The Body of Il Duce (24 page)

Could one show compassion for the Fascist dead without becoming a Fascist sympathizer? Would not compassion for the Fascist dead—Mussolini among them—chip away at the foundations of a democracy attained by the blood of the Resistance? Where did intellectual considerations about Il Duce's remains end and “obscene speculation” about a “dishonorable corpse” begin?
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In 1950s Italy, the sensitive anti-Fascist conscience was troubled by such questions. “Mother, tell me, is it really evil / To take and string up a general? / Just one of them, hanging head down / I won't ask for anything more, this time around,” sang the Cantacronache (“the reporters”), forerunners of the left-wing singer-songwriters of the 1960s. Addressing the fraught issue in song, they treated the moral legitimacy of a republic founded at Piazzale Loreto in a lighter vein.
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More seriously, the well-known Sicilian poet and Nobel Laureate Salvatore Quasimodo wrote about the same theme in his “Laude, 29 April, 1945.” The poem also opens with a son questioning his mother:

And why, mother, do you spit on a body

that hangs head down, feet tied

to the crossbar? Aren't you just as disgusted by the others

that hang by its side? Oh, that woman,

her stockings worthy of a crazy can-can,

her mouth and throat like flowers trod underfoot.

No, mother, stop: shout at the crowd

to go away. They are not mourning, they are revelling,

rejoicing: the horseflies are already buzzing

at the veins. You fired

at that face, now: mother, mother, mother.
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In the decade after Mussolini and Claretta Petacci were strung up in Piazzale Loreto, no Italian poet—and certainly none on the left, where Quasimodo remained although he distanced himself from the Communists—looked so unflinchingly at the unsavory spectacle of April 29, 1945. No one else wrote about the ferocity of the crowd in Piazzale Loreto with such frankness. As the poem goes on, we learn that the son is questioning his mother from the grave: “You are dead, son / And because you are dead / you can forgive.” Quasimodo seems to suggest that the civil war was so terrible as to make pardon possible only for the dead, not for the survivors. And so the son comes to agree with his mother, replying that “the fat green flies / collect in bunches on the meat hooks: rage and blood / rightly flow.” Along with this poem, Quasimodo dedicated another, “To the Fifteen of Piazzale Loreto,” to the Resistance fighters shot and dumped in the piazza on August 10, 1944. In the memory of the postwar left, that heap of bodies thrown in the square seemed to provide some, if not sufficient, reason for the bodies strung up on the crossbar on the day of the Liberation.

Like Quasimodo, Gaetano Salvemini was one of the few anti-Fascists who dared to lift the taboo from Piazzale Loreto and consider it as one of the keystones of the Italian republic. Even before returning to Italy from exile in America, the aging historian of modern Italy freely crowed over the insult the Resistance had delivered to the ox of the nation: “They hung him up by his feet like a butchered ox in front of the meat shop.” Many thought Salvemini's words scandalous, revealing a moral laxity especially unpardonable in a Harvard professor. Scandalous or not, Salvemini's view of Piazzale Loreto was anything but superficial. A longtime anti-Fascist, he had relished the fantasy of Mussolini dead and supported attempts to bring his death about long before April 29, 1945. And after Il Duce's exposure in the piazza, Salvemini did more than simply write a few approving sentences; he searched his conscience, questioning his old attitude toward assassinating Mussolini, a move that during the years of the regime he had considered pointless and risky. “I did not believe that liberty and justice were more sacred than life itself,” he wrote after the Liberation, noting that he had trembled with fear in April 1945, to think that the life of Mussolini might continue to be considered sacred.
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Salvemini also searched for a justification for the display of Mussolini's body. His quest reminded him of Anteo Zamboni, murdered by a gang of Fascists in Bologna in 1926 after the sixteen-year-old supposedly tried to kill Il Duce. The historian was seeking to respond to the Jesuit publication
Civiltà cattolica,
which had annoyed him by expressing concern for Mussolini's fate at Piazzale Loreto but none for the victims of Fascist violence. Zamboni's body, he maintained, had been “strung up and exhibited in Bologna for a week.”
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Salvemini was too serious a scholar not to grasp the gravity of this claim. If the young Zamboni's corpse was indeed displayed in Bologna in 1926, then the Fascist practice of exhibiting the bodies of the dead would have in fact begun at least a decade earlier than was generally believed. As it happened, though, the event never took place. The plan to string the body up was nixed by Fascist boss Italo Balbo and the corpse was hastily transported to the Bologna cemetery. Besides, this was not Salvemini's first encounter with Zamboni's body. As early as 1930, in an anti-Fascist tract written with the historian's encouragement, Emilio Lussu referred to the cruel treatment of Zamboni, saying that the body was “dragged through the streets and left for eleven days before it was buried.”
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When Salvemini took up the story after the war, the dragging had become hanging and the delay in burial had become public exhibition of the corpse. The appeal of these charges was obvious: why should the anti-Fascists be ashamed of displaying the body of a war criminal when twenty years earlier the Fascists had done the same to an innocent boy?

