and memories that were associated with the major squares of every city. Despite the fact that these were not encounters with a people endowed with free will but an audience organised and dragooned to offer gratification to a dictator, the memory of Mussolini’s visits often proved to be deep and long-lasting. Notes  1 M. Isnenghi, ‘Aspetti del rituale di massa fascista: stampa e dintorni’, in R. Redi (ed.), Cinema italiano sotto il fascismo (Venice: Marsilio, 1979), p. 52. Official text was provided by the Stefani news agency while the Ministry of Popular Culture issued guidelines for local reporters to follow.   2 The fold-outs were a speciality of the Rivista Illustrata del Popolo d’Italia. For an analysis, see J.T. Schnapp, ‘Mob Porn’, in Schnapp and M. Tiews (eds.), Crowds (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), pp. 1–29.   3 E. G. Laura, Le stagioni dell’aquila: storia dell’Istituto Luce (Rome: Ente dello ­spettacolo, 2000), pp. 102–3.   4 Ibid., pp. 105–6.

126

The cult of the Duce

  5 G. Pini, Benito Mussolini (15th edn, Bologna: Cappelli, 1940), p. 9.   6 F. Bartolini, Rivali d’Italia: Roma e Milano dal Settecento a oggi (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 2006), pp. 56, 72.   7 Quoted in M. Sarfatti, The Life of Benito Mussolini (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1925), p. 250.   8 A. Gravelli, Uno e molti: interpretazioni spirituali di Mussolini (Rome: Nuova Europa, 1938), p. 32.   9 Ibid., pp. 31, 47. 10 M. Isnenghi, L’Italia in piazza: i luoghi della vita pubblica dal 1848 ai nostri giorni (Milan: Mondadori, 1994), p. 313. 11 M. Isnenghi, ‘La piazza’, in Isnenghi (ed.), I luoghi della memoria: strutture ed eventi dell’Italia unita (Rome: Laterza, 1997) p. 50. 12 Laura, Le stagioni dell’aquila, p. 104. 13 Isnenghi, ‘La piazza’, p. 50. 14 See A. Casellato, ‘Le piazza del duce: riti e immagini’, in Il Duce nelle Venezie, reproduction of Le tre Venezie, 13:10 (October 1938) (n.d.), pp. 1–2. 15 Very specific indications were given to the press as to the coverage of these visits. For example, on 29 June 1940, the day following Italo Balbo’s death, the Ministry of Popular Culture instructed that ‘the journey of the Duce should appear at the side of the front page over 3–4 columns’ and ‘The account of the visits the Duce undertook today in Piedmont should appear below a title of 5–6 columns, but NOT on the front page that should be dedicated mainly to the sad event regarding Balbo.’ See C. Matteini (ed.), Ordini alla stampa (Rome: Editrice Polilibraria Italiana, 1945), p. 108. 16 F. Ciarlantini, Mussolini immaginario (Milan, Sonzogno, 1933), p. 6. 17 Ibid., p. 17. 18 Ibid., p. 17. 19 Ibid., p. 19. 20 G. Galli, Mussolini: un destino a Milano (Milan: Kaos, 2008), p. 8. 21 R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini (London: Arnold, 2002), p. 123. 22 Marga, Aneddoti su Mussolini, cited in A. Gravelli, Mussolini aneddotico (Rome: Casa Editrice Latinità, 1952), p. 75. 23 Ibid., p. 131. 24 On this event, see G. Bernagozzi, Il mito dell’immagine (Bologna: Clueb, 1983), p. 110. 25 Isnenghi, ‘La piazza’, p. 44. 26 See S. Gundle, ‘Un Martini per il Duce: l’immaginario del consumismo in Italia negli anni Venti e Trenta’, in A. Villari (ed.), L’arte della pubblicità: il manifesto italiano e le avanguardie 1920–1940 (Milan: Silvana, 2008), pp. 46–69. 27 N. Santoro, I cinque giorni del DUCE a Milano: cronistorico (Milan: ‘Lettura Italiana’, 1937), p. 15. 28 Isnenghi, L’Italia in piazza, p. 315. 29 P. Cambié to G. Vigorelli, 18 December 1944, Archivio Centrale dello Stato (henceforth ACS), Segreteria Particolare del Duce (henceforth SPD), Carteggio riservato (1922–43), b. 105.



Mussolini’s appearances in the regions127

30 Bruno (illegible) to Anita Quadrelli, 18 December 1944, ACS, SPD, Cart. ris. (1922–43), b.105. 31 A. Beltramelli, L’uomo nuovo (Milan: Mondadori, 1923), p. 12. 32 Ibid., p. 31. 33 R. De Felice, Mussolini il duce. Vol. 1: Gli anni del consenso 1929–1936 (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), p. 798. 34 Ibid., p. 799. 35 See R. Renzi, ‘Il cinema, una regione’, in R. Finzi (ed.), L’Emilia Romagna (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), p. 821. 36 Ibid., p. 799. 37 M. Cardillo, Il duce in moviola (Bari: Dedalo, 1983), p. 97. 38 Ibid., pp. 144–5. 39 This was the case, for example, when Mussolini visited Verona in September 1938. See M. Berezin, Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 141–4. 40 Photographs and recollections of the visit are contained in F. Berti Arnoaldi, Bologna in camicia nera (Bologna: Pendragon, 2006). 41 Matteini, Ordini alla stampa, p. 166. 42 A. Marescalchi (ed.), Come ho visto il Duce: 7 ottobre XIX (Bologna: Ducati, 1941), pp. 10–43. 43 Ibid., p. 17. 44 Bosworth, Mussolini, p. 244: ‘By the mid-1930s a stern, unsmiling, thin-lipped and shaven-headed Duce, as likely as not equipped with a military helmet, became the ubiquitous image of the dictator.’ 45 A. Cerri, Il Duce nei pensieri di undicimila baresi (Bari: Laterza & Polo, 1926), p. 10. Bosworth notes that Mussolini had undertaken a speaking tour of Puglia in 1912. See Mussolini, p. 89. 46 Cerri, Il Duce, p. 10. 47 A full-page photograph of this event was published in La Rivista Illustrata del Popolo d’Italia, November 1925, p. 15. 48 ACS, Pensieri di cittadini baresi su Mussolini – raccolti per iniziativa e cura di Emanuele Messeni-Petruzzelli, Vol. 1 (Bari, 1926). 49 See M. Petrignani and F. Porsia, Bari (Bari: Laterza, 1982), Ch. 10 (n.p.). 50 S. Petrucci, In Puglia con Mussolini (Rome: Novissima, 1934), p. 45. 51 Ibid., p. 45. 52 Bosworth, Mussolini, p. 177. 53 P.V. Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso: fascismo e mass media (Bari: Laterza, 1975), p. 310. 54 Ibid., p. 310. 55 See S. Storchi, ‘ “Il fascismo è una casa di vetro”: Giuseppe Terragni and the politics of space in Fascist Italy’, Italian Studies, 62:2 (2007), 231–45 and Eugene Pooley, Ch. 13 in this volume. 56 Emilio Gentile quotes an informer of the Ministry of Popular Culture as remarking on this response among the rice-weeders. See Il culto del littorio (Rome: Laterza, 1993), p. 288.

128

The cult of the Duce

57 Quoted in ibid., p. 290. 58 Ibid., p. 290. 59 The victory of Fascism in Sardinia is described in E. Lussu, Marcia su Roma e ­dintorni (Turin: Einaudi, 1945). 60 The Stefani news agency produced a photo album of the visit, later reprinted with essays, as A. Cesaraccio et al. (eds.), Mussolini in Sardegna (Cagliari: Gia editrice, 1983). 61 The opportunism of a variety of individuals is described by Lussu. See also R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy ( London: Allen Lane, 2005) on the career of Edgardo Sulis (pp. 421–30). 62 Ibid. 63 See Cesaraccio, in Mussolini in Sardegna, n.p. 64 G. Bottai, Diario 1935–1944 (Milan: Rizzoli, 1982), p. 305. 65 G. Massani, Duce e popolo (Rome; Il Rubicone, 1942). 66 See for example La Domenica del Corriere, 26 April 1942, pp. 4–5. 67 De Felice, Mussolini il duce, 1, p. 304. 68 Ibid., p. 181. 69 P. Milza, Mussolini (Rome: Carocci, 2000), p. 599, argues that ‘the religious character of the great patriotic celebrations of which Mussolini was the great priest should not make us forget their recreational and festive aspect, which was another element employed by the authorities to mobilise the masses and maintain the system of consent’.

8

The internalisation of the cult of the Duce: the evidence of diaries and letters Christopher Duggan

One of the most striking features of the Fascist regime, as seen in diaries and letters written at the time, is an extraordinary sense of Mussolini’s accessibility. However remarkable his character, however unique his gifts, however much a genius or a ‘man of providence’, the Duce was nonetheless a figure whom men, women and children, of all ages and backgrounds, felt they could relate to – and often in an extremely intimate way. The innumerable letters, telegrams, poems, drawings and paintings preserved in the Segreteria Particolare del Duce in the central archives in Rome, and above all the hundreds of huge boxes of sentimenti containing countless tributes on his birthday and saint’s day, congratulations on surviving assassination attempts or securing some success in foreign policy or receiving a new title or honour, messages of thanks following speeches or visits or radio broadcasts, condolences for illnesses or deaths within his family, requests for private audiences and expressions of sorrow (mingled usually with pride and gratitude) at the loss or ‘sacrifice’ of a son, husband or brother in Ethiopia or the Second World War, bear testimony to a remarkable measure of connectedness between the leader of the Fascist state and ordinary members of the general public. The accessibility of Mussolini, however, and the fervent language that was often used in addressing him, cannot be taken unproblematically as a measure of either the Duce’s or the regime’s ‘popularity’. People’s motives in writing to the Fascist leader were complex and varied. In some instances the expressions of enthusiasm might have been spontaneous and genuine, but in many cases the desire, whether explicit or implicit, for a material reward or favour of some kind would inevitably have pushed the supplicant into using the kind of exuberant language that the regime was keen to encourage as part of its fideistic value system. Diaries, too, present considerable interpretative difficulties. Those kept as records of private thoughts can be taken as good indicators of true feelings, but in some instances the writers may have felt constrained by concerns that the text might fall into the wrong hands (this is a manifest concern in certain cases in the late 1930s and the Second World War). Sometimes, too (though this is in itself highly revealing) the authors

130

The cult of the Duce

give the impression of wanting to record, if only for their own comfort, what they believe they ought to be saying about Mussolini and Fascism. Similar caveats apply to correspondence between private individuals, where fear that injudicious comments might be picked up by censors or used against them by opponents inevitably acted as a brake on spontaneity. There is also a broader issue of how representative written material is of a society that still had very high levels of illiteracy. Fostering contact with the Duce Whatever the spontaneous impulses from ‘below’ towards the Duce, there is little doubt that Mussolini himself fostered the idea of his accessibility by deliberately engaging – albeit necessarily in a very selective way – with individuals and their problems. After all, as the writer Corrado Alvaro observed in 1934, much of his extraordinary appeal to the masses lay in a widespread view that he was somehow omniscient and could intervene to rectify their wrongs in accordance with an ‘old ideal of justice’. And even when he was not aware of a specific grievance, it was commonly felt that he would act to remedy it just as soon as it came to his attention.1 Mussolini assiduously played up to such beliefs. The editor of Il Popolo d’Italia recalled how the Duce telephoned him on one occasion after reading in a newspaper of a mother who was living with triplets, seven other children and a sick husband in a single room, telling him to send someone to the poor woman ‘immediately’ (‘because we must not lose time with the usual bureaucratic headaches’) with a gift of 3,000 lire in his name. In reporting the charitable gesture in Il Popolo d’Italia the next day, the editor was told to emphasise how Mussolini had spotted the story tucked away in a corner of ‘one of the many newspapers that he reads and notwithstanding the huge burden of work that he was saddled with’.2 At an institutional level, the principal mechanism for facilitating direct contact with the public was the Segreteria Particolare del Duce. This office, which was never officially an organ either of the government or of the Fascist Party, expanded fast in the late 1920s as the cult of Mussolini emerged as a central pillar of the regime, and by the early 1930s it was employing a core staff of nearly fifty civil servants, divided between Palazzo Venezia and the Viminale, with others drafted in from various ministries as occasion required. These officials had the task of sifting through the 1,500 or so private letters that were sent to Mussolini every day and deciding which should be forwarded to him for his personal scrutiny – up to 200 – and which of the remainder merited a positive response (in which case the Duce would be given credit in the reply – in the event of rejection, his name was omitted and an impersonal formula used instead). By the time of Mussolini’s fall the Segreteria had accumulated a massive archive, with more than 565,000 files and millions of cards



The internalisation of the cult of the Duce131

recording individual items of correspondence. Over 480,000 of the files were sent for destruction in the summer of 1943.3 The extraordinary volume of correspondence to the Duce can be accounted for in a number of ways. In the first place, it was encouraged. The liberal state was criticised for having failed to bridge the gap between the masses and the institutions, ‘real’ and ‘legal’ Italy. Fascism was determined to rectify this. The flood of letters from people to leader was a material equivalent to the ecstatic cheering of crowds and an indication of the regime’s spiritual dynamism (silence, by contrast, signalled failure: ‘In recent times requests for my photo­ graph have dropped sharply’, Mussolini lamented in the summer of 1943).4 As Arnaldo Mussolini explained in Il Popolo d’Italia in May 1926 in an article entitled ‘The Man and the Crowd’, the unbridled enthusiasm for the Duce showed how Fascism had successfully tapped into popular cravings for ‘order, discipline and a commander’ after the chaos of the recent past. He added that it was vital to encourage the ‘exuberant devotion’ and the ‘huge messianic expectations’ so that the feelings could then be channelled into attaining national greatness.5 Related to this, writing to the Duce was also encouraged as a mark of faith, a sign of an individual’s willingness to open his or her soul to the leader. Many commentators linked such a manifestation of intimacy to the feelings of religiosity that were seen as essential to Fascism. According to Margherita Sarfatti in her best-selling biography of Mussolini, written in 1925, ‘the religious sense of life’ (which she felt had been accentuated by the horrors of the First World War and its aftermath) was encapsulated in the willingness of ordinary people to manifest their ‘veneration for the Leader’,6 while Giorgio Pini claimed two years later in Critica fascista that ‘the civil religiosity of a people require[d] a point of focus’ towards which to direct their feelings: ‘From time immemorial Italy has been in need of a great figure who would act as a national symbol, a divinity, a unifying myth and a source of inspiration for our history.’7 In this context, an intimate unburdening of the heart to the Duce, especially in times of difficulty, could be regarded as a commendable expression of ‘faith’. And by the 1930s such highly personalised forms of communication had come to be regarded as quite normal. ‘When do you write a letter to Mussolini?’, asked Il Corriere della Sera in an article in 1936: Not always, but on practically every occasion, at a difficult time in your life … When you are looking around and don’t know who to turn to any more, you remember that He is there. Who, but Him, can help you? … The Duce knows that when you write to him it is out of genuine sorrow or real need. He is the confidant of everyone and, as far as he can, he will help anyone … And where is the Duce? … He is anywhere. He is even – have you not felt it? – in that gloomy little room downstairs where you, poor thing, were writing of your sufferings. Have you not felt that he was listening to you?8

132

The cult of the Duce

Another factor contributing to the huge volume of correspondence with the Duce was, somewhat paradoxically, the ideological weakness of Fascism. Commentators from a very early stage pointed out that support for the government derived far less from belief in the party or what the party stood for than from admiration for Mussolini. This was especially true of the South. ‘The people in our region’, wrote an official from Campania somewhat ruefully in August 1923, ‘follow the Duce affectionately, and it can always be confidently said that they love and respect him greatly. But you continually feel it is a question of his personality, of “Mussolinism”, not of Fascism.’9 And this situation did not change. The persistent lack of clarity during the next two decades as to what exactly Fascism represented, aggravated by the emphasis on faith (often blind faith) as opposed to rationality as a mark of political virtue, made the figure of Mussolini, as much by default as by design, the emotional linchpin of the regime. For Fascists of a strongly intellectual persuasion this was deeply galling. ‘Mussolini’, wrote Giuseppe Bottai in his diary in May 1943, in near-despair at the lack of initiative being displayed by all those around him as the country slumped towards defeat, ‘has stripped us of those very qualities with which we could and should have served him. What use is faith when you have no idea what you are having faith in? Faith to a man, in politics, can only be faith in the ideas that he incarnates. Take away the ideas, and all you have left is corporeal, physical faith.’10 Linked to the ideological hollowness of Fascism was also a deep dissatisfaction, which intensified in the course of the 1930s, with both the State and the party bureaucracy. And the pervasive feelings of frustration and anger at the inefficiency and corruption of the regime had the curious effect of helping to elevate the Duce into a position of apparently blameless isolation high above the fray. From this lofty position, it was hoped, Mussolini would be able to intervene to sort things out once he was informed of what was going on. The phrase se lo sapesse il Duce [if only the Duce knew] recurs repeatedly in letters and diaries of the period when writers were describing administrative incompetence or the malpractices of party officials. And it was not, it would seem, just an empty mantra. According to the leading Fascist intellectual, Paolo Orano, indeed, the regularity with which Italians exclaimed when something was not right, ‘if only Mussolini knew! – if only I could tell Mussolini in person!’, was an indication of the ‘extraordinary moral function that Mussolini, as symbol and myth, had assumed in the history of Italy and the world’. He thought the reflex was probably at root ‘religious’.11 Reports from the political secret police, OVRA, in the 1930s suggest that this rather paradoxical tendency for discontent with the party or the local administration to strengthen faith (or at least hope) in the Duce was most pronounced among the poorer classes. Agents frequently noted, not without surprise, how Mussolini was widely seen by ordinary people, especially in



The internalisation of the cult of the Duce133

more rural areas, as ignorant of what was going on and as ‘betrayed’ rather than as personally responsible for what was taking place. As one informant wrote in August 1932: In a rapid tour around southern Italy we have been able to observe how public opinion is almost everywhere – and strangely – becoming ever more sympathetic to the Duce and ever less so to Fascism, which is viewed through the prism of local squabbles and the conduct of party leaders. This conduct is not always – indeed is hardly ever – exemplary … The masses seem every day to become more and more attached to the Duce, who is never blamed in any way at all for the faults that are attributed to the local party officials.12

The resilience of the cult The doggedness with which Italians of varying degrees of ‘Fascist’ convictions clung on to the idea of Mussolini as a figure of virtue, despite the manifest failings of so many of his close colleagues and, from 1940, the disastrous conduct of the war, is striking. The case of the Florentine hotel-manager, Carlo Ciseri, is a good example. Ciseri, a veteran of the First World War with a passionate aversion to Italy’s liberal leadership, was convinced from the time he first heard Mussolini speak in 1920 that he was an exceptional man ‘sent by God’ to save the country from the threat of the Bolsheviks and restore the ‘glories and honour of ancient Rome’. His admiration for the Duce remained boundless throughout the 1920s and 1930s – though he chose never to join the Fascist Party. Inevitably, however, his faith was severely tested by the defeats in Greece and North Africa. ‘How on earth can this have happened?’, he wrote in his diary in November 1940. ‘Where is all our preparation for war which had been trumpeted to the four winds? I do not want – and cannot – believe in the reality of what is going on.’ But he refused to blame Mussolini for the country’s humiliations, preferring instead to imagine that the Duce must have been the victim of criminal deception: ‘Whoever gave the Head of the Government assurances [about the situation] is a traitor of the fatherland.’13 Ciseri fought in East Africa in 1940–41 and witnessed at first hand the chaotic condition of the Italian armed forces. In May 1941 he was captured by the British and spent the next four and a half years in prison camps. But he still could not bring himself to criticise the Duce. When he learned of Mussolini’s fall in July 1943, he experienced an overwhelming sense of disorientation and struggled in his diary to make some sense of what had taken place: I felt a kind of dizziness that left me dazed and confused and stopped me from articulating any words … Surrounded almost entirely by incompetents, profiteers and egoists, and by false friends of the worst sort, he has been betrayed from the very start of his glorious rise. This vile treachery must have reached such a level of criminality and such proportions that he, as an honest man of

134

The cult of the Duce

faith and a pure Italian, chose to sacrifice his hopes, his pride, his ideals, his entire self, in order to make the hardest and greatest service he could to save the fatherland … Until I am given certain and tangible proof, I will not be able to believe the infamy that is being thrown in the face of a man who fervently sought our greatness. Has he made mistakes? … He can only be accused of one just now – and that is an excess of goodness, which in a statesman can be called weakness. It is strange, certainly, in a man of his kind … If only he had imitated, even just in part … the ferocious Stalin, cleaning out all the scum, perhaps we would never have reached this point.14

The fact that Ciseri was a prisoner for much of the war inevitably left him detached from those who were experiencing directly the demoralisation of encroaching defeat, whether in the army or on the home front. His faith in Mussolini may as a consequence have been somewhat insulated. Yet the indications are that Ciseri’s determination to believe in the Duce, almost come what may, was shared by many millions of Italians, at least down to the end of 1942. The disasters of 1940–41 were commonly blamed on the incompetence (or worse) of the army commanders and in particular the much reviled Galeazzo Ciano; and it was only when the defeats in North Africa and the Soviet Union signalled clearly that the war would be lost that mass affection for Mussolini began to mutate towards disenchantment, anger and hatred.15 Again, though, there seem to have been significant differences between city and countryside. The prominent Fascist Tullio Cianetti noted a striking change of mood in Rome when he returned there in May 1941 after serving on the Greek front: instead of the old refrain of ‘HE is great and good, but those around him are useless’, people, he said, were now openly critical of Mussolini.16 But OVRA reports for regions such as Sardinia indicate that confidence in the Duce remained almost undiminished among the rural population until his fall.17 The resilience of the cult of the Duce was partly determined by the need to cling on to an object of hope in the midst of the growing adversity. The thousands of intensely emotional letters that continued to be sent by members of the public to Mussolini during the first half of 1943 indicate how close the connection frequently was between desperation and faith. Typical was a letter written by a woman in July 1943 following the invasion of Sicily by the Allies: Duce! In this most agonising of moments I feel it necessary for my faith to write to You, even if I have no hope that You will read me, because I want to reconfirm to You that I believe, I believe, I believe, in Your words. It seems that God has forgotten Italy and the painful sacrifices that it has been offering now for four years on its altar … There are too many foolish people around us who doubt and fear – and even my faith seems sometimes to waver! … Forgive me if I cannot write better. But do not judge the tears that streak my cheeks, Duce, as a sign of weakness; rather accept them as a sign of my immense love and now also my



The internalisation of the cult of the Duce135 grief for You and my land. Even if I am just a humble woman, command and I will obey You!18

Exceptionalism and ‘providence’ As this letter suggests, there were two key elements at the heart of Mussolini’s accessibility: a sense that he was intensely human, and could thus be related to as a friend, a father, a brother, a son or a lover, and a simultaneous feeling that he was an exceptional, indeed providential, figure who could achieve miraculous things. It was the combination of these two elements – inevitably in varying measures according to time, place and the character of the individual concerned – that gave such force to the cult and made its internalisation for millions of Italians feel so potent. An anecdote in the autobiography of the Piedmontese schoolteacher, Zelmira Marazio (a work which demonstrates throughout vividly just how emotive the mix of exceptionality and ordinariness was in the case of Mussolini), encapsulates the two aspects of the Duce’s appeal. She recalls travelling as a girl on a train through the Agro Romano in the early 1930s, looking out at the new roads and towns on the recently reclaimed land. A middle-aged man suddenly turned from the window and declared to his fellow passengers: ‘Do you see, do you see, this fertile and cultivated land? Until yesterday this was the kingdom of poverty and malaria. Who has brought about this transformation? A little fellow (“ometto”), yes, a little fellow has been able to do all this. A little fellow with a big heart and an even bigger head. He has created a new Italy.’ A murmur of approval ran through those present. I too agreed, smiling, even if the word ‘ometto’ seemed to me inappropriate when applied to Mussolini. Wherever you went you breathed an atmosphere that was full of ‘him’.19

Marazio’s own feelings for Mussolini, like those of many women, it seems, combined a desire for something akin to transcendence with elements, acknowledged or otherwise, of sexual attraction; and the temporal and religious planes coexisted in a potent if often rather uneasy relationship. Marazio recalled a teenage schoolfriend asking her at a time when Mussolini was frequently to be seen stripped to the waist in Luce newsreels harvesting wheat whether she felt anything for him sexually. She became confused: ‘I had not thought of him as somebody you would embrace and kiss: for me he was a god.’ Her friend, however, had no hesitation in declaring that the Duce was her ideal type of man – ‘very handsome, strong and dominating’. But when Marazio went on to ask how old the Duce was, her friend – who had no idea as to his age – suddenly became perplexed herself and wondered what would happen if Mussolini were ever to get ill or even die: ‘The Duce, die? No, it was not possible … We were both dismayed at the thought. It was as if the sun

136

The cult of the Duce

were to be extinguished – did we not sing: “God has sent you to Italy / as he sends you the light!” The conversation left Marazio feeling deeply unsettled: up to that point Mussolini had been to her ‘the man of Providence’, ‘the sun of my life’; she now saw that ‘it was possible to love that man in a different way to mine’.20 The fact that schoolchildren were constantly exhorted to respect, obey and love the Duce (‘Even if Mussolini were not for us Italians like a celestial saviour, whom we thus have a sacred duty to know and love, his life … should be made familiar to all you children, and to every child, as an example and model’, said a typical school manual – in its ninth edition – in 1937),21 generated in the minds of at least some young women a sense of competing loyalties when it came to their relationships with men. The diary of the Tuscan teenager Athe Gracci seems to have been written simultaneously to record, affirm and disentangle her love for her fiancé, Enzo, and for the Duce (and also for God). When in the spring of 1939 she interrupted her affair with Enzo, the 16-year-old felt ‘free’ once again to devote herself fully to the ‘fatherland’, ‘because I love the Duce above everything else; because the Duce makes me tremble, because I only have to hear his words to be transported with my heart and soul into a world of joy and greatness’. A few months later, with war in Europe looming, she wrote of her determination to do all she could to serve Italy and to maintain her devotion to Mussolini: ‘O Duce, Duce of our life, commander of all our people, everyone places their love in you, everyone hopes in you, and if you do not succeed in winning peace … we will admire all of you just the same: your smile, your words, your deeds.’ By now she was back together with Enzo, and when war was declared on 10 June 1940 she confided her sense of sadness and fear to her diary and concluded, by way of profession: ‘I love the Duce, I love Enzo above all else.’22 A correlative of ‘love’ was a desire for physical contact, and women admirers in particular frequently asked for audiences with the Duce or urged him to come to their town (‘My Duce … Genoa awaits you with all its heart, and I have such a longing to see you, even if only from a distance, and confirm that you are not a myth, but a man, and hear for once your passionate words from your lips and not through the radio’).23 Diaries, letters and memoirs, as well as reports by party officials and prefects, indicate just how strong the impulse was to see and touch Mussolini when he arrived for one of his public visits. Zelmira Marazio recalled being in a crowd in Piazza Vittorio Veneto, Turin, in May 1939, when she was 17, listening to a speech by the Duce. ‘Everybody’, she said, ‘wanted to see him close up, salute him and touch him when he came down from the podium.’ As soon as he had finished, We all, as if possessed, surged towards him, shouting and gesticulating. I was swept along in that human torrent and lost my wristwatch on this occasion – or



The internalisation of the cult of the Duce137 else had it stolen. But that did not spoil my day: my happiness was too great at having seen my Duce near to, at having caught the flashing of his famous eagle eyes.24

A more immediate description of what it felt like to witness one of the Duce’s speeches is provided by the diary of Maria Teresa Rossetti, a highly intelligent student of physics at the University of Padua in the mid- to late 1930s. Maria came from a largely apolitical middle-class family, and her own support for Fascism, though in general strong, and at times ardent (as with the declaration of empire in 1936), was far from unconditional and was subjected to growing critical scrutiny as the country drifted towards war. She was particularly disturbed by the introduction of the anti-Semitic laws in 1938 (which caused a number of her teachers to lose their jobs), seeing them as a sign that Mussolini had lost his ‘balance’ and was now confusing cruelty with patriotism. But when towards the end of that year the 23-year-old heard that the Duce was going to visit Padua, she could hardly sleep for excitement: I did not miss a word of his speech or an expression of his face and I took away with me a marvellous impression. He is an exceptional man who exudes an immense force that can enchain endless multitudes. His face is unique and inimitable, full of strength and sweetness, hard and human. You had to see how he smiled at the cheers and with what perfect style he gave the Roman salute. Looking at that face you would feel prepared for anything, whatever the sacrifice, whatever the struggle … I shouted and shouted so much that I lost my voice and was hoarse the whole day, but I felt such enthusiasm as I will never forget.25

Direct contact with the Duce through audiences or attendances at speeches and rallies had a common supplement (and surrogate) in photographs, and millions of homes up and down the country were adorned with pictures of the Fascist leader, often proudly displayed alongside religious pictures. Many of the letters sent to Mussolini by both men and women included requests for his photograph, preferably signed. Sometimes a specific image was sought. One young woman, who said she had for years prayed for the Duce daily and never forgotten to put flowers in front of the photographs of him that she ‘guarded with jealous care’, asked for a picture taken some years before that she had looked everywhere for in vain: You were dressed elegantly in civilian clothes … Your smiling eyes highlighted your pale and adorable face! Beneath your jacket around your neck there was a brightly coloured scarf that fell at an angle across your shirt front. You were standing with your left leg in front of you with the knee slightly bent. Your right hand was resting on a beautiful stick … How attractive your masculine figure was! You were talking to a group of friends. Do you remember it, Excellency?26

An additional form of surrogate contact was provided by Mussolini’s ‘shrine’ in his home town of Predappio, which from the mid-1920s became

138

The cult of the Duce

the focus of a huge pilgrimage and tourist industry. Reports spoke of female visitors caressing or kissing items of furniture in the house where he had been born with ‘religious’ awe27 – though the dividing line between religious and erotic feelings was not always self-evident. One woman from Bologna, who from 1937 to 1943 wrote over 800 letters of an intensely passionate character to Mussolini (with the suggestion in a number of them that she had had a sexual relationship with him at some point, experiencing his ‘so tender and beautiful love’ – whether in fantasy or reality is not clear), related how when she had visited Predappio she had found it difficult to leave his bedroom: The day I went to Predappio I felt I wanted to stay in your little rustic house. Inside I saw so much light shining and it was you that was shining, and, you know, I touched your little bed and clutched it tight. And I would have liked to stay there alone and make all the things there mine. I thought so much about you and said to myself: ‘If at this moment my dear Benito were to come in, how many kisses and caresses would I give him. I would embrace him so hard he could never let me go!’28

For men, too, devotion to Mussolini often inhabited a sphere where the distinction between spiritual and more tactile or sensual feelings was quite hard to discern. The diaries of prominent figures in the regime frequently display a fascination with the body, appearance and expressions of the Duce, and a desire to have as much direct contact with the leader as possible. Giuseppe Bottai, who confessed in 1942 that he had failed after over twenty years of close observation to work out if Mussolini’s extraordinary mannerisms and gestures – the rolling of his eyes, the thrusting-out of his chin and chest – were spontaneous or artificial,29 commented in December 1935 on how the Duce’s physique had become more refined as the regime had grown in spirituality: when he had first known Mussolini in 1918 his hands had seemed crude, strong and gnarled; ‘now they are small, delicate, and almost feminine, like those of a midwife’.30 Luigi Federzoni carefully recorded Mussolini’s shifting moods and demeanour in the diary he kept in early 1927 and displayed almost childlike delight when the Duce smiled at him or patted him on the shoulder.31 Galeazzo Ciano, too, drew huge pleasure from the physical presence of Mussolini and freely confessed to ‘loving’ him. The final words of his diary after he was dismissed as Foreign Minister in February 1943 are: ‘I love Mussolini, I love him greatly, and the thing I will miss most will be the contact with him.’32 An element in the attraction, as Bottai, Federzoni and Ciano all indicate, was a feeling once again that the Duce was simultaneously extremely human and also quite exceptional and unfathomable; and the sense of his inscrutability was a major factor, certainly in the mind of Bottai, driving so many to want to identify with him passionately (‘my generation is entirely in Mussolini: it is Mussolini. He cannot be measured outside of us: but he in us, and we



The internalisation of the cult of the Duce139

ourselves in him’).33 The histrionic gestures and poses may have invited jokes and mimicry, but as the journalist Leonida Fazi recalled, the humour was in general born of deep affection (‘this was the man who seemed to embody my feelings’), not of derision: ‘The Mussolini with his hands on his hips and the chin jutting out seemed to us endearing.’34 Indeed Fazi and his friends regarded Mussolini as a kindred spirit – somebody they almost had a right to ‘own’. On one occasion, when they heard that he was giving a speech in a town some 30 km from Ferrara, where they were studying at university, they raced off on their bicycles ‘just to see him’: We managed to work our way towards the front of the crowd in the piazza in the centre of the town. Mussolini spoke for no more than ten minutes and then came down from the town hall and walked towards his car … We followed him. He was surrounded by a crowd but we managed to push our way through to within a few feet of him, shouting like madmen. The phrase we repeated most was: ‘We want you [tu] in Ferrara.’ The word ‘tu’ came spontaneously to us. We screamed so much that in the end he heard us. He turned and said: ‘I will come to Ferrara as well.’ I cannot remember what happened after this because of my level of enthusiasm – which I could now describe as delirium … I was captivated by [Mussolini] … Many considered him infallible … When I was fifteen, he seemed a demigod; when I was twenty, he seemed a leader whom it was unthinkable to disobey.35

The idea that Mussolini was ‘infallible’, or a ‘demigod’, or ‘a man of providence, sent by God’, is one that recurs with growing frequency in writings by supporters of Fascism from the mid-1920s. Disentangling in each instance the impulses that lay behind such language is almost impossible. In some cases the principal motive may have been one of propaganda: a desire, for instance, to construct an image of the Duce that it was felt would resonate with the ‘credulous’ masses. In others a degree of self-interest may have been at work: as eulogies to Mussolini became part and parcel of the cultural fabric of the regime, expressing ever more fulsome and extreme tributes to the Duce was an obvious way to gain political recognition or advancement. In still others the authors might have been sincere in their claims that Mussolini was a providential figure. What does seem manifestly clear, though, is that the religious scaffolding that was erected around the character of the Duce and his position and function within the regime intersected with existing linguistic and cultural templates provided by Catholicism and the messianic national expectations formulated by the likes of Mazzini in the Risorgimento (and carried through the liberal era by countless disenchanted intellectuals). A typical example of how these various religious and historical topoi came together is offered by a speech, reproduced in the journal Capitolium in 1926, in which Federico Ratti expatiated on Rome’s mission now that Mussolini – ‘the greatest miracle of our race’ – had come to power:

140

The cult of the Duce

It was right that from the extreme edge of our generation there should spring into the world on 29 July 1883 the newest and greatest son of Rome, which has awoken again for the third time: Benito Mussolini. Yes, God willed it, Duce, God willed it that you should be born on the edges of our heroic generation, in time to know and suffer its inexpressible grief … God willed it, Duce of Italy, that you should be born to a blacksmith so that you should be supremely fitted to hammer the human metal of this generation and forge it according to your will. God willed, Duce of Rome, that you should be born in Romagna, thirty kilometres from the Rubicon of Caesar, and willed that you too should cross it in the same fashion, and in the same fashion come to Rome … .36

In diaries and letters, the desire for an intimate connection with the Duce was given cultural endorsement by the practice and language of Catholic prayer. In the public sphere the establishment of Mussolini as a focus for divine intercession was sanctioned in a growing number of settings in the 1920s – classrooms, meetings of party youth organisations, church ceremonies, political rallies; and the process accelerated after the 1929 conciliation with the Vatican. What is notable about the private sphere is how intensely the religious nexus appears at times to have been internalised. An example is offered by the diary of Primo Boccaleri, a primary-school teacher of humble peasant extraction from the province of Alessandria, who at the end of 1941, aged 32, was sent on what he called his ‘mission’ to civilise the children of a village in newly occupied Croatia. After his first day at the school he knelt beside his bed, thinking of his family and Italy, and prayed: ‘My mission has begun: I ask God to give me the health and strength for my task. I pray to God to increase my love for the Fatherland and my faith in the Duce. I ask God to give long life to my Duce so that Italy can become ever greater. I ask God to grant me too the victory of life and civilisation in this land.’ Two days later his thoughts turned again in reverential gratitude to Mussolini: ‘Duce, how dear you are to our Italian hearts, to our love as fascists, we who are your believers and fighters! – you, who have restored our cities and our villages, you, who have caused the humble but seemly dwellings of our diligent and wise peasants and workers to be kissed by the sun and health.’37 Some of the most vivid examples of how the sense of connection with the Duce was intertwined with Catholic paradigms of intercession are to be found in the private letters sent to Mussolini at the Segreteria Particolare del Duce. ‘Forgive me if I, a humble woman, dare to write to you and address you with tu. But when I pray to God I do not use either Voi or Lei, and You for me are a God, a superhuman being sent to us by a superior power … .’38 ‘Pardon me if I use tu with you, but I also talk with the same familiarity when I look to God and pray, because all those who are Great are Good and forgiving.’39 ‘I am a poor father of eleven children who turns to You with that same faith as when in the darkest hours of our life we turn to Him who alone can provide



The internalisation of the cult of the Duce141

salvation.’40 ‘[M]ay the vows of your people, who see in You alone the greatness of Italy, be fulfilled in your name, Duce. I profess to You … my faith, and promise to continue my mission as an Italian Mother ever more worthily.’41 ‘May God protect you from on high for many years to come, and may your body then be embalmed so that it can be honoured in your town of Predappio near to your loved ones.’42 ‘Duce, every morning Your name is murmured before the Divine Virgin, imploring strength, health and victory… .’43 Since Mussolini afforded for millions of Italians what appeared to be a providential element at the heart of fascism, it is perhaps not surprising that the moments of most intense engagement with him were often those of actual or impending loss or grief: at such times the Duce could provide justification and meaning for suffering. Many soldiers in the Second World War wrote letters voicing contentment at laying down their lives for Mussolini (‘I was born for the war of Mussolini, and for him I wish to die’;44 ‘Duce, when you receive this letter I will already be dead, fallen on the field of honour with your name preserved in the depths of my soul’).45 There may, of course, have been a mercenary motive behind such expressions of loyalty: a hope that the widow or parents would gain a better pension. And the same might be said of the many wounded soldiers who wrote to the Duce to express their continued faith in him and the Fascist cause. But the fervour and apparent spontaneity of so many of the letters suggests that the main aim was to establish meaning for the loss they had incurred. Franco Oldrini, a former Fiume Legionary, was perhaps unusual only in the extent of his effusiveness. In April 1941, in the course of the campaign in Greece, he was hit by a mortar and had to have a leg amputated. Shortly after the operation he wrote to Mussolini to say that his spirit was ‘still strong’, his morale ‘very high’, and his love for the Duce ‘more than great’: With the pure and great faith You have instilled in us, Duce … with the love of a son for his Father, of a fascist for his Duce, of a Black Shirt for his Leader, I took up my rifle … Duce! Attached to my bed Your Effigy of when you were wounded and were on crutches, and I kiss Your Crutches – which I will soon have to use; I kiss them with passion, because making myself equal to You in physical suffering, I will come to resemble You more in the Ideal. For the blood given in Your name to the Fatherland; for the willing gift of my limb, Duce, I thank You!46

Some of the most poignant letters written to the Duce were those from relatives who had lost a son, a husband or a brother fighting in the Ethiopian campaign or in the Second World War. Again it is impossible altogether to discount a financial incentive with such correspondence; but once more the passionate language and the recurrence of words that resonated with religious significance – ‘blood’, ‘sacrifice’, ‘holocaust’, ‘martyrdom’, ‘faith’, ‘holy cause’ – suggest that the cult of the Duce operated in its most internalised and

142

The cult of the Duce

i­ntimate form as a point of ethical reference whose validity derived largely from the fact that it dovetailed with deep-rooted Catholic templates. To take one example from many hundreds of similar letters preserved in the Segreteria Particolare del Duce relating to the invasion of Ethiopia, that of a semi-literate peasant woman from a village near Cosenza whose brother had been killed in January 1936, ‘with the name of Your Excellency and of our Italy on his lips’: But my eyes are not weeping. Although I am just a poor peasant woman for whom his arms were very precious, as they were strong and helped me to cultivate the small field that I rent, I nevertheless feel boundless pride that one of my blood has offered himself up of his own will to his Duce and the Fatherland, heroically sacrificing himself. And may the selfish and arrogant world know that the poor and noble women of Italy are, and always will be, ready to offer up their lives too, at one sign from Your Excellency.47

Notes  1 C. Alvaro, Terra nuova: prima cronaca dell’agro pontino (Rome: Istituto fascista di cultura, Edizioni di novissima, 1934), p. 54.   2 G. Pini, Filo diretto con Palazzo Venezia (Bologna: Cappelli, 1950), p. 103.   3 T. Mazzatosta and C. Volpi, L’italietta fascista (lettere al potere 1936–1943) (Bologna: Cappelli, 1980), pp. 15–21.   4 B. Mussolini, Pensieri pontini e sardi (August 1943), in B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, ed. E. and D. Susmel, Vol. 34 (Florence: La Fenice, 1961), p. 279.   5 A. Mussolini, ‘L’Uomo e la Folla’, Il Popolo d’Italia, 25 May 1926.   6 M. Sarfatti, Dux (Milan: Mondadori, 1926), p. 295.   7 G. Pini, ‘Divagazioni’, Critica fascista, 1 December 1927, quoted in E. Gentile, Il culto del littorio (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 1993), p. 275.   8 Mazzatosta and Volpi, L’italietta fascista, pp. 11–12.   9 L. Santoro, Roberto Farinacci e il Partito nazionale fascista, 1923–1926 (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2008), p. 164. 10 G. Bottai, Diario 1935–1944, ed. G. B. Guerri (Milan: Rizzoli, 2001), p. 379 (19 May 1943). 11 P. Orano, Mussolini da vicino (Rome: Casa editrice pincione, 1928), pp. 107–10. 12 A. Imbriani, Gli italiani e il Duce: il mito e l’immagine di Mussolini negli ultimi anni del fascismo (1938–1943) (Naples: Liguori, 1992), p. 114 (19 August 1932). 13 Archivio Diaristico Nazionale, Pieve Santo Stefano (henceforth ADN), Carlo Ciseri, Diario 1915–84, March 1920, 28 October 1923, November 1940, 15 February 1941. 14 Ibid., 26 July 1943, 4 August 1943. 15 Imbriani, Gli italiani e il Duce, pp. 102–21, 123–39, 183–92. 16 T. Cianetti, Memorie dal carcere di Verona, ed. R. De Felice (Milan: Rizzoli, 1983), p. 337. 17 Imbriani, Gli italiani e il Duce, pp. 162–4, 194–9. 18 Mazzatosta and Volpi, L’italietta fascista, p. 115.



The internalisation of the cult of the Duce143

19 Z. Marazio, Il mio fascismo: storia di una donna (Baiso: Verdechiaro, 2005), pp. 39–40. 20 Ibid., pp. 42–3. 21 S. Grana, Mussolini spiegato ai bimbi: facili conversazioni sull’opera del Duce di prima e dopo la Marcia su Roma rivolte ai piccoli e utili ai grandi (9th edn, Turin: Paravia, 1937), p. 79. 22 ADN, A. Gracci, Diario della mia vita (1938–47), pp. 48–9, 74–5, 150–1. 23 Archivio Centrale dello Stato (henceforth ACS), Segreteria Particolare del Duce, Carteggio Ordinario (henceforth SPD, C. O.) Sentimenti, b. 2768, ‘una piccolo donna’, 30 March 1938. 24 Marazio, Il mio fascismo, p. 49. 25 P. Gios, ‘Il diario di Maria Teresa Rossetti: una giovane intellettuale tra fascismo e antifascismo’, in A. Ventura (ed.), Sulla crisi del regime fascista 1938–1943: La società italiana dal ‘consenso’ alla Resistenza (Venice: Marsilio, 1996), pp. 434–5. 26 ACS, SPD, C. O., b. 2762, name not clear (initials and accompanying abstract sketch), 28 October 1940. 27 Cf. P. Willson, Peasant Women and Politics in Fascist Italy: The ‘massaie rurali’ (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 155–6. 28 Mazzatosta and Volpi, L’italietta fascista, pp. 66, 72. 29 Bottai, Diario, p. 295 (4 January 1942). 30 Ibid., p. 71 (29 December 1935). 31 L. Federzoni, 1927: Diario di un ministro del fascismo, ed. A. Macchi (Florence: Passigli, 1993), pp. 25, 27, 54, 131, etc. 32 G. Ciano, Diario 1937–1943, ed. R. De Felice (Milan: Rizzoli, 1980), p. 697 (8 February 1943). Cf. Federzoni, 1927, p. 404 (7 March 1940). 33 Bottai, Diario, p. 187 (17 April 1940) . 34 A. Grandi, I giovani di Mussolini: fascisti convinti, fascisti pentiti, antifascisti (Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 2001), p. 45. 35 Ibid., p. 46. 36 Quoted in E. Gentile, Fascismo di pietra (Rome–Bari: Laterza,, 2007), p. 136. 37 ADN, Primo Boccaleri, Diario della mia vita e della mia missione in Dalmazia, 1941–2, 9 December 1941, 11 December 1941. 38 ACS, SPD, C. O., b. 2768, ‘una piccola donna’, 30 March 1938. 39 Ibid., letter of Carlo Ambrosi, March 1938. 40 Mazzatosta and Volpi, L’italietta fascista, p. 189. 41 ACS, SPD, C. O., b. 2793, widow from Vertova (Bergamo), 16 June 1936. 42 Ibid, b. 2768, from Vicenza, 3 December 1942. 43 Ibid., Adele Zabelli, December 1942. 44 B. Ceva, 5 anni di storia italiana 1940–1945: da lettere e diari di caduti (Milan: Edizioni di comunità, 1964), p. 135 (Riccardo Beduschi, 9 January 1941). 45 Ibid., pp. 197–8 (Enrico Remondini). 46 ACS, SPD, C. O., b. 2823, Franco Oldrini, 18 May 1941. 47 Ibid, b. 2793, Rosaria Celebre, 10 March 1936.

9

Mussolini and the Italian Empire, 1935–41 Giuseppe Finaldi

Audiences of the Duce cult in the Italian colonies Si va per Mussolini nell’Africa Orientale Abbiam con gli Abissini molti conti da saldar… Si va per Mussolini, per l’Italia e per il re

The chorus of the 1935 popular song In Africa si va jovially states that Italians were off to conquer East Africa ‘for Mussolini’ as if to bring the dictator a gift worthy of the godlike status his persona was fast assuming at home. In English the use of this phraseology appears as servile and unambiguous, but in Italian per can mean both ‘for’ and ‘because of’, suggesting a rather more nuanced connection between the Duce and his conquering people. In any case, as an afterthought, it would seem, the song’s chorus adds that Mussolini should be placed alongside both ‘Italy’ and the ‘king’. The monarch and the nation had alone been sufficient energisers of Italy’s pre-Fascist colonising and Mussolini appears to complete rather than monopolise the picture in the 1935 song. Readers will need no reminding that the much more remembered ditty Faccetta Nera, also celebrating the Italian conquest of Ethiopia, suggested that the soon to be liberated Abyssinians could with bated breath now expect ‘a new Duce and a new King’. Searching for a ‘cult of the Duce’ specific to Italy’s colonies needs to take into account that there was a pre-Fascist empire, although it was only in the Ventennio that investment (economic, human and cultural) in the colonies became substantial. It should also be borne in mind that in the Empire there were two very specific audiences at which the cult of the Duce was aimed. Very differently from home, where the entire population was considered to be (with the exception of dissidents and eventually Jews) part of the national community, notwithstanding class and gender differences, in the colonies the demarcation between the coloniser and the colonised was concrete to the point of eventually becoming enshrined in law. While both groups were considered to be legitimate Italian subjects (there were no evident plans to eradicate the indigenous population), the colonised were to occupy an infe-



Mussolini and the Italian Empire, 1935–41145

rior social position and to live an entirely separate life from the dominant whites. This racial ordering of the colony was made apparent, for example, in the late 1930s by the plan to rebuild Addis Ababa, which was very partially implemented,1 and the thorough reconstruction of Asmara between 1935 and 1941.2 The centre of the Eritrean capital became a white-only city while the native population was granted more outlying zones; the two areas remained segregated. Coupled with the racial laws enacted by the late 1930s, the separation of the two populations throughout Italy’s colonies was complete, at least on paper. In practice there was substantial contact between the two groups, particularly in the workplace and through the sex business, in the military and owing to domestic service, but the establishment of two ‘autonomous’ and socially unequal populations remained the underlying principle structuring the Empire.3 In this context any cult of the Duce alive in the colonies would be articulated with respect to its split audience, or so would seem most logical. The reality was that defining the indigenous population solely by race, for example, would have elided religious differences which might have been useful in a policy of divide et impera. ‘Eritreans’, who had been under Italian control for longer than Ethiopians and who had en masse been conscripted into the Italian armed forces, could not be talked to in the same way as Abyssinians who had been taught to admire the equestrian statue of Menelik II in Addis Ababa, and for whom the rule of the Solomonic dynasty had been sustained for time immemorial by the Coptic Church and by the very ‘feudal’ structure of society. The Jewish population of Libya, town-dwelling and relatively Europeanised, would have seen itself differently from the surrounding Arabs and the semi-nomads of the interior. After 1945 Libyan Jews hoped for a return of Italian rule, Arabs did not.4 At the same time some ‘Eritreans’ took up arms against Ethiopia, claiming that the long period of Italian colonisation had forged a nation with a separate identity from the larger African country.5 Among Italians different audiences can also be discerned. Soldiers, for example, who made up by far the largest number of ‘colonials’, would have been treated very much as ‘Italians abroad’, carrying with them for their brief stay in the colonies political and cultural concepts absorbed at home. The case of administrators, businessmen and peasants, who remained longer in the colony (and perhaps intended staying permanently), would have been different, although it is unclear, except among a small number of veteran colonisers in Libya, if a ‘colonial’ view distinct from that of Italians back home ever matured among the Italians living in Africa. In all, a large Italian presence with tens of thousands envisaging themselves as permanent settlers was a plausible scenario only for the brief spell between 1936 and 1941. Before 1936 there were simply too few Italians in Africa beyond the required administrators and soldiers to really matter; and after 1941 the majority of Italians abandoned

146

The cult of the Duce

the colonies for good. Subsequently the indigenous populations ceased to be subjects of Mussolini’s Italy and embarked on the new road of post-colonial nationalism. In other words, the Italian Empire was neither long-lived nor particularly high on the national agenda except for the critical period 1935–41, where it did take centre stage in defining what Fascism stood for. The complexities and nuances of a specific ‘Duce Cult’ in the Italian colonies would therefore require a far more detailed examination than the present chapter allows. Nevertheless, the following represents an initial if cursory glance at the way the ‘Duce Cult’ articulated itself among some of the Empire’s different audiences. It looks at two case studies to illustrate the workings of a ‘Duce Cult’ specific to the Empire; but it makes no claim to be exhaustive. Rather it represents a snapshot view prompting further exploration. The 20,000 in Libya: ideal acolytes of the cult of the Duce The territory which eventually became Libya was in many ways a ‘normal’ European colony. Although captured just prior to the First World War, and so some time after the Scramble for Africa had parcelled out most of the continent to the other European powers, its historical trajectory followed the usual pattern of a European colony. An initial ‘paper conquest’, which entailed the securing of strongholds (in the Libyan case, on the coast), was followed by military infiltration into the hinterland and thence piecemeal land occupation. Italy did not have it easy, though. Stern resistance to Italian rule from the semi-nomadic tribes of the Libyan interior and the infertility of its soil meant that as late as 1937 the Italian population numbered no more than 4,500 beyond the towns of Tripoli and Benghazi.6 By the early 1930s the draconian and brutal ‘pacification’ methods used by Rodolfo Graziani and Pietro Badoglio7 had left the road open to more sustained colonisation, albeit at the cost of having permanently scarred the relationship with the colony’s indigenous population. However, the uneasy relationship with Libya’s Arabs (disgruntled leaders had crossed the borders into Egypt and Tunisia and formed an émigré community ready to pounce on the colony should the occasion arise) was less important for the moment than the fact that the way had potentially been opened for populating Libya with Italian farmers. ‘Demographic colonisation’, that is, colonial conquest for the benefit of Italy’s land-hungry peasantry, had been the ostensible reason for Italy entering the colonial fray in the first place.8 While it had been impossible for preFascist governments and indeed for Mussolini’s dictatorship in its first decade to embark on a serious ‘demographic’ colonial project (local resistance had yet to be dealt with), the successful conquest of Ethiopia in 1936 had placed the empire issue at the centre of how Fascism defined itself in relation to the Italian people. Mussolini’s new title, ‘Founder of the Empire’, was always



Mussolini and the Italian Empire, 1935–41147

appended to his name after 1936 and Vittorio Emanuele III was now referred to as the ‘king–emperor’ rather than merely the ‘king’. The conquest of Ethiopia was read as a sign that the Italy of the Duce was light years from the sad and bitter days in which Umbertine Italy had been defeated by the black and barefoot warriors of Emperor Menelik. Mussolini took on a new imperial incarnation9 which required that the fruits of his splendid victory now be passed on to those for whom the imperial mantle had been so splendidly acquired: the people of what had been called the ‘proletarian nation’. But there was the potential to do much more than confirm Mussolini in his new imperial manifestation. It was Italo Balbo, Mussolini’s closest and most popular collaborator (and therefore rival), who conceived the idea of a programme of mass migration to Libya to be viewed under the spotlight of national and international attention. Balbo may have been sent to Libya as governor-general to distance him from Roman centres of power and intrigue,10 but he made the most of his appointment to consolidate his image in Italy as well as to enhance the prestige of the regime. He saw Libya as presenting an excellent opportunity to demonstrate to Italians and to the world what Fascism meant and how the Duce’s subjects related to the relaunching of Mussolini’s Italy in the late 1930s. The settling of Libya, a new territory unshackled by the negotiations required in the homeland11 where Fascism needed to impose itself on a pre-existing (and therefore compromised) past,12 could be carried out according to specifically ‘Fascist’ precepts. The sponsored migration in 1938 of the ‘20,000’, or Ventimila (as they were dramatically labelled by Balbo, although their number was closer to 15,000), was designed to bear witness to the way Italians had been welded into Fascists over the last decade. Indeed, those who made the choice to move to Libya, the style in which the migration took place and the existence envisaged for these servants of the Duce’s vision once they arrived in the colony were all showcased as paradigmatic of a novel Fascist way of life. The Ventimila were presented as acolytes, or better catechumens, of the cult of Mussolini. While the story of the ‘20,000’ has been told on many occasions,13 recent interest in understanding Fascism as ‘political religion’, or at least seeing the adulation of the Duce in terms of cultic or pseudo-religious practice, sheds new light on this episode. Its narrative was thought through down to the most implausible detail. The peasants chosen to make the trip were, for example, allowed to bring a few clothes, some crockery, a bicycle (if they were lucky enough to possess one) and one or two family mementos, but on no account was a pack of playing cards permitted: with its connotations of idleness, apolitical leisure or collective divertimento, this might taint the Fascist purity required for a new life in the promised land.14 The Duce had already provided for their every need down there in the desert that they would transform into a new Canaan.

148

The cult of the Duce

Balbo’s idea was only set in motion in March 1938, and like the conquest of Abyssinia took less than seven months to put into practice. ‘Fascist Tempo’ meant the application of a youthful and virile vigour to any plan of action, and the colonists were hounded by Mussolini to speedy action. They had to be paterfamilias, ideally with some experience of the trenches, ex-servicemen like the legionaries of old who were granted land after a lifetime in the Roman army. The Great War was meant to have steeled them for the backbreaking labour required in the colonies. These textbook peasants had to have impeccable ‘Fascist’ credentials: party members if possible, no criminal record or shadows in their past. They were continuously accredited and checked by doctors, the local party bureaucracy or agronomists. No educational qualifications were needed apart from a capacity to read and write: no doubt to provide an assurance that Fascism had been able to communicate to them over the years. Only those with at least six children could be expected to be prized with land in Libya. Some took the ship with ten, the Veneti often with more; and a wife heavy with child was a boon rather than a hindrance to embarking. These were Mussolini’s clichés made flesh; it would come as no surprise that the first child born to any of the migrants once their journey had begun was baptised on the train to Genoa with the name Italo Benito Vittorio (as well as ‘Giorgio’, as the peasant Father had insisted need also be included).15 An accompanying priest officiated (one had been assigned to each troop of peasants), Balbo acted as godfather and both the Duce and the king received their hosannas. A typical narrative of one of the Ventimila ran as follows. The peasant applied to go to Libya to the relevant Colonising Commission. He was vetted according to the criteria outlined above, and if he was one of the ‘fortunate ones’ he had to settle all his affairs at home, don his party uniform and prepare his and his family’s baggage 24 hours before the allotted time for departure. His belongings were picked up by army trucks and sent off to Africa as the peasant was not to appear carrying heavy luggage during the migration. Pinned to the clothes of each member of the family were the number and locality of ‘their’ farm in Libya. On the appointed day the family’s first duty was to be present at the local commune’s ceremonial leave-taking. In San Donà del Piave (Veneto) the whole town turned up for the send-off and the local party head delivered a speech: ‘You are going to far lands as fruitful as any on earth to perform the great task the Duce has willed. You will find there a beautiful house, a spacious farm, and tools and machinery to work it under a sky that is forever blue and forever warm. If you labour faithfully, in a short time your family will be prosperous. The Duce will not forsake you; he will watch over your labours ready to give you whatever you need.’ It was then time to move on to the station. The trains bringing them to Genoa (or Naples if they came from the South) were plastered with flags and placards bearing slogans such as ‘You are the Duce’s rural workers’ or ‘We



Mussolini and the Italian Empire, 1935–41149

Fascist peasants will always march wherever the Duce orders us to go’. Where the train stopped along the way the staccato and repetitive cries of ‘Duce, Duce’ were heard, as well as the obligatory Fascist anthem of Giovinezza. In Genoa the fanfare was enormous. Every significant newspaper in the country had sent its correspondents, and peasants were interviewed and obliged to give a canonical description of their lives and hopes. Martin Moore, the Daily Telegraph correspondent who witnessed the event wrote: ‘taciturn peasants were interviewed and they told of the wars they had fought in, their part in the “struggle” [the rise of Fascism to power], the hardships of the old life and their hopes in the new. Unfailingly they expressed their trust in the Duce.’ In Genoa the peasants attended an open-air mass where they received the Church’s go-ahead to place their trust in the hands of the ‘man sent by providence’ (though in each new Libyan village a church had also been built so that trust was perhaps more in the style of a bargain struck). In Genoa the thousands of Fascist hangers-on accompanying the migrants, including Balbo, knelt and received the sacred chrism of the Church to this new departure of the regime. On leaving the Ligurian capital and joining the others from Naples the 15 ships (including the luxury liner the Vulcania, on which Balbo sailed) received a surprise (but carefully planned) visit from the Duce himself. Mussolini had boarded the Trieste at Gaeta and the warship halted imperiously as the migrant-carrying vessels slowly went by. Moore wrote that each ship passed dangerously close to the Trieste and listed heavily as everyone aboard swept to the side of the vessel to see the ‘stocky figure’ of the Duce, fanatically chanting ‘Duce, Duce’ and proffering the Fascist salute. This was the ultimate blessing and incitement to action by the Leader himself. Naturally all was soon to be seen by the population of Italy in newspapers, magazines or more probably on the silver screen: the cameramen of the Istituto Luce had been working overtime.16 In Tripoli lorries were ready to transport the peasants to the farms that had been built by 25,000 labourers over the previous six months; but a grand ceremony was needed first in the main piazza of the Libyan capital. The peasants in their family groups moved towards the centre of the city, egged on by waving crowds and the indefatigable Balbo. They marched under banners covered with slogans such as ‘the Duce redeems the earth and establishes cities’, ‘begin your new life by vowing that you will be worthy of Mussolini’ or ‘let every colonist be a soldier under the command of the Duce’. In the piazza the archbishop of the colony blessed the throng, and although Mussolini was not physically present a massive mural depicting his helmeted head loomed over the new immigrants. The highlight of this meeting of the faithful was Balbo’s unveiling of a bronze equestrian statue of Mussolini bearing aloft the ‘sword of Islam’. The inscription on its travertine base (later reported to Italians in newsreels) read as follows: ‘To Benito Mussolini pacifier of the

150

The cult of the Duce

peoples, redeemer of the lands of Libya. The immemorial and proud people of the land where the sword of Islam is brandished consecrate their faith, under the aegis of the Lictor, in the challenges posed by their new destiny.’ According to one newsreel, ‘after having invited the comrade colonists to renew their promise to be worthy of Fascist Italy’s civilising mission, all exalted the Great Leader who on the land, in the skies and upon the seas of the world increases the power and irradiates the light of Imperial Italy’.17 Such was the kind of talk the grizzled farmer of the Ferrara provinces was expected to endure in order to get to his plot of land. But even now there was more. After an evening of celebrations, the peasants returned to the ships for the night. The next morning the lorries picked them up and drove them out onto the Litoranea (Balbo’s new road spanning the entire Libyan coast). Some, though, had to wait another night before getting the first glimpse of their farmstead. Tents had been prepared at a spot a short distance from their new homes: it was important to Balbo that each family should arrive during the day with enough time to settle in before dark. At the camp, more speeches, camaraderie, mass and food were to be had. In the morning all the families rose early to salute the Italian flag. Balbo whizzed around talking to as many as possible, inciting and encouraging, always expecting these peasants to fit the mould he had himself constructed. It would appear that the peasants were quickly learning to oblige. One young head of household, on being asked by the Libyan governor-general what he thought of the country, remarked that he had not realised that he would be able to use his bicycle so much in Africa; a slip of the tongue perhaps? Cycling was hardly what he had been brought over for. ‘I shall be out on Sunday’, the peasant quickly corrected himself and the smiling Balbo retorted: ‘So you shall. You can cycle for miles on the Litoranea, but don’t forget that you have work to do as well.’ The young peasant responded, ‘fascistamente’, to a no doubt relieved Balbo: ‘Excellency, you can trust me.’18 The moment had arrived. What awaited each colonist as he crossed the threshold of his new home? Aside from furnishings appropriate to a spartan but dignified lifestyle, there were the food supplies that had carefully been placed in every kitchen. These were important enough to report in Italian newspapers and on newsreels. ‘50 kg of flour, 10 kg of potatoes, 10 kg of pasta, 5 kg of rice, a large bottle of oil, ten tins of tomato pulp, a litre of vinegar. In each yard was stacked half a tonne of firewood and on each kitchen table stood an identical stove, with a bottle of paraffin and five boxes of matches.’ All this ben di dio, as a northern Italian peasant would have put it, was a trifle compared to the 1,300 lire the government had spent on building each new house, but it was a clever touch and probably explained why Balbo wanted everyone to arrive during the day. Most houses had no electricity, although such a deficiency would hardly have been a problem for



Mussolini and the Italian Empire, 1935–41151

the normal Italian peasant of the 1930s. But most important of all, the food and supplies had been stacked in the corner of the kitchen under a portrait of Mussolini (in civilian clothes this time) looking out between two Italian flags.19 The burden placed on these colonists was a heavy one. In return for the chance of owning a farm (they could become freeholders after 25 years) the Italian peasants who had ticked the appropriate boxes at home put themselves under the surveillance of the Fascist apparatus, which banked on their and their family’s performance. As catechumens of the cult of the Duce their behaviour was rigidly controlled. On no account could the farm be abandoned and all crops planted were to be decided by the colonising organisation (Fascist controlled). Only one reason was accepted for long-term leave from the farm: military service. The new villages built by the Libyan government (and the Italian army stationed in Africa) had no taverns but each was equipped with an administrative building, a church and a Casa del Fascio. Life from the moment the lease on the farm had been accepted meant a tough existence where the easy option of finding a job in Tripoli was debarred (even for the sons of the main householder). Performance would be scrupulously scrutinised: Balbo had handed the keys to these men with the promise and threat that he would ‘be back’. Yet if the cult of the Duce had an effect (and there is no reason to suspect that it did not, at least at one level), the relationship between acolyte and leader had to be one of reciprocal trust and service. It is a testament to the enormous poverty of Italy in the 1930s that an inevitably very uncertain future on land in a distant colony and an almost serflike contract were avidly sought after and accepted by so many clear-headed men. The latter were not brainwashed aficionados mindlessly drooling over every word that came from the Duce’s or any other blackshirted excellency’s lips, but men who were prepared to strike a simple deal. Mussolini (and those who represented him in the cities) knew that the poverty of the Italian peasants offered enormous opportunities for manipulation and that the promise of land was an instrument for winning them over. In the colonies (as had been the case in the ‘reclaimed’ areas of Italy itself) the Fascists could give away what they could not cede at home because the indigenous Africans could generally be discounted, in contrast to the landowners and the thick network of interlocking but often antagonistic relationships back in the peninsula. In Libya, Fascism could be presented as a pristine new world built on the ideals that emanated from the mind of the dictator. The life of the peasant who made the trip was imagined in the stereotypical terms of school textbooks or inscriptions on monuments, but the migrants were prepared to go along with the razzmatazz and acquiesce in their roles as Mussolinian acolytes for the sake of the sacks of flour or the heaps of maize they could see in the larder. What made the Ventimila

152

The cult of the Duce

(and their descendants) such loyal ‘Fascists’ until well into the 1960s was the fact that after 1945 their faith had remained a corollary of their desire to continue to work the farms Balbo had granted them.20 They struggled with the British, the Arab Nationalists and especially the Italians who had abandoned the Mussolinian dream; and when those that had remained in Libya were expelled by Gaddafi in 1970 they felt it had been the Italian Republic which betrayed them and not the dead Duce who had reneged on his promises back in 1941–42. The historian Angelo Del Boca has called all this ‘nostalgia’; and indeed it was. But it was also a sign of a more profound desire on the part of the settlers to read their life as spiritually meaningful: that they had been mere pawns in Balbo and Mussolini’s propaganda exercise (one which most Italians, it had seemed at the time, supported wholeheartedly) was an idea that was bound to be rejected. As such the devotion of the Ventimila to the cult of Mussolini was a superb example of the inner workings of the cult as a whole. If in Italy a dramatic loss of faith accompanied the experience of the Second World War, among the Libyan settlers such a ‘loss of faith’ would have entailed their liquidation. Unlike the Italians in Italy and obviously the indigenous populations of the colonies (with ‘Eritreans’ being a partial exception), they had no plausible identity other than the Fascist one to turn to. ‘Light of Rome’, or poems in praise of the Duce in Ethiopia In post-1945 Ethiopia it was customary for local artists, who since 1896 had painted magnificent scenes of the Battle of Adowa for churches, storytellers and patrons, to add the caschetto coloniale with strapped-on sunglasses to the attire of the defeated troops, an item of clothing that went with the 1935 and not the 1896 invasion. It little mattered to Ethiopians in the portrayal of their victory if they had beaten Fascist or liberal Italians. However, at least one Ethiopian artist appears not to have been averse to the Italian occupation. In a style strikingly similar to the paintings of Adowa, he reinterpreted the cult of the Duce, depicting Mussolini – not Vittorio Emanuele – seated on the throne of imperial Ethiopia with a lion at his feet and a blackshirted officer marching past with a battalion of native soldiers: only an Italian flag with its cross of Savoy fluttering over an Ethiopian palace reminds the viewer that after 1936 it was in reality the Italian king (and not the Duce) who had replaced Emperor Haile Selassie.21 In 1943, after his betrayal by the diminutive Italian monarch, Mussolini expressed his regrets that he had not declared Italy a republic in 1936 ‘after the end of the Abyssinian campaign’.22 However, the idea of Fascism shorn of its monarchical cling could, at least to a degree, be played around with in the colonies. The leverage available to win consensus among the population of Ethiopia



Mussolini and the Italian Empire, 1935–41153

during and after the Italian invasion was slight. Not only had the conquest meted out violence on a scale never experienced by the people of Abyssinia, but before the launching of the war very little thought had been given to what role the indigenous population would have in the new Fascist Empire. While the songs spoke of ‘liberating’ slaves and replacing Emperor Haile Selassie with the benign rule of Italy, Ethiopians themselves were envisaged at worst as disappearing, thus freeing the land for Italian peasants, or, at best, as future helots in the service of the dominant colonial population. Women were to be the objects of systematic rape justified by the virility of the Italian male and his perceived right to collect the booty of conquest.23 Such an attitude, as the Germans were to find when they occupied Eastern Europe with a similar lack of foresight, was hardly a workable programme for long-term occupation. In the absence of genocide, only endemic and costly rebelliousness among the native peoples of Ethiopia could be expected in the near future. Whatever leverage might be available to the colonial authorities to connect to native people needed to be carefully safeguarded, indeed, energetically promoted: the mobile cinemas of the Luce newsreel company, for example, were set up almost as soon as troops had cleared the way.24 The areas of leverage to be exploited included the notion of Italy as bearer of modernity and the rule of law, and, for Muslims, liberation from the ‘oppressive’ rule of the old Coptic Christian elite. The right of conquest by force of arms, and the granting of legitimacy to a victorious enemy, were certainly not concepts too distant from an Ethiopian culture which had historically bestowed rank, wealth and power on military success. The fact that in 1936 Haile Selassie had fled to Britain rather than defend his throne to the last told against him for some; and it was not the first time (nor would it be the last) that a ruler had been deposed by force in Ethiopia’s travailed political history.25 Ethiopians had been used to the autocracy of their monarchy and there was a chance that exchanging the Negus Neghest Haile Selassie for Mussolini (or more appropriately Vittorio Emanuele III) would be palatable enough. The role of the image of Mussolini in winning over Ethiopians to Italian overlordship was bound to be paramount. Whether it was the giant face of the Duce overlooking Adowa (sculpted by a soldier) or the Galleria Mussolini, which according to Corriere della Sera correspondent Ciro Poggiali was tunnelled through Mount Termaber in 1938 only to show the natives what ‘Italian tenacity’ could achieve (the road could instead have climbed over the mountain),26 Mussolini was used to express that Italy meant business. His watchful presence was meant to shock and awe Ethiopians into submission, but also provide an encouraging image of a stern but just master who would reward collaboration with wealth and the benefits of modern civilisation. Such an image was not without its power to convince, especially some intellectuals for whom Ethiopia’s extraneousness to European colonialism had meant

154

The cult of the Duce

economic stagnation, political corruption and cultural backwardness. For the Ethiopian intellectual Afe Work Ghevre Jesus, who was Italian-educated, married in 1904 to Eugenia Rossi in Turin, and a great admirer of all things Italian,27 a bright future for his country entailed at least an interim period under European rule. As chargé d’affaires for Ethiopia in Rome in 1935, he intimated, on being informed that his country was now at war with Italy, his enthusiastic collaboration with the future Italian Empire, stating to Italian Ambassador Raffaele Guariglia that, ‘if Italy captured Ethiopia, civilised her and made her prosperous, the day would come when the Abyssinians, having become strong and prosperous, would free themselves from Italy as the United States had from England’.28 Bahru Zewde has written extensively about Ethiopian intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s who lamented the backwardness of their country and wondered what the unique survival of Ethiopian independence had achieved.29 While the majority of these intellectuals remained wedded to national independence and sustained the struggle against Italy (most were murdered after the 1937 attempt on Viceroy Rodolfo Graziani’s life), for some, collaboration appeared as a viable option. It was these men who briefly acted as interlocutors for the regime and who appear to have succumbed to the Mussolinian spell. Afe Work himself contributed to the Italian periodical Etiopia and the Amharic newspaper Qesaru Mangest Malektagna, and described Italy’s enemies as ‘wild worms’30 disturbing the smooth construction of Caesar’s new African Empire. He received the honorary title Afa Quesar [the mouth of Caesar] in 1939, though it is unclear if Quesar referred to Vittorio Emanuele or Mussolini.31 It was in Fascist-sponsored Amharic publications, such as the newspaper mentioned above, and in Luce di Roma [Light of Rome] that the adulation of Mussolini on the part of collaborationist Ethiopians can be traced. It was perhaps unclear in Ethiopia how exactly power was shared in Italy between king and Duce, but the following description, to be found in an Amharic publication, was as good as any (although it may not have been wholly appreciated by Mussolini). Ethiopia’s eyes were sick She believed in Emmanuel’s light And received sight. Emmanuel’s Ark is in Rome, Duce Mussolini is her chief priest.32

A poem to the Italian Flag summed up the symbolic division of power between king and Duce – surely to the satisfaction of the Fascist editors of Luce di Roma. Mussolini would have chuckled at his primacy in this instance: Italian flag your place is high above: Emmanuel on your left, Duce on your right …



Mussolini and the Italian Empire, 1935–41155

‘Behold!’ ran another poem, Ethiopia has become mother of lights, For Italy has shared her light. A world of light becomes our country From now on darkness will be no more. In the day and night, if one travels No fears will plague the road, for it is all light. Even the cars have four eyes!

Mussolini himself was referred to as the bringer of this ‘light’, a metaphor much used in the colonial encounter. The paroxysms of praise, so common now in the peninsula,33 appear also to have been conducive to some Amharic poets: A teacher, lord and leader Thought of this Eastern Land. The land they call African Italy Became her east, the Duce being her sun. How lucky we are to see The new sun replacing the old …

The aeroplane is referred to as ‘the wide and great eagle of Mussolini, never covered by clouds and free of darkness’. The rather rickety Italian air force looked impressive in Ethiopia: History is being made Here in Africa. Wisdom has flown Like eagle and hawk. Romans have reached to the sun They’re walking on the sky … Baked in Rome, lunch in Shoa eaten.34

And so it continues, with Mussolini inspiring such praise as: Ink and pen write on paper Tongue and words speak together They will never end praising the Duce The wise among the wise, Hero above all, and King of Kings …

Or: He is our pride And stronghold. Long live Mussolini The judge and prince of peace …35

156

The cult of the Duce

Conclusion It is difficult to tell how far these poems struck a chord or reflected in any way the thought of normal Ethiopian subjects; probably not. But the technology brought to bear on the population by the Italian invasion and the concrete achievements of the regime in Ethiopia (such as the rapidly built road network) could hazily be seen as connected to this godlike figure whose name was always on the lips of the new administrators and their monuments, and who was spoken of by the swarm of Farangi [Europeans] who had suddenly swept into the country. If the poems reflected anything at all it was the fact that some Ethiopians at least knew what was expected of them by the Italian authorities; and, in the same as for the Ventimila, lip service to this Duce was well worth survival, a cash payment (Afe Work was paid around 54,000 lire annually for being the ‘Mouth of Caesar’36) or perhaps a position in the new order. The Ventimila remained true to the cult for the reasons outlined above, but in Ethiopia the brief moment of Italian rule gave way to Haile Selassie’s restoration. Menelik’s statue was returned to where it had been before it was taken down by the Fascists and St George’s Church in Addis Ababa (which had been badly damaged after the 1937 attempt on Graziani’s life) was repainted with images of Haile Selassie at Geneva defending with dignity his country’s liberty, or of the emperor fighting his way back to the capital to reclaim his throne. Fascism had been a violent interlude in the life of most Ethiopians, but the promise of progress, improvement and the benefits of modernity, which had been central to what the Duce had supposedly stood for while he briefly presided over this ancient land, remained. Haile Selassie himself justified his rule on the very same grounds. ‘While We were engaged upon all this careful work and were beginning to lead Our people on the road to civilization’, he wrote in his autobiography, ‘Our enemy rose up with violence sending to Our country many troops with modern equipment as well as numerous warplanes and tanks, breaking the covenant of the nations and fighting us with machine-guns and artillery and with modern weapons many times superior in quality and quantity to our equipment.’37 That this careful ‘road to progress’ was perceived to have been too slow or a blatant lie probably accounted for the ‘socialist’ revolution against Haile Selassie in the 1970s, as well as for Eritrea’s unanimous desire to use its separate colonial past to quit the Ethiopian Empire. The cult of the Duce was always bargained with, even by its self-proclaimed acolytes. Among its various audiences in the Italian colonies Mussolini may have been worshipped for different reasons, but the sack of flour on the kitchen table of the shiny new farmstead in Cyrenaica would have been paramount to the Italian peasant who had crossed the Mediterranean; and to the Muslim looking with hope at the Duce astride his white horse brandishing the ‘sword of Islam’ (which had been forged in Florence) it was possi-



Mussolini and the Italian Empire, 1935–41157

bly the thought of the stable income to be had as an Ascaro [military irregular] that was appealing.38 In this sense, for the Ventimila as for those Ethiopians who sung Mussolini’s praises the cult of the Duce was experienced as an optimistic and palatable version of the future for themselves and the groups they identified with; but then, adherence to any ‘cult’ always places this hope at the centre of its belief system. Notes  1 M. Fuller, ‘Wherever you go, there you are: Fascist plans for the colonial city of Addis Ababa and the colonizing suburb of EUR ’42’, Journal of Contemporary History, 31:2 (1996), 397–418.  2 E. Denison, Asmara: Africa’s Secret Modernist City (London: Merrel, 2003).  3 N. Labanca, Oltremare (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002).  4 R. De Felice, Jews in an Arab Land, Libya, 1835–1970 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985).  5 R. Bereketeab, Eritrea: The Making of a Nation, 1890–1991 (Asmara: Red Sea Press, 2006).  6 G. Rochat, Balbo (Turin: UTET, 1986), p. 266.  7 A. De Grand, ‘Mussolini’s follies: Fascism in its imperial and racist phase, 1935– 1940’, Contemporary European History, 13 (2004), 127–47.  8 See G. Finaldi, ‘The Peasants Did Not Think of Africa’, in J. MacKenzie (ed.), European Empire and the People (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011).  9 E. Gentile, Fascismo di Pietra (Rome: Laterza, 2007), Ch. 7. 10 R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 295. 11 As early as 1891 Baron Leopoldo Franchetti had seen in the colonies exactly the same possibility for freedom of action absent in the compromised homeland. However, his vision was one of freeholding peasants imbued with the democratic spirit at work in the American West. See L. Franchetti, ‘L’Italia e la sua colonia Africana’, in R. Villari (ed.), Il Sud nella storia d’Italia: antologia della questione meridionale (Bari: Laterza, 1974), I, pp. 221–2. 12 Something of this had been present in the resettlement of Italians in the Agro Pontino and other reclaimed land in Italy itself. See F. Caprotti, Mussolini’s Cities: Internal Colonialism in Italy, 1930–1939 (Amherst, MA: Cambria Press, 2007). 13 For example C. Segré, Fourth Shore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), Ch. 6; A. Del Boca, Gli italiani in Libia (2 vols, Rome: Laterza, 1994), pp. 256–71. 14 M. Moore, Fourth Shore (London: Routledge, 1940), p. 33. 15 All information on the Ventimila migration event is taken from ibid. or Istituto Luce newsreels available at www.archivioluce.it. 16 See Luce Documentary, ‘I ventimila coloni nelle nuove provincie libiche’, available at www.archivioluce.it. 17 Giornale Luce, B1406 09/11/1938 (accessed 17 September 2010). 18 Moore, Fourth Shore, p. 124. 19 See the magnificent photograph of the store of provisions in ibid., p. 23.

158

The cult of the Duce

20 See on this Del Boca, Gli italiani in Libia, Vol. 2, Ch. 5. 21 This painting with no clear provenance is reproduced in R. De Felice and L. Goglia, Mussolini: il mito (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 1983), plate XIV. 22 Reported by Nazi superman Otto Skorzeny and quoted in C. Hibbert, Benito Mussolini (London: Reprint Society, 1963), p. 280. 23 See N. Labanca, Una guerra per l’impero (Turin: Einaudi, 2005), pp. 250–75. 24 R. Ben-Ghiat, ‘The Italian colonial cinema: agendas and audiences’, Modern Italy, 8:1 (2003), 49–63. 25 B. Zewde, A History of Modern Ethiopia (Athens: Ohio University Press), 1991. 26 M. Antonsich, ‘Signs of power: Fascist urban iconographies in Ethiopia (1930s– 1940s)’, GeoJournal, 52 (2000), 325–38 (p. 328). 27 On this fascinating character see A. Rouaud, Afä-Wärq 1868–1947: Un intellectuel éthiopien témoin de son temps (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1991). 28 R. Guariglia, Ricordi 1922–1946 (Naples: ESI, 1950), p. 304. 29 B. Zewde, ‘The Ethiopian intelligentsia and the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935–1941’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 26:2 (1993), 271–95; Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia: The Reformist Intellectuals of the Early Twentieth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002). 30 Zewde ,‘The Ethiopian intelligentsia,’ p. 285. 31 The new title of ‘First Marshal of the Empire’ had been dreamed up by Mussolini in March 1938. Both he and the king were bestowed with it, infuriating Vittorio Emanuele, who valued his titular precedence over the Duce. See A. Del Boca, Gli Italiani in Africa Orientale (4 vols, Rome: Laterza, 1976–87), Vol. 3 (1986), pp. 288–9. 32 Collected by Z. Tariku, ‘Pro-Italian poems during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia’, Amharic BA thesis, University of Addis Ababa, 1974. Some of these were published in the Fascist-sponsored Amharic newspaper, Luce di Roma. 33 The most fulsome was surely the 754 pages of G. Gelardi’s Il Poema dell’Impero (Turin, 1938). 34 Tariku, ‘Pro-Italian poems’. 35 Ibid. 36 G. Stella, ‘Un personaggio amletico: Afework Ghevre Jesus (1868–1947)’, Africa, 41:4 (December 1986), 581–602. Also available at www.ilcornodafrica.it/pcaawgj1.htm. 37 Emperor Haile Selassie I, My Life and Ethiopia’s Progress 1892–1937 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). 38 Del Boca, Gli italiani in Africa orientale, Vol. 23, p. 287; Gli italiani in Libia, Vol. 2, p. 284.

Part III

The Iconography of the Duce

10

Portraits of the Duce Giuliana Pieri

Francesco Sapori, in his 1932 L’arte e il Duce, asserted the importance of art for the Fascist regime: ‘As Benito Mussolini claimed in Campidoglio on 24 May 1924, “I don’t think the terms Italy and art are separable”. … Invested with the supreme political authority, his [Mussolini’s] moral law is that of the Roman citizen: he creates the state every day. Hence he respects all creators: he is an artist and an art patron.’1 Despite the hyperbole of his prose, Sapori did rightly stress the regime’s and Mussolini’s personal interest in the visual arts and the centrality of the arts in the ideology of the regime. Mussolini, in his famous speech at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Perugia in 1926, had stated: ‘a great art can be reborn, an art which can be both traditionalist and modern … the new art of our time, a Fascist art’.2 This oft-quoted statement highlights the plurality and variety of styles fostered by the regime – which were the cause of much misunderstanding in the post-war period – which were accompanied by the strategic reorganisation of artistic institutions. The ‘Fascistisation’ of the arts encompassed public bodies, museums, galleries, exhibitions and academies, as well as the more obvious focus of the regime on public works.3 It was an actual reworking of the visual landscape of the country both physically, mainly through architecture, and metaphorically. Critical studies, however, have tended to treat the figurative culture of the regime either marginally or have focused on cinema, photography, posters and graphics. Overall they have shied away from the fine arts.4 This is partly due to a reluctance to acknowledge the extent of the role played by art in the Fascist regime, and partly to a rigid dichotomy which separates art from propaganda art. Emily Braun’s seminal study on Sironi was a turning point; her analysis of the stylistic links between Sironi’s work and the ideology and aspirations of the regime refocused critical attention on the function of the fine arts in its strategies of consensus.5 Yet her study has remained isolated. The most glaring gap in the literature is the lack of an assessment of the role of the fine arts in the establishment and diffusion of the cult of Mussolini. Despite her attempt to redress the question of the links between the regime and the fine arts, Laura Malvano, in her study on Fascismo e politica

162

The cult of the Duce

­ ell’immagine, claimed: ‘it was the mass image that channelled with more ease d the theme of the cult of the Duce, whilst the cultured image, in painting and sculpture, was more apt to express Italianness metaphorically’.6 This view, which is still prevalent in the critical debate, was related until recently to the scarcity of iconographic sources. Giorgio Di Genova’s controversial 1997 exhibition ‘L’uomo della provvidenza’ – which literally brought out of Italy’s closets an extraordinary number of forgotten portraits of the Duce, from both private and public collections – and a small number of later exhibitions7 have uncovered a wealth of material which has undergone partial scrutiny. The principal contribution of these exhibitions has been the breaking-down of the barrier between art and propaganda art. However, the very nature of the material uncovered, with its wide range of quality, materials and styles, poses a problem for the art historian. Are the works that have been uncovered a simple jumble of Mussoliniana? To what extent are they representative of the regime’s and Mussolini’s own iconographic vision of the Duce? Did the regime control the production of these images? Did the aesthetic quality of these representations have any influence on the production and/or diffusion of images of the Duce? This chapter will look at the evolution of the iconography of the Duce in both painting and sculpture and at the links between formal elements and some of the aesthetic and ideological traits of the cult of Mussolini in the period 1922–43. I have focused on a small sample of works, mainly the official portraits of the Duce that appeared in Francesco Sapori’s 1932 volume L’arte e il Duce (Adolfo Wildt, Dux; Giuseppe Graziosi, Statua equestre del Duce; Ettore di Giorgio, Dux; Primo Conti, La prima ondata; and Thayaht, Sintesi plastica del Duce), since they represent the official face of the dictator at the time of the celebrations of the Decennale. The iconography of the Duce Franco Sborgi claimed that Mussolini had a huge impact on official portraiture which in Liberal Italy overall had been characterised by stereotypical images, in the realist tradition, of the founding fathers of the Risorgimento and the royal family, visible in schools and public offices throughout the country. This traditional style and context changed dramatically in the 1920s under various influences: the First World War and the new cult of the fallen and the war heroes, the influence of the personality cult of Gabriele D’Annunzio,8 and Marinetti’s focus on hyper-expressive gestures which characterised the new Futurist mode of communication. A new accent was thus put on emphatic gestures and expressions. Italian painting and sculpture in the aftermath of the First World War went through the difficult transition from the stylistic innovation of the avant-garde, under both home-grown and foreign models, to the much celebrated (by the regime) and misunderstood



Portraits of the Duce163

1  Ettore di Giorgio, Dux

(by later ­generations) ‘return to order’, creating thus a complex stylistic landscape in which the traditional forms of nineteenth-century realism came to a halt, leaving a gap of both form and content, which was filled, as we shall see, by images of Fascism and its leader. Sborgi’s view of the development of the iconography of Mussolini is tripartite. The first iconographic phase, corresponding to the early years of Mussolini’s office as Italy’s youngest ever prime minister, follows the canons of official portraiture and stylistically stays well within the confines of the realist style. Alfredo Protti, S.E. Benito Mussolini, 1933 (Milan, private collection) and Ambrogio Alciati, Studio per il ritratto di Benito Mussolini, 1928 (Rome, Eredi Alciati collection) are very good examples of this phase.9 It soon evolved into a new image in which Mussolini’s heroic performative gestures took centre stage and transformed three immediately recognisable physical features and mannerisms – Mussolini’s intense gaze, his protruding square jaw and his arms-on-hips pose – into symbolic and iconic elements which would continue to characterise portraits of the Duce. These images, with their emphasis on the theatrical oratory favoured by Mussolini, took inspiration also from the popular imagery of silent films in an interesting dialogue between the dictator, the moving images and the visual artists.10 Ettore

164

The cult of the Duce

di Giorgio’s lithograph, Dux (Figure 1), representing a young Mussolini, seems to belong to this iconographic category.11 The intensity of the staring eyes, which was influenced by both photographic portraits and the myths surrounding Mussolini in the early 1920s, and the luminous, unblemished and perfectly oval face, which differs from other examples in the elongated proportions and the exposure of a portion of the neck, normally not visible, all contribute to the creation of the long and lean look of a very youthful leader. The inclusion of Di Giorgio, now an almost entirely forgotten figure, in Sapori’s monograph alongside works by established artists may seem anomalous.12 Yet it is in many ways entirely consistent with the regime’s strategy of inclusion in order to foster consensus amongst the artistic community. What is different about Di Giorgio’s image, and this might help to explain its inclusion in Sapori’s monograph, is the restrained tone, the lack of theatrical emphasis which generally underscored images within this second category. What we have here is the young Mussolini, perfectly poised, determined and focused, appearing in Sapori’s book alongside Primo Conti’s La prima ondata (see below), with which it shares the volumetric proportions that openly recall early Renaissance examples. The overt visual parallel between the two images, which are positioned side by side in Sapori’s monograph, is a further source of meaning, as it invites a direct link between this young leader and the modernday condottiere in Conti’s triumphal rendition of the Fascist revolution, and helps to construct the myth of the ineluctability of Mussolini’s messianic mission. After 1925, and 1928 in particular, commentators have noted that there are new and increasingly more regimented images of the Duce. Both Sborgi and Di Genova see the emergence, in the late 1920s, of three categories of images: the popular image discussed above; images of Mussolini as the emblem of modernity, with strong links with second wave Futurism;13 and, in the 1930s, with the expansion of the Empire and the increased interest in the classical heritage, the imperial Mussolini. These phases were also discussed by Italo Calvino, whose visual memories of the dictator commenced with the startling novelty of Italy’s youngest prime minister, thoroughly modern in his absence of facial hair, but also ‘reassuring continuity, along with authoritarian severity’.14 This image, which Calvino dates to 1929, was replaced around 1932, on the occasion of the first anniversary of the March on Rome, by the (often equestrian) Roman imperial Mussolini appearing in profile, which Calvino considers an important shift because it allowed artists to turn the dictator into a graphic object. The later phase of the regime was characterised by two iconographic models: what Calvino calls the ‘Cubist’ style, which in his article is represented by Thayaht’s portrait of Mussolini, and the image (often in three-quarter rather than in full profile) of the Duce with the dome-shaped helmet. Calvino’s personal recollection, with its focus on photographic images



Portraits of the Duce165

of Mussolini, has influenced considerably the idea of a chronological evolution of the images of the dictator, which has been embraced by historians and art historians and, as Di Genova and Sborgi show, has resulted in the notion of well-defined and almost self-contained iconographic phases, which are the visual parallel of the political evolution of the regime. Yet, not only was the iconography of Mussolini multifaceted, but the different iconographic categories coexisted. The overwhelming impression when sifting through busts, statuettes, sculptures, oil paintings and lithographs is that he could take up different personas at any given time, a mark perhaps of what Umberto Eco calls the ‘political and ideological discombobulation’; a structured confusion which characterised the pluralism favoured by the regime in the arts and beyond.15 Besides, what also seems significant is that, despite the stylistic differences, most artists I have examined had a similar approach in their treatment of those physical features which transformed the Duce into an instantly recognisable icon. Sapori, on the occasion of the celebrations of the Decennale, had noted the proliferation of portraits of Mussolini: ‘the portraits of Mussolini are in their thousands. They will reach legendary figures, they will be countless. Those of Augustus, Julius II and Napoleon will not be comparable with them.’16 The veritable visual ‘Ducemania’ which characterised the commemoration of the Decennale does not only point towards the sheer number of portraits of Mussolini which were circulating in Italy at the time, but also invites more caution when looking at the iconographic trajectory of images of the Duce.17 Adolfo Wildt: the ideal Duce The ideological and stylistic interconnection of past and present, which was at the core of Fascist politics and propaganda, was also central to the iconographic construction of the Duce. In particular, the romanità fostered by the regime resulted in a complex interplay of sources.18 Arguably the most important and most often reproduced image of Mussolini as civis romanus is Adolfo Wildt’s Ritratto di Benito Mussolini (Dux) of 1923, which, as Paola Mola noted, became ‘in Italy and abroad, the most popular official icon of the regime’s propaganda’.19 It was Margherita Sarfatti who commissioned this work on the first anniversary of the March on Rome and the portrait was shown for the first time during the inauguration of the Casa del Fascio in Milan, in October 1923.20 The contemporary reception of the work was mixed; many did not like the infula – ‘those defenceless and ageing bandages’ – others questioned the way in which Mussolini’s virility was conveyed by the sculpture.21 Sarfatti praised Wildt’s interpretation of Mussolini’s severe expression and the energy of his eyes.22 Sapori emphasised the strength of the neck and shoulders bearing the physical and ideal weight of the head and

166

The cult of the Duce

of Mussolini’s will: ‘the strong neck which supports the impetus of the head, tensing under the inspired and inspiring motionless will, towers over the white mass of the wide shoulders’.23 Wildt’s earlier works are among the best examples of symbolist sculpture in Italy. The influence of Jugendstil and Art Nouveau are translated by Wildt into willowy and ethereal marble figures and drawings which recall the graphic work of Gustav Klimt.24 Wildt’s portrait of Mussolini is in many ways a departure from his signature style and shows how the combined influence of Sarfatti’s stylistic preferences, and the myth already at work in the early 1920s around the subject, resulted in a more classical celebratory image, which stylistically is closer to what Rossana Bossaglia calls ‘il neo-purismo novecentista’.25 Yet, as Pontiggia noted, ‘the Portrait by Wildt does not represent a subject but an ideal type … what the artist was interested in was not so much Mussolini the man, with his physical characteristics, but the ideal he embodied.’26 If one compares the portrait of Mussolini with Wildt’s portrait of the King, Sua Maestà il Re (1929), which is the almost exact iconographic copy of the former, one can see that the king’s facial hair, the texture of the skin and the laurel leaves on his head, adding a decorative accent, result in a more naturalistic portrayal.27 The king’s portrait is a more sensitive and realistic representation of the sitter, but Mussolini’s head is the ideal representation of notions of dignitas, asceticism and resolve, and is stylistically closer to Wildt’s celebrated marble portrait of Pius XI of 1926 (Vatican Museums, Rome). The ideal Duce was, already in 1923, a combination of imperial authority, determination, strength, and, above all, was already subjected to a higher degree of abstraction. The flat hair and absence of texture turn the highly polished marble surface into a fluid, almost mirrored surface, which is bare and essential. The absence of decoration, which gives this bust an enhanced architectural solidity, is the visual translation of the superior status of the subject. The rigid frontal pose and the perfect symmetry of the face portray Mussolini already as a distant presence – this is also further emphasised by the lack of definition of the eyes, a reference to classical statuary – frozen in a timeless dimension, and, as Pontiggia has noted perceptively: ‘it represents the peak of lyric idealisation of Fascist mysticism’.28 This is an ideal and spiritual reading of the conceptual essence of the Duce in which the physical reality of the man’s features has undergone a process of progressive stripping down. The large square jaw has been softened; the lips are full and perfectly symmetrical; the nose has been elongated to create a stronger vertical line, which accentuates the symmetry of the entire face, and also helps to lengthen elegantly the otherwise squat features. A further visual trick was played on the viewers by the fact that Wildt’s bust was to my knowledge invariably photographed in profile; this is how it appeared on the inside cover of all the Italian editions of Sarfatti’s biography of Mussolini, Dux (first published in 1926)



Portraits of the Duce167

and in textbooks. This has been generally viewed as a direct link with Roman coins and the imperial iconography. There are, however, also strong links with Renaissance examples, especially Pisanello’s medals, which were among the very first to create a Roman imperial iconography for Renaissance princes. The full profile in Renaissance portraits may ‘also indicate superior rank, since the subject’s eyes do not deign to make contact with all who are lower in status’, and help to reinforce, in the photographic reproduction of Wildt’s work, the aura of the untouchable moral and ethical superiority of the Duce.29 The sharply chiselled edge of the brow, which is especially accentuated in the photographic reproduction of this work, emphasises the overall effect of steely determination attributed to the Duce and, visually, is already suggestive of the later iconographic fascination with the metallic head of the Fascist leader. Primo Conti: the Duce as knight The reference contained in the Regulations of the Fascist Militia, first published on 3 October 1922, to the fact that ‘for him honour is, as it was for the knight of old, a law’, points towards a little explored area of Mussolini’s iconography: the Duce as medieval knight.30 The Italian Gothic revival had fostered and fed the myths and visual representations of the Risorgimento. In the first half of the nineteenth century, historical novels, history painting and the artistic movement of the Puristi, with their stylistic references to both the German Nazarenes and Italian early Renaissance examples, paved the way for Italy’s medieval revival which swept over Italian architecture, painting and the applied arts, especially in the last decades of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century.31 The Italian royal family had borrowed from this rich medieval tradition and iconography and had created a popular imagery and rituals which aimed to give the country a sense of a shared past. D’Annunzio, in his Roman period in the 1880s and 1890s, added to this imagery his own aestheticised idea of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as well as foreign models, especially the northern medievalism of the English Pre-Raphaelites. Although not prevalent, there are a significant number of examples of images of Mussolini, both in the late Romantic and Realist style, and the style of the Novecento Italiano which are indebted to this iconographic model. The most representative is Primo Conti’s La prima ondata of 1929–30 (oil on canvas) (Figure 2), which was first exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1930, and is now in the collection of the Banca Toscana.32 Sapori’s description of the work – ‘in Garibaldian manner, Primo Conti made him [Mussolini] swing up into the saddle over the dark background, surrounded by the legionaries inflamed with his gesture of bellicose redemption’ – creates a clear link between the Duce and arguably the most iconic heroic figure of the new Italy, Giuseppe Garibaldi.33 The most recent reading of this work stresses Conti’s

168

The cult of the Duce

2  Primo Conti, La prima ondata, 1929–30

stylistic dialogue with Velázquez, especially his portraits of Philip V and Prince Baltasar Carlos, as well as Géricault’s portrayal of Napoleon and his army on horseback.34 The iconographic model is, however, one firmly present in Italian early Renaissance mural painting, as well as in nineteenth-century narrative painting and commemorative sculpture, and was especially associated with the portrayal of Italy’s kings. Mussolini here is a medieval warrior; his face, in classical profile, has the dignitas and volumetric proportions which can be found in the works of Masaccio and Piero della Francesca (one should note the solid sculptural quality of the perfect oval shape).35 The classical Roman heritage, which was an important facet of the complex amalgam of Mussolini’s iconography, is almost invariably invoked by commentators when presented with images of the Duce on horseback. However, as Conti’s canvas shows, classical models are more often than not filtered through Renaissance and, more importantly, nineteenth-century examples, making the equestrian Mussolini closer to a medieval knight than the new Augustus. The visual and symbolic link between classical Rome and the Middle Ages was also already present in both France and Italy, in the Napoleonic period, when medieval and classic imperial symbolism coexisted as a means to reinforce the idea of a shared visual and cultural past that linked ancient Rome to



Portraits of the Duce169

3 Golia, San Giorgio Benito uccide il mostro delle sanzioni, 1935

pre-modern Europe. A ceramic plate (Wolfsonian Museum, Miami Beach) (Figure 3) with Mussolini as a modern-day St George, slaying the dragon of the economic sanctions imposed by the League of Nations after the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, is a later literal example of the vitality of this imagery.36 Roger J. Crum, in his analysis of the Fascist recontextualisation and reconceptualisation of Renaissance imagery, noted the importance of the martial iconography of St George. The appropriation of the image of a saint was also part of the complex message of renewal promoted by the regime; one should not forget that in 1936 La dottrina del Fascismo defined Fascism as ‘a religious and military Order’, and ‘this notion of vigilance, sacrifice, and martyrdom, and sainthood permeated Italian society’.37 Both the martial and the equestrian iconography of the Duce make reference to the different symbolic pasts of the Fascist regime, as well as showing the gradual infiltration of a new iconographic element: the helmet. The iconographic shift from a mostly bareheaded Duce to the helmeted one did seem to happen, in photographic and popular images of Mussolini, in the mid- to late 1930s when the imperial rhetoric of the regime became more mature. It mirrored the changes of the Italian army’s helmet to the new German-inspired streamlined version. The full profile of Mussolini in the closely fitting helmet

170

The cult of the Duce

became ubiquitous from around 1938 and especially during the war. However, the best, and earliest, interpretations of this extreme martial iconography of the Duce came from the Futurists, who in the 1920s were already interested in a symbolic, graphic and often abstract interpretation of the Fascist leader as a futurist warrior-machine.38 Thayaht: the Duce as emblem of modernity The iconography of Mussolini as the embodiment of the modernity which the whole country was striving for is where one can find some of the most striking images of the dictator. Mussolini as the Modern Man was a powerful symbol of the regime and central to the construction of the image of the Duce in the 1920s. In the 1930s, when the links with second-wave Futurism and Italian Rationalism became stronger, the result was an addition to the already complex iconography of the dictator. The two most iconic representations of Mussolini as the modern knightwarrior are probably Condottiero (Dux con pietra miliare) (1929) (Figure 4) by Thayaht (Ernesto Michahelles, 1893–1959) and the Profilo continuo del DUCE (1933), also known as ‘DUX’, by the Tuscan sculptor Renato Bertelli (1900– 74).39 Both were executed in stone and metal versions; both present strong, streamlined and unornamented shapes; and both offer an ultra-­synthetic version of the Duce as helmeted effigy. Thayaht was the first to bring to the extreme the idea of the Duce as embodiment of warfare and to accentuate the ideal and abstract interpretation of the features of the Duce.40 Mussolini had openly declared his liking of this work, of which he owned a copy, and which was often reproduced with Mussolini’s handwritten endorsement: ‘This is Benito Mussolini as Benito Mussolini likes it’.41 Contemporary commentators were highly appreciative of Thayaht’s sculpture: Marinetti praised Thayaht’s synthetic rendering: ‘the elementary planes of the cheeks, chin and brow, as they were defined and organised by Thayaht in “Dux”, were sufficient to express the thought, will, eyes and voice of Benito Mussolini’.42 Sapori focused on the helmet, which in his words ‘offers a schematic and effective vision of a closed helmet, torn off a sixteenth-century armour’.43 This bust was first exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1930 and had a special place at the celebrations of the Decennale taking up a full page in the special issue of the Rivista del Popolo d’Italia dedicated to the exhibition. The helmet, ‘which looked like a metallic extension of the smooth surface of his head’,44 had a physical and metaphorical function. Traditionally the armoured body, when the metal is not simply covering it, but becomes the body itself, so closely it is moulded onto the physical body, has blurred the boundaries between seen and unseen, hinting at a physicality barely contained by the metal covering and, in countless images of knights in armour,



Portraits of the Duce171

4 Thayaht, Condottiero (Dux con pietra miliare), 1929

transforming the hard body into an open sexual metaphor for uncontained (and uncontainable) male sexuality. The Duce’s steely determination is metaphorically rendered in the metallic effigy, its hard shell hinting also at corporal perfection and wholesome physical fitness. In their study on art, sex and eugenics, Fae Brauer and Anthea Cullen suggest that the visual arts embraced the representation of the fit, healthy, hygienic, hereditarily wholesome and racially uncontaminated body and thus managed to make this body ‘aesthetically and sexually delectable’.45 The healthy and fit body became natural, hence civilised, and, ultimately, beautiful. The beautiful body and the ideal body of the Duce were central to the ideology of Fascism. The aspirational imagery constructed around the body of the Duce contained notions of virility and physical prowess, but also ideas of spiritual and moral good, which has its roots in Christian iconography, in turn based on the classical notion of the kalos kai agatos in which the physically beautiful is also morally superior. A later painting inspired by Thayaht’s head, Il grande nocchiere (Figure 5), was exhibited in Florence in 1941. Here Thayaht’s mask is transformed into a huge automaton-boatman, dominating over a map of Europe and the northern Mediterranean. The metallic shape refers to what Braun sees as ‘the stardardization of modern mass man with that of the machine’, which

172

The cult of the Duce

5 Thayaht, Il grande nocchiere, 1939



Portraits of the Duce173

characterised Futurist aesthetics and reflected the (real or hoped for) mechanisation of contemporary society.46 Yet, the exaggerated scale of the figure, a modern-day warrior-Pantocrator, standing pillar-like to the west of Europe and emerging from the Atlantic Ocean, whilst striving to convey ideas of resolve, restless energy and irrepressible force, which formed the underlying rhetorical structure of so many images of the Duce, results in an empty monumentality. Conclusion The syncretism which characterised Fascist ideology is mirrored in the different faces of Mussolini, the ultimate object of Fascist worship. Differing iconographic categories not only coexisted but were internally articulated, resulting in a complex multifaceted imagery of the Duce. The iconography of the imperial Romanità, for instance, could encompass the purest neoclassicism, Wildt’s Symbolist-infused classical style, and Sironi’s ‘deliberately primitivizing’ bulky and rough forms that were closer to Etruscan and Romanesque examples.47 The metallic Duce was both a Futurist creation and a direct evolution of the medieval and medievalist chivalric iconography. The one common trait of portraits of Mussolini is, however, the treatment of the subject’s protruding jaw and furrowed brow, which were usually not accentuated. They were visible, in order to make the subject instantly recognisable, but they were subject to a high degree of idealisation and emphasis was instead given to the symmetry of the face, which could be read as a sign of both physical might and supernatural perfection. The characteristic streamlining of the human form and the emphasis on a sleek silhouette, which were important elements in the Futurist and Novecento style of images, was another means through which artists represented the Duce’s power. As can be seen in images which started to dismantle the myth of Mussolini from 1943 onwards, too much prominence to these features and on the size of Duce’s body could easily create a grotesque effect and turn Mussolini into a caricature. Tono Zancanaro’s Gibbo I il Grande a’ la spada dell’Islam of 1944 (Figure 6) is one such example. The visual pun here is with the series of photographs of the dictator taken at the time of the conquest of Libya in which Mussolini appeared in uniform on horseback against the glaring African sun, holding the sword of Islam and pointing vertically towards the sky. In Zancanaro’s image, Mussolini–Gibbo is an obese figure whose overabundant flesh folds onto itself. In the visual rendering of the face, the vertical axis and the oval shape, which had been favoured and positively emphasised by other artists, are turned by Zancanaro into a focus on the horizontal lines: the mouth is extended to create a deep crease, which runs along the whole of the lower part of the face, highlighting the squat, square shape of the head and turning the famed angular jaw into

174

The cult of the Duce

6  Tono Zancanaro, Gibbo I il Grande e la spada dell’Islam, 1944

a flaccid protuberance on the misshapen, horned head, a final proof of the highly symbolic meaning of visual proportions in art. Despite the absence of a chronological development of the iconography of Mussolini, in the 1930s, under the intensification of the cult of the Duce, there was an increasing emphasis on the divinity of the Duce, who was embodied abstractly in rays of light and strong directional forces in the composition, as well as in the famous sculpted sans serif block capitals of DUX or DUCE, one of the most omnipresent means of representation of the nation’s leader.48 The artists involved in the exhibition of the Decennale, in which the prime protagonist was unquestionably Mussolini, had opted for an overall symbolic and abstract representation of the Duce, a further proof that symbolic and ideal, figurative and typographic depictions were all part of the extraordinary flourishing of images of the Fascist leader, whose composite myth blended past and present, secular and religious ideas of palingenesis, imperial rhetoric, medieval and Renaissance imagery, in a concerted effort to create a wide cultural and historical basis to the power of the dictator.



Portraits of the Duce175

Notes  1 F. Sapori, L’arte e il Duce (Milan: Mondadori, 1932), pp. 285–7.   2 Quoted in Sapori, ‘Tendenze plastiche’, in ibid., pp. 187–99 (p. 187).   3 There are countless examples that testify to the regime’s interest in the fascitizzazione of the arts: the Istituto Nazionale LUCE, created in 1924, which was under the control of the Ufficio Stampa and hence under the direct control of Mussolini; the establishment of the Accademia d’Italia in 1926; the Sezione Belle Arti e Biblioteche, which was part of the Ministero dell’Educazione Nazionale, and, in 1939, turned into the Direzione Generale delle Arti under the instruction of Mussolini; marking a tightening on propaganda, the transformation of the Ufficio Stampa into Sottosegretariato per la Stampa e la Propaganda under the direction of Ciano in 1934; the creation in 1937 of the Minculpop; and, in 1939, the birth of the Ufficio per l’Arte Contemporanea and the infamous Premio Cremona.   4 Some of the pioneering studies in this field are E. Crispolti et al., Arte e Fascismo in Italia e Germania (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974); F. Tempesti, Arte dell’Italia Fascista (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976); G. Armellini, Le immagini del Fascismo nelle arti figurative (Milan: Fabbri, 1980). An important contribution to the revaluation of the links between Italian art and Fascism also came from the catalogues of the groundbreaking, but much criticised, exhibitions in the 1980s on Italian art of the 1920s and 1930s: R. Barilli and F. Solmi (eds.), La Metafisica: gli Anni Venti (Bologna: Grafis, 1980) and Annitrenta: arte e cultura in Italia (Milan: Mazzotta, 1982).   5 E. Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).   6 L. Malvano, Fascismo e politica dell’immagine (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1988), p. 32.   7 G. Di Genova, ‘L’uomo della provvidenza’: iconografia del Duce 1923–1945 (Bologna: Bora, 1997). Franco Sborgi, ‘Ritratti di Mussolini fra identificazione classica e assonanze d’avanguardia’, in Il ritratto storico del Novecento 1902–1952: dal volto alla maschera (Crespina: Piacini, 2003), pp. 57–73. Mussolini ritrovato: storia di una collezione privata (Bologna: Minerva, 2009).   8 See E. Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 17.   9 Both works are illustrated in Di Genova, ‘L’uomo della provvidenza’, pp. 108–9 and cat. nos. 45, 46. 10 Sborgi, ‘Ritratti di Mussolini’, thinks that these are ‘expedients of an oratorical theatricalisation that seem to derive from the linguistic emphases of silent cinema, which was both widely comprehensible and highly popular’, p. 57. He also stresses ‘This exchange with the imaginary of silent cinema’, p. 58. 11 Ettore di Giorgio’s lithograph (present whereabouts unknown) is illustrated in Sapori, L’arte e il Duce, p. 158, ill. no. 72. 12 On Ettore di Giorgio see G.C. Polidori, ‘Ettore di Giorgio’, Emporium, 75 (1932), 67–8 and L. Di Giorgio, L’opera di Ettore di Giorgio, mio padre (Florence: Firenze libri, 1995).

176

The cult of the Duce

13 This link between the Duce and modernism is also very strong in Italian graphic design, especially the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista of 1932 and the images of Mussolini on this occasion. 14 I. Calvino, ‘The Dictator’s Hats’, Stanford Italian Review, 8:1–2 (1990), 195–210 (pp. 196–7). The article also appeared in The New Yorker, 6 January 2003, but was originally published as ‘Cominciò con un cilindro’, in La Repubblica, 10–11 July 1983, on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Mussolini. 15 U. Eco, ‘Ur-Fascism’, New York Review of Books, 42:11 (22 June 1995), 12–15 (p. 14). 16 Sapori, ‘Ritratti e interpretazioni’, in L’arte e il Duce, pp. 133–41 (p. 135). 17 Interestingly, Sapori does not focus simply on the visual arts, mentioning alongside the work of painters, sculptors, printmakers and medaglisti also photographic, cinematic and literary portraits. 18 A.T. Wilkins, ‘Augustus, Mussolini, and the Parallel Imagery of the Empire’, in C. Lazzaro and R. Crum (eds.), Donatello among the Blackshirts (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 53–65. Wilkins noted how Mussolini’s early emulation of Julius Caesar shifted towards Augustus as the Fascist empire became a reality in the 1930s. However, this article focuses on archaeology and architecture and not on the iconography of Augustus and that of Mussolini. See also G. Silk, ‘ “Il Primo Pilota”: Mussolini, Fascist Aeronautical Symbolism, and Imperial Rome’, in Lazzaro and Crum, Donatello among the Blackshirts, pp. 67–81. Silk shows how Fascist aeronautical images propagandistically develop correspondences between Mussolini and ancient Roman leaders. 19 P. Mola, Wildt (Milan: FMR, 1988), p. 86. Wildt also carved a marble mask of Mussolini, Maschera di Mussolini, also in 1923; this is the exact reproduction of the face of his Mussolini. For an up-to-date bibliography on Wildt see also D. Astrologo Abadal (ed.), Anima Mundi: i marmi di Adolfo Wildt (Gemonio: Silvana Editoriale/Maontrasio Arte, 2007). 20 The plaster shown on this occasion was later turned into several marble (Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, Milan) and a bronze (Musei Civici, Brescia) copies. 21 E. Pontiggia (ed.), Adolfo Wildt e i suoi allievi (Milan: Skira, 2000), p. 90. 22 Pontiggia, Adolfo Wildt e i suoi allievi, p. 44. 23 Sapori, p. 137. 24 See P. Mola, ‘Wildt classico, gotico e barocco’, in Adolfo Wildt 1868–1931 (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Arte, 1989), pp. 9–31. On Wildt’s symbolism see also Adolfo Wildt. Ein Italienischer Bildhauer Des Symbolismus, catalogue of the exhibition, Darmstadt, Institut Mathildenhöhe, 1990. 25 R. Bossaglia, ‘Da Wildt a Martini’, in Da Wildt a Martini: i grandi scultori italiani del Novecento (Milan: Skira, 1999), pp. 11–14 (p. 11). 26 E. Pontiggia (ed.), Da Boccioni a Sironi: Il mondo di Margherita Sarfatti (Milan: Skira, 1997), p. 44. 27 Pontiggia, Adolfo Wildt e i suoi allievi, p. 120. 28 Ibid., p. 44. 29 G. Silk, ‘ “Il Primo Pilota” ’, p. 71. 30 Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics, p. 19.



Portraits of the Duce177

31 R. Bordone, Lo specchio di Shalott: L’invenzione del Medioevo nella cultura dell’Ottocento (Naples: Liguori, 1993). 32 C. Sisi (ed.), Da Fattori a Burri: Dipinti, sculture e disegni dalla Collezione della Banca Toscana, cat. no. 88 (Florence: Centro Di, 1993), pp. 104–5. 33 Sapori, L’arte e il Duce, p. 136. 34 Sisi, Da Fattori a Burri, p. 105. 35 Italian art historians in the 1920s and 1930s viewed Masaccio and Piero as the ultimate embodiment of unadorned simplicity and solemnity to which contemporary painters should also aspire. See E. Tea, Lo spirito religioso e il Novecento (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1937), p. 41. 36 The plate, by the Italian designer Golia (Eugenio Colmo), is in the Wolfsonian Collection and is used by Dennis P. Doordan as a starting visual prop in his analysis of ‘Fascist propaganda as the incorporation by a young political regime of familiar themes, image, and myths to promote a novel political creed’. D. P. Doordan, ‘In the shadow of the fasces: political design in Fascist Italy’, Design Issues, 13:1 (1997), 39–52 (p. 40). See also R. Crum, ‘Shaping the Fascist “New Man”. Donatello’s St George and Mussolini’s Appropriated Renaissance of the Italian Nation’, in Lazzaro and Crum, Donatello among the Blackshirts, pp. 133–44. 37 Crum, ‘Shaping the Fascist “New Man” ’, p. 139. 38 Emily Braun noted how Giacomo Balla’s illustrations in L’Impero were abstract and symbolic. Balla used ‘esoteric symbols and flamelike contours to evoke the otherworldly quality of the new spiritual leader’. Braun, Sironi, p. 136. 39 For Bertelli see Ch. 14 in this volume. See also ‘La “ducemania” aeropittorica e non dei futuristi’, in Di Genova, “L’uomo della Provvidenza”, pp. 130–43. 40 On Thayaht see A. Scappini, ‘Ernesto Michahelles in arte “Thayaht” artista “globale” del Secondo Futurismo’, Bollettino della Accademia degli Euteleti della città di San Miniato: Rivista di Storia, Lettere, Scienza ed Arti, 64:77 (1997), 149–99; D. Fonti (ed.), Thayaht: futurista irregolare (Milan: Skyra, 2005); A. Scappini (ed.), Thayaht: vita, scritti, carteggi (Milan: Skyra, 2005). 41 A. Maraini, ‘L’uomo’, in Ernesto Thayaht (Florence: Giannini, 1932), pp. 5–16 (p. 17). 42 F. T. Marinetti, ‘Lo scultore’, in Fonti, Thayaht, pp. 17–23 (p. 17). 43 Sapori, L’arte e il Duce, p. 137. 44 Calvino, ‘The Dictator’s Hats’, p. 203. 45 F. Brauer and A. Cullen (eds.), Art, Sex and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), p. 7. 46 Braun, Sironi, p. 137. 47 Ibid., p. 141. 48 The sculptural quality of this typographic representation did also build ‘upon the myth of the Duce as the architect of the new Italy’. Braun, Sironi, p. 140.

11

Photographing Mussolini Alessandra Antola

Mussolini was the first European political leader to be extensively photographed, with his image reproduced in newspapers, posters, postcards, offices and public buildings. The ubiquity of his image ensured that his face, gestures and physical presence were immediately recognisable, even though only a limited number of people ever saw him in person, let alone in close proximity. Consequently his photographs, being accessible, transferable, portable and mass-produced, became the principal medium for the circulation of his image. Still today, they provide an important visual record of the Fascist regime and its leader. Rather than their more frequent function as ancillary tools in support of text, in this chapter photographs of Mussolini will be considered as historical documents.1 Photography was a fundamental part of Mussolini’s appeal throughout the regime. However, identifying the narrative conventions in use when his images were made is problematic, since the trajectory of the Duce’s photographs, that is, the metamorphosis of the image through the process of selection and manipulation in preparation for its destination, is often incomplete. When they are published today his images are always removed from their original context.2 From the Risorgimento photographs were employed in order to engage and create an emotional bond with people and to gain support for a political agenda. The public display of rulers through images in twentieth-century western society appropriated religious forms for mundane purposes, as these were supposed to induce reverence as artefacts just as paintings, woodcuts or busts had done in the past, albeit with specific characteristics inherent to the new medium. Shortly after photography was invented and made available for publication in the press, royals started to commission official photographic portraits to represent their likeness to the general public, with their images becoming a regular feature of the illustrated sections of any newspaper or magazine. The photographic representation of royal persons in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries proved to be particularly adaptable to developing historical circumstances, as the monarchy evolved from political force to



Photographing Mussolini179

national symbol. Technological improvements made photography and its by-products, such as cartes-de-visite and postcards, cheaper and easily massproduced as efficient tools of propaganda, used not only by royal households but also by powerful personages aiming to manipulate their images and gather support. One of the most notable examples of the use of the photographic images is Garibaldi, whose image, promoted through photographs, became posthumously a ‘sacred symbol of secular Italy’.3 During the inter-war years in Italy, people were thus visually well prepared to receive this type of propaganda through personification. Well before Fascism and the rise of Mussolini, photographs were used to create an emotional link between the powerful and the people, as later they were used to forge a relationship between the Fascist hierarchy and the Italians during the regime. In the attempt to persuade the Italians to engage actively with Fascist goals, full use was made of new communications technology and commercial practices, with industries specific to photography modifying their activities to conform with the regime’s objectives, as well as commercial and practical benefits.4 The ‘bulimic relationship’5 Mussolini had with his own image, that resulted in a vast production of photographs, when put in context and not seen in isolation, was an aspect of the political and cultural modernisation process facilitated by the development of mass communication during the regime.6 Further elements, though, are necessary to establish a context, such as the intended purpose of an image, the editorial intervention and above all where these images were seen throughout the Ventennio. Not only was Mussolini the principal subject for the regime’s photographic propaganda, but many authors credit him as the sole inventor and editor of his own image.7 The following analysis of four key photographic images highlights how his body was studied and adjusted according to necessity and historical opportunity, with the occasional influence of show-business communication techniques.8 It will be shown that Mussolini’s personal input was important, but only part of a complex synergy of factors that determined his photographic representation. The body ‘uncontrolled’ Mussolini did not achieve celebrity status overnight; rather it was the result of a mediatic strategy which began during the early phase of his political career, when he was still the passive subject and not the active commissioner of his own photographic representation.9 A particular photographic event, at the time of the debate over Italy’s intervention during the First World War, illustrates Mussolini’s awareness of the growing power of the press, especially when allied to the potency, immediacy and modernity of photographs. To promote his visibility, the 32-year-old journalist realised that preaching

180

The cult of the Duce

his cause through his newly founded Il Popolo d’Italia was not enough. He believed it necessary to take to the streets to provoke the authorities.10 During a rally in Rome in 1915, a dramatic photograph of his arrest was taken, that subsequently became part of his visual biographical representation. Mussolini is photographed at the very moment of his being physically apprehended, and this unique image is perhaps the only one where Mussolini’s body is represented in photography as unposed and disorderly.11 No such images would have been allowed by Mussolini’s future regime, committed as it was to always portraying his body in a dignified, solemn or authoritarian manner. However, on this occasion his uncontrolled body perfectly fitted the purpose. Mussolini had begun a kind of personal war against anyone who attempted to stop his alternative revolutionary Fasci, and his vociferous rage had to be translated into strong physical messages, since Mussolini wanted ‘to teach the ‘workers’ that only intervention could produce ‘social revolution’.12 A modern viewer may think Mussolini looks awkward in this photograph, but at the time his disharmonious body was open to a different interpretation, that of the hero’s passionate gesture, ready to sacrifice himself and set an example for others to emulate. The ostensibly odd decision to reproduce this particular image in the Fascist press becomes obvious when compared to two other (unpublished) shots from the same sequence, taken moments earlier. In these, Mussolini looks directly at the camera and is seen walking calmly with a group of men who have mistakenly been considered by commentators to be his friends (Figure 7).13 Not only are these shots less dramatic; they reveal that Mussolini was aware of the presence of the photographer and that he may have modified his behaviour for effect. Indeed, the photographer may have been complicit in what could be a staged photograph, since, during a busy and contested rally that turned into a riot, no one comes between the camera and Mussolini. In all three shots the politician is obviously the subject, always at the centre of the image, and facing the camera. Whatever the dynamic, both Mussolini and the photographer knew that this was an excellent photo-opportunity and the next day, Monday 12 April 1915, it featured on the front page of Il Giornale d’Italia. From Mussolini’s point of view, the images had the advantage of being ostensibly endowed with a high level of veracity;14 the apprehension of his rebellious body captured in the image served as irrefutable evidence of his political commitment. The extent of Mussolini’s own editorial input into the reproduction of the image remains a matter of speculation, although looking at all three images, his complicity with the photographer seems beyond dispute. Credit must be given to the personalised, lively and sometimes irreverent style of Adolfo Porry-Pastorel (1888–1960), the photographer of this series, whose subsequent activity under the regime reflected a growing



Photographing Mussolini181

7  Adolfo Porry Pastorel (attrib.), unpublished photograph of Mussolini being escorted by plain-clothes policemen, 1915

trend towards an ‘intrusive and harsher’ style of photography that was free to ‘erode the niceties of social division’.15 Pastorel is known for actively creating and setting up photographic opportunities, and may well have done so in this instance. Photographically, the arrest of Mussolini represents a turning point, with the press appealing to sensationalist appetite and giving the public what they wanted: entertainment, sport, crime and politics.16 Mussolini’s ‘disobedience’ in the informal and compositionally dynamic photograph by Pastorel was visually revealed through his unruly body. The image exemplified his break with the constraints of accustomed codes of political orthodoxy as well as the conventional manner of their representation. The photograph of Mussolini’s arrest in 1915 became the model for the future didactic photographic representation of Mussolini, in form if not in content. From this moment on, he was always represented in an exemplary fashion. His image came to act as a living reminder of what was possible: the representation of his body summed up in visual terms his achievements, his genius, his heroism and his intellectual prowess. Highly abstract values that were not readily comprehensible by the illiterate masses were conveyed through images that were artfully constructed by those responsible for Mussolini’s image manipulation.

182

The cult of the Duce

Head, face and body: visual shorthand The extensive exposure of Mussolini’s image demonstrates how photography was the ideal medium to fix in the collective imagination an idea of the multiple physical and moral qualities that were attributed to the dictator. Images created a strong sense of identification in the minds of people who looked at, and sometimes treasured his portraits, as they had in the past with royal portraits.17 They served to create a bond that was based on supposed knowledge of the person represented. According to Ludmilla Jordanova, provided the viewer knew or thought they knew who they were looking at, the face or even the body were sufficient to create a bond, because most people subscribe ‘to assumptions about the visibility of character in the face’.18 Within the process of self-legitimisation, the leader had to personify revolutionary ideals and create popular allegiance through symbolic self-representation.19 An early photo-portrait of Mussolini by the photographer Caminada (Figure 8), taken contemporarily with a serious challenge to his personal ­charisma in 1921,20 is a case in point. It was a groundbreaking symbolic representation where his face alone appears from a dark background. This photograph marked the beginning of one direction in the visual shorthand that would make Mussolini immediately recognisable, and later consolidate the dictator’s established photographic representation. Taken from above, the composition emphasised his seemingly shaved head, the strong jaw, protruding lips and piercing eyes which are still possibly the singular most recognisable aspects of his photographic iconography. Mussolini’s chin and jaw in particular were the focus of many of his portraits, since these were commonly considered specific signs of his masculinity, courage, willpower and daring.21 Following the typical photo-portrait style of some theatre personalities, singers or silent-movie actors, the visual language adopted in this early photograph eliminated any anecdotal distraction to concentrate on signs or a particular gesture, annihilating background details and props to emphasise the face that emerged from total darkness softened by a minimal luminous aura.22 The persuasive and seductive charge of this ‘romantic’ style had the desired effect and within ten years would inspire a variety of interpretations, including the gigantic projections of the Duce used in nocturnal sets.23 As Karen Pinkus notes, the significant place that Mussolini’s body occupied in the iconography of Fascism reflected the consideration of his own body as a ‘detached object’ to be manipulated and permanently put on display, as if he could also see it from the external position of the viewing subject.24 In addition to the ethereal quality of the Caminada portrait, the power of Mussolini’s bodiless image was accentuated by being freed from the encumbrance posed by material reality. The process of singling out details or parts of the dictator’s



Photographing Mussolini183

8  Gianni Caminada, photograph of Mussolini later reproduced as a postcard, 1921

184

The cult of the Duce

body was further reinforced by fragmentation of his printed image, which Pinkus interestingly qualifies as multiplication,25 when the infinite reproductions were consumed within a context familiar to the viewer, thus engendering identification and trust in the subject.26 During the inter-war period the growing interest in pictures was satisfied by the blossoming of illustrated magazines and a new generation of photographers.27 Contrary to the exclusive relationship between Hitler and Hoffman,28 Mussolini had no dedicated personal photographer throughout his career,29 allowing not only Luce but many others to photograph him as well.30 Amongst these was Ghitta Carell (1899–1972), one of the most soughtafter portrait studio photographers of the period, who was highly skilled in the manipulation of the negative plates to complement or accentuate the psychology of her subjects, often creating a film-star appeal.31 More than a decade after Caminada’s decontextualised representation of Mussolini, a Carell photograph reproduced in Illustrazione Italiana was selectively framed to create a similar effect, where the boundary of the image was not enough to contain his whole face.32 The opposite page of text entitled ‘Mussolini Europeo’ offset the image, stressing that the dictator was fighting for a new international justice. His familiar, intense, menacing gaze suggested ‘ownership’ not so much of an image, but of a physical and moral territory unique to the moment in history. Edited and published during a foreign policy crisis, this image may not have been intended to reclaim a face as ‘his’, but rather served as part of an authentic physical reality to be perceived as ‘the active mapping of a confident and assertive act’ occupying a larger context.33 His closely shaved head, backlit to create an aura that emphasised the intensity of his staring eyes, is a significant example of Mussolini’s visual shorthand where the power of his body was not directly referred to, but implicitly evoked through the intensity of his gaze, as was also his presence. Here, as with other portraits by Carell of Mussolini, the deliberate ambivalent construction of values illustrated the multifaceted identity the Duce had to continually develop to engage with the Italians. The photographic types of ‘Warrior’, ‘Leader’ and ‘Founder of the Empire’ were all living reminders of the growing formal omnipotence of the Duce. The clothed, armoured body While accoutrements and details were eliminated from the psychological portraits of the Duce, where face and head were the sole focus, the photographic representation of Mussolini’s heroic body was laden with symbols, accessories and elements often appropriated from religious forms and traditional myths.34 One of the abstract concepts, often used during the regime and represented through personification that made power visible, was the traditional metaphor of horse and rider, where the figure of the leader was



Photographing Mussolini185

­ hotographically translated into the Duce in uniform, the modern equivalent p of armour.35 Subjecting photographs to a contextual analysis of a particular event with Mussolini as military leader will reveal how photographs were changed and manipulated according to the different media used. One of the most iconic images of Mussolini on horseback was taken in Libya in 1937 as he received the sword of Islam, with this image initially being sent via telephoto to the Corriere della Sera for immediate publication,36 and subsequently manipulated for differing propaganda destinations. The first published image shows a groom holding Mussolini’s horse, yet in another from the same event published later in Giorgio Pini’s biography of 1939, the groom has disappeared, replaced by palm trees. The metamorphosis of this photograph as a Fascist propaganda statement was now complete: the martial pose was exaggerated by the low-angle view, the figure of the dictator prominent against the retouched background, with a sword forming the apex of a triangular composition. By manipulating and editing the original image, a new pattern of meaning was constructed, that combined a contemporary interpretation of the events with an ideological message. Irrespective of the photographer’s personal preference, the conventions for the representation of the ruler as heroic and superhuman led to the creation of the triumphant Mussolini on a horse in Libya. Rather than a realistic portrayal of the dictator, this construction should be read as theatre and part of a choreographic space with a public representation of an idealised self,37 and in the same way that a viewer would accept an actor playing differing roles, no contradiction was apparently seen with the representation of the ruler as a bureaucrat or knight on horseback. What we today may consider as naïve was probably acceptable because the body of Mussolini functioned as a concept that filled the uniform he wore. Although we now know that these images were taken by the photojournalist Luigi Leoni (1899–1991),38 at the time the only credit was to the Istituto Luce, an anonymity that served to accentuate Mussolini as the subject, and stress that the potency of his image was the result of mystical qualities. Photographers at the time were still considered as technicians rather than communicators and were rigidly controlled. Images, once developed, printed and mounted in albums, were delivered to Mussolini or functionaries of his centralised propaganda structure to be reviewed for publication. A factor that also helped create a permissible image of Mussolini was the photographers’ internalisation of his accepted iconographic canons. This form of self-censorship, combined with the ongoing process of approval from differing bodies, authorised by Mussolini or his immediate subordinates, ensured reproduction of image-types acceptable to the Duce. Photographers knew that Mussolini portrayed in a martial pose was a guarantee of their photographs being accepted.39 Another rendering of this image was published in 1937 in

186

The cult of the Duce

9  Adolfo Porry Pastorel, photograph of Mussolini sowing seed in the nursery of the Forestry Militia, 1934

Illustrazione Italiana, where through clever cropping the importance of the Duce was further accentuated by eliminating all unnecessary details, even to the extent of the horse being reduced to the function of a throne. Mussolini’s body in uniform in another celebrated series of images shows him playing the part of an agricultural labourer sowing a field. In the first image surrounded by photographers, party officials and labourers, three photographers are seen in movement having to react quickly, as, during events, Mussolini refused to hold poses for the camera (Figure 9).40 It is unlikely that this image was published, although another image, taken by Porry Pastorel, possibly from the same position as the previous image but a few moments later, was suitable for publication as a press photograph since the context was coherent, with no photographers or other details to distract from the centrality of Mussolini. Another photograph from the same event was subsequently manipulated to isolate Mussolini and reproduced as a photomontage, published in the monthly La Vittoria in 1935. The composition of this last image is particularly worth noting for the juxtaposition of the contrasting realities represented by the military planes and mechanised agriculture with the fields hand-sown by the farmer–dictator.41 It is a composite image encapsulating the differing ideals that Fascism wished to transmit, and



Photographing Mussolini187

its reproduction would have been a key element of the pedagogical function of the Luce Institute. The unclothed body So far the analysis of Mussolini’s body as represented in photography has focused on personifications of the ruler employing traditional, well-known iconographical conventions in the collective imaginary, which the regime adopted and revisited through a modern medium. Perhaps the most radical development in the photographic representation of a political leader can be seen in Mussolini’s exhibiting his partially unclothed body. The use of a state of undress for any public person other than film stars was without precedent. Photography had a long history of representing the nude body, especially women, principally for artists or pornography produced for private consumption, ‘implying a sense of the hidden, the illicit, and of the secret’. 42 The male nude, which had dominated the arts in earlier centuries, had always been the personification of ideal virtues.43 After the First World War, photography promoted the male nude through the cult of the body made healthy by physical exercise, which could be perceived as a revival of the classical ideal of a healthy mind in a healthy body that was then considered beyond suspicion of eroticism.44 The male ideal had changed to the physically fit, muscular body, so that dancers and athletes became favourite models,45 as represented in several studies by a renowned studio photographer active in Rome from the 1930s, Elio Luxardo (1908–1969), who realised studies of the Italian boxing champion Primo Carnera and other athletes.46 Aesthetics played a determining role in promoting the stereotype of the new Fascist man and the culture of the body beautiful was an important symbol. The portrayal of role models whose posture projected self-control, with muscles emphasising virility, symbolised the dynamism and discipline Fascism thought society lacked and needed. The Luce Institute image from 1938 of The battle for grain was a much publicised propaganda event, reproduced in Il Corriere della Sera and Pini’s biography. As a propaganda tool, the photograph of the shirtless Duce ticked all the boxes, conveying virility and athleticism whilst demonstrating the accessibility of the ruler, who came across as spontaneous even though the photograph was completely staged. Editorial manipulation aimed at eliminating distance between Mussolini and his people, and a second image from this event which was not approved for publication makes one question the reasons behind this editorial choice, since the Duce looks in excellent form. Like a film star, bare-chested, wearing a flat cap, this is a fine shot of Mussolini that was probably rejected for publication owing to him being surrounded by soldiers rather than peasants.47 Photographed from the waist up, the contrast between

188

The cult of the Duce

10  Unknown, Mussolini threshing the wheat at Aprilia, later reproduced as a postcard in 1938

the light and shadow on his body accentuated by the soldiers in shadow and the officer in white naval uniform ensured that Mussolini, seen side-on, dominated the page, his figure seemingly detached from the background. Contrary to a true farmer, who would rather keep his shirt on to protect his skin from the sun or sharp tools, Mussolini’s shirtless body was intended to stand out and fulfil the role Italians expected him to play, the disdain of liberal bourgeois values and the celebration of the rural. If published next to the crisp, decorative officers’ uniforms, his bare chest rather than virile pride could have invited ridicule, or worse, convey vulnerability. The event also produced a further image of Mussolini, this time alone against a neutral background, his naked torso retouched to eliminate body-hair. Reproduced in 1938 as a postcard for circulation beyond the event, this photograph was decontextualised to extend its relevance, allowing the viewers to project their personalised identification with the Duce’s persona (Figure 10). Yet another image, again from the same event, was of a type favoured by Mussolini at the later stage of the dictatorship showing him in contact with the people. Nudity served to maintain Mussolini’s popular and populist appeal, demonstrating virility and at the same time adding the further element of sexual enticement.



Photographing Mussolini189

Conclusion The specific characteristics inherent in the photographic medium, its infinite reproducibility and ‘simultaneous affinity to reality and fantasy’,48 kept the representation of Mussolini’s body in line with the times and modern enough to translate the need for politics to become visually intriguing and accessible to the masses. The growing urban culture in which Fascism was initially formed made full use of contemporary communication techniques to inspire enthusiasm from its followers, aiming at stimulating the imagination and rousing emotions to create a new identity.49 As mass culture developed, the photographic language representing Mussolini evolved, expressed visibly in symbolic and colourful stereotypes, which although banal, played an important part in the national process of modernisation and socialisation. With the further central control over the press, Fascist propaganda championed photography as a modern and populist medium that had a universal appeal, engaging the masses emotionally whilst transforming popular values and customs in line with the regime’s aspirations. Photographic evidence demonstrates that the Duce was the main actor of the life of the regime, but it cannot confirm that he was the sole editor of his image. In the construction of his cult, how the photograph was produced, published and consumed was as important as the initial intention. The interaction between power, cultural activities and the public included photographers as well as the diversified net of practices that together were responsible for the production and impact of the Duce’s visual image. Notes  1 For authors in line with this approach to Fascist photography see G. De Luna, G. D’Autilia and L. Criscenti (eds.), L’Italia del Novecento: le fotografie e la storia. Vol. 1: Il potere da Giolitti a Mussolini (Turin: Einaudi, 2005) and in particular the essays by G. D’Autilia, ‘Il fascismo senza passione. L’Istituto Luce’, S. Luzzatto, “Niente tubi di stufa sulla testa.” L’autoritratto del fascismo’, L. Criscenti, ‘La memoria in archivio: i fondi fotografici dell’Istituto Luce’ and A. Mignemi, ‘Sguardi incrociati. L’Italia in Guerra (1943–45)’, pp. 279–349; E. Sturani, ‘Il fascismo in cartolina’, in E. Gentile (ed.), Modernità totalitaria: il fascismo italiano (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 2008); the detailed captions accompanying photographs in E. Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).  2 P. Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Use of Images as Historical Evidence (London: Reaktion, 2001), p. 22.  3 L. Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 5.  4 S. Gundle, ‘Un Martini per il Duce: l’immaginario del consumismo nell’Italia degli

190

The cult of the Duce

anni Venti e Trenta’, in A. Villari (ed.), L’arte della pubblicità: il manifesto italiano e le avanguardie 1920–1940 (Milan: Silvana, 2008), p. 51.  5 P. Chessa, Dux: Benito Mussolini: una biografia per immagini (Milan: Mondadori, 2008), p. 21.  6 Riall, Garibaldi, p. 15.  7 See P. Melograni, ‘The cult of the Duce in Mussolini’s Italy’, Journal of Contemporary History, 11:4 (1976), 221–37; Chessa, Dux, p. 16; S. Luzzatto, “Niente tubi di stufa sulla testa.” L’autoritratto del fascismo’, in De Luna et al., L’Italia del Novecento, p. 118.  8 E. Grazioli, Corpo e figura umana nella fotografia (Milan: Mondadori, 1998), p. 161.  9 The relevant emotional signs at the right time and place could thus affect the reader who was able to understand a visual language constructed according to mutual codes of belief. Richard Sennett divides the subjects of public realm into ‘skilled performers’, who expressed themselves actively in public, and ‘spectators’ who did not participate in public life but observed. Politicians began to be judged ‘as believable by whether or not they aroused the same belief in their personalities as actors did when on stage’. The silent spectators needed to see in the public personage certain traits of personality, ‘whether he possessed them or not; they invested in him in fantasy what he may lack in reality’. Specific to Italian society, this type of readership developed within a world in transformation and was represented by heterogeneous populations living in cities and gradually developing an urban consciousness. See R. Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Penguin, 1978), pp. 259–68. 10 S. Romano, Mussolini: una biografia per immagini (Milan: Longanesi, 2000), p. 38. 11 In this context ‘unposed’ could be read as ‘discomposed’ to describe the intentional representation of Mussolini’s body deprived of composure in stark contrast to his subsequent highly controlled imagery. 12 R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini (London: Arnold, 2002), p. 110. 13 E.G. Laura, Immagine del fascismo: la conquista del potere 1915–1925 (Milan: Longanesi, 1973) and G. Santomassimo, La marcia su Roma (Florence: Giunti, 2000); one image from this series, where Mussolini walks calmly accompanied by the same men while looking at the camera, to my knowledge has never been neither reproduced nor linked to Mussolini’s arrest in 1915; details given on the reverse are ‘Argo di Strazza Agenzia fotografica per la stampa Via Camperio 5 Milano’. Inventory no. FMA 415/24, Civico Archivio Fotografico, Castello Sforzesco, Milan. 14 A. Mignemi, ‘Sguardi incrociati’, in De Luna et al., L’Italia del Novecento, p. 341. 15 R. Hargreaves and B. Deedes, Daily Encounters: Photographs from Fleet Street, catalogue of the exhibition, London, National Portrait Gallery, 5 July–21 October 2007, p. 54. 16 Ibid., pp. 54–6. 17 A. Schwarzenbach, ‘Royal photographs: emotions for the people’, Contemporary European History, 13:3 (2004), 255–80 (p. 260).



Photographing Mussolini191

18 L. Jordanova, Defining Features: Scientific and Medical Portraits 1660–2000 (London: Reaktion, 2000), p. 80. 19 Riall, Garibaldi, pp. 59–67. 20 E. Gentile, ‘Mussolini’s charisma’, Modern Italy, 3:2 (1998), 219–35 (p. 222). 21 E. Nodin, ‘The Illusions of Ghitta Carell: Women Photographers in Italy’, in L. Johannesson and G. Knape (eds.), Women Photographers – European Experience (Gothenburg, 2004), p. 114. 22 G. Ginex (ed.), Divine: Emilio Sommariva fotografo. Opere scelte 1910–1930 (Milan: Nomos, 2004), p. 28. 23 Sturani, Le cartoline per il duce (Turin: Edizioni del Capricorno, 2003), p. 18. One of these effigies constructed in front of the cathedral in Milan was photographed and reproduced, probably as a photomontage, in La Domenica del Corriere, 5 November 1933, p. 3. 24 K. Pinkus, Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising under Fascism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 16. 25 Ibid., p. 16. 26 S. Ewen, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1988), p. 90. 27 Between the two wars telephoto, teletype setter, radio, sound and colour cinema and magnetic tape recording were developed; illustrated magazines were very popular and experimental television was in its infancy. See G. Gozzini, Storia del giornalismo (Milan: Mondadori, 2000), p. 205. 28 C. Schmolders, Hitler’s Face: The Biography of an Image (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p. 119 and F. D’Almeida, High Society in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), p. 113. 29 Although for some years the dictator had a few favourites, such as Amerigo Petitti, who was Mussolini’s personal photographer during the first years of his political career before Istituto Luce replaced him in 1928. In Sturani, Le cartoline per il Duce, n. 1, p. 34. 30 E. Sturani, ‘Il fascismo in cartolina’, in E. Gentile (ed.), Modernità totalitaria (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 2008), p. 127. 31 See A. Antola, ‘Ghitta Carell and Italian studio photography in the 1930s’, Modern Italy 16:3 (2011), 249–73. 32 R. Alessi, ‘Mussolini Europeo’, Illustrazione Italiana, 9 October 1938, was the twopage article illustrated with the close-up of Mussolini’s face. 33 G. Clarke, The Photograph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 127. 34 Gundle, ‘Un Martini per il Duce’, p. 53 and Burke, Eyewitnessing, p. 55. 35 Burke, Eyewitnessing, pp. 61, 73. 36 The telephoto system, modern at the time, allowed the press to receive photographs quickly and over great distances. This is further explained in an article published in La Domenica del Corriere, 28 July 1935, p. 8, claiming that the transmission of a 18cm x 26cm photograph took 12 minutes. 37 Burke, Eyewitnessing, p. 68. 38 Luigi Leoni began to work as a photojournalist in Adolfo Porry Pastorel’s ‘Vedo’ agency, quickly becoming a freelance photographer throughout the Fascist

192

The cult of the Duce

period. He also worked as editor-in-chief of Lavoro Fascista. Archivio Storico Luigi Leoni, www.archiviofotograficoluigileoni.com/biografia.asp. 39 Vincenzo Carrese (1910–81), photographer and founder of the independent photographic agency Publifoto in Milan, stated that life in those days was not that difficult for photojournalists and as long as the Duce was portrayed in a martial pose, photographs were accepted by the press. See ‘Quarant’anni della Publifoto’, Popular Photography Italiana, 127 (March 1968), p. 20 in A. L. Carlotti, Fotografia e fotografi a Milano dall’Ottocento ad oggi (Milan: Abitare Segesta, 2000), p. 82 and M. Gariboldi (ed.), Tino Petrelli. Storie per immagini, immagini di storie (Parma: Tip.Le.Co., 1992), p. 200. 40 For instance, in 1938 during the documentary film The Private Life of Mussolini by Edwin Ware Hullinger an operator shot 300m of film of a door that never opened. The moment he gave up the Duce entered through the door, by the time he set his camera up again the Duce was gone and of course he could not call him back. In Mussolini astro cinematografico, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Ministero della cultura popolare, Gabinetto, b. 36. 41 Adolfo Porry Pastorel, Macchia di Terracina, Sabaudia, Milizia Nazionale Forestale, 19 December 1934, in Romano, Mussolini, p. 73. 42 Clarke, The Photograph, p. 123. 43 P. Weiermair, The Hidden Image: Photographs of the Male Nude in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge, MA–London: MIT Press, 1987), p. 11. 44 Ibid., p. 15. 45 Ibid., p. 19. 46 L. Violo (ed.), Luxardo (Milan: Motta Editore, 2000), pp. 72–7. 47 Owing to the presence of photographers and the staged impression, this image was possibly not published. See M. Franzinelli and E.V. Marino, Il duce proibito: Le fotografie di Mussolini che gli Italiani non hanno mai visto (Milan: Mondadori, 2003), p. 75. 48 Ewen, All Consuming Images, p. 90. 49 Gundle, ‘Un Martini per il Duce’, pp. 51, 56, 57.

12

Mussolini as monument: the equestrian statue of the Duce at the Littoriale Stadium in Bologna Simona Storchi In 1932, the art critic Francesco Sapori observed in a richly illustrated article on Mussolini’s portraits that, by then, the portraits numbered thousands; they were made in all shapes and styles, and used all the available techniques and media.1 According to Sapori, the artists’ fascination with portraying the Duce was motivated by the desire to have a close encounter with a man of great charisma and power, and to experience the chance to capture and reproduce the signs of such an extraordinary personality. The critic reported that over the years Mussolini had welcomed several artists into his study, so that they could portray him from life. While many artists had attempted to make fulllength portraits, most had been content to reproduce his face, which they had imagined fierce, and had found instead to be characterised by a ‘plastic affective mobility’. Sapori used the language that by 1932 was commonplace in descriptions of Mussolini; he praised the Roman profile, the magnetic gaze and the powerful voice, all of which were seen as indicators of lineage, appeal, charisma and leadership. He also emphasised how Mussolini embodied not only Italian history and cultural heritage, but also an image of modern Italy, that was alive and active, organised and developed.2 Despite the hyperbole typical of the period, Sapori was making a valid point. As Giorgio di Genova noted in a 1997 exhibition catalogue on the images of the Duce, the iconography of Mussolini presented a variety unknown to that of dictators such as Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Saddam Hussein, the reproduction of whose images was fundamentally realistic and aimed at immediate recognisability.3 Mussolini’s image instead became manipulated to such an extent, particularly by avant-garde artists and illustrators, as to become a stylised icon. Formal portraits, informed by traditional iconography, coexisted with avant-garde and experimental portraits, illustrations, posters, photographs and photomontages.4 The image of the Duce was at the centre of the propaganda aimed at the glorification of the regime. It was conveyed through all the media, to such an extent as to make it totally familiar. This visual impact, reinforced by the newsreels and documentaries of the Istituto Luce, was crucial in realising

194

The cult of the Duce

the aim of reaching the masses, particularly those who were not literate.5 As Emilio Gentile has noted, the glorification of the figure of Mussolini became fundamental in the creation of consensus under the regime.6 In this context Mussolini was represented as a man with multiple talents, encompassing action and thought: ‘statesman, legislator, philosopher, writer, artist, universal genius, but also prophet, messiah, apostle, infallible master, sent by God, marked by destiny and bearer of destiny’, but also as a model, the prototype of the new Italian, to which all the Italians ought to aspire. The relationship between Fascism and visual culture, Laura Malvano observes, was a significant part of the Fascist cultural policy: it responded to the regime’s propaganda objectives, articulating a distinction between the messages conveyed by high and mass culture. With particular reference to the image of Mussolini, she maintains that while mass culture was seen as more suited to spread the cult of the Duce, high culture – particularly painting and sculpture – was used to convey metaphors of Italianness and relied on already codified artistic discourses.7 With respect to more modern forms of reproduction, the formal portrait, both painted and sculpted, had an authority that derived from the history of portraiture itself, from an iconographic tradition in which the portrayed subject was automatically inserted. As Joanna Woodall observes, in the twentieth century portraits no longer achieved the conflation of signifier, referent and signified that was at the centre of illusionistic portraiture as theorised in the Renaissance. She points out that ‘today, the fixed, immovable features of a portrayed face can seem like a mask frustrating the desire for union with the imaged self. In looking at a conventional portrait we no longer have implicit faith in a moment of phantasised unmasking … it is structurally impossible to remove portraiture’s mimetic mask and make her communicate.’8 The communication happens at a secondary level, through the implications that formal portraiture entails. Formal portraits, busts and statues had a more institutional role in the diffusion of Mussolini’s image, and placed it alongside that of kings, princes and statesmen of the past. As Malvano notes, in the endless repetition of the Duce’s image, sculpture more than painting performed a celebratory role, with the classical model, inspired by ancient statues, prevailing over that of avant-gardist inspiration.9 Such a glorifying intent was at the origin of the monumental statue of Mussolini on horseback, which the podestà (appointed mayor) of Bologna, Leandro Arpinati, commissioned in 1928 from the sculptor Giuseppe Graziosi (Figure 11). It was to be placed in the recently built Littoriale Stadium in Bologna, under the 42–metre tall Marathon tower, designed by the renowned architect Giorgio Arata.10 The equestrian statue was meant to celebrate Mussolini’s inauguration of the stadium on 31 October 1926, an event marking the fourth anniversary of



Mussolini as monument195

11  Giuseppe Graziosi, equestrian statue of Mussolini at the Littoriale Stadium, Bologna, 1929

Fascism’s rise to power. On that occasion, Mussolini had entered the stadium on horseback, and, as Simon Martin reports, ‘was saluted with a display of waved handkerchiefs by the various male and female Fascist groups, avanguardisti, balilla, syndicate members and general public from all over Italy’.11 The Bolognese newspaper L’Assalto described this event in mythical terms, with Mussolini’s entrance on horseback evoked as that of a conductor of people greeted by a crowd recalling the triumph of a victorious Roman consul. The inauguration of the stadium was described in highly emotional terms, as a solemn, mystic and poetic ritual. The Fascist Party newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia revisited in 1929 the event that led to the commissioning of the statue: ‘It is interesting to go back to the initial idea that inspired this monument. It was born, amidst songs and cheers, in October 1926, when fifty thousand Blackshirts packed in the empty vessel of the Littoriale … listened in absolute silence to the reading of a proclamation by the Duce standing upright in his stirrups on the back of a powerful horse, which occupied a position on top of an improvised pedestal situated where the grandstand now is’.12 It is said that the bronze used for the statue was that of cannons that had been taken from the Austrians during the Risorgimento.13 Arpinati persuaded

196

The cult of the Duce

the Ministry of War to provide the six tonnes of bronze required to cast the statue. They were jointly donated by the army and the navy, a united effort which Arpinati considered symbolically significant.14 The statue was six metres long and five and a half metres tall. In addition, Graziosi also sculpted a winged victory carrying a fascio, which was placed on the tower. Il Popolo d’Italia described the statue of Mussolini in magniloquent terms: The Duce, upright in his stirrups, holding the reins with his right arm slightly bent, and a parchment in his left hand, stands in the act of halting the horse, its right foreleg rampant and its neck arched under the tug of the bit. The Duce wears the uniform of Honorary Corporal of the Militia, with ­frogging and belt. Behind him falls a long cloak, its disorderly folds still ­flapping from the recent by the recent ride. The Chief’s face is full of a proud and ­dominating light.15

The aim of this chapter is to reconstruct the history of the statue and its reception, both during and after Fascism, and consider it as emblematic of the rise, fall and persistence of the cult of Mussolini in Italy though the continued presence of one of his icons. The history of Graziosi’s monumental statue will show the extent to which portraits of the Duce became invested with the halo attributed to Mussolini himself. This amplified the cultic nature of the Duce’s image and turned it into a persistent symbol that lasted beyond his death. The sculptor Giuseppe Graziosi (1879–1942), from whom the statue was commissioned, was a renowned local painter and sculptor. Born in Savignaro sul Panaro, between Modena and Bologna, he had studied sculpture first in Modena, at the Reale Istituto di Belle Arti, then, with the help of a grant, in Florence, where he arrived in 1898. In Florence he joined the Scuola Libera del Nudo at the Accademia and mixed with artists such as the young Ardengo Soffici, with whom he became friends. In Florence Graziosi also attended the lessons of the renowned Tuscan painter Giovanni Fattori. In the late 1850s and 1860s Florence had been at the Italian artistic vanguard with the pre-impressionist Macchiaioli movement. In the post-unification years the principles promoted by the Macchiaioli were superseded by the influence of French Impressionism, despite the resistance of artists such as Fattori, who condemned what he saw as the manneristic imitation of French models. Other influences in the 1890s were English Pre-Raphaelitism and the symbolism of the European Secession movements. Graziosi was particularly influenced by Rodin, whose work he admired in Paris in 1903. He developed a sculptural and pictorial style that was detached equally from Realism and the emerging modernist idioms (such as that of Art



Mussolini as monument197

Nouveau). He instead opted for a retrieval of the nineteenth-century tradition of volumes and the pursuit of objective representation. This led to a particular interest in the human figure. His preferred themes were scenes from rural life, which reflected the environment of his childhood. His paintings expressed a reaction to Impressionism, a quest for technical discipline and the need to reestablish a link with the Macchiaioli tradition. Graziosi acquired national fame and started exhibiting his work at the Venice Biennale in 1903. After the First World War he became a well-­ established artist with studios in Modena, Florence and Milan. In the early 1920s Graziosi’s artistic style became influenced by the Baroque masters in the use of colours, in tune with the general rediscovery of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which had followed the Mostra del Seicento e del Settecento organised by the art critic Ugo Ojetti in Florence in 1922. He also explored traditional perspective, and, as far as sculpture is concerned, he went back to the late sixteenth century as well as to earlier sculptors such as Jacopo della Quercia. Graziosi emerged therefore as an artist who was fundamentally traditional, quite eclectic, with a sensitive approach to contemporary trends. In the mid-1920s he responded to the general call for order by cultivating an interest in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century art. He received several commissions both from private individuals and from the Modena city council,16 which led to the commission for Mussolini’s equestrian statue.17 The statue and its reception The statue was modelled following a tradition of equestrian monuments that went back to the Renaissance. The immediate references were the equestrian monument to Bartolomeo Colleoni by Verrocchio, Giambologna’s monument to Cosimo de’ Medici, and the monument to Alessandro Farnese by Francesco Mochi, from whom – Luciano Rivi argues – Graziosi took the idea of the cloak.18 The portrayal of Mussolini within the tradition of the equestrian monument contributed to the perception of the Duce as belonging to a tradition of heroes, whose received iconography, as Stephen Gundle has noted, often portrayed them on horseback wearing a cloak (interestingly, the first model for the statue made by Graziosi, which realistically reproduced the clothes worn by Mussolini on the day of the inauguration of the stadium, did not wear a cloak. Instead, it wore a fez, which was removed in the final version of the statue, while the cloak was added).19 Such imagery belonged to the construction of a pseudo-heroic charisma, which, as a manufactured aspect of Mussolini’s leadership, involved a high degree of theatricality. Such a reference to the tradition of equestrian statues was combined with a close resemblance to the portrayed subject. Mussolini’s face was modelled from life during a series of sittings. Il Popolo d’Italia reported that Graziosi was

198

The cult of the Duce

allowed to spend several hours every day over four or five days in the Duce’s reception room at the Viminale Palace. During his time with Mussolini the sculptor gathered ‘impressions of his Roman face, emanating goodness, and rather different from the various images of Mussolini that have been given to us by sculptors of every country’.20 According to L’Illustrazione italiana, the finished statue offered ‘the image of the “Duce” in the most luminous sense of the word’. It emphasised the proud attitude, the dominating gaze and the energy emanating from the statue. It also stressed its expressiveness and the close resemblance to the Duce. According to the journalist, Mussolini himself was extremely pleased with the model, and congratulated Graziosi on the ‘powerful work of art’ which connected with the best Renaissance tradition.21 As work on it progressed, the statue generated an enormous amount of expectation. In an article written for the magazine Il Comune di Bologna in 1928, the art critic Italo Cinti praised Graziosi’s art and reported on a model of Mussolini’s statue that Graziosi had presented (Figure 12). The model was described with magniloquent words: He is in the saddle upon that rock-solid beast, his voice roaring like a river surging forth from its Alpine source. The voice is a thunderclap, and only thunder can command the ear of destiny, can intimidate lightning and have the authority of a god. That horseman who has a proclamation to make to a people has a voice that flows forcefully, its roar filling the skies, making the earth shudder, is a command; it is the Law, the firm and inflexible Law of a people that chafes at the bit just like that horse, wanting to listen while wanting to get moving, wanting to obey but wanting also to advance. Listen then, but be ready to step aside because, once the proclamation is finished and the thunder has subsided, a horse and a horseman will gallop forward along the high roads of history … That horseman, children, was the Duce of Italy.

On 26 October Il Corriere della Sera reported on the journey made by the bronze horse (which was sent separately and was far bigger than the bust of Mussolini, which followed) from Florence, where it had been cast, to Bologna. The journalist Vincenzo Bucci offered an almost mythical account of the statue’s journey, recounting every detail. He reported that the statue had crossed the Apennines on a lorry, lying on its side and, because of its size, the head and the legs of the horse stuck out of the vehicle, with the result that it occupied the whole road throughout the journey. Because of this, Bucci explained, all the vehicles the lorry crossed paths with had to give way, either moving back, stopping at the side of the road or turning into a side street. The lorry was preceded by a car, which warned other vehicles to make way for it. The description led the reader to believe almost that it was the Duce himself who was travelling across the Apennines, amid the astonishment of local people, as the horse crossed mountain villages in Tuscany and Emilia. In the



Mussolini as monument199

12  Giuseppe Graziosi, model of Mussolini’s equestrian statue in the sculptor’s studio

town of Lòiano, in order to let the statue cross a narrow street in the centre, all the doors and windows had to be shut, as the horse’s ears bumped against the open shutters. During its journey, the statue scratched walls and pulled down advertising signs, but, according to the account in Il Corriere, it nevertheless had an altogether ‘excellent journey’.22 In the days preceding the unveiling of the monument, the Bolognese newspapers Il Resto del Carlino and L’Avvenire d’Italia heightened the sense of expectation, by reporting daily on the statue. Each report was accompanied by photographs of the statue and comments that fuelled the sense that the

200

The cult of the Duce

city was about to witness a major event. The reports started on 23 October, with both the newspapers announcing the imminent arrival of the statue, and with Il Resto del Carlino giving details of the monument, placing particular emphasis on its size. The feeling of awe inspired by its sheer bulk was a recurrent theme in the local press. On 24 October, the Carlino announced the arrival of the statue at the Littoriale. The article explained that the expectation had been that the statue would arrive in several pieces that would have to be fused together once the statue was in place. In reality, the first piece to arrive in Bologna was the whole horse, a huge piece of sculpture whose appearance generated astonishment, marvel, and even fear. The hoisting of the horse on to its pedestal in the stadium was described in itself as a gigantic enterprise, requiring great engineering, organisational and coordination skills on the part of the technical team. Indeed, the whole operation, which occurred at night, under the stadium lights, amid the shouting of the workers, and surrounded by the suggestive backdrop of the stadium, was described as a spectacle in itself. The description of the horse was accompanied by a plethora of similes and metaphors aimed at emphasising the magnificence of the monument, but also the awe it inspired, which increased the sense of extraordinariness that the whole event and its preparation generated. The horse was described as a ‘ghost’, an ‘enormous silhouette’, a ‘monster’, emerging from the fog on its arrival at dawn like a ‘fabled antediluvian animal’.23 The following day Il Resto del Carlino announced the arrival of the bust of the Duce in Bologna, praising the ability with which the technical team had conducted the transport and difficult hoisting operations, a sign, in the words of the reporter, of the efforts the city of Bologna was prepared to make to pay an unforgettable homage to the Duce.24 On 26 October, L’Avvenire reported on the inauguration schedule; the unveiling of the statue would occur in the presence of Giuseppe Bottai, Leandro Arpinati and several representatives of the local authorities. The unveiling, which was scheduled for the morning of 27 October, coincided with the celebration of the anniversary of the March on Rome. It was the first of a series of events which included inaugurations of public buildings in Bologna. Although these included the paving of part of the Via Emilia, the section of a hospital, public housing, offices and military warehouses, the only event to receive headline treatment was the unveiling of Graziosi’s statue at the Littoriale.25 On the day of the inauguration, Il Resto del Carlino contributed to the celebrations with a front-page article by Giorgio Pini (who, in 1926, had published a successful biography of Mussolini) which surveyed Mussolini’s activities in the previous few years and stressed how the achievements of the regime were increasingly identified with Mussolini’s personal activities. The article was complemented by a photograph of the equestrian statue in place at the Littoriale, which both reminded the Bolognese people of the events of the



Mussolini as monument201

day and emphasised a perception of the regime clearly centred on the figure of Mussolini.26 On 29 October, L’Avvenire reported on the inauguration of the statue as a memorable event attended by thousands of people and accompanied by gymnastics performances and aeroplane flyovers. The unveiling itself was described as a simple yet solemn ceremony. After being introduced by a trumpet, Bottai and Arpinati appeared before the cheering crowd, the flag covering the statue was slowly removed and Bottai made a brief and sober speech, in which he reiterated the sense that the statue incarnated Mussolini’s numen, that the effigy constituted a tangible presence of the Duce’s spirit. His words were significant in this respect; he spoke of Mussolini’s image as a constant encouraging presence in the struggles of his generation. The image unveiled was not simply cast in bronze, he asserted, but was alive and forging ahead towards new goals. ‘We have unveiled the true face of the new Italy, the true face of the Fascist revolution, which is Mussolini’s face’, he concluded.27 A few days after the celebrations in Bologna, L’Illustrazione italiana devoted a detailed article to the unveiling of the statue. It was reported as an event that marked Bologna as a centre of modernity, a modernity defined by the Littoriale Stadium, a building which was seen as in tune with the acknowledged importance of sport in the contemporary age. Such an association with modernity was reinforced by it being described as the site where the Duce had appeared in all his youthful energy and power. Graziosi’s commemorative statue was praised for being a work of art which achieved a physical resemblance to the portrayed subject while conveying an ideal significance. Graziosi, according to the author of the article, had managed to capture Mussolini the man and the Duce at the same time. The location of the statue was also deemed to be significant. It was placed against a backdrop of red stone in a semicircular niche that was seen as a reference to the buildings of the medieval communes. The elegance and magnificence of the bronze used for the sculpture was seen as a reference to the Renaissance, a time in which, in the words of the article’s author, great leaders and princes were honoured for rescuing their people from ‘degenerate democracy’ and endorsing them with dignity, strength and power. He added that just as the statues of leading figures of the past were traditionally viewed against buildings that were the physical manifestation of less florid epochs that preceded them, so too was the statue of the leader of the new Italy. He thereby equated Mussolini with the great Renaissance figures.28 The fate of the statue For 14 years, Graziosi’s statue of Mussolini surveyed a long succession of events in the stadium, including matches played in the football World Cup

202

The cult of the Duce

of 1934, which was won by the Italian national team. Athletes performing in the stadium regularly posed next to it and had their photograph taken. Its subsequent history was more troubled. In 1943 the Littoriale became the headquarters of the fire brigades, after a fire station was bombed in July that year. The stadium gymnasia and the changing rooms were also used to accommodate civilians whose houses had been destroyed in the bombings. The stadium was used as a military warehouse and, after the war, as a depot for Anglo-American tanks and military vehicles.29 Graziosi’s statue of Mussolini suffered even greater indignity. On 26 July 1943, on hearing news of Mussolini’s arrest and the fall of his regime, several Fascist symbols were destroyed in Bologna, as elsewhere. In the Piazza Maggiore (Bologna’s central square) photographs of Mussolini were burned, banners were taken from the Casa del Fascio, and marble insignia were smashed. In addition, the most important effigy of Mussolini in the city, the equestrian statue at the Littoriale, was attacked and destroyed. The figure of the horseman was easily dislodged – as it weighed only 500 kg – and rolled down the steps of the stadium. Pulling down the horse, which was much heavier (about 3,500 kg) and was fixed in concrete, proved more difficult. The statue’s head was detached from the body, tied with a rope and dragged through the streets of Bologna. It was then abandoned. The rest of the body was left in one of the Littoriale’s gymnasia, and it would lie there for several months, until it was removed by the Germans in January 1945. Beyond this, the fate of the body is officially unknown.30 The horse, meanwhile, remained on the pedestal. These acts of iconoclasm recalled an earlier episode in Bolognese history. In 1511 the Bolognese people rebelled against Pope Julius II, whose army had invaded the city in 1506. After expelling Cardinal Francesco Alidosi from the city, they burnt a wooden statue of the Pope. At the end of 1511, when the Pope sent his army to reconquer the city, the people, as an act of rebellion, threw a bronze statue of Julius II, made by Michelangelo, down the steps of the Basilica of St Petronio. They then removed its head and offered the remains of the statue to the Duke of Ferrara, who used them to cast a cannon, which was called ‘the Julia’.31 In his influential book The King’s Body, Sergio Bertelli reports the episode of the destruction of the Pope Julius statue.32 He attributes its decapitation and destruction to a widespread practice in the Middle Ages and in the Early Modern period, which consisted of the repudiation of the body of the leader – as the mystical body in which the community recognised itself – when this was considered to be a danger to the community’s cohesion. The repudiation followed specific rituals associated with dethroning. In the absence of the king or of his ministers, similar rituals were enacted by attacking statues. The image of the leader had a special value to the eyes of his subjects in that it was considered to contain his very numen. Bertelli traces the



Mussolini as monument203

sacralisation of statues back to the Babylonians – where the destruction of the statue of a god led to a kind of divine death – and to the Roman Empire, where the cult of the emperor’s statue was widespread and where imago and numen were closely united. The similarities between the two episodes are striking, and tie in with Luisa Passerini’s interpretation of the cult of Mussolini as the expression of a regression to a pre-modern public sphere, with the difference that the superior power was granted to the leader by the masses themselves, to which it was anchored.33 Hence, the importance attributed to the image of the dictator, which publicly exhibited a sacred quality which would be otherwise invisible (and therefore nonexistent). The descriptions of Mussolini’s portraits, with their emphasis on the artists’ ability to capture the essence of Mussolini’s personality, power and magnetism, tend to support this interpretation. In this sense, Mussolini’s icon, as presented in his portraits, was perceived to contain his numen – his spirit and sacred aura – which, paradoxically, was itself the product not so much of real charisma, but of a manufactured version of it.34 Dismemberment and re-creation After the end of the war, the commission responsible for the conservation of the city’s artistic heritage was faced with the problem of what to do with the remaining parts of the statue. They proposed removing the horse from its location, detaching the remaining parts of the horseman and making the necessary repairs before relocating the horse in a public place.35 However, after the 1946 local elections, the left-wing administration ordered the removal of the horse and its relocation to one of the stadium’s warehouses, on the grounds that, despite being the work of a talented artist, the horse, deprived of its horseman, continued ‘to tower over the whole stadium, while at the same time offering a grotesque spectacle, as the horseman’s legs are still attached to the horse’.36 In fact, this order was not executed, as the remuneration offered to specialised companies for the job was too low. Later the same year the National Association of Italian Partisans (ANPI), after acquiring new headquarters in the centre of Bologna (the Casa del Partigiano in the Montagnola area), made a formal request to the city council for permission to use the bronze of Mussolini’s horse to make two statues of partisans to be placed outside the building.37 The statue had already been deemed of no particular artistic value by the Sindacato Belle Arti.38 In December 1946 permission was granted by the council.39 After formal permission was also granted by the prefect’s office in June 1947, the horse was finally pulled down and taken to Verona to be melted down and turned by the sculptor Luciano Minguzzi into the two statues of partisans (Figure 13). These remained at the Montagnola until 1986, when they were moved to Porta Lame, one of the city gates that

204

The cult of the Duce

13  Luciano Minguzzi, statues of a male and female partisan, 1947

had been the site of a legendary battle between partisans and the armed forces of the Social Republic.40 Graziosi’s statue did not end its life in 1947 and its vicissitudes are still the stuff of legend today, which testifies to the persistence of the resonances of the cult of Mussolini in contemporary Italy. According to the testimony of Arturo Conti, a veteran of the Italian Social Republic (RSI) and in the early 2000s president of the Istituto Storico della Repubblica Sociale Italiana (an association founded in 1986 with the aim of preserving and transmitting the history of the RSI and of promoting and sponsoring research on it), while the Germans were taking away the bust on a truck,41 Mario Mattioli (a lieutenant in the Brigate nere) requested the head as a gift (Conti describes his intervention as ‘an intelligent act, a rescue operation’). Mattioli took the head and buried it in his garden at Via S. Vitale 72. When he became the local secretary of the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI) in 1953, Mattioli dug up the head and took it to the offices of the party in Via Castiglione 26. Here there was a small room that was a ‘little devotional space’ with the photographs of the fallen, and in the middle ‘there was the head’. When the party offices moved to Vicolo Posterla 18, the head went too. It remained there until 1994, when the MSI was in the process of transforming itself into the post-Fascist Alleanza Nazionale and was disposing of all the symbols that had associ-



Mussolini as monument205

14  The head of Graziosi’s equestrian statue today

ated the party with Fascism. Filippo Berselli, a newly elected senator for the Alleanza Nazionale, took custody of the head. When the order arrived to dispose of all images of Mussolini, Berselli threatened to throw it away. Conti recounted that he went with a truck to rescue it and took it to the office of the Istituto Storico della Repubblica Sociale Italiana, where it is still held. Conti argued that the head was formally the property of the State. When the carabinieri came to inspect the head in the office, he invited them to take it but they declined. He asserted that Mussolini did not like statues of himself for superstitious reasons. This one was allowed because Bologna was special; it was, he claimed, the ‘quadrivio of Fascism’, the ‘heart of the Fascist revolution’; it had a central role, and therefore ‘set the tone for the regime’. Conti’s attitude towards the head was both nostalgic and protective. He declared that he would be happy for it to have ‘a dignified place’ in a museum. He felt that the head embodied a personal memory – that of Mussolini himself – and that it was both a memento and a legacy, which had been handed down for generations, and of which he was the last recipient.42 In the room where I met Arturo Conti, the head of Graziosi’s statue was positioned on a table in the corner; beneath it was draped an RSI flag (Figure 14). Behind it there was, on the left, a small framed photograph of the casket

206

The cult of the Duce

containing Mussolini’s remains and, on the right, a Fascist pledge, also framed. On the walls were a large framed list of the ‘martyrs’ of the RSI and a large photograph of Mussolini visiting Bologna in 1926. Mussolini’s numen clearly still inhabited the place. As Sergio Luzzatto notes, Mussolini’s aspiration was to last: he wanted to challenge time and seek eternity, to such an extent that in his propaganda images he displayed the rigid, almost corpselike appearance of a statue. He points out that, like other twentieth-century total­itarian regimes, Fascism elaborated the aspiration to invest the body of the charismatic leader with the durability of the institution that he embodied and encompassed. This turned the leader into a monument, an almost inanimate object.43 Graziosi’s head dominated the room and was a disquieting reminder, as well as an uncanny, almost physical, embodiment, of the persistence of a cult, that, in clandestine or minoritarian forms, still persisted in Italy. Notes

I would like to thank Simon Martin, Emanuela Storchi and Alessandro Baù for their assistance in the preparation of this chapter.  1 F. Sapori, ‘Nel primo decennale dell’era fascista. Ritratti del duce’, Emporium, 76:455 (November 1932), 259–77.   2 See also F. Sapori, L’arte e il duce (Milan: Mondadori, 1932), pp. 133–41.   3 G. Di Genova, ‘Iconografia del duce (1923–1945)’, in Di Genova (ed.), ‘L’uomo della provvidenza’: iconografia del duce 1923–1945 (Bologna: Bora, 1997), p. 15.   4 See G. Armellini, Le immagini del fascismo nelle arti figurative (Milan: Fabbri, 1980), pp. 78–82.   5 G. Battara, ‘Il ventennio e l’estetizzazione del potere’, in Mussolini ritrovato (Argelato: Minerva, 2009), p. 19. See also P. Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso: fascismo e mass media (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 1975), pp. 79–84.   6 E. Gentile, Il culto del littorio (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 1993), pp. 270–4. See also S. Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 42–88.   7 L. Malvano, Fascismo e politica dell’immagine (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1988), pp. 31–3.   8 J. Woodall, ‘Introduction: Facing the Subject’, in Woodall (ed.), Portraiture: Facing the Subject (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 9.   9 Malvano, Fascismo e politica dell’immagine, p. 66. 10 On the history of the Littoriale Stadium see N.S. Onofri and V. Ottani (eds.), Dal littoriale allo stadio: storia per immagini dell’impianto sportive Bolognese (Bologna: Consorzio Cooperative Costruzioni, 1990) and S. Martin, Football and Fascism: The National Game under Mussolini (Oxford: Berg, 2004). 11 Martin, Football and Fascism, pp. 130–1. 12 ‘La statua equestre del Duce che sarà inaugurata al Littoriale’, Il Popolo d’Italia, 25 October 1929, p. 3.



Mussolini as monument207

13 N.S. Onofri, ‘La storia dello stadio, di un cavallo di bronzo e del suo cavaliere perduto’, in Onofri and Ottani, Dal littoriale allo stadio, p. 16. 14 Archivio Comunale di Bologna (henceforth ACB), b. 1383, Tit. XIII, rub. 3, fasc. ‘Statua equestre al Duce eretta al Littoriale’, 1929. 15 ‘La statua equestre del Duce che sarà inaugurata al Littoriale’, Il Popolo d’Italia, 25 October 1929, p. 3. 16 See L. Rivi, ‘Lo scultore, la città, la tradizione’, in M. Canova and F. Piccinini (eds.), Il fondo Giuseppe Graziosi (Modena: Panini, 2007), pp. 27–40. 17 See F. Petrucci, ‘Profilo di Giuseppe Graziosi’, in Canova and Piccinini, Il fondo Giuseppe Graziosi, pp. 11–26. 18 Rivi, ‘Lo scultore, la città, la tradizione’, p. 35. 19 S. Gundle, ‘The death (and re-birth) of the hero: charisma and manufactured ­charisma in modern Italy’, Modern Italy, 3:2 (1998), 173–89 (pp. 181–2). 20 ‘La statua equestre del Duce che sorgerà nello stadio del Littoriale a Bologna’, Il Popolo d’Italia, 25 January 1929, p. 3. 21 R. M. M., ‘La statua equestre del Duce per il Littoriale di Bologna’, L’Illustrazione italiana, 56:16 (April 1929), 614. 22 V. Bucci, ‘La statua equestre del Duce al Littoriale di Bologna’, Il Corriere della Sera, 26 October 1929. 23 ‘Il bronzeo cavallo di Mussolini è giunto sotto la Torre di Maratona’, Il Resto del Carlino, 24 October 1929, p. 4. 24 ‘La celebrazione di domenica al Littoriale. Il monumento equestre s’ergerà oggi al completo’, Il Resto del Carlino, 25 October 1929, p. 4. 25 ‘La manifestazione di domani al Littoriale: Il monumento equestre a Mussolini già pronto per l’inaugurazione sulla torre di Maratona. Il dicorso ufficiale sarà tenuto da S.E. Bottai’, L’Avvenire d’Italia, 26 October 1929, p. 5. 26 G. Pini, ‘Mussolini e la sua opera’, Il Resto del Carlino, 27 October 1929, p. 1. 27 ‘Le manifestazioni celebrative di domenica per il settimo annuale della Marcia su Roma: L’inaugurazione del monumento a Mussolini al Littoriale’, L’Avvenire d’Italia, 29 October 1929, p. 4. 28 L. Ruggi, ‘Bologna nel VII annuale della marcia su Roma. Lo scoprimento della statua equestre al Duce: La posa della prima pietra dell’erigenda casa di riposo degli artisti drammatici italiani, L’Illustrazione italiana, 56:44 (3 November 1929), pp. 699–700. 29 Onofri, ‘La storia dello stadio’, p. 21. 30 Ibid., p. 23. 31 Ibid., p. 24. 32 S. Bertelli, The King’s Body: Sacred Rituals of Power in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 2001), p. 247. 33 L. Passerini, Mussolini immaginario (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 1991), pp. 69–70. See also M. Isnenghi, ‘Il corpo del Duce’, in S. Bertelli and C. Grottanelli (eds.), Gli occhi di Alessandro: potere sovrano e sacralità del corpo da Alessandro Magno a Ceausescu (Florence: Ponte alle Grazie, 1990), pp. 170–83. 34 Gundle, ‘The death (and re-birth) of the hero’, pp. 182–3.

208

The cult of the Duce

35 ACB, b. 1383, Tit. XII, rub. 3, fasc. Rimozione del Cavallo in bronzo della statua equestre dello Stadio, Direzione dei servizi tecnici, 7 February 1946. 36 ACB, b. 1383, Tit. XIII, rub. 3, fasc. Rimozione del Cavallo in bronzo della statua equestre dello Stadio, Delibera del Comune di Bologna, 2 July 1946. See also Onofri, ‘La storia dello stadio’, p. 23. 37 ACB, b. 1383, Tit., XIII, rub. 3, fasc. Rimozione del Cavallo in bronzo della statua equestre dello Stadio, letter from the Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d’Italia to the Mayor of Bologna, 8 November 1946. 38 ACB, b. 1383, Tit. XIII, rub. 3, fasc. Rimozione del Cavallo in bronzo della statua equestre dello Stadio, letter from the Sindacato Belle Arti to the Associazione Partigiani d’Italia, 28 October 1946. 39 ACB, b. 1383, Tit. XIII, rub. 3, fasc. Rimozione del Cavallo in bronzo della statua equestre dello Stadio, Delibera del Comune di Bologna, 11 December 1946. 40 Onofri, ‘La storia dello stadio’, pp. 23–4. 41 Ibid., p. 23. 42 Interview with Arturo Conti, 18 December 2006. An alternative account of the events can be found in G. Quercioli, Bologna e il suo stadio (Bologna: Pendragon, 2006), p. 36. 43 S. Luzzatto, Il corpo del duce (Turin: Einaudi, 1998), pp. 23–4.

13

Mussolini and the city of Rome Eugene Pooley

The idea that Rome reveals and sustains plural identities has been understood as an essential mark of its distinction.1 Commonly characterised as a palimpsest and a city possessed by diverse sets of values, Rome has surpassed the inherent sense of multiplicity and conflict generated in every city to become understood as a ‘symbolically over-determined’ site, a place of ‘excessive memory’.2 Establishing its own position in relation to Rome’s multilayered, challenging identity, the Fascist regime undertook a socio-political programme that sought to create a new and highly conspicuous modern identity for Rome, promising a post-liberal revival of a ‘failed’ capital city and a regeneration of Rome’s past glories. Continuous propaganda promoted the upturn in fortunes of Rome during Fascist rule, and the idea of the regenerated and progressive capital became entirely synonymous with the city’s new title: Roma di Mussolini or Roma Mussoliniana. Repeatedly used in book publications and press articles of the era, the common currency of these phrases should neither disguise their complexity nor the depth of their significance. The notion of Mussolini’s Rome was more than a convenient label to bestow a new identity on the capital: it was also central to the elaboration and diffusion of the Duce’s cult. Biographical and historical literature perpetuated a unique spiritual bond between the leader and the city, defined by Achille Starace as an inseparable entity, the ‘Rome– Mussolini binomial’.3 Mussolini was deemed to personify, as part of this mystical bond, the transcendent ideals of romanità that set the city and its history apart. The relationship between Rome and Mussolini, though, was not an exclusively metaphysical ideal, but also a material and tangible reality. And it is this connection between the built environment of Rome and the Duce that this chapter considers. It first seeks to establish how this material relationship was exploited to boost the cult of Mussolini, developing new depths to his persona and fostering important connections with the nation. And second it discusses how the diverse projects of architects and artists met with varied success as they sought to materialise aspects of the cult in the cityscape, using innovative approaches to shape Mussolini’s presence within Rome.

210

The cult of the Duce

Mussolini in the city: urbanista to muratore Urban planning schemes have been understood as having an intimate connection to the dictator’s cult, as tools that are spatially expressive of the sociopolitical order that seeks to place the leader at its centre.4 And while this holds true in Fascist Italy, where planning programmes sought to objectify Mussolini in the cityscape, it risks glossing one of the key sociopolitical and cultural phenomena of Fascist rule: the establishing of the discipline of urbanistica (town planning). This new approach to urban change fundamentally altered the relationship between the individual, the city and the State, casting Mussolini in a central role and permitting his subjective engagement in the processes of creating the city. While much of Western Europe witnessed the emergence of town planning as an individual discipline at the turn of the twentieth century, the growth of urbanistica in Italy, and the emergence of the figure of the urbanista (town planner), took place almost exclusively during the Fascist period. Prior to 1926 there was no Italian participation at international planning conferences, no Italian language journals dealing specifically with urban change and only the incipient stages of organised planning groups. Indeed the terms urbanistica and urbanista, understood as the art of town planning and its practitioner, only came into common use in the 1920s. But the rise of the discipline, together with theories and ideas surrounding it, was rapid, progressively encouraged by the ideological goals of the regime and the strong connection that was forged by Fascist thinking between the building of the city and the (meta)building of the state. As the movement expanded the idea of the urbanista came strikingly to the fore. More than an amalgam of architect and engineer, the urbanista embodied a new class of modern professional empowered with the ability to diagnose a city’s problems, resolve social issues and embellish the beauty of urban space. Planners were at the very forefront of the nation’s development and planning became seen as an archetypal Fascist discipline, even as a metaphor for totalitarian idealism. The demiurgic status acquired by the urbanista was displayed prominently at the sixth Milan Triennale in 1936 when a dedicated Mostra dell’urbanistica examined the progress and importance of planning. Urbanistica was on the lips of the nation: urban change was pushed onto the newspaper front pages and impressed on the public imagination, proof of the attempt to cultivate a ‘planning mentality’ in the country at large.5 What is more, urbanistica began to absorb elements of other social, historical and artistic disciplines, to become essentially comprehensive in its scope; the image of the urbanista’s all-seeing eye took centre stage at the Triennale: ‘The planner’s eye can identify, amongst the disorder of old urban developments, the problems that affect man’s life in the city.’6



Mussolini and the city of Rome211

This presentation of the urbanista as a panoptic individual, training his eye on all manner of problems to create order out of disorder, found direct analogy in descriptions of Mussolini’s omnipresence and omnipotence in Rome: ‘[Mussolini] observes everything … intervenes everywhere…’.7 Indeed, at the probable peak of his popularity in the wake of the declaration of empire, Mussolini graphically assumed the guise of the urbanista in a specially published multilingual issue of the principal architectural journal of the regime, Architettura, in December 1936. Promoting the new urban fabric of an ‘imperial’ capital, the cover presented a sequence of images of Mussolini under the banner headline Urbanistica della Roma Mussoliniana, purposefully seeking to reveal the Duce’s hand behind the planning, surveying, building and engineering of the new city, creating, in short, a visual portrait of Mussolini urbanista as the arch-planner of the capital. More specifically it was further notice of Mussolini’s role as the master designer of Rome. The Duce had previously described himself as the ‘spiritual father’8 of the much-debated and much-vaunted 1931 plan for Rome and had its authorship nominally deferred to him by the group who had settled on its design.9 Indeed Mussolini’s very public and proactive approach to altering Rome’s urban structure was seen by Silvio Ardy, one of the early theorists of urbanistica, as the ultimate catalyst for the urbanistica movement itself.10 Mussolini’s integral role in the process of rebuilding Rome also fostered a vital comparison with Augustus, casting the Duce as the modern restitutor urbis, at the head of the moral and technical revival of the city. And, in the shadow of the Ara Pacis and the Mausoleum of Augustus, in Piazza Augusto Imperatore, a Latin inscription appeared on the wall of the newly constructed Istituto Nazionale della Previdenza Sociale, telling of the deeds of Mussolini in restoring order and beauty to the urban fabric of the area. Above this contemporary res gestae appeared a hymn to the idea of Rome in a grand mosaic by Ferruccio Ferrazzi.11 At this spot, and in this inscription, the contemporary idea of the urbanista met with the restitutor urbis of antiquity under the image of Rome. While this image of Mussolini as the cerebral, all-powerful urbanista allowed for an idealised projection of his persona over and above the whole cityscape, it did not preclude the engagement of a quite contrary, more visceral Duce on the streets of Rome. Famously ever-present at demolitions and inaugurations, Mussolini made himself eminently visible in the processes of urban change, establishing his own iconography with every swing of the pickaxe. More than a purely symbolic act, his wielding of the axe was a reminder of his humble background as a one-time labourer in Switzerland, albeit a very temporary one, and of his lifelong status as the ‘blacksmith’s son’.12 The image of the leader as builder, as Duce muratore, was, according to Ciarlantini, one of Mussolini’s many biographers, one of the most ­enduring of all personas, and of particular appeal to children.13 It was an image that

212

The cult of the Duce

Mussolini cultivated in the public eye by instigating various walkabouts and increasingly regular site visits in Rome, establishing the idea of a relationship between the common man and himself by claiming a natural empathy with site workers and attempting to demonstrate that, physically and spiritually, he was a constitutive part of the crowd as well as being its leader. The frenzy of media reporting of such visits reached a peak as the ten-year anniversary celebrations of October 1932 approached. Descriptions of his tours evinced the picture of a leader entirely at ease at the most personal level, who is witnessed treating the crowds ‘like friends and brothers’, and not ‘an amorphous flock of citizens’.14 Notwithstanding Mussolini’s own, at times disparaging, comments on the ‘masses’, these visits, or more pointedly their widespread reporting, were as key in ‘mobilising’ support as were the more spectacular staged displays of large-scale support and adoration. Whether choreographed or spontaneous, these snapshot scenes presented a naturalised image of a down-to-earth Mussolini that was recognised as having deep resonance in the population: it fostered the impression that Mussolini ‘belonged’ to the crowd and not to the political elite, lending credence to the notion that he had truly ‘emerged from the heart of the people’.15 The cityscape, then, whether being experienced in its fragmented state of renovation or conceived holistically as part of the new social science of urbanistica, bolstered the idea that Mussolini could be at once part of the crowd – and separate from it. His role in the making of the city, from urbanista to muratore, exemplifies the manner in which the personality cult is sustained by polarities of meaning, from the high to the low, where the leader is simultaneously understood as an extraordinary and ordinary man, a duality that was expressed in the distribution of the earthly and heavenly titles applied to Mussolini, from condottiero and ‘restorer’, to ‘man of providence’ and ‘saviour’. Foro Mussolini: centre and sublimation While these contradictory qualities of Mussolini bolstered his universal appeal, they also rendered the process of creating a singular, defined visual representation of the Duce highly problematic. Indeed the question of how to best capture Mussolini and embrace the polarities so integral to his persona, was a core issue of the broader debates over creating Fascist art. Rendering Mussolini’s significance and omnipresence was as tricky as bottling the weather: ‘It is hot, it is cold. Today, in Italy, it is Mussolini.’16 The issue of representing, or immortalising, Mussolini in the built environment, however, was quite different. Here planners, artists and architects were permitted to work on a grander scale, and with greater freedoms, with the aim of describing or evoking Mussolini in new and more complex ways that went



Mussolini and the city of Rome213

far beyond framed portraits or standardised busts. These efforts to integrate and reify the Duce in Rome, and articulate his relationship with the people, will be looked at in several categories: in planned urban zones, public visual art, formal architectural elements and individual monuments. Perhaps the most elemental, and earliest, homages were those that sought to fundamentally reconfigure the city’s toponymy by proposing newly redesigned focal points of the capital be dedicated to the Duce. When Rome hosted the twelfth congress of the International Federation for Housing and Planning in September 1929, competing, and heavily debated, proposals for the city’s urban redevelopment went on display at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni as the centrepiece of the Mostra dei piani regolatori e delle abitazioni. The most important of these plans were united in the aim of settling the city’s new centre around Mussolini, but the meaning and direction of the centre of each proposal was cadenced by their pursuit of contrasting urban models. The Gruppo degli Urbanisti Romani (GUR), led by Marcello Piacentini, proposed the creation of a viale Mussolini around which would be centred a monumental and entirely modern development with a new station to the east of the city. The Burbera group, headed by Gustavo Giovannoni, proposed a Foro Mussolini be created at the axis of two great new arteries cutting across the city, a conscious reprisal of an urban form from antiquity, the cardus and decumanus. Most dramatically of all, Armando Brasini, one of the most controversial architects of the period, carved out a Forum Mussolini between Piazza Colonna and Piazza di Montecitorio, with a view to setting this new forum on a wide boulevard, the Via Imperiale, that would, through extensive demolition, link it to the Roman and Imperial forums, via the Vittoriano, at its southern point, and to Piazza Augusto Imperatore in the north. It aimed to build a narrative from antiquity, through the Risorgimento, to the contemporary era. While the GUR and Burbera plans symbolically placed Mussolini at the centre of modern and classical urban forms, Brasini’s project revealed a greater attempt to immortalise and idealise the Duce by integrating him into the story of Rome’s forums, the capital’s most characteristic urban feature.17 While none of these projects was realised, a Foro Mussolini was, of course, constructed in Monte Mario on the north bank of the Tiber. Renamed the Foro Italico in 1943, the central significance of the complex to the regime and to the iconography of Fascism was in no manner pre-planned. Begun in the 1920s as a sporting and educational centre for the youth group, the Opera Nazionale Balilla (ONB), by the 1930s it was a key political showpiece, used as a stage for military and gymnastic displays and as the highlight of the visit of foreign dignitaries, notably that of Hitler in May 1938. This ‘city within a city’ came, more than any other single work or complex, to represent Roma Mussoliniana.18 Yet one of the key features of the Foro was its rather oblique representation

214

The cult of the Duce

of Mussolini himself. It is striking that in the open spaces of the complex there is (or was) no statue of Mussolini, nor any figural representation to ‘mark’ his Forum, as if the choices made to evoke the Duce purposefully sought to overcome the problem of creating an effigy by sublimating Mussolini’s presence using signs, symbols and icons. At the entrance of the complex stands Mussolini’s obelisk, erected in 1932, behind which extends the mosaicked piazzale, completed to Luigi Moretti’s design in May 1937 to mark the anniversary of the declaration of empire. Conceived by Renato Ricci, the head of the ONB, the obelisk subsumed, through a combination of narrative and design, the modern with the ancient, and the earthly with the sublime, paying homage to the Duce by paradoxically eliminating traces of a ‘real’, tangible and human Mussolini. The journey of the monolith from its source deep in the marble caves of Carrara to the ‘sacred’ territory of Rome was described through the intertwining of two narrative threads, one telling the story of the labour behind extracting and transporting the monument, and another setting it in an historic context through its situation alongside the capital’s noted obelisks. As the monolith neared the end of its journey, it was purposefully carried in front of the obelisk in St Peter’s square, a moment reported as the coming together of two ‘great epochs’, as if the monuments were engaged in a form of dialogue.19 It was a graphic reminder of the significance of erecting an obelisk in the capital, of its role as the symbol par excellence of the glory of empire and civilisation of Rome. Through the narrative of its journey and its historical significance, the obelisk assumed a mythopoeic status, even before its inscription formally identified it with Mussolini. Indeed the unusual inscription, dedicating the monolith to ‘MVSSOLINI DVX’ in vertical sans serif lettering, together with the art-deco aesthetic of the base, produced a conspicuously contemporary façade. The conjunction between the modernist tendency of its design and its historical value as a symbol of Rome can be seen to embrace another of the key contradictions of Mussolini’s character, described by Giuseppe Bottai: ‘This man has an ancient temperament but lives in his time with … a highly acute sense of modernity’.20 As such, the obelisk could be read as a sublimated portrait of the Duce, whose verticality succeeds in expressing his elemental force as a leader and whose aesthetic manages to replicate his synthesis of the modern and the ancient. Despite this, the monument never became a wholly totemic emblem of Mussolini himself, instead serving as a widespread symbol for the Foro and, more particularly, for the ONB, adorning textbooks, membership cards and official documents.21 This transposition of the cult into oblique homage is echoed in Moretti’s piazzale behind the obelisk. The grand mosaic, while reinforcing in form and content the dialogue between the ancient and the modern and describing acts



Mussolini and the city of Rome215

of athletic prowess, is framed by its repeated choruses of Duce/Dux and ‘M’ symbols.22 The regularity of these symbols is vivid evidence of a widespread shorthand reference to Mussolini that, in the context of the Foro, works to pay homage by articulating a new language that is suggestive, domineering and multi-vocal. The language of sublimation is articulated once again, though on a more intimate, personal scale, in Moretti’s Palestra del Duce, a room in the baths complex of the Foro, designed as both a functional space for and an idealised space of Mussolini.23 The modernist lines and refined elegance of the room, completed in 1936, feature a series of allegories played out in deference to the Duce, but again the space contains no figural likeness. Instead an idealised classical statue by Silvio Canevari evokes Mussolini’s praised athleticism, and an allegorical mosaic by Gino Severini alludes to his power as a leader. Depicting an Icarus figure as it tumbles away from the sun, Severini’s work shows a lion ascending towards the light. It being the birth sign of Mussolini and a symbol of the conquest of empire, the lion, in syzygy with the sun, represents the dominance and strength of the Duce. This marked lack of a figural representation of Mussolini in the Foro’s open spaces and the Duce’s own dedicated room may have tempered the post-war reaction to the complex. After the not altogether rigorous process of damnatio memoriae, the decorative spaces remained largely unaltered, indeed subsequently restored for sporting events. There were efforts to efface Mussolini’s ‘presence’ by eliminating the lettering on the obelisk in the 1950s, but a cost-effective solution proved elusive. And proposals to cover or remove the mosaics for the 1960 Olympic Games resulted in political protest, controversy and only minimal changes, so that Mussolini’s sublimated presence has been conserved behind the superficial renaming of the complex.24 Mussolini in murals and mosaics There is, however, one image of the Duce at the Foro that is locked inside what is now the Salone d’Onore of the Comitato Olimpico Nazionale Italiano (CONI, the Italian Olympic Committee), the former Aula Magna of the Accademia. Inside the room, at its opposite ends, are two monumental pictures (approximately 14 by 8 metres), one entitled the Apotheosis of Fascism, by Luigi Montanarini and the other the History of Rome, by Angelo Canevari, both thought to have been executed in the mid- to late 1930s. Montanarini’s work is dominated by a central portrait of the Duce and was controversially restored in 1996–97 amid accusations of misplaced nostalgia, having remained covered since shortly after the war by a curtain, later replaced with one bearing the five Olympic rings.25 The melodramatic visual dynamic of the room is generated by two key

216

The cult of the Duce

elements, first by the manner in which Montanarini’s work clearly elevates and foreshortens the Duce, and second by the historical dialogue between the two paintings. The dramatic movement of the crowd towards Mussolini acts as an allegory for Fascism itself, with officials, workers, soldiers, women, children and allegories of Victory all turned toward the Duce. Mussolini is distinguished from the crowd by his looking outward from the picture, depicted with a gaze that looks both metaphorically to the future of the nation, and literally to the past, to Canevari’s History of Rome at the opposite end of the room, seeing his role as the head of a new Italy explicitly reflected in the construction of Rome. Such large-scale works facilitated the bringing together of the Fascist idealisation of the nation and its history around the figure of Mussolini. Montanarini’s picture, however, in conjunction with that of Canevari, stands out as being one of the relatively few examples of such completed public, monumental depictions of the Duce that survived in Rome. These works are testament to the significance given to the grand decoration of public architectural projects in the 1930s, supported by the theories of leading protagonists, such as Mario Sironi, who contended that mural paintings were capable of capturing the popular imagination to a far greater extent than other art forms.26 Sironi himself executed another of the mural depictions of Mussolini to have remained in the capital, at Piacentini’s Casa Madre dei Mutilati that sits between the Palazzo di Giustizia and Castel Sant’Angelo.27 In the first-floor sacrarium Sironi was commissioned to paint two frescoes to celebrate the Empire, one representing the king, the other Mussolini, both on horseback. Having been covered in 1946 to protect it from being destroyed, it was subsequently rediscovered and restored in 1988.28 The work is notable for representing Mussolini in isolation when it was more common practice for grand visual compositions to situate Mussolini at the epicentre of ideological and historical narratives. Such was the case with a mural that is now covered at the former Palazzo delle Corporazioni (now Palazzo dell’Industria) across the city. Built between 1926 and 1932, to the design of Piacentini and Giuseppe Vaccaro in Via Veneto, the Palazzo contains one of the first monumental compositions featuring the Duce, as part of a grand fresco by Arnaldo Carpanetti.29 The central wall of the work depicted Mussolini’s speech at Dalmine in March 1919, with the Duce flanked on one side by flag-waving workers and on the other by soldiers returning to join the throng of labourers. Carpanetti, himself a former combatant and founding member of the Fascist movement, conflated the Fascist revolution with the ideal of a unified national labour force, with Mussolini as the pivotal figure.30 The most spectacular visual sequence of the whole period, though, intended to be the ideal expression of the Rome–Mussolini ‘binomial’, was to have come at Adalberto Libera’s Palazzo dei Congressi e Ricevimenti, one of the ­buildings



Mussolini and the city of Rome217

designed as a centrepiece for the 1942 World Exhibition. Announcing itself, from the exterior, as a modernist basilica, Libera wished to evoke, in the interior, a ‘metaphysical vision’ of Rome itself.31 While the building was completed, its internal decoration was not. In the inner chamber below the dome, four interior panels, around 30 metres high, were to have been covered in monumental mosaics, telling, in turn, the story of Rome’s beginnings, followed by the age of Empire, the Renaissance and a crowning work depicting Mussolini’s Rome: the artistic brief explained that the chamber was to be ‘the chapel of the idea of Rome, the fulcrum of civilisation’.32 As such it can be seen as the very centre of the whole exhibition complex that was described by one of its key devisers, Giuseppe Bottai, as being in itself the concrete manifestation of this idea of Rome.33 The mosaic project was a very clear attempt to embed Mussolini in a sweeping narrative of Rome’s history, and to place him and the present epoch as the culmination of a civilising ideal. Giovanni Guerrini’s winning design for the ‘Mussolini’s Rome’ mosaic included in its lower section the architectural symbols of the new terza Roma, but lifted Mussolini to the very apex of the work, surrounded again, as in Montanarini’s picture, by members of the Fascist hierarchy. Had it been completed it would have been the most ‘sacred’ representation of Mussolini, sanctioning his place at the peak of the regime and at the climax of Rome’s history. Duce and popolo: the arengario It was not only visual artists who were tasked with articulating the relationship between Mussolini, Rome and the ideal of the Fascist nation in public projects. This relationship was central to one of the most important architectural competitions of the regime, the Palazzo Littorio in Rome, a contest that marked a culturally critical point after the bitter debates of the preceding years. The construction, imagined as the new headquarters of the regime, was to be built on a triangular section of land fronting the newly finished Via dell’Impero (now Via dei Fori Imperiali), opposite the Basilica of Maxentius, with the aim of creating a new identity for Rome by articulating a Fascist stile littorio.34 As a central part of the competition, launched in December 1933, participants were challenged to create an arengario to enable Mussolini to review parades and, more significantly, deliver speeches to a thronging crowd. The position and design of the arengario, understood as a balcony from which to address an assembled crowd, was to be one of the defining elements of the complex, with a majority of proposals understanding it as the key juncture not just between Mussolini and an immediate crowd but as the symbolic point of communion between leader and nation. It was imagined as the de jure centre point of the capital, a new space for Mussolini critically situated above the

218

The cult of the Duce

much-celebrated new road, the Via dell’Impero. In fact, the Via dell’Impero was often described as much more than a road, ‘not like a road, but a landscape, a piazza, an agora, a forum: a world’. Thus the arengario would be the platform from which the Duce would be able to dominate his ‘world’.35 By 1933, the arengario, as an architectural feature, had become wholly symbolic of Mussolini’s dominant presence.36 Throughout Italy, from the appropriation of the balcony of Palazzo Venezia to the erection of temporary platforms for speeches, it was used to stage the Duce–popolo (people) relationship in its most dramatic, imaginative and enduring manner. Yet it also came to be viewed as a mark of the changing nature of the cult, with balconies set progressively higher and higher in piazzas, a fact that provided transparent evidence of the increasing distance, both literal and emotive, that was opening up between Mussolini and the crowd.37 The arengario of the Palazzo Littorio, to be built as the supreme example of its type, needed to negotiate the problem of its construction carefully. One of the most renowned of over one hundred competition entries that went on display in September 1934, labelled Project A, by the team that included Luigi Vietti and Giuseppe Terragni, sought to draw a clear line between the Duce and the crowd by their use of the arengario.38 Dramatically isolating Mussolini’s balcony as it jutted out at the top of a space between two slightly curvilinear walls fronting the Via dell’Impero, it was designed to externalise the most extreme sense of adoration in the crowd on the street below. It sought to delineate the duality of leader and people: ‘The architect places the leader high up, alone … the people swarm below, overflowing like a tidal wave.’39 And Sironi, a key collaborator of the Vietti-Terragni group, suggested that the design of this relationship was fundamental in elucidating a sense of the monumental. Sironi saw a true idea of the monumental located not in architectural scale but in the diffusion of Mussolini’s voice over the oceanic crowd: ‘Monumentality … is the voice of the leader over the voices of the masses. It is the expression of faith … .’40 In complete contrast to this monumental duality, Mario De Renzi’s plans aimed to subsume the Duce–popolo relationship by creating a compact, subtly cadenced play of space that encouraged the idea of spontaneity and complete unity. De Renzi’s design had the construction sitting neatly in the triangular space, with the arengario at the extremity of the building’s forward point, facing the Colosseum and maximising a sense of proximity where ‘Leader, hierarchy and people live in communion’.41 Agnoldomenico Pica addressed the problem with ingenuity by proposing a solution he felt straddled these two extremes to generate the illusion of Mussolini being at once imposing and in close proximity to the crowd: he wished to ‘giganticise’ the Duce by creating a balcony of vast size but only allow for minimal elevation, such that the platform, appearing as a floating



Mussolini and the city of Rome219

space amongst a voluminous crowd, gave the impression of Mussolini being supported and buoyed by his audience, indeed appearing as the very ‘product’ of the crowd.42 The differing ideological and aesthetic visions for the project, evinced in this small sample of ideas, created fierce debate in the press and parliament. Eventually the site at Via dell’Impero was abandoned and the chance lost to create a new nexus of Mussolini’s Rome and articulate the Duce–popolo relationship in this most prized of spaces. It was not, however, lost altogether. After a second competition in 1937, that considered a site at Piazza Raudusculana (now Piazza Albania), it was eventually decided the construction would be built at the Foro Mussolini to a design by Del Debbio, Vittorio Ballio-Morpurgo and Arnaldo Foschini. Having, by then, established its role as a key Fascist space, the importance of the Foro would be rendered even greater by the building of the Palazzo Littorio.43 Before this decision was taken, however, Luigi Moretti had embellished the plans for the Foro in 1936 to realise on a grander and more dramatic scale a space for the Duce– popolo communion. To the right of the extant complex he sought to create the unrealised arengario of the Via dell’Impero in a new form, by designing a multi-purpose arena with a total capacity set at 400,000, capable of housing military parades and gymnastic displays but whose essence was defined by its function as the space for the ‘unique dialogues between the Duce and the Italian people’.44 Labelled the Piazzale delle adunate or Arengo della nazione, it set a balcony in front of a heart-shaped piazza, and made explicit the idea of transforming the amorphous crowd into an identified body of people, a nation. And equally important to this was Moretti’s broader vision for the whole site. He sought to integrate the Foro fully into the capital’s urban structure, to make it not only a ‘living’ part of the city, but the new monumental entrance to Rome itself.45 Further, the site positioned itself at the very centre of the broader ‘national urban plan’, on a great north–south axis that stretched through the peninsula, such that the nation, at once ideologically and geographically, would become centred at the Foro, and more specifically at the point of contact between Mussolini and the crowd at the new Arengo.46 After the failure of the Palazzo Littorio on Via dell’Impero, Moretti’s plan attempted to reposition the centre of both city and state at the Foro Mussolini, as a new umbilicus urbis Romae. Deifying the Duce To crown the significance of this centre, it was to be possessed of an extraordinary, monumental marker, intended to be visible from all over the city. Perhaps the closest the regime came to realising a definitive monument to Mussolini (and Fascism) in the capital, the so-called Statue (or Colossus) of

220

The cult of the Duce

Fascism was designed by Aroldo Bellini as an attempt to personify Fascism by transforming ideology into material form.47 Public announcement of its creation was made in the wake of the conquest of Ethiopia, though the idea of a gigantic statue at the Foro was the fruit of several years’ work.48 In May and June 1936 photographs began to appear in the national and international press of the monument’s separately fused body parts.49 Standing 86 metres tall and cast in bronze, the colossus was designed to be one of the most striking structures in the world, and though it was to be almost three times the height of the Statue of Liberty (not including the base), the New York harbour monument provided the main point of reference, both in terms of global renown and engineering, with Italian authorities making specific enquiries into its internal structure.50 The colossus was to have invited visitors by creating an adjoining exhibition space to house the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution (as the Palazzo Littorio in Via dell’Impero ought to have done) and a viewing platform at the top of the monument, accessible by two lifts, to have been installed, one in each leg of the statue.51 The positioning of, and access to, the statue was studied separately by Del Debbio, Moretti and the team of Mario Paniconi and Giulio Pediconi.52 The initial proposal to locate the colossus on Monte Mario was revised to bring the statue closer to the Arengo, so that, in Moretti’s final plan, it would in fact stand directly behind Mussolini’s platform, a materially idealised figuration of Fascism animated by the leader and crowd below, as if themselves sanctified in front of the colossal new deity. Anecdotal evidence reported that the proposed design of the statue met with Mussolini’s approval on two particular accounts, first for the fact that it would have stood taller than the dome of St Peter’s and second for the resemblance of the features of the colossus to the Duce himself.53 But this supposed likeness was, in fact, a purposeful and fascinating obfuscation. Its facial features were delineated, Ricci explained, so as not to create a precise representation of Mussolini but merely evoke his image through a generic Herculean figure, with the intention that future generations should read into the mythologised statue a sublimated and deified ideal of the Duce.54 Overcoming, again, the problem of capturing Mussolini’s image, Ricci aimed to create the ultimate act of sublimation, by deifying the Duce through this monumental transfiguration. Most probably due to lack of funds, neither the colossus nor Moretti’s Arengo materialised. And while the idea of the colossus itself came under fire from some for being a ‘barbaric’ offence to Rome’s dignity, its failure left others questioning why the capital had not succeeded in dedicating a definitive monument to Mussolini.55 One pair of architects sought to address this void with a proposal that was put to the World Exhibition committee in 1939. Umberto Calvanese



Mussolini and the city of Rome221

and Manlio Ciani outlined their idea for the Torrèlice Dux, an iconographic landmark described as the ‘Fascist Revolution transfigured in art’.56 The story of the rise of Fascism and Mussolini would be narrated in themed rooms, decorated by extracts from the Duce’s speeches, a design highly reminiscent of the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, inside a 110-metre-high tower. The authors intended the structure to be at once a monument to the idea of Fascism and its spiritual core, expressed as a ‘synthetic work of historic– artistic documentation’. And, more significantly, it purposefully sought to address the lack of a central artistic homage to Mussolini, with Calvanese and Ciani contending that whilst historical and biographical literature had created definitive works of reference and praise for the Duce, the artistic and architectural community had not.57 The Torrèlice Dux intended to resolve the problem by creating an holistic work that would seek to replicate and reify Mussolini’s visceral and cerebral ‘vitality’, celebrating the Duce as the ‘apotheosis’ of the Italian race. The proposal was, however, swiftly rejected by the Exhibition committee, who judged that the construction would have no place within the narrative of the complex where Mussolini and Fascist ideology, Calvanese and Ciani were told, would be exalted throughout the Exhibition in a variety of ways.58 So if Mussolini’s absence from the capital is marked by the failure of such a definitive homage, then his ‘presence’ remains in the obliquity of the Foro and the handful of remaining visual compositions and inscriptions. Ultimately ‘Mussolini’s Rome’ is defined less by its concrete legacy and more by its emergence as the product of a cultural milieu that radically altered the approach to city change, allowing the Duce to establish a critical rapport with the public as the true maker of the new capital. Notes  1 L. Fiorani and A. Prosperi, ‘Una città “plurale” ’, in Fornari and Prosperi (eds.) Storia d’Italia. Annali 16. Roma, la città del papa: vita civile e religiosa dal giubileo di Bonifacio VIII al giubileo di papa Woitila (Turin: Einaudi, 2000), pp. xxiii–xxxi.   2 D. Pick, ‘Reviews of books, Europe: early modern and modern’, American Historical Review, 105:4 (2000), 1417 and M. Fumaroli, ‘Rome dans l’imagination et la mémoire de l’Europe,’ Lettere italiane, 48:3 (1996), 347.   3 ‘Le grandi imprese archeologiche compiute a Roma dal Regime’, La Tribuna, 9 February 1933, p. 3.   4 M. Rolf, ‘Working Towards the Centre: Leader Cults and Spatial Politics in Pre-War Stalinism’, in B. Apor et al. (eds.), The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships: Stalin and the Eastern Bloc (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 141–57.   5 Giuseppe Pagano in P. Bottoni, Urbanistica, Quaderni della Triennale (Milan: Ulrico Hoepli Editori, 1938), pp. 6–7.

222

The cult of the Duce

  6 Ibid., p. 28.   7 A. Muñoz, Roma di Mussolini (Milan: Treves, 1935), p. x.   8 Atti Parlamentari della Camera dei Senatori, 1a Sessione 1929–1932, 18 March 1932, p. 4874. Mussolini’s role as padre spirituale refers in part to his oft-quoted speeches setting out a vision for the urban future of Rome delivered on 21 April 1924 and 31 December 1925.   9 Governatorato di Roma, Piano Regolatore di Roma 1931 (Milan–Rome: Treves– Treccani–Tumminelli, 1931), p. 18. 10 S. Ardy, Proposta di creazione di un Istituto Italiano di Urbanesimo e di alti Studi Municipali (Turin: Congresso Internazionale di Urbanesimo, 28 May 1926), p. 17. 11 A. Muñoz, ‘Il mito di Roma. Musaico di Ferruccio Ferrazzi nella Piazza d’Augusto Imperatore’, L’Urbe, 6.5 (1941), 28–30. 12 R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini (London: Arnold, 2002), p. 60. 13 F. Ciarlantini, Mussolini immaginario (Milan: Casa Editrice Sonzogno, 1933), p. 160. 14 Ibid. 15 A. Soffici, ‘Moralizzare l’Italia’, Il Tevere, 22 July 1927, p. 1. 16 Calandrino, untitled text, Il Selvaggio, 4:19 (1927), p. 73. 17 For more on Brasini see L. Brasini (ed.), L’opera architettonica e urbanistica di Armando Brasini: dall’Urbe Massima al Ponte sullo Stretto di Messina (Corigliano Calabro: Stabilimento Tipografico Arti Grafiche Joniche, 1979). 18 Lando Ferretti, cited in S. Santuccio, ‘Storia Urbanistica’, in A. Greco and S. Santuccio, Foro Italico (Rome: Multigrafica Editore, 1991), p. 15. 19 F. Clementi, ‘L’obelisco vaticano e il monolite del Foro Mussolini’, Il Giornale d’Italia, 12 March 1930, p. 4. 20 G. Bottai, Mussolini costruttore d’Impero (Mantua: ‘Mussolinia’ Edizioni Paladino, 1926), p. 9. 21 M.G. D’Amelio, ‘Il metodo progettuale di Attilio Calzavara’, in Tra futurismo e visual design: Attilio Calzavara e il progetto grafico di ‘Opere Pubbliche 1922–1932’ (Reggio Calabria: Iiriti Editori, 2005), pp. 37–44. See also D’Amelio, L’obelisco marmoreo del Foro Italico a Roma: storia, immagini e note tecniche (Rome: Palombi Editori, 2009). 22 The mosaic was completed by the team of Gino Severini, Achille Capizzano, Giulio Rosso and Angelo Canevari. 23 ‘Palestra del Duce alle Terme del Foro Mussolini’, Architettura, 19:12 (1940), 582–94. 24 ‘Consiglio Comunale di Roma, Verbale n. 59, 29 November 1955’, Comune di Roma. Atti Consigliari (November–December 1955), pp. 4391–3. See also V. Vidotto, ‘Il mito di Mussolini e le memorie nazionali: Le trasformazioni del Foro Italico 1937–1960’, in Roma: architettura e città negli anni della seconda guerra mondiale, Atti della Giornata di studio del 24 gennaio 2003 (Rome: Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza”, 2004), pp. 112–21. 25 G. Rugarli, ‘Quel Mussolini va restaurato: è storia’, Il Messaggero, 28 February 1996, p. 1; A. Pontani, ‘Dovete far vedere l’affresco del Duce’, La Repubblica,



26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34

35 36

37 38

39 40 41 42 43

Mussolini and the city of Rome223 28 February 1996, p. 50; M. Guidi, ‘Ecco tutta la verità sull’affresco del Coni’, Il Messaggero, 3 August 1997, p. 20. ‘Manifesto della pittura murale’, La Colonna, December 1933, in E. Camesasca (ed.), Mario Sironi: scritti editi e inediti (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1980), pp. 155–6. R. Barbiellini Amidei et al., La Casa Madre dei Mutilati di Guerra (Rome: Editalia, 1993). M. Gallo, ‘Il Sironi nascosto’, Il Tempo. Cronaca di Roma, 27 September 1988, p. 1 and D. Petrocelli, ‘Gli affreschi di Sironi ora verranno esposti’, Il Tempo, 28 September 1988, ‘Cronaca di Roma’ supplement, p. v. Individual portraits of Mussolini were, however, hung in the capital’s significant government buildings at an earlier stage. Gisberto Ceracchini’s ‘Trionfo del Duce’, for example, executed between 1923 and 1925, hung in the Palazzo del Viminale. C. E. Oppo, ‘Gli affreschi di Arnaldo Carpanetti al Ministero delle Corporazioni’, La Tribuna, 11 (1933), 3. A. Libera, ‘Decorazione ad intario di legno per la parete riflettante del podio nella grande sala dei Congressi’, Archivo Centrale dello Stato (henceforth ACS), EUR, Servizi Artistici, b. 957, f. 9468, sf. 2. ACS, EUR, Servizi Artistici, b. 957, f. 9468, sf. 2. Giuseppe Bottai, La politica delle arti: scritti 1918–1943, ed. Alessandro Masi (Rome: Editalia, 1992), p. 156. See M. Zammerini, Concorso per il Palazzo Littorio (Rome: Testo & Immagine, 2002) and for details of individual entries see Il nuovo stile littorio: i progetti per il Palazzo del Littorio e della Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista in Via dell’Impero (Milan: Bertarelli, 1936). M. Canino, ‘Il concorso per il Palazzo Littorio in Roma’, Pan, 2:11 (1934), 431. M. Fuller, ‘Tradition as a Means to the End of Tradition: Farmers’ Houses in Italy’s Fascist-Era New Towns’, in N. AlSayyad (ed.), The End of Tradition? (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 176–7 and D. Ghirardo, Building New Communities: New Deal America and Fascist Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 71. Y. De Begnac, Palazzo Venezia: storia di un regime (Rome: Editrice La Rocca, 1950), p. 444. Vietti and Terragni’s team, that also produced a Project B, included Antonio Carminati, Pietro Lingeri, Ernesto Saliva, Marcello Nizzoli and Mario Sironi. For more on this team see J. D. Burnside, ‘A new take on Terragni’, Journal of Architectural Education, 51:4 (1998), 224–32. Canino, ‘Il concorso’, p. 428. E. Camesasca (ed.), Mario Sironi: scritti editi e inediti (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1980), p. 182. Canino, ‘Il concorso’, p. 429. ‘Il Concorso per la Casa Littoria. Architetto Agnoldomenico Pica’, Quadrivio, 14 October 1934, p. 8. V. Civico, ‘La casa littoria al Foro Mussolini’, Capitolium, 13:1 (1938), 17.

224

The cult of the Duce

44 A. Pica (ed.), Il Foro Mussolini, Opera Balilla, Anno XV (Milan: Valentino Bompiani, 1937), p. 93. 45 Moretti cited in S. Santuccio, ‘Moretti e Ricci’, in Santuccio (ed.), Le case e il foro: l’architettura dell’ONB (Florence: Alinea Editore, 2005), p. 82. 46 Pica, Il Foro Mussolini, p. 36. 47 Ibid., p. 6. 48 D. Sabatello, ‘A proposito del Colosso’, Critica fascista, 14:21 (1936), 335 and ACS, Archivio Ricci, Documentazione, b. 2, f. 4, sf. 7, Promemoria, 22 June 1936. 49 Galleria d’arte nazionale moderna (hereafter GNAM), Archivio Bioiconografico, UA2013, Aroldo Bellini. At least both feet, one knee and the head of the colossus were created. 50 ACS, Archivio Ricci, Documentazione, b. 2, f. 4, sf. 7, letter from Oswald Camp and John Heimburger, US Department of the Interior, to Mario Giani, Italian Consulate, New York, 14 August 1936. 51 ‘La statua dell’ “Italia Fascista” per ricordare la fondazione dell’Impero’, in GNAM, Archivio Bioiconografico, UA2013, Aroldo Bellini. 52 L. Iermano, ‘L’area della Farnesina. La trasformazione del Foro Mussolini nella porta nord di Roma’, in Roma: architettura e città, pp. 104–5. 53 Q. Navarra, Memorie del commesso di Mussolini (Milan: Longanesi, 1983), p. 153. 54 ACS, Archivio Ricci, Documentazione, b. 2, f. 4, sf. 7, Promemoria, 22 June 1936. 55 Sabatello, ’A proposito del Colosso’, pp. 335–6. 56 ACS, EUR, Servizi Artistici, b. 937, f. 8742, Umberto Calvanese and Manlio Ciani to Vittorio Cini, 16 October 1939 and Relazione sulla Torrèlice Dux. 57 ‘What have architecture, sculpture and painting created in his honour that is truly great and enduring? Very little, and altogether piecemeal’, in Relazione sulla Torrèlice Dux, p. 3. 58 ACS, EUR, Servizi Artistici, b. 937, f. 8742, C. Pareschi to Soccorso Calvanese, 19 October 1939.

Part IV

After the Fall of Fascism

14

The destiny of the art and artefacts Giuliana Pieri

Incredible decorations painted on the walls, horrible busts of coloured plaster in every corner, colourful emblems and banners in lieu of tapestries, gilded plaster fasci … chromolithographs of the Duce in impossible positions, huge sabres and wooden spears painted in charcoal. These are the Fascist headquarters and the offices of the syndicates and local councils … living monuments to bad taste.1

Giuseppe Bottai’s scornful attack on the proliferation of Fascist art and artefacts of dubious taste shows how issues over the quality and quantity of images of Mussolini were central to the regime’s cultural policy and the construction and management of the visual cult of the Duce. The ‘Ducemania’, which resulted in the production of this visual paraphernalia and created the visual saturation of images of the Duce which fed the cult, came to an abrupt halt in 1943.2 Claudio Caponi’s recollection of the concealment (and subsequent brief reappearance) of the visual symbols of the regime in Prato, following the events of 25 July 1943, is emblematic of the iconoclasm which followed the collapse of the regime.3 While many busts, paintings and other artefacts were destroyed or stolen in the turbulent period between 1943 and 1945, others were simply consigned to deposits or private collections. Yet others, including some of the most successful representations of the Duce, experienced a strange afterlife, which not only exemplifies the overall difficult post-war reception of Italian art from the 1920s and 1930s, but also shows how the analysis of the cult of the Duce in Italy is still linked with contemporary political and ideological debates. This chapter examines the two aspects of the destiny of the art depicting Mussolini. First, it explores post-war exhibitions featuring the work of artists, many associated with Futurism, who contributed to the cult. It assesses the extent to which works featuring the Duce were acknowledged or obscured. Second, it examines the long-range influence of some works, especially the Profilo continuo del DUCE (1933), also known as ‘Dux’, by the Tuscan sculptor Renato Bertelli (1900–74). As we shall see, the chronology of the resurgence of interest in Fascist art and images of the Duce, and the appropriation by contemporary artists and designers of iconic images of Mussolini in a

228

The cult of the Duce

new (often apolitical) context, are important in understanding some of the complex political and cultural obstacles to an open discussion of Fascism and its legacy on Italian art and culture since the late 1950s. Fascist art and art under Fascism: exhibiting and concealing the cult in post-war Italy After the initial iconoclasm, the physical concealment of images of Mussolini was accompanied by critical oblivion. Although specialist publications in the 1960s and 1970s made tentative steps in the reassessment of the visual culture of the Fascist regime,4 a number of important volumes on the history of Italian art, published in Italy in the 1980s and 1990s and aimed at both specialists and the general public, spun a common narrative around Italian art between the wars. Unsurprisingly, there was an attempt to erase the links between individual artists and the regime, as well as a more general portrayal of Italian artists, in the 1920s and 1930s, as detached from political engagement and preoccupations. The way in which a number of celebrated art historians have glossed over the links between Fascism and the arts is revealing. Giulio Carlo Argan, for instance, in his Storia dell’arte classica e italiana, stated: ‘there was no Fascist art. It was only because of bourgeois bias and the diffidence with which repressive regimes treat culture that Fascism was hostile towards artistic research, without however never condemning and banning it like in Germany.’5 Antonio Del Guercio presented the development of Italian art between the wars as dominated by individual artists, who were described without reference to their historical and cultural background and even in isolation from each other.6 The 1982 Einaudi Storia dell’arte italiana claimed that ‘the real aim of the Fascist claim over culture was not a question of form, iconography or content but rather it centred around a code of behaviour, ideological claims and cultural prevention which relied on psychological censorship and, even more, on self-censorship’.7 In 1986, Mondadori’s Storia dell’arte italiana, in the chapter entitled ‘Fascist Art between classical reaction, modernism and mass society’, simply stated: ‘we cannot talk of Fascist art’.8 Alternating between an outright denial of the existence of Fascist art and the adoption of a more moderate approach – as summed up by Mario De Micheli’s statement that ‘Fascism’s policy towards the arts was moderate’ – 9 what all these critics have in common is a deep-seated resistance towards the notion of the Fascist regime’s active intervention in the arts. Under the longstanding influence of Crocean aesthetic categories, they have constructed a history of Italian art in the first half of the twentieth century as a succession of discrete histories of artists operating in cultural isolation, were it not for their interest in contemporary European art, and, giving ample space to the antiNovecento movements – Chiaristi, Scuola Romana and Corrente – critics



The destiny of the art and artefacts229

have tended to highlight the anti-fascist tendencies in Italian art and the ­relative freedom of artists under the regime.10 The most striking example of the post-war rewriting of the history of Italian art in the first half of the century was the difficult birth of the concept of second-wave Futurism, which, because of its clear links with Fascism, was first forgotten, and then presented with clear omissions. Lionello Venturi’s 1947 volume on Italian contemporary art did not mention the second Futurist generation; was dismissive of Balla, who in fact had played an important role as a mediator between the first and second Futurist movements; and made no mention at all of Enrico Prampolini.11 The first real assessment of secondo Futurismo came with studies by Guido Ballo and Enrico Crispolti.12 What these and later critics did, however, was to stress the difficulties encountered by the Futurists with the Fascist establishment and their marginalisation in favour of artists who presented a more traditional face of Italian art.13 Although the links with Fascism could not be denied, they were rewritten in an art-historical narrative that focused on the difference between secondwave Futurism and mainstream Fascist art and culture. If critical discussion on the links between Italian artists and the regime was ideologically fraught, portraits of Mussolini, with the partial exception of photographic ones, completely disappeared from the critical radar until much later. The catalogue of the exhibition Annitrenta, in 1982, which many rightly consider a watershed in Italy for the reception of Fascist art and culture, included only two portraits of Mussolini: Paolo Garretto’s Mussolini e il leone di Giuda (1936) and Xanti Schawinsky’s 1934 photomontage SI. 1934, in which Mussolini’s bust is cut out from a photograph of a crowd gathered presumably at one of the party rallies.14 Interestingly, these two images, although originally conceived as celebrations of the Duce, could easily fit into two unproblematical rhetorical categories: caricature (Garretto’s exaggerated head and jaw made Mussolini into a cartoon-like character) and outright propaganda. The 1995 centenary Venice Biennale showed three portraits of Mussolini in the section dedicated to ‘Totalitarian Arts and Degenerate Art 1930–45’: Enrico Prampolini’s Mussolini: sintesi plastica (1924), Renato Bertelli’s Profilo continuo (1933; more on this later) and Adolfo Wildt’s marble portrait of Mussolini (c.1925). However, the first substantial body of images of Mussolini was shown in Italy only in 1997, on the occasion of the controversial exhibition L’Uomo della Provvidenza, organised by Giorgio di Genova at the Palazzo Mediceo at Seravezza. The huge furore in the Italian press at the time is testimony to the political and ideological issues at stake in Italy in those years.15 Despite the fact that a number of images of Mussolini had been shown over a decade before, in the 1985 exhibition of the Wolfsonian collection in Miami, the 1997 show was the first time that the Italians had to confront the existence of a complex body of celebratory images, often of great aesthetic

230

The cult of the Duce

power, from some of Italy’s best painters and sculptors of the first half of the twentieth century. Among the works that were exhibited for the first time at Seravezza one can find Ram’s bronze Il Duce (1936),16 Lorenzo Viani’s prints Benito Mussolini (1926),17 Giacomo Balla’s bronze statuette Sono venuto a dare un Governo all’Italia (1924)18 and Thayaht’s marble versions of Dux (1930–31).19 The quality of many of these works seems to have caused the greatest unease because it made critics newly aware of the extent of the cult, its complex imagery and the overall sophisticated iconographic strategies which sustained it. A brief survey of some of the most celebrated portraits of Mussolini shows that they were simply withdrawn from public display for a number of decades. Only as interest in totalitarian art resurfaced in the 1990s did the body of images of Mussolini which had been part of the visual landscape of the regime and, more importantly, had helped sanction Mussolini’s leadership also reappear.20 Primo Conti’s La prima ondata remained hidden away in the collection of the Banca Toscana until 1993.21 The critical void around Thayaht lasted until 1997 when two studies were published; earlier he had appeared in exhibitions on Futurism, which carefully avoided his portraits of Mussolini, and overall critical attention had been focused on his activity as fashion illustrator and designer.22 Adolfo Wildt’s Ritratto di Benito Mussolini (1923) was, as we have seen, one of the official icons of the Duce. Wildt had enjoyed a prestigious career under the regime, which included the chair of sculpture at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan and, in 1930, the membership of the Accademia d’Italia. After his death in 1931, he remained one of the artists celebrated by the regime; both his writings on sculpture and critical essays on his work enjoyed several re-editions.23 In the post-war period, however, we find outright critical ostracism. In 1958, for instance the art critic Mario Portalupi published an article significantly entitled ‘Is it legitimate to talk once more about Adolfo Wildt?’.24 The critical rediscovery of Italian Symbolist painting and Art Nouveau, in the 1970s, brought a renewed, albeit still limited, interest in Wildt. However, studies focused exclusively on his Symbolist works and no mention was made of his portrait of Mussolini and of other figures of the regime – the portrait of the Fascist ‘martyr’ Nicola Buonservizi (1925), which had been shown at the exhibition of Novecento Italiano in 1926, had been singled out for especial praise by Mussolini.25 A proper critical reassessment of Wildt’s work came only with Paola Mola’s studies in 1980s.26 Mola’s 1988 monograph included illustrations of the portrait of Mussolini and the Maschera di Mussolini, photographed in FMR magazine’s signature stark black background and bright lighting, which emphasised Wildt’s masterly technique. The first solo exhibition of Wildt in the post-war period was in Venice in 1989 and, tellingly, it did not include any of Wildt’s portraits of Mussolini, preferring a reading of his work which emphasised the links with



The destiny of the art and artefacts231

European Symbolism and Art Nouveau, and with Italy’s Art-Deco and new c­ lassicism.27 The Maschera di Mussolini was first exhibited only in 1990,28 and the Ritratto di Benito Mussolini in 1994. The critical trajectory in the post-war years of the Umbrian Futurist painter Gerardo Dottori (1884–1977) is indicative of the fate of many local artists who had produced celebrated (and copious) images of the Duce.29 The initial complete critical oblivion was followed by his inclusion in exhibitions on Futurism in the 1980s (previous shows, whilst the artist was still alive, were local and focused on his religious production which was a thematically neutral artistic territory).30 His Ritratto di Mussolini (1928) remained in the collection of the Università per Stranieri in Perugia, away from public display until the 1997 exhibition.31 Un italiano di Mussolini (ritratto di Mario Carli)(1931), in which the Duce dominates the top right-hand corner of the composition, recalling the traditional iconography of the Pantocrator, was first exhibited at the 1932 Venice Biennale, when Dottori was the most famous Futurist air painter. It was auctioned at Sotheby’s in 1985, became part of the Mitchell Wolfson Jr. Collection, and was shown to the Italian public for the first time in the post-war period in Milan in 1987, and in Genoa in 1996.32 Dottori’s oil on panel Ritratto del Duce (1933), in the collection of the Civico Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, showing the face of the Duce in typical Futurist mode, made up of strong angular intersecting planes which give a sharp definition to his physical and ideal features, was exhibited for the first time in 1994 at the Kunst und Dictatur show in Vienna.33 Dottori’s huge fresco at the Università per Stranieri in Perugia, La luce dell’antica madre (1937), which celebrated Rome as new caput mundi, included a portrait of Mussolini in the foreground which was successively removed by Dottori himself during restoration works in the immediate post-war years.34 Another fresco, an equestrian portrait of Mussolini completed in 1936, which dominated the end wall of the dining room of the Opera Nazionale Assistenza Orfani dei Sanitari Italiani (ONAOSI) in Perugia, was also destroyed after the fall of the regime.35 Other frescoes were detached from the walls and their whereabouts are now unknown; for instance Dottori’s La mente gloriosa: Roma (1936), which was part of the fresco cycle Le tappe della Marcia su Roma, and which showed a towering profile of Mussolini looking over the Colosseum, the she-wolf and Romulus and Remus, was preserved but has never been seen in public.36 Renato Bertelli’s Continuous Profile: the making of a postmodern icon Bertelli’s Profilo continuo del DUCE [Continuous Profile of the Duce; 1933] perfectly encapsulates ideas about dynamism, speed and simultaneity which remained at the core of the Futurist representation of space in the 1920s and

232

The cult of the Duce

15  Renato Bertelli, Profilo continuo del DUCE, 1933

1930s (Figure 15). It is a striking example of an important body of images of Mussolini in which the Duce is presented as the emblem of modernity. Images in this category include some of the most innovative and unusual portrayals of the Duce (Enrico Prampolini, Mussolini: sintesi plastica [1925] and Architettura spirituale [1926]; Thayaht, Head of Mussolini [1929]; Fortunato Depero, Duce nel mondo [1934] and Barbara, Sintesi aeropittorica del Duce [1940]). The Profilo did capture what one might call the centripetal force of the myth of the Duce. Bertelli’s vision of Mussolini as a head rotated through 360 degrees and visible from every point seems to translate visually Vitaliano Brancati’s description of the Duce: ‘if this man is in a room, the room seems to revolve around him; if he is in the middle of a crowd, the crowd flows and simmers around him; if he is in the middle of his people, his people circle around him, forming a pyramid and spontaneously place him at the top’.37 However, what is especially remarkable about Bertelli’s representation of the Duce is its recent postmodern revival that transformed a work, which enjoyed only limited success at the time of the regime and did not belong to the core of official images of the Duce, into an iconic image of Mussolini in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.38



The destiny of the art and artefacts233

The Profilo is today a very collectable piece, fetching increasingly high prices on the international art market,39 and has recently come to be viewed as representative of Italian art of the regime years as well as an outstanding example of the style of the late Futurist movement. It was exhibited in 1985 with other pieces from the Wolfsonian collection in Miami which became the catalyst for a resurgence of interest in Bertelli’s work. However, the first exhibition in Italy to show Bertelli’s work in the post-war period was the 1995 centenary exhibition of the Venice Biennale.40 It was exhibited again in 1997 at Seravezza and, thanks to a full-page illustration in the review of the exhibition in Il Sole 24 Ore, it reached a wider international public.41 The copy in the collection of the Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (MART), has also been in several shows organised by the museum in recent years, showcasing Italian art from the 1930s.42 A new generation of artists and designers have thus been exposed to this image and this seems to have resulted in direct influences on their work. The American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe owned a copy and in the mid-1980s photographed both his Profilo and worked on a self-portrait which was inspired directly by Bertelli’s work and resulted in a photodynamic profile, Self-portrait (1985).43 The British sculptor Tony Cragg has talked about his stylistic fascination with the copy of the Profilo at the Imperial War Museum (IWM), London (formerly in the personal collection of Galeazzo Ciano), and echoes can be found in Rational Beings, his series Articulated Column and his most recent Divide (2006).44 The IWM copy also inspired an overtly political interpretation of Bertelli’s work by the American designer Julian LaVerdiere who, in February 2004, exhibited his Continuous Profile of George W. Bush in New York at the exhibition ‘Open Proposition: Artists for the Bill of Rights’.45 The New Yorkbased designer Karim Rashid showcased a collection of vases, called ‘Ego’, at New York Design week in 2005, which playfully referenced Bertelli’s work in their rotating profiles.46 The recent critical reappraisal of the Profilo does, however, raise some important issues regarding the enduring legacy of the cult of the Duce and the still politically and ideologically fraught reception of Italian art from the years of the regime. The catalogue entry in the 2006 Paris exhibition on Italian art in the first half of the twentieth century boldly claims of Bertelli’s Profilo: ‘It is one of the most interesting examples of the art of the Fascist period, because it does not respond to the canons and the rhetoric of official sculpture to which the artists of the regime submitted themselves.’47 This statement, singling out Bertelli’s work and detaching the artist from any explicit links with the regime, is echoed in a recent monograph on Bertelli, in which, discussing the relationship with the regime and with Mussolini in particular, the sculptor is portrayed as fundamentally detached from the regime and consciously shying away from public commissions.48 The Profilo

234

The cult of the Duce

continuo is indeed entirely ­different from Bertelli’s religious works and figurative style, which had been influenced by his teachers at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, Domenico Trentecoste and Libero Andreotti. Yet, the view of Bertelli, as it were, inadvertently stumbling into the visual strategies of the regime, is misleading. Bertelli’s first commission, for instance, was a public one: the reliefs on the columns of the Casa del Fascio designed by the architect Adolfo Coppedè (1926–27), at Lastra a Signa, Bertelli’s birthplace, and one of the many architectural victims of the post-war iconoclasm.49 There is also evidence that in the early 1930s Bertelli was trying to obtain public commissions.50 Furthermore, unpublished documents from the archive of the Segreteria Particolare del Duce do indicate a closer relationship with Mussolini than previously suggested. Bertelli was in touch with Mussolini on several occasions in the 1930s,51 and especially in 1938, when the correspondence shows that he had requested and received financial support from the Cassa di Assistenza del Sindacato di Belle Arti in Rome, between 1934 and 1938, for a total of 1,500 lire. The idea of Bertelli overall as an isolated figure has arguably contributed to his recent reappraisal since it could easily be read as a sign of his political noncommitment. Bertelli never became one of the official artists of the regime, but this seems to me to have less to do with his conscious choice of isolation from the public world and more to do, as suggested by Moretti, with the fact that the Profilo was conceived from the beginning as a reproducible design object.52 In a letter dated 1 December 1941, Bertelli asked Mussolini’s permission to sell the Profilo in glass and other media as a table ornament. Mussolini did not grant permission. One can only speculate as to the reasons behind this veto, which seems to contradict the policy of visual saturation of images of the Duce. My suggestion is that the uneasiness of the Duce in the case of this version of the Profilo stemmed both from the domestic use and decorative nature of this art-deco object, which did not match the imperial and increasingly martial iconography of the Duce in the 1940s, and also from the use of materials. The decorative glass piece contradicted the futurist underpinnings of the Profilo, ‘fusing Mussolini with the energy and power of a whirling propeller or gyrating engine … a technologically charged, modern-day version of a semidivine ancient Roman leader, who sees all and does it all’.53 Glass made the association of the Profilo with traditional sculpture weaker and its choice over stone was more than a simple cosmetic question, since materials were important visual vehicles of meaning consciously used by both artists and the regime to convey the abstract and ideal qualities embodied by the Fascist leader. Mussolini’s veto also shows that under Bottai’s influence the regime and its leader were becoming more acutely aware of the centrality of the issue of quality versus quantity of the images of the dictator which were circulating, and that the visual policy of the cult of the Duce was stylistically and thematically inclusive only in so far



The destiny of the art and artefacts235

as the images belonged to those iconographic categories which, by this stage in the 1940s, had been established and developed for over a decade. Bertelli’s Profilo raises interesting questions on the role of reproduced images of the Duce: the Profilo is both an example of the capillary diffusion of images of the Duce in the life of the Italians (photographic images are the most important example of this type of reproducible images) and of the domestication of the image of the Duce which literally, given its cost, could easily enter common households. It is also a striking example of how the image of the Duce, reproduced in myriad diverse objects and figurations, was turned into a commodity that sold. What its recent revival shows is that the mostly apolitical reappropriation of the Profilo in the work of contemporary artists and designers, typical of the postmodern predatory use of disparate sources, has been accompanied by an less ideologically transparent strategy in the work of contemporary critics. Moretti in Critica d’Arte describes the Profilo as ‘today, wholly redeemed from the political legacy of its time’.54 Yet, critics have so far consistently undermined and often openly misunderstood Bertelli’s relationship with the Fascist regime, betraying, in the focus on the aesthetic versus the political, their debt to the post-war strategy of oblivion of the cult of the dictator and the art that originated around it. Sitting between art and ephemera, the Profilo is a key example of the trajectory of the cult of Mussolini in the post-war years: the initial disappearance of images and artists linked to the regime from the critical radar gave way in the 1980s and 1990s to a resurgence of interest in images of the Italian dictator at a time when the Italians started to debate again publicly issues of national and cultural identity. The arts and the cult in the new millennium The collection of the MAGI ’900 museum at Pieve di Cento, near Bologna, opens a new chapter in the history of the arts that supported the cult of Mussolini. The private collector Giulio Bargellini, who founded the museum in 2000, reunited in a single collection works from other private collections and from one of the single most significant private collectors of the twentieth century, the journalist and historian Duilio Susmel (1919–84).55 Giacomo Battara recounts how Susmel, in the 1950s and 1960s, used to scour flea markets and bric-a-brac shops in Rome in his search for Mussoliniana and Fascist memorabilia in an attempt to preserve works of historical interest at a time in which the visual paraphernalia of the regime were still being destroyed or hidden away.56 Bargellini’s collection, which opened to the public in 2009 and which comprises a vast array of images of Mussolini in different media and of differing artistic quality, ranging from medals, statuettes, busts, oil paintings, ceramics and photographs, down to small everyday objects such as bottle-openers and key-fobs, is testimony to a renewed interest

236

The cult of the Duce

in the ­iconography of the Fascist leader. The interesting mix of fine arts and propaganda art, including also examples of caricatures of the dictator of the early 1940s, when the erosion of public consensus lead to a growing artistic counter-cult of the Duce, seems to imply a public acceptance of the images of Mussolini as historical document now devoid of partisan undertones. The project of a dedicated exhibition space of visual material centring on the Duce is a welcome addition to the considerable scholarship on the history of Fascism since the 1960s in Italy and abroad. It is also evidence of a still mostly unknown aspect of the history of collecting in Italy in the second half of the twentieth century. With the new century a wealth of small private, and until then carefully hidden, collections have become more visible thanks mainly to the contribution of websites dedicated to Fascism and its leader.57 The increasing visibility and growing market value of Mussoliniana show similarities with the international interest in collecting design objects and artefacts of the former Soviet Union and East Germany, with its related Ostalgie. The journalist Arrigo Petacco, in the preface to the catalogue of the MAGI ’900 exhibition, emphatically asked: ‘since Mussolini has finally been cleared through customs and has his place in history, shall I be free to talk about him in an aseptic manner, like you talk about Cavour, Crispi or Giolitti?’58 Petacco clearly believes that, at the end of the first decade of the new millennium, the time has come to reconsider Mussolini and his legacy with the same detachment that is reserved for other past Italian leaders. In the new millennium it seems once again acceptable to display images of Mussolini and the arts and artists of the regime; the ideologically fraught battles over the visual legacy of Fascism seem to have been superseded; and objects and images of Fascism and its leader have turned again into commodities that sell. The lack of public controversy at the time of the opening of the Mussolini exhibition at the MAGI ’900 must be viewed alongside the increasing availability of knickknacks and mementos displaying the image of the Duce in Predappio and other Italian cities which would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. The reasons behind this wider public acceptance of images of Mussolini suggest a loosening of the strong anti-fascist culture which characterised Italian society and politics in the second half of the twentieth century and can be seen as the final testimony of the enduring legacy of the cult of the Duce. It is also, though, a result of changing artistic practices and a cultural climate that encourages revisitations of the past and eclectic appropriations. Notes  1 G. Bottai, ‘Il regime per l’arte’, in Politica Fascista delle arti (Rome: Signorelli, 1940), quoted also in L. Malvano, Fascismo e politica dell’immagine (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1988), p. 38.



The destiny of the art and artefacts237

 2 On the idea of the visual saturation which accompanied the cult see S. Falasca Zamponi, ‘Mussolini’s Self-Staging’, in Kunst und Propaganda im Streit der Nazionen 1930–1945 (Dresden: Sandstein, 2007), p. 89.  3 Claudio Caponi, ‘Mussolini a cavallo’, Prato, 24:63 (1983), 36–40.  4 The best example is F. Tempesti, Arte dell’Italia Fascista (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976).  5 G. C. Argan, ‘L’arte moderna’, in Storia dell’arte classica e italiana, Vol. 5, (Florence: Sansoni, 1980), pp. 284–6.  6 A. Del Guercio, ‘La pittura del Novecento’, in Storia dell’arte in Italia (Turin: Utet, 1980), n.p.  7 P. Fossati, ‘Pittura e scultura tra le due guerre’, in Storia dell’arte italiana. Part 2, Vol. 3: Il Novecento (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), p. 186.  8 ‘L’arte Fascista tra reazione classicista, modernismo e società di massa’, in C. Bertelli, G. Briganti and A. Giuliano (eds.), Storia dell’arte in Italia (Milan: Mondadori, 1986), p. 257.  9 M. De Micheli, ‘Italia: il possibilismo estetico del regime’, in L’arte sotto le dittature (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2000), p. 51. 10 Ibid. 11 L. Venturi, La pittura contemporanea (Milan: Hoepli, 1947). 12 G. Ballo, Pittori italiani dal futurismo a oggi (Rome: Edizioni Mediterranee, 1956) and Preistoria del futurismo: corso monografico di storia dell’arte (Milan: Maestri, 1960); E. Crispolti, Il secondo futurismo: Torino 1923–38 (Turin: Pozzo, 1961). See also Der Zweite Futurismus und die Kunstpolitik des Faschismus in Italien von 1922–1943 (Frankfurt am Main: Haag & Herchen, 1979), which was the first exhibition to talk openly about the links between secondo Futurismo and Fascist artistic policies. 13 See on this G. Berghaus, ‘Il secondo Futurismo e il regime Fascista’, Terzocchio, 23:85 (1997), 3–7 and 24:86 (1998), 6–9. 14 A. Pansera (ed.), Gli annitrenta: arte e cultura in Italia (Milan: Mazzotta, 1982). 15 On the controversy surrounding this exhibition see R. Bossaglia, ‘I volti del Duce’, Quadri e Sculture, 27 (1997), 60–1. 16 G. di Genova (ed.), ‘L’uomo della provvidenza’: iconografia del Duce 1923–1945 (Genoa: Bora, 1997), p. 169. 17 Ibid., cat. nos. iii.48 and iii.49, p. 170. 18 Ibid., cat. no. iii.68, p. 171. 19 Ibid., cat. nos. iii.86 and iii.87, p. 172, both in private collections. 20 In 1990, Igor Golomstock’s study of art and totalitarianism was published in Italy: Arte totalitaria nell’URSS di Stalin, nella Germania di Hitler, nell’Italia di Mussolini e nella Cina di Mao (Milan: Leonardo, 1990). See also the exhibitions Kunst und Diktatur: Architektur, Bildhauerei und Malerei in Österreich, Deutschland, Italien und der Sowjetunion 1922–56, Künstlerhaus, Vienna, 1994 (Badel: Grasl, 1994) and Art and Power: Europe Under the Dictators 1930–45, Hayward Gallery, London (London: Thames & Hudson, 1995). 21 C. Sisi (ed.), Da Fattori a Burri: dipinti, sculture e disegni dalla Collezione della Banca Toscana (Florence: Centro Di, 1993), cat. no. 88, pp. 104–5. 22 V. Benhamou, ‘Ernesto Thayaht (1893–1959): nouvelle perspectives, 1997’, in

238

The cult of the Duce

Europe, 1910–1939: quand l’art habillait le vêtement, catalogue of the exhibition, Musée de la Mode et du Costume, Paris, 1997, pp. 44–53. A. Scappini, ‘Ernesto Michahelles in arte “Thayaht” artista “globale” del Secondo Futurismo’, Bollettino della Accademia degli Euteleti della città di San Miniato: Rivista di Storia, Lettere, Scienza ed Arti, 74: 64 (1997), 149–99. 23 The monograph on Wildt by G. Nicodemi, Adolfo Wildt (Milan: Hoepli, 1929), was republished in 1934 and 1945. 24 M. Portalupi, ‘È lecito riparlare di Adolfo Wildt?’, Il nazionale (Rome), 27 April 1958, p. 3. 25 E. Pontiggia (ed.), Adolfo Wildt e i suoi allievi, catalogue of the exhibition, Brescia, Palazzo Martinengo (Milan: Skira, 2000), cat. no. 36, p. 96. 26 By P. Mola, see the following: ‘Wildt & Milano: Adolfo Wildt’, FMR, Italian edn, 13:2 (1983), 86–9; ‘Adolfo Wildt. Note biografiche e critiche dal 1894 al 1912’, Storia dell’Arte, 48 (May–August 1983), 139–58; and the beautifully illustrated monograph Wildt (Milano: FMR, 1988). 27 Adolfo Wildt 1868–1931, catalogue of the exhibition, Venice, Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Ca’ Pesaro (Milan: Mondadori Arte, 1989). 28 Adolfo Wildt Ein Italienischer Bildhauer Des Symbolismus, catalogue of the exhibition, Matildenhöhe, Darmstadt, 1990, pp. 106–7. See also Eckhard Leuschner, ‘Mussolini-Maske’, in Wir Sind Maske, catalogue of the exhibition, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2009), cat. no. 1.31, pp. 95–6. 29 See M. Duranti (ed.), Gerardo Dottori: catalogo generale ragionato (2 vols., Perugia: Fabrizio Fabbri Editore, 2006), and in particular Antonella Pesola, ‘La fortuna critica di Gerardo Dottori’, Vol. 1, pp. 337–51. 30 Dottori’s works appeared in important exhibitions in the 1980s on Futurism and Italian art of the 1930s: Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo (Turin, 1980); Annitrenta (Milan, Palazzo Reale, 1982) and Futurismo e Futurismi (Venice, Palazzo Grassi, 1986), the first blockbuster exhibition on Futurism. 31 Gerardo Dottori, II, cat. no. 188—29. 32 Ibid., cat. no. 265—1376. The exhibitions referred above were the small Futurmostra (Milan, Galleria San Carlo, 1987) and The Wolfson Collection in Genoa: Italian art 1883–1945 (Genoa, Collezione Wolfson, 1996). 33 Gerardo Dottori, II, cat. no. 295 a-b—1375. 34 Ibid., cat. no. 938—1923. 35 Ibid., cat. no. 933—1896. 36 Ibid., cat. no. 935—1732. 37 V. Brancati, ‘La mia visita a Mussolini’, Critica Fascista, 1 August 1931, p. 292. Quoted also in M. Moretti, Renato Bertelli (Signa: Masso delle Fate Edizioni, 2007), p. 59. 38 M. Moretti in ‘Mussolini a Profilo Continuo’, Critica d’Arte, 33–4 (2008), 143–8 (p. 144). This statement openly contradicts Franco Sborgi’s view of Bertelli’s work as a ‘thoroughly official image of the modernity of the regime’. In F. Sborgi, ‘Ritratti di Mussolini fra identificazione classica e assonanze d’avanguardia’, in Il ritratto storico del Novecento, dal volto alla maschera, 1902–



The destiny of the art and artefacts239

1952, catalogue of the exhibition, ed. F. Cagianelli (Pisa: Pacini Editore, 2003), p. 63. 39 One copy, with the estimated price of $4,743, was sold by Christie’s in Milan in 2005 for $16,908. 40 The Profilo Continuo was exhibited in the section ‘Arti totalitarie e arte degenerata’, in M. Brusatin and J. Clair (eds.), Identità e alterità: figure del corpo, 1895– 1995 (Venice: Marsilio, 1995), pp. 310–11. The image was reproduced full-page in the catalogue. 41 Enrico Baj, ‘Un frappe futuristico romano e del littorio’, Il Sole 24 Ore, 17 June 1985. 42 The exhibitions of the MART which included the Profilo continuo were Le stanze dell’arte: figure e immagini del XX secolo, 2002–03; Futurismo: Novecento. Astrazione – Arte Italiana del XX secolo (St Petersburg, Hermitage Museum, 2005); Italia nova, Une aventure de l’art italien 1900–1950 (Paris, Grand Palais, 2006) (Milan: Skira, 2006); G. Bosoni (ed.), Il modo italiano: Italian design and avant-garde in the 20th century (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2006). The exhibition toured Canada and ended at the MART. 43 See M. Moretti, ‘Il “Profilo continuo” oggi’, in Moretti, Renato Bertelli, pp. 69–71 and ‘Mussolini a Profilo Continuo’, p. 147. 44 Born in Liverpool in 1949, Cragg studied at the Royal College of Art in the early 1970s when British sculpture was still dominated by Henry Moore and Anthony Caro. He was particularly influenced by the Land artist Richard Long. Later his interests moved towards Rodin, Brancusi, Medardo Rosso and Umberto Boccioni. Rational Beings in particular shows the influence of ‘the portrait studies of Leonardo da Vinci and the anamorphoses painted by Holbein, the infinite columns of Brancusi, the profiles of Duchamp, down to Profilo continuo’. L. Pratesi, ‘Dal frammento alla forma’, in Tony Cragg: Material Thoughts, catalogue of the exhibition, Milan, Fondazione Stelline (Milan: Electa, 2007), p. 25. 45 www.artnet.com/magazine/people/smith/smith2-23-19.asp (accessed 31 January 2011). 46 www.ocad.ca/Assets/pdf_media/ocad/about/Galleries/karim_rashid.pdf (acces­ sed 31 January 2011). 47 Moretti, Renato Bertelli, p. 70. 48 ‘[Bertelli was] by nature reluctant to move in intellectual and political circles’; ibid., p. 56. ‘Having the mentality of a free agent and genuinely resistant to impositions and compromise, Bertelli preferred to make his living from religious and decorative sculpture rather than depend on the games over commissions that he did not find congenial’; p. 73. 49 A. Baldinotti, ‘La casa del Fascio di Ponte a Signa: Adolfo Coppedè e Renato Bertelli’, in Moretti, Renato Bertelli, pp. 151–4. 50 In 1930, Bertelli wrote to his former teacher Libero Andreotti about his submission for the competition of the Foro Mussolini. It is not known whether the Giocatore di Pallone, known now only through a photograph, was ever sent to the competition. Moretti also published a number of sketches for a Monumento ai Caduti (see Moretti, Renato Bertelli, p. 41). In 1931, Bertelli also exhibited Il nostro

240

The cult of the Duce

grano (present whereabouts unknown), a work produced for one of the many competitions launched in conjunction with the battle for grain. 51 Bertelli wrote to Mussolini between June and August 1931, when he sent to the Duce his Madonna del Buon Viaggio (another work which he conceived as a reproducible model); in 1933, he sent Mussolini the Profilo continuo; in 1935, he sent the Madonna del Buon Viaggio to Vittorio and Bruno Mussolini; in 1936, he asked permission to send an unspecified bronze sculpture as a gift to the Duce. 52 Bertelli in fact patented the image, sold the patent to a local entrepreneur, Guido Andrei, and only retained rights for the reproduction of the Profilo in terracotta and plaster. Moretti, Renato Bertelli, p. 61. 53 G. Silk, ‘ “Il Primo Pilota”. Mussolini, Fascist Aeronautical Symbolism, and Imperial Rome’, in C. Lazzaro and R. J. Crum (eds.), Donatello among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy (Ithaca, NY–London: Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 81. 54 Moretti, ‘Mussolini a Profilo Continuo’, p. 148. 55 Mussolini ritrovato: storia di una collezione proibita (Bologna: Minerva, 2009). 56 G. Battara, ‘Il ventennio e l’estetizzazione del potere’, in ibid., pp. 35–7. 57 Of especial interest for the considerable amount of visual material available to the public is the website www.libroemoschetto.com, a virtual museum of objets d’art, books and visual material of the Fascist period as well as a trading point for specialist collectors. 58 A. Petacco, ‘Prefazione’, in Mussolini ritrovato, p. 8.

15

The aftermath of the Mussolini cult: history, nostalgia and popular culture Stephen Gundle

The day following the announcement on 25 July 1943 that Mussolini had been replaced as president of the Council of Ministers by the former head of the armed forces Marshall Badoglio, many Italians took to the streets to celebrate. An iconoclastic fury was unleashed that saw monuments pulled down, portraits attacked, photographs burned and many other symbols of Fascism removed and destroyed. After two years of domestic hardship and wartime setbacks, including the landing of the Allies in Sicily and the bombing of Rome, Mussolini had been defeated in the Fascist Grand Council, dismissed by the king and placed under arrest. The public reaction gave the first widespread indication that the horrors of war had dramatically changed the opinion that many Italians had of the man who led them for over twenty years. Twenty-one months later the final act took place. Defeated in war and captured fleeing ignominiously towards the Swiss border accompanied by German soldiers, the former Duce was rapidly executed on 28 April 1945. His body, brought to Milan together with those of his lover Claretta Petacci and several of his remaining associates, was dumped on the ground in Piazzale Loreto where it was made the object of abuse and derision. In this very square, the bodies of 15 hostages, killed in a reprisal by the Republican National Guard, had been left to lie for a whole day the previous August.1 As crowds gathered, alerted by Radio Milano, the bodies were hoisted up and left to hang upside down for the rest of the day from the metal roof of a petrol station. For Mirco Dondi, the attitude of the crowd turned at this moment ‘from joyous to angry’ as it gave voice to ‘great hatred against Mussolini’.2 For anti-fascists he had signed his own death warrant long before, when he accepted responsibility for the killing of opposition deputy Giacomo Matteotti.3 For others, antipathy was more recent. Mussolini’s dead body was turned into a spectacle in retribution for the blood Fascism had spilled or caused to be spilled by its taking the country into the war. Although photographs of the events in Piazzale Loreto would not be widely published until some years later, and moving images only several decades later, Mussolini’s fate swiftly became well known.4 His ignominious death

242

The cult of the Duce

symbolised the end of an enchantment, while the public display of his cadaver ensured that there could be no doubt whatsoever that he would never return. As Dondi states: ‘The popular and dramatic detachment from Mussolini in Piazzale Loreto and in every “Piazzale Loreto” was the premise for the opening of a new political season.’5 In the following years, Mussolini faded. Fascist Italy, like more or less every authoritarian regime, was viewed with nostalgia by some. But, while not insignificant, the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI) remained a marginal force in the Republic that, even at its strongest, polled no more than 8.68 per cent of the vote.6 For most of the country, as Leo Longanesi, a journalist with some residual Fascist sympathies, put it, ‘destiny changed horses’.7 On the political plane, the mass parties of the Republic established a relatively stable, if divided, political system that was anchored to the West under the leadership of the USA. The anti-fascist Resistance provided the main narrative in relation to the recent past that all the main parties, to one degree or another, embraced. Socially and economically, the country experienced in the 1950s and 1960s some of the biggest changes in its history. Comfort and consumerism displaced greatness and conquest as national goals. After the final burial of his remains in the family crypt at the San Cassiano cemetery in Predappio in 1957, not even Mussolini’s ghost troubled the post-war republic. In reality, Mussolini continued to cast a shadow. In terms of the ideology of the Republic, the Resistance, which in any case had been a geographically circumscribed phenomenon, was not as powerful or persuasive a narrative as some would have wished. In cultural terms, there were significant continuities between the pre-war and post-war periods.8 In a period of expansion of cultural consumption, publishers of magazines and books found that Mussolini was just as remunerative a subject dead as he had been alive. By centre-right public opinion above all, the former Duce and his defunct regime were viewed with a certain favour and indulgence even if there was no real desire to turn the clock back. In film and literature, he was evoked, alluded to and occasionally joked about for years before being brought once more to life by actors in feature films. The Mussolini family continued to live in the public eye, with the Duce’s widow Donna Rachele dying only in 1979 and his last-surviving son Romano in 2006. In the Duce’s birthplace of Predappio, a tourist and souvenir industry flourished. Despite declining interest in his political heritage, Mussolini the man continued to cast a spell. Over sixty years after the end of the war, scarcely a week passes without Mussolini featuring in the Italian press. Whether it was the attempt to rename the University of Bari (which until 2010 formally bore Mussolini’s name), a re-enactment of Mussolini’s adventurous release from the Gran Sasso following his imprisonment in July 1943, the staging of a Mussolini-themed historical dinner in his native Romagna or publication of



The aftermath of the Mussolini cult243

the diaries of Claretta Petacci, there always seemed to be a news story regarding the former dictator. While once Mussolini had only achieved a weak presence on the internet,9 he later became a permanent presence with numerous websites perpetuating aspects of his memory. Some of this was stimulated by the debates that accompanied the creation of the post-fascist National Alliance party and then its dissolution on the formation of the Berlusconi-led People of Freedom in 2009. As former admirers severed their links with Mussolini’s memory, his historical role was reassessed. Not without reason, the right-wing historian Alessandro Campi asserted in 2001 that Mussolini’s posthumous vitality was such that he is sempre di scena [always at centre stage].10 The aim here is to explore this phenomenon by reference to three themes. First, the formation of conservative public opinion in the first decade and a half following the war will be considered. Second, attention will be paid to the place of Mussolini in the star system of the post-war period. Thirdly, consideration will be given to the presence of Mussolini in popular culture. Mussolini in popular memory Serious historical treatment of the Fascist period began in Italy in the 1960s with the appearance of the first volumes in Renzo De Felice’s monumental political biography of the dictator and his regime.11 The issue of the way in which the Fascist heritage was dealt with by Italian society after 1945 did not become a matter of research until much later. It was broadly assumed that, while the regime may have commanded mass support for a period, by the end of the war the nation had become detached from its values and practices. The liberation heralded a new beginning, an opportunity to turn the page and start afresh. Recent work on the intellectuals, the illustrated press, Mussolini’s cadaver, biography and image, monuments, the popular mentality, and conservative opinion has highlighted, by contrast, that the passage from Fascism to consolidation of the post-war Republic was marked by a complex and tortuous process of reflection in which continuities and backward-looking sentiments mingled with genuine new departures.12 Luca La Rovere has shown that innumerable different views were aired by intellectuals about how Fascism could and should be interpreted and replaced.13 The initial attitude of many anti-fascists that an extensive purge of the entire public sector was the only way to extirpate the roots of the regime softened dramatically when the parties found themselves faced with the need to put down roots of their own in a society that had been profoundly compromised by two decades of Fascist rule. While suspicious of those who had been convinced Fascists until late in the regime’s life, or who were of such an age that they had inevitably been conditioned by the regime’s pedagogy and propaganda, they regarded themselves as the main vehicle whereby individuals could be socialised to democracy.

244

The cult of the Duce

They therefore preferred to recruit rather than castigate those who had been seduced by Fascism. Despite the relative moderation of the actual conduct of the parties, in contrast to some of their language, the threat of penalty against those who had been Fascist party members provoked anger and resentment among the thousands who had adapted to prevailing contingencies for pragmatic reasons or who had been caught up in the general flow of enthusiasm for the regime’s triumphs. Despite the collapse of Fascism and the disasters of the war, few of these felt they had anything to reprove themselves for. Up to 50,000 state employees were subjected to sanction for their allegiance to the regime. Although by 1946 the vast majority had been reintegrated into their former jobs, there was still resentment against these measures.14 After the war, the democratic parties and, through them, the state, were obliged to fill a significant gap in public life. Fascism may have failed to effect the ‘anthropological revolution’ that was among its aims, but it had created many associations that had been the backbone of civil life.15 The success of mass membership parties in planting roots in the social body was due in part to their role in replacing these with new collateral organisations. There was a conformist element in this and other types of behaviour that was detected and deplored by, among others, the writer Vitaliano Brancati, who had hoped to have seen the last of the huge rallies and collective activities the regime promoted.16 The gap left by the formal disappearance of a cult of personality that had been so crucial in bringing consent to the regime presented a challenge to the parties. The cult had been the most evident sign of the dictatorship and the return of democratic practices and citizenship heralded its end. Yet it had become a feature of collective psychology and formed a key vehicle whereby people had understood their relationship to the state. Combined with the monarchy, which was abolished in 1946, it was a channel of socialisation of a paternalistic type whose end left some bereft or disorientated. The Catholic Church was the first to understand the nature of this problem. Its promotion of the charismatic cult of Pope Pius XII occurred in response to it. This was grounded in a campaign to reassert Rome as a sacred centre and the very fulcrum of world history.17 The great gatherings in St Peter’s square were given in the post-war years a dramatic quality that was partly taken over from the defunct regime while also deriving from the sense that the present age was one marked by cosmic crisis.18 The cult began from 1942 and was reinforced in the emotive contacts between pontiff and populace that followed the bombing of Rome in 1943. A whole series of initiatives in the following years, many of which took the form of mass happenings, served to anchor the faithful to the Church and discourage them from giving credence to the siren calls of the left. If Mussolini had been hailed by the bourgeoisie



The aftermath of the Mussolini cult245

after the First World War as the saviour of the nation from chaos, then Pius XII filled a similar role from the mid- to late 1940s. Whereas Mussolini posed as the strong man not afraid to resort to violence, the Pope, by contrast, was presented as a defenceless victim, the fragile contemporary embodiment of the suffering Christ.19 In their own ways, the Christian Democrats, the Communists and the Socialists, as well as smaller parties, aimed to block any tendency to see their leaders as extraordinary individuals. Inevitably leaders were measured to some extent against Mussolini even though they stressed differences and distanced themselves from the leadership style of the Duce.20 As Marzia Marsili has observed: ‘Post-war leaders proposed themselves to the masses using calm tones and understanding words, and by presenting kind and reassuring faces that were distant from the Fascist rhetoric of the superman.’21 Neither the Christian Democrat De Gasperi nor the Communist Togliatti were presented as strong or tireless; both adopted a professorial manner and dressed conventionally. Although both were engaged in the potentially charismatic task of building their parties and founding a new political system, this was not played up. De Gasperi, who hailed from the mountainous region of Trentino Alto Adige, was contrasted to the lowlander Mussolini. His family image and gentleness were stressed. Togliatti was lionised to some extent on account of his connections to the two figures of Gramsci and Stalin. The left had a history of myth-making around its leaders; the cult of Mussolini had first developed in the socialist movement whose left wing had acclaimed him as its duce before he abandoned the cause.22 Togliatti did not encourage this but he was aware that the Communist Party leader was the bearer of institutional charisma, and he allowed a form of personal cult to take shape following the attempt on his life in July 1948 and in the aftermath of the death of Stalin in 1953.23 Despite the efforts of these parties, whose leaders were fearful of throwbacks and Fascist nostalgia, Mussolini continued to provide a template of strong personal leadership that would prove extremely difficult to uproot completely. With his arrogant bluster and unquestionable propagandistic verve, the founder and leader of a post-war flash party, the Uomo Qualunque (Everyman), the Neapolitan playwright Guglielmo Giannini, was the first of several post-war politicians whose public persona would recall aspects of the former dictator (in spite of his attacks on ‘the buffoon of Predappio’).24 Although a sincere anti-fascist, Giannini mobilised a diffuse hostility to the anti-fascist parties (accused of re-creating a Fascism of their own) that betrayed a certain intolerance of democracy itself. Another populist figure who prospered in the South was Achille Lauro, the shipping magnate who became mayor of Naples. Aspects of nostalgia were to be found in the press, although it was also a sphere through which old loyalties were replaced or reconfigured. Some

246

The cult of the Duce

journalists passed seamlessly from the Fascist to the moderate press while Communist newspapers accepted willingly writers who had worked for Fascism but had now converted to the left.25 Two former Fascist supporters who would exercise a long-range influence were Leo Longanesi and Indro Montanelli. While the former would die in 1957, the latter would remain active into advanced old age and still have a purchase on public opinion in the 1990s. Longanesi had been employed for a period as a propaganda consultant of the Ministry of Popular Culture; Montanelli was a correspondent for the Corriere della Sera. Both had lost their faith in the regime and its symbol by 1943 and had refrained from involvement in the Italian Social Republic. After the war, however, they rediscovered a sympathy for Mussolini and produced a series of works that contributed decisively to the way the fallen dictator came to be viewed by moderate and right-wing opinion. Broadly speaking, they humanised him by portraying him as a flawed and narcissistic individual who embodied many vices typical of the Italians. Together they wrote up interviews they conducted with a hard-up former attendant of Mussolini’s at Palazzo Venezia, Quinto Navarra, and published them as the Memorie del cameriere di Mussolini [Memoirs of Mussolini’s attendant].26 The ironical verve with which numerous of the former Duce’s personal quirks, customs, tastes and sexual habits were recorded was an important contributor to the volume’s success. Montanelli also penned Il buon uomo Mussolini [The good man Mussolini], in which he ghosted his subject’s supposed last will and testament. In a preface written to a 1975 re-edition of the book, he stated that he intended it as a ‘counterpoint to the necrophile – or necrophobe? – ­infatuation that drove Italians not even to give peace to his corpse, which had to be kept hidden in order to spare it abuse and violation’.27 For years Montanelli would bolster his claim to speak on the subject by stating that he had personally witnessed the macabre display of Fascist bodies in Piazzale Loreto. His biographers discovered, however, that in fact he had been in Switzerland at the time.28 Longanesi frequently indulged in nostalgic reflections on his fellow Romagnole. In 1952 he wrote Un morto fra noi [A dead man in our midst] in which he claimed that ‘the hour of democratic boredom had chimed’, with the result that: ‘You started to hear some people speak with nostalgia about him, Mussolini.’29 Montanelli and Longanesi lamented the mediocrity of the present,30 poked fun at the unchanging vices of their fellow countrymen, and cast themselves as critical outsiders. Montanelli first realised that he was giving voice to a significant strand of opinion in 1946, when for three months he responded in print to letters sent by readers to the Corriere della Sera, a role he would resume decades later. He saw that there was a whole vein of untapped resentment that demanded a spokesman. The main platform for the men’s views would be Il Borghese, the magazine Longanesi founded in 1950,31



The aftermath of the Mussolini cult247

and a best-selling series of popular histories that Montanelli would write over several decades. Illustrated weeklies such as Oggi and Epoca, which were a publishing phenomenon of the post-war years, were the main vehicle of the diffusion of an indulgent view of Fascism and its founder. They ran frequent stories about Mussolini and other personalities of the period, catering to a curiosity and hunger for information that arose after the fall of the regime. In her analysis of these magazines, Cristina Baldassini found that a softened, sentimental view of Fascism prevailed in which a whole series of events, personalities and experiences, including the triumphs of Italian aviation, colonialism and the National After-work Organisation, were treated as good.32 The political violence, the repression of dissent, the race laws and atrocities perpetrated by the regime, by contrast, were veiled. Beyond the political aspects of Mussolini’s memory, Campi argues that the unusual presence of Mussolini in post-war Italy should be seen in relation to the appeal of what he terms ‘the story of Benito’.33 The Duce’s surviving family members contributed to this, but they were also an independent factor. Rachele Mussolini was an emblematic personality in the 1950s and 1960s. A tragic figure, she returned to the family home at the Villa Carpena in Predappio and ran a restaurant. She was, it might be said, the Fascist counterpart to Alcide Cervi, the old peasant whose seven sons, all of whom had been involved in Resistance activity, were shot in 1944 in a reprisal killing. Whereas Papa Cervi was promoted as a symbol of the Resistance and his sacrifice was elaborated in the left-wing press,34 Mussolini’s widow featured in mainstream weeklies, telling the story of her life with il mio uomo Benito [my man Benito] and presenting her album of family photographs.35 Her testimony opened the way to innumerable articles that – to take the title of a series that appeared in Settimo giorno in 1961 – focused on ‘Mussolini seen through the keyhole’. Over the years, everyone from Mussolini’s valets, his driver, housekeeper, seamstress and beach attendant was given the opportunity to tell his or her story. The tragedy of Claretta Petacci was a further theme that was often revisited. Strange angel Like most of the inter-war dictators, Mussolini was in some respects a star and his media persona exercised a shaping influence on the star system of his time. It is therefore useful to examine what happened to this in the postwar era. Mussolini had dominated the newsreels personally, but the values and motivations of the new Italian of the age of Mussolini were expressed in feature films mainly by two actors. Amedeo Nazzari and Fosco Giachetti were not Fascist Party members and did not take any public role off screen.

248

The cult of the Duce

But the type of stern, unflinching virility they represented in their best-known roles marked them as examples of the type of Fascist masculinity that found its primary embodiment in Mussolini himself.36 The two men’s careers followed different paths after 1945. Neither commanded the prestige parts they had routinely filled earlier but, while Giachetti remained popular with film lovers in the late 1940s, he was cast infrequently by directors. Nazzari, for his part, appeared in a series of low-budget but immensely popular tear-jerker melodramas in which he played the wronged husband, the inflexible father or the upright family man coping with misfortune. From the mid-1950s, by which time he was well into middle age (he was born in 1907), he was cast by such directors as Dino Risi, Mario Monicelli and Luigi Zampa to satirise his own earlier star persona. In Risi’s Il gaucho, for example, he played a wealthy, ultra-nationalistic Italian migrant to Argentina who wallows in nostalgia for Fascism. Nazzari remained hugely popular, especially, it has been claimed, with lower-class audiences in the South (writing in 1959, Giulio Cesare Castello described him as ‘a Clark Gable for backward regions’).37 He retained his following until his death in 1979. What needs to be asked is whether the indubitable linkage between his persona and Mussolini’s in the Fascist period meant that he became a focus for those who in different ways felt the need for some form of continuity or compensation in the post-war period. The patriotism and nationalism that marked his pre-war persona were less marked in later years but they formed part of the pact with the audience on which his popularity was founded. Nazzari, it could be said, was the living proof that the values that Fascism had promoted remained part of the patrimony of the Italian people. Several of the war films in which he or Giachetti starred, including the African-set Bengasi (Augusto Genina, 1942), were re-released with much fanfare in the 1950s.38 Nazzari’s durability is striking, as most leading post-war directors preferred not to use actors who were identified with the regime. The male actors who enjoyed most favour with the public in the years between the late 1940s and the early 1960s were not at all ideal types. The comic actors Totò, Aldo Fabrizi, Erminio Macario and Renato Rascel were, each in his own way, physically amusing (Fabrizi was corpulent and Rascel very short, for example), and they offered a blatant contrast to the model of virility. But the brusque shift from heroic to satirical masculinity constituted, if anything, proof that the Mussolinian model still resonated. Ruth Ben-Ghiat has argued that Mussolini’s relationship with the Italians informs the plot and characters of Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, Giuseppe De Santis, 1949),39 a film that, with its focus on melodrama among the rice weeders, has no obvious link to pre-war events. The popularity of Roman comic actor Alberto Sordi in the period from the late 1950s has been linked to the enormous changes taking place during



The aftermath of the Mussolini cult249

the period of the economic boom. Sordi played ambitious if fundamentally mediocre opportunists, men imbued with the conventional Italian vices of narcissism, cowardice and excessive attachment to the mother, who were superficially modern. Federico Fellini defined these defects as typical of ‘a young man who had grown up under Fascism and was thrown into a democracy he did not understand’.40 For Grazia Livi, the typical Sordi character was ‘a confused personality because the sudden shift from dictatorship to democracy, precisely during the crucial years of his education, prevented him becoming a man in a mature and coherent way’.41 The actor’s weak characters yearn for a strong example to look up to and they are unctuous when they find one. For example, in Il vigile (The Traffic Cop, Luigi Zampa, 1960), the actor plays an indolent young man keen to avoid menial work but attracted by the idea of becoming a motorised traffic cop. At one point, bemoaning the conduct of contemporary politicians, he exclaims in exasperation: ‘Once, there was someone [more powerful] … !’ Sordi drew no clear distinction between his on-screen characters and his off-screen persona. In life, he often spoke with sympathy of Fascism, a lapse for which the screenwriter Scarpelli excused him, saying, ‘his are not the thoughts of a Fascist but of a Balilla [Fascist boy scout]’.42 One of his unrealised projects was a comedy centred on the private Mussolini that would have taken inspiration from Quinto Navarra’s memoirs.43 Mussolini was a product of Italian political culture, but the place he continued to occupy in the collective imaginary derived not from the persistence of the culture that had spawned him but rather from the formative place he occupied in the nation’s mass consciousness. In this respect he can be likened to one of the ‘strange angels’ that Andy Bull discusses in his exploration of the posthumous resonance of some celebrities.44 Seeking to explain the permanent place occupied in the western imagination by Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, James Dean and John F. Kennedy, he identified four contributory factors: they achieved fame at a time that in hindsight seemed simpler, optimistic, affluent, and idealistic; they were at the pinnacle of a popular culture the world loved and envied; the seamy side of their lives was concealed while they lived and its later exposure came too late to alter their image; they emerged at a time when relatively few stars were known to all.45 His argument is that the biggest idols of the present come from the past. ‘We want them to embody all the rosy-tinted appeal of a lost time of perceived hope and happiness’, he argues.46 Mussolini does not sit easily in the company of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. But if we consider him in a purely Italian context then the comparison makes more sense. After Garibaldi, he was the first political leader to register in the consciousness of the nation as a presence with a recognisable physiognomy and persona that had an impact beyond politics. Campi

250

The cult of the Duce

argues that, despite being a dictator and an opponent of freedom, Mussolini was, paradoxically, ‘in many ways the true “democratiser” of Italian society, the one through whom the politics of our country took on a really popular and mass dimension and came to be practised on a national scale’.47 A multiplicity of media including photography, cinema, the illustrated press, radio, gramophone records and posters, as well as architecture, wall inscriptions, sculpture and painting, were harnessed to the task of bolstering his personality cult. Mussolini was seen and heard by millions of people, both in person and through mass communications. To some extent therefore it can be said that he became a permanent feature of the mediatic repertoire of the nation. In addition, the Fascist period, as has been shown above, was considered by many, if certainly not all, to have been a simpler, happier time than the postwar decades. Mussolini was a protagonist on the global stage in a way that post-war leaders were not. His defects and peccadilloes only came to public view following his downfall. Although he did not die at the peak of his career or as a young man, his life was abruptly curtailed. Finally, the collective enthusiasms of the 1930s were more universally shared than almost any political moment in the polarised polity of the Republic. Echoes and evocations Bull’s notion of the strange angel points to the complex connection between the historical existence of the cult of Mussolini and the mass cultural universe that took shape in the post-war period. Fascist aesthetics aimed to transcend commercial culture to invest the everyday with mythic resonance. Its practitioners rejected the ironic, the temporary and the ugly and treated the relationship between the individual and the mass in a hierarchical way that precluded dreams of personal fulfilment. Yet hybridity was always a feature of it. With regard to Germany, Leni Riefenstahl’s film of the 1934 Nuremberg rally, Triumph of the Will, which was perhaps the single most significant contribution to the creation of the cult of the Führer, has been analysed both in terms of its contribution to Fascist aesthetics and its later impact on cinematic imagery, advertising and pop videos.48 As Georg Seesslen has argued, Riefenstahl’s films contained ‘all of the “building blocks” of entertainment’, albeit ‘with some significant displacements’.49 This meant that Nazi art and propaganda did not simply stand in isolation from popular culture and could not easily be made wholly taboo after the war. The techniques Riefenstahl employed to bolster the Third Reich’s claim to timelessness and Hitler’s unique status appealed to later film-makers who merely wished to create memorable impressions. These observations cannot be applied directly to Italy. No film of the power and originality of Triumph of the Will was produced. Nevertheless, some of



The aftermath of the Mussolini cult251

the propaganda and the art created by the regime were hybrids, while other examples are now of recognised artistic value. The post-war influence of architecture and other applied arts also needs consideration. The avant-garde contributions to the cult remain striking, as are the photomontages that not only transmitted a political message but also turned Mussolini into a modernist icon. These hold a place in art history and had an influence on commercial culture. In their time, images that presented fusions of leader and mass had the purpose of ‘casting the image of the masses in the image of the leader and/ or the state and vice versa’.50 ‘By means of a sustained visual dialogue, the one is presented as the inevitable counterpart of the other’, Jeffrey Schnapp has argued. Mussolini’s profile drawn over a mass crowd, or his face composed of, or his body immersed in, a crowd, now belong to the history of photomontage and the documentarist aesthetic. Already in the 1930s, this type of representation was not confined to propaganda but spread to advertising.51 Today it has a marked period feel because the mass aesthetic does not function in the same way. Nevertheless, similar motifs are occasionally employed. Mussolini himself has sometimes reappeared in such unlikely locations as advertisements for Venice’s Excelsior Hotel or in detective novels.52 The regime invested heavily in architecture and had a huge impact on the built environment. It carried out a massive building programme, creating in the course of its life hundreds of public buildings including ministries, police stations, railway stations, post offices, law courts, schools, swimming pools, children’s holiday camps and whole new towns. Architecture had been employed for centuries as a means of establishing glory and communicating a message of power that would resonate through the ages. Far from being mere accessories or choreography, Pino Nicoloso argues, buildings were ‘true symbols of the regime, essential for the diffusion of the lay religion of Mussolini’.53 As reflections of an order that was predicated on the assertion of national superiority, they were solid, imposing and sometimes overpowering. In the post-war years some of these buildings were stripped of exterior symbols, while others were destined for new functions. Almost none were demolished. Indeed one or two of the regime’s prestige projects, notably the E42 in Rome – the present-day EUR quarter – were not completed until the 1950s. The question that needs to be asked therefore is whether these edifices have continued in some form to exercise their intended formative power. Outside the context of the regime, any influence was inevitably lessened, but it would be difficult to argue that buildings so evidently constructed under – and serving the purposes of – the regime lost all connection with it. Constructed to last and to transmit the memory of Fascism to future generations, they at best became bearers of ‘hybrid messages, less menacing and invasive than the originals’.54 ‘In the landscape of the early post-war period, they were residues

252

The cult of the Duce

of an interrupted project to totalitarise Italian society, souvenirs of the iron alliance forged between Fascism’s Duce and his architects and his people’, Nicoloso argues.55 Over time they became generic transmitters of Fascism’s national aspirations that blended easily with a sentimentalised memory of Fascism itself. ‘In the end’, he concludes, ‘Mussolini’s intention to speak to Fascism’s successors through architecture appears to have been a successful one’.56 Nicoloso suggests therefore that Fascism’s legacy continued, in diluted form, to constitute an influence through its material legacy. The same question must be addressed in relation to locations that first became tourist sites during the inter-war period, owing to their links to Mussolini, and the tourism of more recent decades. The Duce’s birthplace of Predappio became a place of pilgrimage under the regime and it continued to attract visitors after the war.57 It was not alone in maintaining this function. The Gola del Furlo near Fermignano in the Marche region also became a pilgrimage site under the regime owing to the creation on the mountain face of a profile of Mussolini. The Duce was accustomed to travel through the pass on his way to Predappio and in 1936 the forestry militia commissioned the profile, that was already partially present as a natural configuration, as a homage. At the inauguration Mussolini himself expressed disapproval of the sculpted profile because it depicted him horizontally, in a resting position.58 Nevertheless it attracted many visitors. The sculpted head was partly destroyed in 1946 on the orders of the then Minister of Public Works, but the profile remains broadly visible. To enhance its tourist appeal and assist the local economy, there was talk in the 1980s of promoting its restoration.59 The dining room of the Hotel Furlo is still decorated in the style of the era and it is possible to sleep in the room where Mussolini used to stay. Other localities have sought to exploit related historical associations. In January 2008 it was announced that the centre-left administration of the town of Salò would offer guided tours of the places and building associated with the Italian Social Republic.60 The demand, it transpired, came from tourists visiting Lake Garda who were mainly German. The luxury hotel Villa Fiordaliso at Gardone Riviera, where Mussolini’s mistress spent the final weeks of her life, offers guests the chance to occupy the Claretta Suite. This sort of tourism is difficult to classify; elements of nostalgia mix with voyeuristic curiosity and disaffection from the present. One informed observer, Ilvo Diamanti, does not find the phenomenon at all worrying. It is proof, he has remarked, of ‘the “trivialisation of Fascism” commercialized like any product’.61 It would be misleading to conclude from this that Mussolini has been stripped of all his historical charisma. It is striking that, despite the marked process of humanisation of Mussolini in the post-war years, the Duce leader figure still has a certain charge. There is a marked difference here with respect to Hitler, as Mussolini has not undergone the process that Seesslen



The aftermath of the Mussolini cult253

has referred to as the renaissance of Riefenstahl’s ‘Adolf Hitler Superstar’ in post-war pop culture ‘as a demon or clown’, ‘the negative of the Riefenstahl superstar’.62 Hitler, or Hitler-like figures, are routinely depicted in films and in popular fiction. Despite the desacralisation of the Duce in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1942) and literary works such as Curzio Malaparte’s Kaputt (1944) or Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Eros e Priapo (1967), Mussolini has not become an all-purpose signifier of evil or a Chaplinesque clown available as a comic template. This has implications even within far-right culture, where it appears that Mussolini’s appeal is waning. Among the groups of the far right, there has been, Paolo Berizzi notes, ‘a process of Nazification’ that is evident also in the material seized by the forces of order: ‘the swastikas and the symbols of the Third Reich are more numerous than the busts of Mussolini’.63 Yet also notes a peculiar eclecticism. Visiting the meeting places of a neo-fascist student group, Blocco studentesco, whose members ‘call themselves camerati and salute each other with a raised arm’ he found various ‘extraneous bodies’ in the mixer of their iconographic references: ‘alongside the Futurism of Marinetti, in many sections of the Blocco images of Mussolini and Nietzsche sit together with those of Marx, Che Guevara and Arbore, yes Renzo Arbore’ (a popular Neapolitan entertainer and musician not known for his right-wing sympathies).64 However, there are areas of society in which some of Mussolini’s old charisma still has a power. One of these is football. While the left has been identified with particular teams and at times, notably the 1970s, with football supporters in general, certain teams have far-right reputations and supporters. This applies notably to Lazio, at one time Mussolini’s own favoured team, several of whose players declared their support for the MSI.65 The most dedicated fans practised Fascist salutes and engaged in hooliganism. In more recent years, the veteran Lazio player Paolo Di Canio, back with his team in 2003 after a stint in Britain, made no secret of his admiration for Mussolini, which was reflected in a ‘DUX’ tattoo on his right arm.66 The connection between violence on and off the field and declared Fascist sympathies would suggest that a certain brutish masculinity can find the symbolic system of Fascism useful.67 Richard Bosworth has referred to a process of ‘de-ideologisation’ of the Fascist dictatorship’s history and ‘the cancelling of a moral stance towards the relatively recent events of the past’.68 In relation to Mussolini specifically, this process has occurred in such a way that the historical judgement on the role he played has struggled to assert itself in some areas against indulgent memory and the resonances of material culture. Paradoxically, the indulgent attitude towards him that was a significant – if by no means uncontested – ­cultural trend of the post-war era is characteristic of what Rita Felski has

254

The cult of the Duce

referred to as the ‘feminine phenomenon’ of nostalgia.69 This embraces all and promises a mythic reunification of fragmented elements of a conflictual past on the basis of a sense of restored plenitude. Nostalgia, she argues, works against ‘real history’ in ways that may be comforting but which can also be dangerous. The danger lies in the residual appeal of authoritarian leadership in periods of flux and uncertainty, especially in countries with experience of it. For this reason, as Svetlana Boym argues, ‘unreflected nostalgia breeds monsters’.70 On the other hand, contaminations with popular culture and commercialisation make it difficult for the ghost of Mussolini to exercise a mobilising role for anything other than itself. The cult of Mussolini in this sense continues to have a complex aftermath marked alternately by troubling and trivialising elements. Notes  1 See M. Dondi, ‘Piazzale Loreto’, in M. Isnenghi (ed.), I luoghi della memoria: simboli e miti dell’Italia unita (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 1996), pp. 489–90.   2 Ibid., p. 494.   3 S. Luzzatto, Il corpo del duce (Turin: Einaudi, 1998), p. 6.   4 Only the Duce’s widow Rachele seems to have doubted his death. ‘For a long time I did not even have concrete proof of Benito’s death’, she wrote. ‘Even some ex-partisans wrote to me arguing that the man killed at Giulino di Mezzegra was not my husband but another person. From time to time I thought that the whole thing was a gigantic trick and that Benito was alive and safe who knows where.’ R. Mussolini, ‘Mussolini vent’anni dopo’, Part 3, Gente, 16 (1964), 27.   5 Dondi, ‘Piazzale Loreto’, p. 499.   6 The MSI obtained this result in 1972.   7 L. Longanesi, Il destino ha cambiato cavallo (Milan: Longanesi, 1951).   8 See D. Forgacs and S. Gundle, Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), Introduction.   9 Luzzatto, Il corpo del duce, p. 232. 10 A. Campi, Mussolini (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001), p. 8. 11 The first volume was Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 1883–1920 (Turin: Einaudi, 1965). Six further volumes were published between 1966 and 1997. 12 See Luzzatto, Il corpo del duce; C. Baldassini, L’ombra di Mussolini: l’Italia moderata e la memoria del fascismo (1945–1960) (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2008); L. La Rovere, L’eredità del fascismo: gli intellettuali, i giovani e la transizione al postfascismo, 1943–1948 (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2008). 13 La Rovere, L’eredità del fascismo. 14 R. Ben-Ghiat, ‘Liberation: Film and the Flight from the Fascist past, 1945–50’, in R. J. B. Bosworth and P. Dogliani (eds.), Italian Fascism: History, Memory and Representation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), p. 90. 15 See Forgacs and Gundle, Mass Culture and Italian Society, pp. 234–47. 16 V. Brancati, ‘Le bocche spalancate non fanno la storia’, in Il borghese e l’immensità,



The aftermath of the Mussolini cult255

1930–1954 (1st edn 1946, Milan: Bompiani, 1973), p. 177. On this phenomenon, see M. Dondi, ‘The Fascist Mentality after Fascism’, in Bosworth and Dogliani, Italian Fascism, pp. 152–3. 17 O. Logan, ‘Pius XII: romanità, prophesy and charisma’, Modern Italy, 3:2 (1998), 237–47. 18 Ibid., pp. 238, 240. 19 Ibid., p. 243. 20 See M. Marsili, ‘De Gasperi and Togliatti: political leadership and personality cults in post-war Italy’, Modern Italy, 3:2 (1998), 249–61 (pp. 249–50). 21 Ibid., p. 250. 22 E. Gentile, ‘Mussolini’s Charisma’, Modern Italy, 3:2 (1998), 219–36. 23 S. Gundle, Between Hollywood and Moscow: The Italian Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture, 1943–1991 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 66, 83. 24 S. Setta, L’Uomo qualunque (Rome: Laterza, 1975), p. 123. 25 See M. Venturi, Sdraiati sulla linea: come si viveva nel PCI di Togliatti (Milan: Mondadori, 1991) and F. Gambetti, La grande illusione 1945–1953 (Milan: Mursia, 1976). 26 Q. Navarra, Memorie del cameriere di Mussolini (Milan: Longanesi, 1946). 27 I. Montanelli, Il buon uomo Mussolini (1st edn 1947, Milan: Rizzoli, 1975), pp. 6–7. 28 S. Gerbi and R. Liucci, Lo stregone: la prima vita di Indro Montanelli (Turin: Einaudi, 2006) p. 219. 29 L. Longanesi, Un morto fra noi (Milan: Longanesi, 1952), p. 272. 30 L. Longanesi, In piedi e seduti (1919–1943) (Milan: Longanesi, 1980). 31 See R. Liucci, L’Italia borghese di Leo Longanesi: giornalismo, politica e costume negli anni ’50 (Venice: Marsilio, 2002). 32 Baldassini, L’ombra di Mussolini. 33 Campi, Mussolini, p. 9. 34 See P. Cooke, ‘What Does It Matter If You Die? The Seven Cervi Brothers’, in S. Gundle and L. Rinaldi (eds.), Assassinations and Murder in Modern Italy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 35 Rachele Mussolini’s memoirs were published in numerous instalments in Oggi in 1957. For a comment on their publication, see Baldassini, L’ombra di Mussolini, pp. 285–90. Her album of photographs was published, with her own captions, in Tempo in 1962. 36 See M. Scaglione, I divi del ventennio (Turin: Lindau, 2005), p. 20. G. Gubitosi, in Amedeo Nazzari (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998) p. 71, argues that Mussolini and the Nazzari persona were complementary in the collective imaginary, even if they were different. 37 G. C. Castello, Il divismo: mitologia del cinema (Turin: ERI, 1957), p. 408. 38 See D. Baratieri, ‘La riedizione di Bengasi e L’assedio dell’Alcazar negli anni Cinquanta’, in S. Bernardi (ed.), La storia del cinema italiano, Vol. 9 1954–1959 (Rome: Scuola nazionale del cinema, 2004). 39 Ben-Ghiat, ‘Liberation’, p. 93.

256

The cult of the Duce

40 Quoted in G. Livi, Alberto Sordi (Milan: Longanesi, 1967), p. 103. 41 Ibid., p. 103. 42 Quoted in G. Fofi, Alberto Sordi: l’Italia in bianco e nero (Milan: Mondadori, 2004), p. 180. 43 Ibid., p. 178. 44 A. Bull, Strange Angels (London: Black Swan, 1995). 45 Ibid., p. 23. 46 Ibid., p. 175. 47 Campi, Mussolini, p. 83. 48 See the essays by C. Strathausen and D. Bathrick in N.C. Pages et al. (eds.), Riefenstahl Screened: An Anthology of New Criticism (New York: Continuum, 2008). 49 G. Seesslen, ‘Blood and Glamour’, in ibid., p. 20. 50 J. T. Schnapp, ‘Mob Porn’, in Schnapp and M. Tiews (eds.), Crowds (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 20. 51 Ibid., p. 39. 52 R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini (London: Arnold, 2002), pp. 425–6. 53 Ibid., p. xvii. 54 Ibid., p. 283. 55 Ibid., p. 281. 56 Ibid., p. 283. 57 See V. Querel, Il paese di Benito: Predappio e dintorni (Rome: Corso, 1954), pp. 74–5 and Bosworth, Mussolini, pp. 418–20. The registers of visitors to Predappio under Fascism, showing only signatures, are now held at the Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome. 58 See R. Ranghieri, ‘Il Furlo per non morire chiede aiuto al Duce’, Il Giornale Nuovo, 5 February 1987, p. 8. 59 Ibid. 60 Anon., ‘È Salò sfida Predappio: un tour fra i palazzi del Duce’, Il Corriere della Sera, 16 January 2008. 61 I. Diamanti, ‘Gran bazaar Mussolini’, La Repubblica, 27 August 2008, p. 1. 62 Seesslen, ‘Blood and Glamour’, p. 21. See also P. Arnds, ‘ “Send in the Clowns”: Carnivalizing the Heil-Hitler Salute in German Visual Culture’, in G. Finney (ed.), Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany: Text as Spectacle (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), pp. 235–48. 63 P. Berizzi, Bande nere: come vivono, chi sono, chi protegge i nuovi nazifascisti (Milan: Bompiani, 2009), p. 14. 64 Ibid., p. 129. 65 J. Foot, Calcio: A History of Italian Football (London: Fourth Estate, 2006), p. 370. 66 Ibid., p. 318. 67 See Bosworth, Mussolini, p. 422. 68 Ibid., p. 425. 69 R. Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 38. 70 S. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. xvi.

16

Mussolini and post-war Italian television Vanessa Roghi

The Duce, the man of providence, the blacksmith’s son, the interventionist, the great journalist, the unquestioned genius, the battler against social injustice, the warrior for the national cause, the passionate lover, the country boy made good, the good family man, the autodidact, the new Caesar, the modern Cola di Rienzo, the Italian Bonaparte, the man betrayed and abandoned, the tireless worker, the economically just politician, the great statesman, the self-made romantic proletarian.1

Under the heading ‘Mussolini’ in the volume Fascisti immaginari, two rightleaning journalists, Luciano Lanna and Filippo Rossi, thus summarise some of the ‘positive’ appellations attributed to the ‘Duce of Fascism’, Benito Mussolini, both in life and after his death. The entry features in a volume that aims to reconstruct the Fascist imaginary in true encyclopedic fashion by defining key words and concepts and by using terms like those cited above. It reflects not historical reality but rather a form of ‘Mussolinism’ that was born, and which grew up, after the death of the man himself. Lanna and Rossi’s approach is emblematic of what has been termed, to borrow Cristina Baldassini’s expression, ‘indulgent memory’.2 This term refers to accounts of Mussolini and Fascism that are based not on accurate historical research but rather on sympathetic journalism, selective omission and stereotype. This sort of reconfiguration of the past took shape immediately after the war and was first championed by the prominent Corriere della Sera journalist Indro Montanelli. To understand the reasons why the figure of Mussolini, rather than the historical phenomenon of which he was a part, has continued to attract such public interest, one must begin with this ‘indulgent memory’. The use of ‘public’ here is deliberate since Mussolini has a genuine audience, measured by audience share and sold to advertisers who know the economic value of those who are keen viewers of history programmes on television. This medium contributed more than any other to the sympathetic memory of Mussolini. Indeed, from the late 1960s, the dictator would become one of Italian television’s ‘heroes’.3

258

The cult of the Duce

The historian Giovanni De Luna has underlined how visual broadcasting contributed to the promotion of a revisionist historiographical discourse around Mussolini and Fascism in general. Yet there are very few studies indeed of the separation, which was caused by the medium itself, between historiographical research and public debate.4 Perhaps because it is difficult to access Italian television archives, a curious paradox exists in Italy whereby the most potent maker of the nation’s imaginary is generally excluded from historical studies. These still focus mainly on the print media, literature, cinema and, in a few rare cases, popular music. Yet, by contrast to what happened in Germany during the Historikerstreit (debate between historians over the Holocaust), television is the critical arena in which the national past in Italy was, and continues to be, reinvented. This chapter will attempt to review the history of Mussolini’s presence on Italian television through those programmes which, more than any set of newspaper articles or film, reshaped perceptions of his character to such an extent that, in the national imaginary, the man became almost completely detached from Fascism. Indeed this separation occurred to the point that Mussolini seemed almost capable of being reconciled with democracy. For this reason some people in Italy continue to believe that the country needs a Mussolini to govern it, even though there is no widespread thirst for a return of Fascism. 1946–60: between nostalgia and repression It is important to be aware that moving images of the macabre display of the bodies of Mussolini and several of his acolytes in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto, which were shot by the Americans, were not employed in Allied propaganda aimed at the Italians. Thus they were not widely seen. Both the Allies and the Italian authorities had an interest in ensuring that Mussolini and his regime were consigned rapidly to the past and the emphasis placed on the moral and material reconstruction of the country. After the dismantling of the Luce Institute, the defunct regime’s main propaganda organ, the production of newsreels was entrusted from 1946 to the Industria cortometraggi Milano (INCOM). The output in fact conserved many of the characteristics of the old Luce newsreels; it was celebratory in tone and disrespectful of political pluralism and production was directly controlled by the executive. Fascism and the Fascists were never mentioned; instead the Germans were presented as the evil party in the war. The Mussolini family featured from time to time but it was treated as though it was really no different from any other Italian family. From the moment television was inaugurated in 1954, a similar approach prevailed. Indeed, if anything, television news was even less inclined to deal with the legacy of Fascism and its founder than the newsreels. The moving



Mussolini and post-war Italian television259

of the Duce’s remains to Predappio in 1957 was given no air time in national newscasts, although it did feature in the newsreels that were shown in cinemas. Due to the continual interventions of the conservative press on the subject, the matter of the one-time Duce’s lack of a final resting place had been seen as an open wound. The final healing of this supposed ‘wound’ enabled the state broadcaster RAI to seize the chance to begin to address recent Italian history. Fascism had the great advantage, where television was concerned, of having left an abundant heritage of cinematographic material. Between December 1958 and early 1959, Cinquant’anni 1898–1948 (Fifty Years 1898–1948), by Silvio Negro and Gian Vittorio Baldi, was broadcast. Silvio Negri was Vatican correspondent of the Corriere della sera and a devotee of photography; he saw the making of the programme, which would be his last significant project, as an opportunity to make use of an important photographic resource. A keen researcher of images, he decided to treat the film material of the Luce Institute as an audiovisual archive and, thanks to Baldi’s direction, the programme was well produced and proved immensely popular. For the first time, it prompted reflection on the responsibilities of Italian Liberalism in the rise of Fascism. The commentary implied as much, but it was notable that the images themselves offered clear proof of the complicity between the Liberal government and Mussolini. 1959–71: the birth of a character In 1959, as many critics noted at the time, two films brought a ‘breath of fresh air’ to the Venice film festival. Il generale della Rovere [General Della Rovere, dir. Roberto Rossellini], the tale of a good-for-nothing who is mistaken for a antifascist general and ends up being executed in his place, and La grande guerra [The Great War, dir. Mario Monicelli], a tragicomedy that challenged the heroic image of the Italians who fought in the First World War, were to revolutionise the relationship between cinema and the recent history of Italy. After more than a decade in which Italian film production had been dominated by light comedy and melodrama, contemporary history became the subject of important films. In the same period, three documentaries on Mussolini were made. These were Benito Mussolini: anatomia di un dittatore [Benito Mussolini: Anatomy of a Dictator], directed by Mino Loy and written by Giancarlo Fusco; Benito Mussolini, directed by Pasquale Prunas, supervised by Roberto Rossellini and written by Enzo Biagi and Sergio Zavoli, and All’armi, siam fascisti! [To Arms, we are Fascists!] by Lino Del Fra, Cecilia Mangini and Lino Miccichè.5 The first two were made using the same primary source material, the films of the Luce Institute, which had only been used once before, for the programme Cinquant’anni di vita italiana [Fifty Years of Italian Life]. For reasons of ‘good taste’, wrote Giuseppe Gadda Conti in the

260

The cult of the Duce

journal Il Mulino, both films omitted to show Mussolini’s hanging corpse, ‘an event which in its day made profit for certain magazines and gave life to a macabre photographic market’.6 The two films were completely faithful to the material they used, even if the voice-over commentaries were notably different. In Prunas’s work, the private life of Mussolini was highlighted on screen ‘for the first time’. The third documentary, All’armi siam fascisti, followed a very different path, being issued later, after falling foul of the censors, and using material from partisan groups rather than Luce. Franco Fortini’s commentary now appears stridently ideological, underlining the nexus between Fascism and anti-communism; indeed the film ends with the events of Porta San Paolo in Rome in 1960, when the police violently repressed an anti-fascist demonstration, and the accusation that the government of the day wanted, de facto, to restore Fascism. In the second half of the 1960s, television engaged in more structured debate on Mussolini and Fascism. In line with the strongly pedagogical mission which RAI had established from its inception, and in keeping with the new climate of dialogue between opposing political forces which was inaugurated by the period of centre-left government, history programmes took on a totally new aspect. They were no longer cinematographically edited documentaries but were specifically ‘made for television’ with the aim of staging history. For the first time, then, there was a need to find an actor who could impersonate Mussolini and make him into a ‘character’.7 The choice fell on the actor Ivo Garrani, who, together with Giancarlo Sbragia, Gian Maria Volontè and Enrico Maria Salerno, had in 1960 founded the Compagnia degli Attori Associati, a group which gave birth to the phenomenon of teatrocronaca, which made use of history and historical film footage on the stage. In 1967, at the Piccolo di Milano, the play II fattaccio del giugno [The Events of June] was staged with Garrani playing, for the first time, the ‘character’ Benito Mussolini. Garrani’s performance was regarded as convincing and in 1969 the Russian director Yuri Ozerov chose him to play the part of Mussolini in his film La liberazione: occupazione d’Europa 1943 [The Liberation: The Occupation of Europe 1943], a Russian epic which reconstructed the last two years of the Second World War. Thus the actor was the obvious choice to play Mussolini when, in the same year, the film La resa dei conti: dal Gran Consiglio al processo di Verona [The Settling of Accounts: From the Grand Council to the Verona Trial) was made for television as part of the series I giorni della storia [The Days of History].8 The programme used a new format that injected a strong element of didacticism and historical judgement. Two prominent journalists, Ugo Zatterin and Emilio Ravel, appeared as newscasters on the programme, announcing the sequence of events as if it were a news broadcast. Reconstructions concentrated on key moments such as the conversation between Mussolini and



Mussolini and post-war Italian television261

the Justice Minister of the Italian Social Republic, Piero Pisenti, evincing Pisenti’s doubt and Mussolini’s reason in a scene which showed the latter’s ‘humanity’: ‘I do not wish death upon anybody. I hope everything is executed justly.’ Garrani, in an interview with Radiocorriere TV, would go on to declare: ‘Mussolini? Fundamentally I think he was a man caught up in events that carried far more weight than he did. Hence his obstinate rejection of reality, his inventing illnesses and conditions to hide his fear and cowardice and his inferiority complex. Hence also his need to use violence against others, a dizzy mix of presumption and opportunism, with the verbal ramblings of a mythomaniac and the blindness of a man who has been completely excised from history but who wants to be part of it, in some way and at any cost.’9 This psychological element, which became a tangible part of the narrative through an actor’s performance, suddenly became, for the first time, part of the ‘interpretative canon’. Far from resulting in a definitive distancing of public interest from a ‘human’, indeed an all-too-human, Mussolini, it instead gave way, in the early 1970s, to a new aspect of public debate on the Duce which would in the main be created and promoted by television. This was not least because historians now acted as consultants or writers, a development which gave journalistic programmes an unprecedented seal of authority and objectivity. 1972–83: ‘Throw away the corpse’ – the new canon In the early 1970s television evolved for a variety of different reasons. Audiences, who had grown more sophisticated, began to tire of the paternalistic and pedagogical tone that marked much of the ouput of the state broadcaster RAI. RAI’s narrative models also came into question in the course of the debate which developed regarding the need for reform to broaden the control of television from the executive to the range of parties represented in parliament. This debate, which led to enactment of this reform in 1975, would see the creation of a destructive spoils system between the parties, but from a cultural point of view it also heralded some interesting examples of experimentation, including in the area of history broadcasting. Luce films alone, albeit accompanied by new voice-overs, were not sufficient to explain to an audience which was experiencing political troubles and violence why, in an earlier era, in two years of trouble and violence had brought the Fascist dictatorship to power. On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Rome, in 1972, the journalist Sergio Zavoli made a series of six broadcasts which reconstructed ‘the birth and the advent’ of Fascism.10 Entitled Nascita di una dittatura [Birth of a Dictatorship], the programme was watched by 9 million viewers. Interestingly, Zavoli chose to render explicit the fact that this was a work of representation. As the critic Aldo Grasso wrote: ‘The attempt

262

The cult of the Duce

to be objective did not prevent Zavoli from unveiling the programme’s narrative construction and the workings of television machinery in relation to its subject: the opening sequence highlighted the presence of cameras, monitors, and screens, leaving the studio setup itself open to question and implicitly suggesting to the viewer that, in spite of every effort to be neutral, each story told on the small screen was the result of an exact and unavoidable work of mediation.’11 Understanding the problematic relationship between historical narration, dissemination and research was not solely a belated realisation on the part of Zavoli. The consultants on the programme were well aware of the need to spell out the inevitable historiographical uncertainties and limitations of a programme which was aimed at a mass audience within an eminently pedagogical context. To do this Zavoli, who was a journalist of great intelligence but also a man who was profoundly aware of the need to balance opinions on television, consulted historians who, for better or worse, served to represent the entire constitutional spectrum. They included Alberto Aquarone, Gaetano Arfè, Renzo De Felice, Gabriele De Rosa, Gastone Manacorda and Salvatore Valitutti. The result was nothing less than a summit of the leading researchers on Fascism and on the historical figure of Mussolini. The Catholic historian De Rosa wrote: ‘Film became a new document which, as such, had the same value as a text, an accurate, sober and solemn work.’ Television became, then, according to this historian, not only a sounding board where historiographical readings could be heard but also a place in which such readings could be generated thanks to the possibility of combining words and images. For the first time, those protagonists in the rise of Fascism who were still alive were called, as witnesses, to speak of their experiences in person. The result was tantamount to a revolution. If history on television had been considered up until that point as one part of the media palimpsest, where information could be assimilated by viewers through a documentary or a drama, then with the intervention of professional historians and witnesses, history on television itself became history. Nascita di una dittatura still remains a ‘positive’ example of the transfer of ideas from the universities to the television screen. Historians did not create ad hoc hypotheses for television but rather brought the fruit of years of study to the small screen. Nascita di una dittatura was the perfect synthesis of the historiographical climate of the years in which it was produced. On the one hand, it offered a reading of Fascism that diminished its character as a genuine ideology,12 and expressed, on the other, the specific desire to stress Mussolini’s limits as a politician, so that any merits might also be mentioned. The programme provoked extended debate. The presence of witnesses, with unrepentant Fascists being given a voice on a public service channel, was seen by some as an insult, an attack on the republican Constitution. The Catholic



Mussolini and post-war Italian television263

historian Giuseppe Rossini was invited by RAI to pen an authoritative reply to these criticisms in the magazine Radiocorriere TV. He wrote: We are firmly convinced that the tendency to endorse a historiography of Fascism that crystallises around certain key ideas runs the risk of causing longterm damage to those very ideals which it was meant to initially defend. There is a need to renew the methodology and basic approach of historiography so as to allow for a broader analysis of a phenomenon as complex as Fascism. After all, the documentation and critical grounding are already in place – as, to a certain degree, this television programme shows – to finally navigate this ‘headland’ and to bravely, and unconditionally, open it up to the tide of historiography. Perhaps today we might be capable – to use an expression of Vittorini – of ’throwing away the corpse’ which we have, for so long, stowed away as a nation, because the new generations seem less tied to old ideas and their paths are no longer littered by myths from the past that were once the object of acritical consideration. Do not misunderstand me: this is not an ideological surrender. Anti-fascism is still the guiding force for our generation and the basis of the Republican regime. But so as to retain the role of anti-fascism, the parameters of understanding its history must be renewed, to embed them in the cultural and political realities which we face; in short, our task is to render the terminology of an important moment of our civil history understandable and relevant.13

The fact remained, though, that Mussolini drew viewers. This he would continue to do. On 15 December 1978 the mini-series Tecnica di un colpo di Stato: Marcia su Roma [Techniques of a Coup d’État: The March on Rome) was aired,14 preceded by a review of history broadcasts on television in the pages of Radiocorriere TV.15 Another well-known actor of the period, Pietro Biondi, took on the role of Mussolini this time. Biondi, clearly, had studied the clips in the Luce archive that Garrani had only been able to glimpse before. The result was an ‘official’ Mussolini who seemed to have stepped out of the newsreels of the 1930s. The formal adherence to Luce’s iconographic project impelled history to be read in a certain manner, with Mussolini as the difficult, angry but resolute character, and human once again, to the point that there was no need for Fascism to be understood. In the very year that former prime minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped and killed, public television chose to present Mussolini as a statesman, albeit in a negative sense. This type of representation once again prompted reflection on the editorial choices of those who, during the worst crisis ever witnessed by the Republic, continued to treat history as if it were unrelated to the present.16 1983–94: the private Duce If it is true that ‘from the 1970s until the end of the 1980s the public memory of Italy was mainly constructed by political parties’,17 then it is even more true

264

The cult of the Duce

where the decisions regarding television are concerned.18 In the early 1980s, in fact, the spoils system in RAI reached its peak and programmes closely reflected the political balance of power. It is not surprising, then, that in 1983 a great deal of television airtime was given over to the centenary of the birth of Benito Mussolini. The new course of Italian politics was forged, in fact, by the decline of the Italian Communist Party and the emergence of a new centre-left coalition, at the forefront of which was the man who was sometimes dubbed a ‘new Duce’, Socialist leader Bettino Craxi. To start with, Nascita di una dittatura was repeated, broadcast from 4 January 1983.19 The re-showing of Zavoli’s programme was striking for several reasons. It signalled a hermeneutic status quo in which public television celebrated itself (it was during these years that ‘meta-television’ began to be spoken of),20 allowing Mussolini to be confirmed as a narrative character rather than an historical figure. It was a pretext for a common memory, a starting point from which to move on to other discussion. A debate, chaired by Zavoli, followed the programme, and this perfectly reflected the political climate of the period. In the studio were the historians Gian Enrico Rusconi, Renzo De Felice and Lucio Villari, and the philosopher Lucio Colletti; there were also two representatives from the political sphere, the Communist Aldo Tortorella and the neo-fascist Pino Rauti. This type of debate opened the path for historians who, through their public preoccupation with Mussolini, became genuine opinion leaders, with Renzo De Felice notably standing out for his authority and knowledge. In an article on the political use of history and the revisionism of historians, De Luna has written, referring to Il rosso e il nero [The Red and the Black], a book which took the form of an extended interview with De Felice: ‘[In that book] De Felice spoke in the name of the “people”; the historian no longer identified himself, then, with a “school”, a party, or a historiographical movement. Rather the historian answered directly “to the people”, without mediation, a direct relationship which bypassed all the pronouncements and complexities of an intellectual project.’21 So, from the early 1980s, consultant historians, and particularly De Felice, by directly addressing the ‘people’ through articles or television programmes which they had scripted or to which they had given their seal of approval, definitively sanctioned the absolute veracity of a televisual Mussolini. Programmes were no longer the product of a collaboration between many historians, writers and journalists, but reflected the single voice of the ‘consultant’ who decided what could and could not be said. Television writers were left to tell story of the dictator’s daily life, that of the man, the ‘poor’ Mussolini. With Padre mio amore mio [My Father My Love], Nicola Caracciolo created another milestone in the story of the Duce on television. In this broadcast, Edda Ciano quite markedly stood out as a genuine Italian heroine. The Duce’s



Mussolini and post-war Italian television265

favourite daughter, she walked with her interviewer, Caracciolo, around the gardens of her former family residence Villa Torlonia, which by then was a public park. She spoke of her husband, Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s probable successor who was later executed on the orders of the Duce himself. Family history thus became a melodrama like the American series Dallas, in keeping with the dominant aesthetic of the 1980s. 1994: the hanging bodies The bodies of Benito Mussolini and Claretta Petacci, hanging upside down in Piazzale Loreto, appeared in Italian homes on 3 April 1994, courtesy of the series Combat Film.22 The programme’s makers claimed that this was the first time that such images had been shown. The programme was repeated later that same evening with Indro Montanelli, Mario Cervi and Giampaolo Pansa in the studio. Once again, journalists predominated, with two of the commentators representing the right-wing press while the other, Giampaolo Pansa, would later go on to write articles which laid the basis for several books he would write attacking the entire legacy of the Resistance. Combat Film has become the most studied history programme, not least because it was reissued on DVD and thus has remained easily accessible. It has been the subject of so much study because it was the programme that definitively made public the idea that dead Fascists and anti-fascists were equal in the public memory of the Italian Republic and because it introduced for the first time the idea that the good faith of whoever committed atrocities was a parameter of historical, rather than legal, judgement. Precisely because so much has been written on Combat Film, it is sufficient here to relate two points made by researchers who have studied it. Referring to the formation of the first Berlusconi government in 1994 which included members of the post-fascist National Alliance, Ilaria Lazzeri wrote: ‘The phenomenon of Combat Film cannot be explained purely by the advent, in 1994, of a government which included a neo-fascist element (although this remained a moment of fundamental fracture)’, but more through ‘the legitimisation acquired at the institutional level – first and foremost with Violante’s speech, but also with that of Ciampi, who recognised moral value in supporting the Italian Social Republic, by virtue of the patriotic feeling which had animated it’.23 She was speaking here of a milestone speech by the Communist President of the Chamber of Deputies, Luciano Violante, that aimed at a reconciliation of the two sides in Italy’s civil war, and the related actions of the president of the republic. Robert Ventresca, meanwhile, explained that ‘The programme proved to be hugely popular among viewers, garnering impressive and record levels of audience share. Yet, the broadcast of Combat Film by Italian state television just weeks after Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right coalition came to power sparked an intense national and European

266

The cult of the Duce

debate over the historical figure of Mussolini, his execution, the war itself and the Ital­ian transition to democracy. Critics called the programme “shock TV” and distasteful, while others worried that the showing of such footage might have the effect of resurrecting Mussolini’s ghost. What they really worried about, of course, was the rehabilitation of Mussolini and Fascism at the very moment when former neo-fascists from the National Alliance could be found in Berlusconi’s government.’24 Combat Film, indeed, in taking Mussolini back to the moment of his death and posthumous exhibition in Piazzale Loreto, closed the circle, turning back the clock on his representation by 50 years, to the days in the late 1940s when Montanelli and his fellow journalist Leo Longanesi had deplored ‘the fool’ but regretted his absence.25 Ventresca added: ‘While its authors maintained that the Combat Film documentary revealed “how we were” close to fifty years ago, Barbara Spinelli, an Italian journalist, reasoned that the broadcast said more about “what we are becoming”.’26 What this was was made clear in 2002, at a conference on the ‘Culture of the Right’ organised by National Alliance Antonio Baldassarre, who was appointed president of RAI’s supervisory council during Berlusconi’s second term in power. He suggested that it was a basic duty of public service television to rewrite Italian history, to rid it of the ideological ‘fables’ that had been recounted for 50 years by the left, by virtue of its ‘hegemony over the media’.27 The historical scheduling of public television at this time was entrusted to Pasquale D’Alessandro, a journalist close to National Alliance who, with programmes such as La grande storia (History’s Big Picture) and Correva l’anno (That Was the Year), brought to a definitive close the chapter on the latest accepted idea of Mussolini. Once more these broadcasts drew a precise picture of a dictator figure who was lacking in personal responsibility, who was fundamentally a weak and poorly advised individual. Conclusion In 2003 the comedian Corrado Guzzanti created for the RAI 3 programme Il caso Scafroglia [The Scafroglia Case] a series of comic sketches called Fascisti su Marte [Fascists on Mars].28 These told the story of a group of Blackshirts who, in May 1939, leave Italy to conquer Mars, ‘the red planet, and thus Communist’. The absurd premise apart, the programme’s historical accuracy was striking, with a fine attention to detail and a faithful study of gestures and vocabulary that came directly from the old Luce Institute newsreels. For the first time in around sixty years of use by the media, these films so redolent of the climate of the Fascist era underwent genuine deconstruction. By stressing the rhetorical aspect of Mussolini and Fascism evident in the Luce films, Guzzanti managed, virtually overnight, to change the reputation that the newsreels had enjoyed until that moment. The films had been fetishised



Mussolini and post-war Italian television267

and seen as a ‘raw outline of truth’,29 in keeping with the mistaken conviction, already highlighted in the analysis of other RAI programmes, that this source in itself was the bearer of an intrinsic truth. Far from representing a hermeneutic conquest, then, the space given to sources and witnesses, and taken away from historians and writers, who for a brief period had made original television programmes, signalled a negative turn in recounting Mussolini. Today as during the regime, he is represented by those very films that were created by Luce with the specific intention of exalting his strength and leadership.30 With the progressive transformation of the historical Mussolini into the mythical Mussolini, an arc was completed that traced his multiple facets from the first decades of the twentieth century to the Italian Republic. From the narrow view of Mussolini in the early post-war years, where only the human aspects of a defeated Duce were considered, his image evolved through to the broader picture of the 1960s and 1970s, which placed him in his time, to the return since the end of the 1990s to a view which might be likened to looking through a set of inverted binoculars to grasp the historical ‘truth’ of Fascism. The result overall has been one of distortion, in which the details of the Duce’s private life can be used to justify and excuse his conduct. In 1987, Marc Ferro, in L’Histoire sous surveillance, predicted a future in which a complete democratisation of the process of disseminating history would be inevitable because of the arrival in the public arena of innumerable minority groups who would break apart that which Giovanni De Luna defined an ‘impregnable canon’.31 In Italy, this has not proved to be the case. Information on television is more impregnable than ever, for reasons to do with a renewed executive control of news. Mussolini continues to live through those people and things that Mimmo Franzinelli has defined as his ‘tormentors’: that is to say, the secret children, secret diaries, and secret grandchildren who have emerged over the years. Even the veteran television presenter Bruno Vespa alluded to semi-jocular rumours that he was Mussolini’s son in a celebrated episode of his programme Porta a porta [Door to Door], in December 2005. Mussolini has always attracted viewers. The rest, for some, is of little importance. Notes  1 L. Lanna and F. Rossi, Fascisti immaginari (Florence: Vallecchi, 2003), p. 325.  2 C. Baldassini, L’ombra di Mussolini: l’Italia moderata e la memoiria del fascismo (1945–1960) (Soveria Mannelli: Rubettino, 2008).  3 On the audiences of history programmes on TV see A. Grasso, Fare storia con la televisione (Milan: Vita e pensiero, 2006).  4 Important exceptions to this include G. Crainz, ‘The Representation of Fascism

268

The cult of the Duce

and the Resistance in the Documentaries of Italian State Television’, in R. J. B. Bosworth and P. Dogliani (eds.), Italian Fascism: History, Memory and Representation (London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 134; G. Crainz, ‘I programmi televisivi sul fascismo e la Resistenza’, in E. Collotti (ed.), Fascismo e antifascismo: rimozioni, revisioni e negazioni (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 2000); La storia in televisione – Annale IRSIFAR 2001, pp. 39–41; L. Cicognetti, La storia in televisione: storici e registi al confronto (Venice: Marsilio, 2001); I. Lazzeri, ‘A dieci anni da Combat film: i ragazzi di Salò in televisione’, Passato e presente, 22:63 (2004), 69–76; R. Ventresca, ‘Mussolini’s ghost’, History and Memory, 18:1 (2006), 86–119.  5 A contemporary review was penned by G. Gadda Conti, ‘Giovani e cinematografo: tre film su Mussolini’, Il Mulino, 11:5 (1962), 506–10.  6 Ibid., p. 507.  7 Between the 1950s and early 1960s there were only a handful of programmes on Fascism: amongst these it is worth remembering Il delitto Matteotti by Nelo Risi (1956), the documentary Benito Mussolini by Pasquale Prunas (1962) and All’armi, siam fascisti! by Lino Dal Fra, Cecilia Mangini and L. Miccichè (1962).  8 The consultants were Renzo De Felice and Gabriele De Rosa, the debate was hosted by Ugo Zatterin and Emilio Ravel and the director was Marco Leto.  9 P. Pintus, ‘Il destino di rifare il Duce’, TV Radiocorriere, 6–12 April 1969, pp. 36–7. 10 Nascita di una dittatura, by Sergio Zavoli, in collaboration with L. Onder and E. Osser, with A. Aquarone, G. Arfè, R. De Felice, G. De Rosa, G. Manacorda and S. Valitutti as historical consultants. Cf. A. Grasso, Storia della televisione italiana (Milan: Garzanti, 1992), p. 245. In 1973 Nascita di una dittatura became a book, edited by Zavoli and published by SEI. The series aired again in 1983, ten years after the first showing, and in 1994, after 20 years. 11 Grasso, Storia, p. 245. 12 ‘In reality, Fascism never had a theoretical base or, as might be said today, an original ideology. It took the attitude and revolutionary mindset of socialism; it took extreme nationalist ideals of power and “imperialism”; it used Catholicism for its own ends. Lacking in theory, Fascism made an ideology out of this very theoretical void, defining itself as a passion, a faith, a blind obedience to orders. It was rhetoric, fear, the poetry of action and endless other words which inspired a small bourgeois element, which wanted to avoid daily happenings and “the dullness of life”; they believed in history with a capital H. That small element, made up of rhetoricians, aestheticians and naive individuals, dreamt of a powerful Italy, ruling the sea, the heir to the Romans and the arbiter of beauty, and believed Italy to be the victim of petty-political scheming; that rank of intellectuals sought glory outside themselves, through great events.’ From V. Libera, ‘Una batosta elettorale all’origine dello squadrismo’, Radiocorriere TV, 12–18 November 1972. 13 G. Rossini, ‘Conoscere il fascismo per condannarlo’, Radiocorriere TV, 19–25 November 1972, p. 139. 14 The programme was broadcast on Rete 2 on 15 December, in four parts, directed by S. Maestranzi with scenography by M. Felisatti and F. Pitorru. Even though the scenography often played a subordinate role to the captions, the scenography



15 16

17 18 19 20 21

22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Mussolini and post-war Italian television269 scrupulously reproduced the idea that the ruling Liberal classes misunderstood Mussolini. G. Di Capua, ‘Vi piace com’è fatta la storia in TV’, Radiocorriere TV, 10–16 December 1978, pp. 14–19. From a formal perspective the experiments of the previous decade were abandoned, which had led to a new way of telling history and making documentaries. See A. Aprà, ‘Itinerario personale nel documentario italiano’, in L. Micciché, Studi su dodici sguardi d’autore in cortometraggio (Turin: Associazione Philip Morris – Progetto Cinema/Lindau, 1995), pp. 281–95. G. De Luna, Le ragioni di un decennio: 1969–1979: militanza, violenza, sconfitta, memoria (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2009), p. 140. For the debate on history and TV in the early 1980s, see G. De Luna, La passione e la ragione: il mestiere dello storico contemporaneo (Milan: Mondadori, 2004). The programme was repeated on its twentieth anniversary in 1994. The re-airing of Zavoli’s successful series suggested that there was no new television debate regarding the Duce. G. De Luna, ‘Revisionismo e resistenza’, in A. Del Boca (ed.), La storia negata: il revisionismo e il suo uso politico (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2009). On the role of the consultant historian see M. Legnani in L. Baldissara, S. Battilossi and P. Ferrari (eds.), Al mercato della storia: il mestiere di storico fra scienza e consumo (Rome: Carocci, 2000). A second series of the show was broadcast in November 1994, on that occasion in prime time. Amongst the most prized clips from the final days of Fascism were the shootings in Dongo and Giulino di Mezzegra, the events at Piazzale Loreto and the autopsy of Mussolini’s corpse. Lazzeri, ‘A dieci anni’, p. 70. Ventresca, ‘Mussolini’s ghost’. See Ch. 15 of this volume. Ventresca, ‘Mussolini’s ghost’, pp. 101–2. Lazzeri, ‘A dieci anni’, p. 75. The series was then made into a film and shown at the Venice Film Festival in 2006. The expression is Italo Moscati’s, one of the writers on the second series, in Il racconto di Combat Film, in R. Olla, Combat Film (Rome: RAI-ERI, 1997), pp. 223–7. N. Gallerano, ‘Storia e uso pubblico della storia’, in Gallerano (ed.), L’uso pubblico della storia (Milan: Angeli, 1995), pp. 17–32. M. Ferro, L’Histoire sous surveillance: science et conscience de l’histoire (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1985).

Afterword R. J. B. Bosworth

In the Italy that he ruled for a generation, it is hard to bury the ghost of Benito Mussolini. In recent years news about the Italian dictator has hit the headlines on many occasions and for reasons great and small. In November 2009 there was news that slivers of the Duce’s brain had been put on sale on eBay at an asking price of 15,000 euros. Since such bodily matter had been carried off to the USA after the dictator was executed at the end of the war, to be returned to his widow, Rachele, more than a decade later, with a note offering the compliments of the American ambassador,1 it was possible that the relic was real. But eBay rapidly withdrew the sale, faced with loud protest from Alessandra Mussolini, an active rightist politician in Berlusconi’s Italy, and Benito’s granddaughter.2 Then, in January/February 2010, it was announced that a collection of the Duce’s speeches had become Italy’s best-selling iPhone application, being downloaded more than a thousand times per day. The London Times reported: ‘it is more popular than a video game based on the film Avatar and an X-ray machine apparatus which [allegedly], allows you to see your friends naked’. This Mussolini remembrance, too, was withdrawn after protests from ‘Jewish groups and Holocaust survivors’.3 Meanwhile, Alessandra Mussolini was combating a sex scandal, when the web offered un video hard that claimed to show her dallying with another far right-wing politician, Roberto Fiore.4 By September the main issue had become the reality or otherwise of the ‘Mussolini diaries’, material that had also been in the news three years earlier.5 Now, too, at least according to the London Daily Telegraph, Pierre Milza, a French biographer of the Duce, revived the charge, once made by Mussolini’s most pertinacious student in Italy, Renzo De Felice, that Winston Churchill had ‘personally’ ordered the dictator’s execution on 28 April 1945 to ensure that the English leader’s pre-war enthusiasm for Fascism would be forgotten or obscured.6 Italy’s increasingly embattled Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, read a more personal message from the ‘discovery’ of the diaries, telling a perhaps astonished audience at an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) meeting in Paris that ‘he, like the fascist dictator,



Afterword271

is thought to wield considerable power, but actually has practically nothing’ (or so Bloomberg Businessweek phrased it).7 Rather more serious new material was made available in the diaries of the Duce’s last lover, Claretta Petacci, a selection from which was published in 2009 with an introduction highly charitable to the Duce’s peccadilloes by Mario Suttora. As far as Suttora was concerned, Mussolini was ‘smart and ingenuous together, false and sincere, brilliant and a disgrace, often embarrassingly puerile, therefore typically Italian, boastful, macho but true’,8 a conclusion that ignored the Duce’s boasting to his young companion that he would ‘exterminate’ the Jews and a number of other peoples. As if all this press sensation was not enough, the death of Mussolini’s jazz-pianist youngest son, Romano, in February 2006,9 led to the foundation of a Centro Studi Romano Mussolini, based at the old family holding of the Villa Carpena, near Forlimpopoli in the Romagna region. Its website promises that the place is ‘always open to visitors’, with the implication that serious contemplation of the dictator’s life and times can occur there. For students locked onto their desktops, the Centre meanwhile offers browsers images of the dictator and his family, a collection of Fascist and more generically patriotic songs, charming period film and newsreel clips, and, a little oddly, a short video of world heavyweight boxing champion, Primo Carnera, in his prime a Fascist ‘hero’.10 Should a tourist tire of the history retailed at this Centro, Mussolini’s nearby home paese, Predappio, and his burial place at the family crypt in the San Cassiano cemetery, just outside the town, are even more worth a visit (see Chapter 6 in this volume). In Predappio, a visitor can locate good food, pretty scenery and an attractive context from where to explore the town’s range of evocations of a dead dictator (and its most famous son). In the days of Mikhail Gorbachev and glasnost, the Georgian director, Tengiz Abuladze, made a wonderfully ironical film entitled Repentance (1984). Its ostensible story was of a small-town thug who, in his brutish criminality, embodied Stalin. Every time he was buried, up he popped again somewhere else to wreak mayhem. In its very last days, Abuladze advised, the USSR had scarcely made its reckoning with its dictator or vozhd and his personality cult.11 The constant, never-ending Italian fuss about Mussolini indicates that, almost seventy years after his death, his body is not yet mouldering quietly in his tomb but rather can be reviewed from many sites, both real and virtual. The cult of this Duce is not yet merely history. To be sure, a sceptical observer might hesitate before adding that Mussolini’s soul goes marching on. In our era of neo-liberal ‘market’ hegemony, the recipes of Fascism for human or national Italian good – autarky, empire, corporatism, war (and a dreadful tally of ‘premature deaths’ reaching a million) – are cruel, crude, dated and irrelevant. The attempts to parallel Berlusconi’s rule with that of the Duce are unconvincing in detail, while Italy’s neo-fascists,

272

The cult of the Duce

long the fourth largest party in the Republic and even more influential in business and zones of popular culture, at present seem converted by their last leader, Gianfranco Fini, into opting for the discreet charm of European conservatism. Certainly Fini has become zealous in his support for the rules of the liberal democratic game (and in wanting to end Berlusconi’s cavalier bending of them), as well as in pronouncing that there can be no turning back to Fascism. If Fini is to be believed, there is little reason for historians to analyse Mussolini’s career in a half-fear that another dictator of his type is waiting to march on Rome. Yet, in his era, as the successive chapters of this book well demonstrate and as is still evident at least in Italy, Mussolini’s cult had major ramifications, be they among the varied people of the peninsula, in the Italian Empire and the wider world, and be the Duce’s image transmitted by film image, high art, photography, biography or any form of mass culture. The Fascist dictatorship was indeed a ‘factory of consent’,12 where great ingenuity and intelligence were devoted to ‘propaganda’. Mussolini’s regime was, in quite a few senses, the pioneer of political command rooted in words and image. Of course, its secret police and more general readiness to infringe legality and utilise violence meant that there was always a stick lurking unconcealed behind the carrot of public appeal. Nonetheless, for anyone who believes that today politics are dependent on ‘spin’, on mollifying most of the people most of the time with the appearance of achievement and purpose, systems where the quickness of the word and image deceive the mind, then the deployment of the cult of the Duce in inter-war Italy should not be forgotten. It is also worth remembering that the word propaganda in those decades carried two evident connections. One highly evident in the Rome that the dictatorship strove to make its historic capital in many senses was with the Catholic Church. The Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide [Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith] was established in the Counter-Reformation by Pope Gregory XV in 1622 with the purpose of reviving and spreading the ‘true faith’, and resisting the assault of Protestantism. ‘Propaganda’ began there and thereafter the Church did not renounce its propaganda mission. It is nice to be reminded by Christopher Duggan that one of Leo XIII’s titles was ‘Father and Supreme Duce of the Italians’. As Duggan and other authors in this book have more generally maintained, the theorising most associated with the contemporary historians Emilio Gentile and Roger Griffin that Fascism proselytised a new ‘political religion’ to achieve an ‘anthropological revolution’ in Italian souls and so make ‘new Italian men and women’ needs to be conditioned by an admission of the surviving authority of the Church (and that of the Savoy monarchy, however uninspiring a dynasty). Fascist propaganda, the cult of a dictator, could scarcely be completely novel in Catholic Italy, where the durable, all but eternal, providential, master of words, image and history was the Vatican.



Afterword273

So much was old. If the ancient Church had not abandoned its effort to advise and lead the people and secure its gospel in their souls, from the USA came the new ideal of consumerism backed by the advertising tricks of Madison Avenue (and, more specifically, of Hollywood, as Gundle and others have noted above), carrying the promise of paradise in the here and now. Inter-war ‘totalitarian’ Italy may have remained in many ways a poor country, one that, after its entry into the war on 10 June 1940, starkly lacked the productivity, resources and technology needed to wage total war. Yet supermarkets were beginning to open in its cities, and Italians were taking to heart the modern dogma: ‘I shop, therefore I am.’ As war approached, Mussolini and other Fascist leaders on occasion warmed themselves with the belief that, in combat, national economic backwardness would not matter so much because a frugal peasant people were used to hardship, expected it and were cheerfully ready to delay their gratification until the end of time, or anyway until the current crisis was over. In practice, however, this conviction that Italy remained a fortress garrisoned by Fascist morality against consumerism and by Fascist propaganda against capitalist advertising proved false. No doubt Italians remained in majority poor. But their miseria did not stop them from envying the rich, all the more if such wealth arrived, as it so often did for Fascist underlings, through contacts and ‘corruption’. Perhaps a hope, if not an expectation, remained deep into 1942 or even early 1943 that the beneficent Duce was himself an exception to such greed and exploitation. But in their modest contribution to a Fascist war effort, Italians were waging a sort of moral strike against the more spartan themes of Fascist propaganda. Somewhere in their secret souls, they were yearning that they, or their children, might find the true happiness of consumption and usher in a world framed more by the propaganda of Madison Avenue and Hollywood’s silver screen than by their dictator’s forbiddingly austere myth. It is clear, then, that there are plenty of reasons to reflect on the cult of the Duce in Fascist Italy for its own sake. Mussolini’s dictatorship is threaded with many histories. The uncovering of their power and contradiction makes rewarding reading for any interested in the desires and fallibility of humankind. Yet Mussolini studies have a further value; they can prompt reflections on issues well beyond the specifics of Italian national history. It is common in Great Britain for commentators (especially if they are not historians of modern Germany) to bewail the centrality that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis have assumed, or are believed to have assumed, whether in seniorschool history or in that public opinion interested in the past. There is an irony here, since worry about too narrow a focus on Germany does nothing to amend the British obsession with what is almost always assumed to be the nation’s utterly virtuous and all-but crucial participation ‘from the very beginning’ in the war against Nazism. Often it seems that not a week passes without

274

The cult of the Duce

the re-evocation of Britain’s allegedly glorious and self-sacrificing battles. Part of the mixture is the (reasonable) conclusion that Hitler was utterly wicked. The Führer is also regularly portrayed as mad, in modern terminology a fanatical fundamentalist, unwaveringly determined on murder and world power. A version of the Second World War, in other words, lives on in the British mind as perpetually contemporary. It proves national decency and effort. It also suggests that, if we want current peace, we must be ready and armed against the re-emergence of ‘other Hitlers’, the warmongering, violent, murderous, dictatorial leaders of ‘rogue states’, places ever ready to ally in another Axis of Evil. The history of the conflict against Nazism seems thus to prove that Britain should never cease to shoulder global police responsibilities and should willingly undertake ‘good’ preventive wars that will stop history repeating itself. No British government should ever cut the defence budget. There are many delusions here. Chief among them is the deep belief that Hitler was the template for all modern dictators. In reality, however, a strong case can be mounted that Mussolini is a much better choice as a guide to dictatorial nature and behaviour, a conclusion that carries different implications about the ‘lessons of history’ to the present. This comment is not meant to be in any way ‘revisionist’. Mussolini rejoiced in being thought ‘savage’, a politician who was certainly not bound by traditional courtesies, by good behaviour or by the letter of the law. He at a minimum created the atmosphere than led to the murder of Giacomo Matteotti and other squadrist slayings. He destroyed free trade unions, suppressed media freedom and restricted the information available to Italians. He was ludicrously sexist and virulently racist. He urged his soldiers and airmen to use period chemical weapons of mass destruction in Libya and Ethiopia and at least talked as if he would have been happy to see Greek cities razed to the ground. He attacked the sovereign state of Ethiopia with no serious cause, and, thereafter, blithely sent his enforced ‘volunteers’ to kill and die in a foreign civil war in Spain. After June 1940 he followed Hitler into every sphere of the Second World War, making little Italy the foe not only of ‘European’ Britain and France but also those global superpowers, the USSR and USA. He did not allow his policies to be checked by budget realities but instead acted as though states could be driven by will rather than economic performance. In issue after issue, he was a malign force in Italy and the wider world. Yet this dictator does not seem well defined as ‘mad’ or ‘fundamentalist’. Indeed, quite a case can be made that he was anything other than a ‘true believer’ in the Fascist ideology that was so noisily preached under his rule, the least worshipful of the cult of the Duce. Often he seemed aware that a week is a long time in politics. Was he at base an anti-communist? Certainly the Fascist squads during the dictator’s rise to power did their best to extirpate Italian Marxism and drove its sympathisers into silence for a generation. In June



Afterword275

1941 Italian troops joined their Axis camerate in Operation Barbarossa. Yet, hardly were they sent to the Eastern Front than Mussolini was trying to back away and convert Hitler to the view that the real enemies were the ‘plutocratic powers’ of Britain and the USA. A compromise peace, the Duce urged, should be found with Stalin (and, after all, Italian–Soviet relations had been ‘normal’ from 1922 to 1939). So was he, above all, an anti-liberal? His Fascist regime overthrew the system and trashed the values of ‘Liberal Italy’. Moreover, in the 1930s, there were vivid propaganda campaigns against the ‘slipper-wearing’ bourgeoisie, decadents who preferred a quiet life and were unready for Fascist rigour. In these years, the national economic line became ‘autarky’, with its loud rejection of the liberal ideal of free trade. Yet, in the 1920s, Mussolini had often enough favoured liberal economics, sold off state property nationalised in the war and primly sought to balance the budget. Even in the 1930s, he and his family could not hide their personal opening to consumerism, whether when the Duce by preference watched at night Laurel and Hardy and other Hollywood comics, when his eldest son, Vittorio, travelled to the USA and sought to combine Italian and American cinema in some positive and commercially fruitful manner, when his youngest son, Romano, developed his lifetime enthusiasm for jazz, or when his eldest daughter, Edda, drank CocaCola with evident pleasure while gladly participating in the cosmopolitan high society of Shanghai, where her husband, Galeazzo Ciano, was serving his diplomatic apprenticeship. The list can continue. If Mussolini was really the high priest or prophet of a Fascist religion, then should he not have dealt with the Catholic Church? How could his Italy ever have been genuinely ‘totalitarian’ unless he sent a squad of his men to close down the Vatican and expel the Pope to another land? In his socialist and anticlerical youth, Mussolini had often enough sounded off about the happy prospect of a final solution to the Catholic problem. In office, however, he trimmed and accommodated, adroitly working out an effective and even statesmanlike cohabitation with Popes Pius XI and XII, in reward, earning (mostly) their public praise. Perhaps there were some difficulties when Italy began to impose anti-Semitic legislation from the summer of 1938. But was Mussolini really a convinced proponent of Judaeocide? Some debate about the matter continues. But the dictator, at different times and for different reasons in his savage mode, would burst out in hatred of many peoples and, however cruel was his Italy’s participation in the Holocaust, it is hard to see the regime driven by Nazi-style fanaticism. Often, Mussolini’s most basic racist assumptions seemed to be those that he shared with many Italians, sure that racial weakness was most plainly displayed among their fellow nationals who lived further south than they did. The older the Duce became (and he was much given to worrying about his own ageing, all the more since

276

The cult of the Duce

his mother, father and brother did not make old bones), the more blatantly cynical he became, somewhere in his secret mind, not least about himself (as well as about his regime, ‘the Fascists’ as he called them, the Partito Nazionale Fascista and Italians).13 It becomes unnecessary to continue. The most useful lesson that Mussolini’s life and the cult of the Duce that raised him to ostensibly godly status in command of his dictatorship in Italy teach is that dictators are not by definition ‘mad’, if that word means incomprehensible or ‘total’ in some way. Rather, they, too, like all of us, mix ideals, ambitions and actions, often in unlikely and even contradictory combinations. They are best understood in the context of their times and societies, with close attention required to the class, ethnic and gender assumptions that structure their thoughts and behaviour. On quite a few occasions, they lack free will and seek to survive the day by appeasement and false promises. These ‘limits of dictators’ power’ do not stop them being inefficient or deluded rulers and brutal killers. But they are not beyond human ken. When their cults urge that they were or are, we the onlookers should be as sceptical as we are when assured of papal or other religious infallibility or that the latest soap powder will wash our blouses and shirts whiter than white. Notes  1 J. P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. xv.  2 www.theinternetpatrol.com/bits-of-mussolinis-blood-and-brain-listed-for-sale-onebay (accessed 6 September 2010).  3 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8497291.stm (accessed 6 September 2010).  4 www.polisblog.it/post/6261/video-hard-tra-alessandra-mussolini-e-roberto-fioreuna-bufala (accessed 6 September 2010).  5 www.ilgiornale.it/cultura/diari_duce_bompiani_li_pubblica/diari-mussolini-del​ u​tri/01-09-2010/articolo-id=470544-page=0-comments=1. The respectable publishing house was moving to make them available in book form.  6 www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/world-war-2/7978285/Winston-Church​ill-​ ordered-assassination-of-Mussolini-to-protect-compromising-letters.html (acc­e­s­ sed 6 September 2010). For De Felice’s conspiracy theory in this regard, see his Rosso e Nero, ed. P. Chessa (Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 1995), pp. 147–8.  7 www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-28/berlusconi-cites-mussolini-diaries-sayshe-has-little-power.html (accessed 6 September 2010).  8 M. Suttora, ‘Questo diario’, in C. Petacci, Mussolini segreto: diari 1932–1938 (Milan: Rizzoli, 2009). The actual diary is thousands of pages long and continues to the end. However, under the operating 70-year rule, material cannot be published until 2015. For introduction to the volume edited by Suttora, see R.J.B. Bosworth, ‘Mussolini frustrated’, BBC History Magazine, October 2010, pp. 34–8.



Afterword277

 9 The death occasioned the publication of another in the long list of anodyne Mussolini family memoirs, aimed as much at an international audience as an Italian. See R. Mussolini, My Father Il Duce: A Memoir by Mussolini’s Son (New York: Kales Press, 2006). Romano was Alessandra’s father. 10 www.casadeiricordi.it/ For details, see D. Marchesini, Carnera (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2006). 11 D. J. Youngblood, ‘Review of Repentance’, American Historical Review, 95 (1990), pp. 1133–6. 12 For the origin of this term, see P. Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso: fascismo e mass media (Bari: Laterza, 1975). 13 For my further development of all these matters, see R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini (rev. edn) (London: Bloomsbury, 2010).

Index

Abruzzo 51 Abuladze, Tengiz 271 Achilles 18 Adams, Christopher 7 Adamson, Walter 75 Addis Ababa 145, 156 Adowa 21, 22, 152, 153 Adriatic 111, 121 Afe Work Ghevre Jesus 154, 156 Africa 22, 145, 148, 150, 151, 155 African Empire 4, 144, 154 East Africa 133 North Africa 133, 134 Agro Romano 135 Alciati, Ambrogio 163 Alessandria 140 Alexandria 104 Alfieri, Dino 81 Alidosi, Francesco 202 Alleanza Nazionale 204, 205, 243, 266 Allies 134, 241, 258 Alps 18, 111, Alvaro, Corrado 123, 130 Amato 67 Anarchism 19, 20, 37, 64 Anderson, Benedict 51 Andreotti, Libero 234 ANPI (National Association of Italian Partisans) 203 Apennines 93, 111, 198 Aprilia 188 Aquarone, Alberto 262 Arata, Giorgio 194 Architettura 211 Arditi 57 Ardy, Silvio 211 Arezzo 101 Arfe, Gaetano 262 Argan, Giulio Carlo 228 Argentina 6, 248

Army (Italian) 13, 16, 59, 81, 100, 134, 148, 151, 169, 196 Arpinati, Leandro 118, 194, 195, 196, 200, 201 Art Nouveau 166, 196-7, 230, 231 Arts and Humanities Research Council 6 Asmara 145 Assisi 32 Assunto, Rosario 36 Athens 18 Atlantic Ocean 173 Augustus 165, 168, 211 Australia 7 Australian National research Council 7 Austro-Hungarian Empire 58, 60 Avanti! 62, 63, 115 Baccanelli, Pietro 102 Badoglio, Pietro 146, 241 Bagehot, Walter 13 Balbo, Italo 28, 35, 81, 116, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152 Baldassare, Antonio 266 Baldassini, Cristina 247 Baldi, Gian Vittorio 259 Balilla 103, 195, 213, 249 Balla, Giacomo 230 Ballio-Morpurgo, Vittorio 219 Baltazar Carlos, Prince 168 Banca Romana 19, 20 Banca Toscana 167 Banfichi, Tullio 67 Barbara 232 Bargellini, Giulio 235 Bari 111, 120, 121, 122, 242 Teatro Petruzzelli 120 Barizzi, Paolo 253 Barnum 85 Bartlett, F. C. 77 Bastianini, Giuseppe 30



Index279

Beaverbrook, Lord 74 Bedel, Maurice 77 Bellini, Aroldo 220 Belluzzo, Giuseppe 100 Belpoliti, Marco 44 Beltrame, Achille 124 Beltramelli, Antonio 41, 53, 117 L’uomo nuovo 41 Bengasi 248 Benghazi 146 Ben-Ghiat, Ruth 248 Béraud, Henri 77 Berlin 94 Berlusconi, Silvio 243, 265, 266, 270, 271 Bernardi, Giulio 67 Bernasconi, Paola 6 Berneri, Camillo 78 Berselli, Filippo 205 Bertelli, Renato 170, 227, 229, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, Bertelli, Sergio 202 The King’s Body 202, Bertellini, Giorgio 78 Bertini, Francesca 72 Biagi, Enzo 261 Bianchi, Cristina 45 Bianchi, Michele 80 Biennale, Venice 49, 167, 170, 197, 229, 231, 233 Biondi, Pietro 263 Bissolati, Leonida 46 Bizzoni, Achille 18 Boccaleri, Primo 140 Bocchini, Arturo 60 Bologna 16, 18, 19, 37, 61, 118, 119, 138, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 235 Basilica di San Petronio 202 Borgo Panigale Casa del Fascio 202 Casa del Partigiano Littoriale Stadium 118, 193, 194, 195, 200, 201, 202 Piazza Maggiore 202, Porta Lame 203 Sindacato Belle Arti 203 Bolshevism 32, 34, 36, 37, 120, 133 Bolzon, Piero 32 Bondi, Dino 77 Bonghi, Ruggiero 19, 28 Boorstin, Daniel 74, 75, 82 Bossaglia, Rossana 166 Bottai, Giuseppe 35, 76, 124, 132, 138, 200, 201, 214, 217, 227, 234

Bosworth, Richard 1, 6, 7, 45, 85, 253, 270 Mussolini 1, Boym, Svetlana 254 Brancati, Vitaliano 244 Brasini, Armando 213 Brauer, Fae 171 Braun, Emily 161, 171 Bresci, Gaetano 19 Brindisi 122 Bucci, Vincenzo 198 Bull, Andy 249, 250 Cabiria 77 Caesar, Julius 111, 121, 140, 154, 156, 257 California 114 Calvanese, Umberto 220, 221 Calvino, Italo 164 Caminada, Gianni 182, 183, 184 Camorra 43 Campania 132 Campi, Alessandro 243, 247, 249 Canevari, Angelo 215, 216 Canevari, Silvio 215 Cannistraro, Philip 41, 42, 47, 53, 122 Capitolium 139 Caponi, Claudio 227 Cappello 37 Caprera 15, 83 Caracciolo, Nicola, 264, 265 Caradonna, Giuseppe 122 Carden-Coyne, Ana 48 Carducci, Giosuè 16, 31 Eterno femminino regale 16 Carpanetti, Arnaldo 216 Carrà, Carlo 42 Carrara 214 Carell, Ghitta 184 Carnera, Primo 187, 271 Caserta 62 Castaldi, Agnese 68 Castelli, Giulio Cesare 248 Castrocaro 96 Cavour, Camillo Benso 236 Ceauceşcu, Nicolae 6 Cervi, Alcide 247 Cervi, Mario 265 Chaplin, Charlie 72, 253 Chevalier, Maurice 77, 80 Chiavolini, Alessandro 60 Chicago Evening American 77 China 6 Chivalry 50, 63 Christian Democrats 245 Christianity 36

280

The cult of the Duce

Churchill, Winston 270 Ciampi, Carlo Azeglio 265 Cianetti, Tullio 32, 33, 134 Ciani, Manlio 221 Ciano, Galeazzo 12, 76, 81, 82, 83, 134, 138, 233, 265, 275 Ciarlantini, Franco 211, Cimadon, Ester 60 Cinti, Italo 198 Ciseri, Carlo 29, 133, 134 Colleoni, Bartolomeo 49, 197 Colletti, Lucio 264 Columbia Pictures 72 Comitato Olimpionico Nazionale Italiano (CONI) 215, Communism 96, 245, 246, 264, 266 Italian Communist Party 245, 264, 265 Conti, Arturo 204, 205 Conti, Giuseppe Gadda 261 Conti, Primo 162, 164, 167, 168, 230 Coppede, Adolfo 234 Cosenza 142 Costa, Andrea 28, 31 Cragg, Tony 232 Craxi, Bettino 264 Cremoncini, Roberta 7 Critica Fascista 35, 131 Crispi, Francesco 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 31, 80, 236 Croatia 140 Croce, Benedetto 32, 228 Crum, Roger 169 Cullen, Anthea 171 Curi, Augusto 120 Cyrenaica 156 D’Alessandro, Pasquale 266 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 16, 28, 34, 75, 80, 110, 115, 162, 167 Daily Express 74 Daily Telegraph 149, 270 Dalmatia 104 Dalser, Ida 57-68, Dante Alighieri 30, 31, 111, 121 De Amicis, Edmondo 16, Cuore 16, De Chirico, Giorgio 42, De Felice, Renzo 118, 125, 243, 262, 264, 270 De Gasperi, Alcide 245 De Grazia, Victoria 77 De Luca, Giovanni, 258, 264, 267 De Luca, Sebastiano 121 De Meis, Angelo 13 De Micheli, Mario 228

De Renzi, Mario 218 De Rosa, Gabriele 262 Decennale 115, 116, 117, 162, 165, 170, 174, 211, 212 Del Boca, Angelo 152 Del Debbio, Enrico 219, 220 Del Fra, Lino 261 Del Guercio, Antonio 228 Delcroix, Carlo 38 Della Quercia, Jacopo 197 Depero, Fortunato 232 Depretis, Agostino 20 Di Bella, Maria Pia 64 Di Canio, Paolo 253 Di Genova, Giorgio 162, 164, 165, 193, 229 Di Giorgio, Ettore 162, 163, 164 Diggins, John 82, 83 Disraeli, Benjamin 73 Don Quixote 46 Dondi, Mirco 241, 242 Dottori, Gerardo 231 Dovadola 96 Dovìa 93, 94, 95, 96 Ducati 119 Duggan, Christopher 1, 6, 11, 27, 129, 272 Eco, Umberto 165 Edward VIII 79 Egypt 146 Emilia-Romagna, see Romagna Epoca 247 Eritrea 145, 152, 156 Estorick Collection 7 Ethiopia 12, 21, 104, 144, 145, 146, 147, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 169, 220, 274 Ethiopian war 118, 129, 141, 142 Etiopia 154 Europe 6, 31, 45, 47, 48, 75, 76, 136, 169, 171, 173, 210, 260 Eastern Europe 153 Fairbanks, Douglas 72, 77, 80 Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta 3, 47 Fallaci, Neera 65 Farinacci, Roberto 28, 34, 35, 96 Farnese, Alessandro 197 Fasci di combattimento 61, 94, 180 Fascism Anti-Fascism 263 Autarky 123, 271, 275 Cultural policy 227, 228-34 Empire 2, 4, 118, 119, 137, 144-57, 164, 184, 211, 214, 215, 216, 271, 272 Fall of 227, 241



Index281

Fascist Militia 67, 196 Foreign Ministry 78 Grand Council 32, 241, 260 Ideology 42, 161, 171, 173, 220,221,262, 274 Land reclamation 120, 123, 124 Ministry of Defence 59 Ministry of Interior 61 Ministry of Justice 67 Ministry of Popular Culture 119, 246 Ministry of War 196 Neo-Fascism see Movimento Sociale Italiano OVRA 132, 134, 272 Party (PNF) 2, 27, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 44, 65, 247 Racial legislation see Race—Racial Laws Squadrism 28, Unions 274 Violence 42, 76, 117, 153, 245, 247, 253, 261, 272 Youth (GIL) 98, 102 Fattori, Giovanni 196 Fazi, Leonida 139 Fazzini, Margherita 64 Aneddoti e giudizi su Mussolini 64 Fedele, Pietro 67 Federzoni, Luigi 138 Felski, Rita 253 Ferrara 139, 150, 202 Ferrero, Guglielmo 21 Ferrazzi, Ferruccio 211 Ferro, Marc 267 Fiera del Levante 121 Finaldi, Giuseppe 7, 144 Fini, Gianfranco 272 Fiumana 95 Fiume (Rijeka) 75, 141 Florence 61, 101, 104, 156, 171, 196, 197, 198, 234 Accademia di Belle Arti 234 Forlì 64, 93, 95, 96, 98, 100, 101, 103, 105 Forlimpopoli 271 Fortini, Franco 260 Fortunato, Giustino 29 Foro Mussolini see Rome, Foro Italico Forum Romanum 213, Foschini, Arnaldo 219 France 14, 20, 35, 62, 63, 68, 168, 274 Franco, Francisco 1 French Revolution 11 Friuli 50 Fumaiolo Mt 95 Funi, Achille 42

Fusco, Giancarlo 261 Futurism 5, 75, 164, 170, 227, 229, 230, 231, 253 Gadda, Carlo Emilio 253 Gaddafi, Muammar 152 Gaeta 149 Galli, Giorgio 116 Garetto, Paolo 229 Garrani, Ivo 260, 261 Garibaldi, Giuseppe 4, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 73, 80, 83, 113, 124, 167, 179, 249 Gasti, Giovanni 61, 62 Gatti, Guido 58 Geneva 62, 156 Genoa 15, 114, 136, 148, 149, 231 Gentile, Emilio 3, 27, 50, 73, 194, 272 The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy 3, 11, Gentile, Giovanni 32 George III, King 17 Géricault 168 Gerarchia 42 Germany 104, 228, 236, 250, 258, 273 see also Nazism Ghione, Emilio 77 Giachetti, Fosco 247, 248 Giannini, Guglielmo 245 Gibson, Violet 37, 68 Giambologna 197 Giampaoli, Mario 36 GIL see Fascism — Youth Gioberti, Vincenzo 11, 12 Giolitti, Giovanni 21, 22, 24, 28, 32, 236 Giovannoni, Gustavo 213 Giovinezza 149 Giro d’Italia 101 Giuliano, Balbino 36 Giuriati, Giovanni 2, 30 Gladstone, William 74 Gorbachev, Mikhail 271 Gori, Gigliola 45 Gracci, Athe 136 Gramsci, Antonio 245 Grandi, Dino 28, 31 Grasso, Aldo 261 Gravelli, Asvero 112 Gray, Ezio Maria 100 Graziani, Rodolfo 146, 154, 156 Graziosi, Giuseppe 162, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 204, 205, 206 Great Britain 17, 74, 153, 253, 273, 274, 275 Greece 133, 141 Gruppo degli Urbanisti Romani 213,

282

The cult of the Duce

Guadagnini 67 Guariglia, Raffaele 154 Guerrini, Giovanni 217 Guerzoni, Giuseppe 18 Guidi Mussolini, Rachele 59, 61, 64, 65, 66, 83, 96, 118, 242, 247, 270 Gundle, Stephen 1, 6, 7, 43, 72, 110, 197, 241, 273 Guzzanti, Corrado 266 Hardy 78, 275 Hemingway, Ernest 78 Heracles 18 Hitler, Adolf 1, 2, 5, 6, 12, 86, 104, 113, 184, 193, 213, 250, 252, 253, 273, 274, 275 Hitler Youth 104 Hoffman 184 Hussein, Saddam 6, 193 Icarus 215 Il Borghese 246 Il comune di Bologna 198 Il Corriere della Sera 35, 131, 153, 185, 187, 198, 199, 246, 257, 259 Il Giornale d’Italia 180 Il Popolo d’Italia 2, 12, 30, 42, 44, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 65, 67, 68, 81, 115, 116, 130, 131, 180, 195 Il Popolo di Romagna 100, 103 Il Resto del Carlino 62, 199, 200 Il sovrano 13 Illustrazione Italiana 184, 186, 198, 201 Il vigile 249 Impressionism 196, 197 Indrio, Ugo 36 Islam 149, 150, 156, 173, 174, 185 Isnenghi, Mario 45, 113, 116 Istituto Luce 82, 111, 116, 119, 122, 135, 149, 153, 184, 185, 187, 193, 258, 259, 260, 261, 263, 266, 267 Istituto Nazionale della Previdenza Sociale 211, Italia del popolo 63 Italy 1, 6, The South 120 Republic of 18, Unification 4, Jara Bank 62 Jona, Elio 62 Jordanova, Ludmilla Jugendstil 166 Julius II, Pope 165, 202

Kai-shek, Chiang 6 Klimt, Gustav 166 L’Assalto 195 L’Avvenire d’Italia 199, 200, 201 La Domenica del Corriere 124 La Piè 105 La Riforma 15, 31 La Rivista del Popolo d’Italia 170 La Rovere, Luca 243 La Vittoria 186 La Voce 23, 28, 32 Lanna, Luciano 257 Lateran Pacts, see Roman Catholic Church— Lateran pacts Laura, Ernesto G. 113 Laurel, Stan 78, 275 Lauro, Achille 245 LaVerdiere, Julian 233 Lazzeri, Maria 265 League of Nations 169 Le Bon, Gustave 31, 46 Lecce 122 Lenin, Vladimir 48 Leo XIII, Pope 15, 16, 272 Leoni, Luigi 185 Libera, Adalberto 216, 217 Liberalism 13, 14, 19, 23, 34, 37, 259 Libya 27, 145-52, 173, 185, 274 Lindbergh, Charles 72 Lippmann, Walter 74, 75 Livi, Grazia 249 Lombard League 12 London 7, 29, 233, 270 Longanesi, Leo 242, 246, 266 Loy, Mino 259 L’Impero 33 L’Unità 28 Luce di Roma Lucetti, Gino 37 Lupi, Dario 60 Lussu, Emilio 84 Luxardo, Elio 187 Luzzatto, Sergio 44, 45, 206 Macchiaioli 196, 197 Maciste 72, 77 Mafia 43 Malaparte, Curzio 41, 76, 253 Muss 76 Maltoni, Rosa 35, 64, 94, 95, 96, 100, 101 Malvano, Laura 161, 194 Manacorda, Gastone 262 Mangini, Cecilia 261



Index283

Mantua 101 Mao Tse Tung 193 Mapplethorpe, Robert 233 Marazio, Zelmira 135, 136 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 72, 75, 76, 162, 170, 253 Marsili, Marzia 245 Martin, Simon 195 Masaccio 168 Matteotti, Giacomo 27, 32, 33, 35, 37, 42, 61, 65, 83, 100, 241, 274 Margherita, Queen 13, 14, 16, 17, 22, 23 Matsouka, Yousuke 104 Maxentius 217, Mazzini, Giuseppe 11, 12, 15, 18, 30, 31, 139 Mecca 106 Medici, Cosimo de’ 197 Meldola 93 Melis Bassu, Giuseppe 36 Menelik II 145, 147, 156 Messeni-Petruzzelli, Emanuele 120 Micciche, Lino 261 Michelangelo Buonarroti 202 Milan 29, 30, 37, 46, 49, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 75, 81, 94, 98, 111, 112, 115, 116, 117, 119, 163, 197, 230, 231, 241, 258, 260 Casa del fascio 49, 165 Piazza del Duomo 37, 116, 117 Piazza San Sepolcro Piazzale Loreto 241, 242, 258, 265 Triennale 210 Via Paolo da Cannobio 116 Mille, Cecil B. de 85 Milza, Pierre 1, 6, 270 Mingazzini, Giovanni 68 Minguzzi, Luciano 203, 204 Miramonti 67 Mochi, Francesco 197 Modena 196, 197 Reale Istituto di Belle Arti 196 Modernity 2, 3, 43, 45, 75, 77, 86, 97, 112, 153, 156, 164, 170, 179, 201, 214, 232 Mola, Paola 165, 230 Monarchy 4, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 28, 45, 178, 244, 272, Mondadori (publisher) 41, 228 Monicelli, Mario 248, 259 Montanarini, Luigi 215, 216, 217 Montanelli, Indro 246, 257, 265 Monza 19 Moore, Martin 149 Moretti, Luigi 214, 215, 219, 220

Moretti, Marco 234, 235 Morgani, Manlio 59 Morin, Edgar 84, 85 Moro, Aldo 263 Moto Guzzi 83 Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) 204, 242, 253 Mussolini, Albino Benito 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 66, 67 Mussolini, Alessandra 270 Mussolini, Alessandro 97, 102 Mussolini, Arnaldo 2, 67, 83, 94, 96, 99, 102, 131 Mussolini, Benito Anti-clericalism 66, 275 Biographers 63, 64, 65, 211, Burial 242 Charisma 76 Death/execution 115, 241, 242, 258, 260, 265, 266 Germany 104 Image 42, 179, 189, 211 Romagnole 95 Socialism 44, 61, 62, 64, 66, 78, 97, 111, 115, 116, 275 Writings La mia vita 64, Vita di Arnaldo 102 Mussolini, Bruno 83 Mussolini, Edda 59, 83, 264, 275 Mussolini, Rachele, see Guidi Mussolini, Rachele Mussolini, Sandrino 102 Mussolini, Vittorio 83, 275 Naldi, Filippo 62 Naples 38, 80, 120, 121, 148, 149, 245 Napoleon 121, 165, 168 Nationalism (Italian) 3, 13, 22, 27, 28, 32, 75, 76, 146, 248 Navarra, Quinto 246, 249 Nazism (National Socialism) 5, 6, 250, 253, 273, 274, 275 Nazzari, Amedeo 247, 248 Negro, Silvio 259 Nicoloso, Pino 251, 252 Nietzsche, Friederich 253 Novecento Italiano 42, 167, 173, 228, 230 Nuova Antologia 19, 23 Oggi 247 Ojetti, Ugo 29, 197 Oldrini, Franco 141 Opera Nazionale Balilla (ONB) 213, 214,

284

The cult of the Duce

Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (OND) 100, 103, 114 Orano, Paolo 30, 132 Oriani, Alfredo 31 Orlando, Vittorio Emanuele 19, 61, 63, OVRA, see Fascism—OVRA Ozerov, Yuri 260 Padua 49, 137 Pagano, Bartolomeo 77 Paganuzzi, Giovanni Battista 16 Palazzo Chigi 33, 37, 120 Pandolfo, Maria Grazia 6 Paniconi, Mario 220 Pansa, Giampaolo 265 Pansa, Mario 80 Pantheon 15 Papini, Giovanni 28 Paris 49, 63, 196, 233, 270 Paris Peace Conference 63, Passerini, Luisa 45, 62, 63, 64, 66, 203 Pavolini, Alessandro 81 Pediconi, Giulio 220 Pellizzi, Camillo 29 Pende, Nicola 121 Peron, Juan 6 Perth 7 Perugia 161, 231 Accademia di Belle Arti 161 Pesaro 104 Petacci, Claretta 68, 241, 243, 247, 252, 265, 271 Petacco, Arrigo 236 Petrolini, Ettore 72, 81 Philip V 168 Piacentini, Marcello 213, 216 Pica, Agnoldomenico 218 Pickford, Mary Piedmont 11, 15 Pieri, Giuliana 1, 6, 7, 161, 227 Piero della Francesca 168, Piersante 98, 101, 103, 105 Pini, Giorgio 30, 53, 111, 131, 200 Biography of Mussolini 53, 185, 187 Pinkus, Karen 182, 184 Pisa 37 Pisacane, Carlo 31 Pisanello 167 Pisenti, Piero 261 Pius IX, Pope 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 Pius XI, Pope 1, 66, 166, 275 Pius XII, Pope 244, 245, 275 Poggiali, Ciro 153 Pollard, John 66

Pontiggia, Elena 166 Porry-Pastorel, Adolfo 180, 181, 186 Portalupi, Mario 230 Positivism 32 Prampolini, Enrico 229, 232 Predappio 4, 34, 38, 59, 93-106, 111, 137, 138, 141, 236, 242, 245, 247, 252, 259, 271 Caproni aircraft factory 98, 105 Casa del Fascio 98, 99, 103, 104 GIL house 98 Palazzo Varano 97, 100, 102 Predappio Nuova 35, 95, 96-9 Rocca delle Caminate 93, 99, 101, 104, 118 San Cassiano 93, 94, 95, 97, 100, 102, 105, 242, 271 Santa Rosa of Lima, church of 35, 95, 96, 97 Prezzolini, Giuseppe 23, 24 Protti, Alfredo 163 Prunas, Pasquale 260 Puglia 120, 121, 122 Qesaru Mangest Malektagna 154 Rabagliati, Alberto 80 Rabbi valley 93, 96 Race and Racism 41, 46, 47, 48, 49, 66, 95, 117, 139, 145, 221, 275 Racial laws 2, 53, 137, 145, 247 RAI (Radiotelevisione italiana) 260, 261, 264, 266 Ram 230 Rashid, Karim 233 Rattazzi, Urbano 20 Ratti, Federico 139 Rauti, Pino 264 Ravel, Emilio 260 Reggio Emilia 27 Renaissance 41, 111, 164, 167, 168, 169, 174, 194, 197, 198, 201, 217, 253 Renzi, Renzo 77 Repubblica Sociale Italiana, see Salò Republic Ricci, Renato 214, 220 Riccione 118 Riefenstahl, Leni 250, 253 Rimini 104 Risi, Dino 248 Riso amaro 249 Risorgimento 11, 12, 19, 31, 38, 77, 111, 139, 162, 167, 178, 195, 213 Rivi, Luciano 197 Rocca delle Caminate, see Predappio— Rocca delle Caminate Rodin, August 196 Roghi, Vanessa 6, 257



Index285

Roman Catholic Church 2, 3, 12, 13, 14, 15, 22, 23, 31, 32, 37, 39, 45, 64, 65, 66, 93, 95, 113, 139, 149, 244, 272, 275, Anti-clericalism Council 1869-70 13 Lateran Pacts 2, 60, 61, 66 Opera dei congressi 15, Vatican 12, 13, 66, 140, 166, 259, 272, 275 Romagna 28, 31, 35, 41, 93, 95, 104, 111,117, 118, 119, 140, 242, 271 Romanità 43, 48, 165, 173, 209 Rome 4, 13, 15, 17, 18, 20, 24, 32, 37, 42, 68 Ara Pacis 211 Classical Rome 12, 30, 168, 211, Campidoglio 161 Colosseum 218, 231 EUR 251 Foro Italico 212, 213,214, 215, 219, 220, 221 March on 3, 32, 41, 44, 49, 65, Mausoleum of Augustus 211 Monte Mario 220 Palazzo delle Esposizioni 213, Palazzo Venezia 113, 130, 218, 246 Porta Pia 37 Quirinal Palace 13 St Peter’s 214, 220, 244 Third Rome 11, 12, 30, 217 Via dell’Impero 217, 218, 219, 220 Viminale 130, 198 Roosevelt, Theodore 72, 74 Rosselli, Roberto 259 Rossetti, Maria Teresa 137 Rossi, Cesare 78, 81 Rossi, Eugenia 154 Rossi, Filippo 257 Rossini, Giuseppe 263 Rubicon 111, 140 Ruggieri, Alfredo 121 Rygier, Maria 68 St George 169 St Sebastian 44 Salò Republic 1, 115, 117, 204, 205, 206, 246, 252, 261, 265 Istituto storico della Repubblica Sociale Italiana 204 Salerno, Enrico Maria 260 Salvemini, Gaetano 24, 28 San Cassiano, see Predappio—San Cassiano San Clemente 58, 68 San Donà del Piave 148 San Servolo 68

Sapori, Francesco 50, 161, 162, 164, 165, 167, 170, 193 L’arte e il Duce 50, 161, 162, 163, 164 Sardinia 11, 111, 122, 123, 124, 134 Sarfatti, Margherita 2, 36, 41-54, 57, 63, 131, 165, 166 Dux 36, 41-54, 63 Segni e colori 50 My Fault: Mussolini as I Knew Him 54 Savonarola, Girolamo 51 Savoy, House of 11, 12, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23, 152, 272 Sborgi, Franco 162, 163, 164, 165 Sbragia, Giancarlo 260 Schawinsky, Xanti 229 Schiavi, Alessandro 105 Schapp, Jeffrey 251 Segreteria Particolare del Duce 39, 129, 130, 140, 142, 234 Seeslen, Georg 250, 252 Selassie, Haile 156 Seldes, George 62 Serenelli, Sofia 6, 93 Settimo giorno 247 Severini, Gino Sforza, Carlo 35 Sicilian Vespers 12 Sicily 134, 241 Sighele, Scipio 22 Simmel, Georg 79 Sironi, Mario 42, 161, 173, 216, 218 Socialism 4, 16, 19, 20, 22, 23, 28, 29, 42, 96, 98, 113, 115, 245, Socialist Party 27, 32, 264 Soffici, Ardengo 196 Sonnino, Sidney 23, 28 Sordi, Alberto 248, 249 Sorel, George 31 Soviet Union 134, 236 Spain 274 Staglieno (cemetery) 15 Stalin, Josef 86, 134, 193, 245, 271, 275 Starace, Achille 2, 81, 102, 104, 116, 118, 122, 209 Starace, Loreto 104 Sturani, Enrico 84 Storchi, Simona 6, 7, 41, 193 Sullivan, Brian 41, 42, 47, 53 Susmel, Duilio 235 Suttora, Mario 271 Switzerland 52, 115, 211, 246 Tacchi Venturi, Pietro 66 Taine, Hippolyte 14

286

The cult of the Duce

Talli, Virgilio 57 Tantillo, Alessandra 6 Taranto Termaber (Mount) Terminillo 82 Terni 32 Thayaht (Ernesto Michahelles) 230, 232 Tiber, River 95, 213 Time 86 Togliatti, Palmiro 245 Tortorella, Aldo 264 Totalitarianism 3, 81, 206, 210, 229, 230, 273, 275 Trade Unions 274 Tranfaglia, Nicola 41 Trasformismo 19 Trentecoste, Domenico 234 Trento 58, 60, 61, 66, 67, 233 Trentino Alto Adige 245 Trieste 149 Tripoli 146, 149, 151 Tunisia 146 Turati, Augusto 2, 37, 80, 82, 100 Turati, Filippo 19 Turin 13, 15, 104, 120, 121, 136, 154 Turiello, Pasquale 17, 19 Tuscany 93, 198 Udine 104 Umberto I, King 19, 20, 22, 23 Umberto, Crown Prince 13, 16, 17 Uomo Qualunque 245 United States of America 54, 75, 83, 154, 242, 270, 273, 274, 275 Urso, Simona 53 Vaccaro, Giuseppe 216 Valentino, Rudolph 78 Varano di Costa 96 Vatican, see Roman Catholic Church—the Vatican Velásquez 168 Veneto 148, 216 Venice 37, 49, 58, 68, 101, 167, 170, 197, 229, 230, 231, 233, 251, 259 St Mark’s, church 37 Ventresca, Robert 265, 266

Venturi, Lionello 229 Verdiani, Mario 67 Verona 119, 203, 260 Vespa, Bruno 267 Viani, Lorenzo 230 Victor Emmanuel II, King 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, Victor Emmanuel III, King 12, 23, 58, 65, 79, 99, 102, 103, 104, 144, 148, 152, 154, 156, 166, 216, 241 Victoria, Queen 17 Vietti, Luigi 218 Villa Torlonia 66, 83, 118, 265 Villari, Pasquale 19, 28 Violante, Luciano 265 Vittoriano 15, 213 Vittorio Veneto 136 Volonte, Gian Maria 260 Volpe, Gioacchino 12, 36 Wieland, Karin 42, Wildt, Adolfo 49, 50, 162, 165, 167, 173, 229, 230 Dux 50, 162, 165-7, 229, 230 Woodall, Joanna 194 World War I 4, 6, 22, 27, 28, 29, 30, 44, 46, 47, 48, 51, 58, 62, 63, 65, 66, 74, 77, 111, 115, 131, 133, 146, 148, 162, 179, 187, 197, 245, 259 War veterans 29, 44, World War II 1, 2, 5, 18, 30, 33, 34, 93, 94, 96, 99, 105, 106, 119, 123, 124, 125, 129, 133, 134, 136, 141, 152, 161, 170, 202, 203, 215, 241, 243, 244, 246, 250, 252, 257, 258, 260, 266, 270, 271, 273, 274, 275 Za la Mort 77 Zamboni, Anteo 37 Zampa, Luigi 248, 249 Zancanaro, Tono 173, Zaniboni, Tito 37 Zatterin, Ugo 260 Zavoli, Sergio 261, 262, 264 Zewde, Bahru 154 Zieger, Antonio 59 Zoli, Pietro Don 94, 100, 102, 103