When, in a meeting in 1954, Salvemini casually referred to Mussolini “with his feet in the air in Piazzale Loreto,” a onetime admirer of the professor, journalist Giovanni Ansaldo, became enraged. In an open letter, Ansaldo published a long list of accusations against him. “What is the point of studying so much, dear professor, what is the point of having seen so many sunrises and so many sunsets,” he asked, if historical scholarship and long experience do not produce in the soul “a higher sense of mercy”?
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True, Mussolini's body had been strung up by the feet. But that was something Italians should never say, or put in print, or even remember; they should “pretend not to know,” because what had been done to Mussolini had dishonored Italy in the eyes of the world. Even among the Resistance, no one wanted to take credit for Piazzale Loreto; the perpetrators had vanished into anonymity. And now, ten years later, “for no good reason,” Salvemini reminded people of the barbarous act in gleeful tones, as if in his twenty-two years of opposing Fascism, and in the ten years after the Liberation, he had dreamed of nothing else, as if the insult to the corpse were the great event that lit up his life. Salvemini's behavior was enough to make Ansaldo doubt not only the professor's good taste but the worth of his thought:

If you are still capable of such one-sided cruelty, laughing because Mussolini's corpse was hung up by the feet, one can only wonder about the moral value of your opposition, which endured for so long and appeared so honorable.… If you do not understand the damage caused to our country by the memory of that outrage, one can only ask what you could possibly understand about what would really be to Italy's benefit.
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More than any other postwar journalist, Ansaldo had thought deeply about the symbolic consequences of Piazzale Loreto. He had begun writing about it in his diary while a military prisoner in Germany and had continued over the years, speaking freely in part because he did not share much of the Resistance ideology. When the company that owned the Piazzale Loreto gas station decided to dismantle the notorious crossbar, Ansaldo wrote a memorable article about the proceedings. Published in
L'Illustrazione italiana
, his story showed how that piece of the piazza had come back to life. After the bodies were taken down, the crossbar remained with its macabre ghosts, since the names of the Fascist dead had been painted on the metal bar. The gas station reopened after the war and people stopping to refuel would “discuss how much gas and at what price where once dark blood had been spilled.” The famous crossbar also stirred fantasies of many would-be executioners, who were always ready to taunt their political adversaries with the threat of hanging them in Piazzale Loreto. Political and union marches filed by the gas station. The terrible crossbar, shameful symbol of the civil war, “risked becoming a monument,” according to Ansaldo.
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While Salvemini refused to treat Piazzale Loreto as an event to be repressed by the Resistance, Ansaldo feared that the famous square would become sacred. Their disagreement over Mussolini with his feet in the air pointed to two radically different kinds of grief. Salvemini's response—a Jacobin version of grief—involved so unforgiving an approach to Fascism that no room was left for compassion for the people who had brought the country to the brink of ruin. Ansaldo's Thermidor variety of grief was too conscious of the moral ambiguities of the civil war to allow for outbursts of hate. Mourning for the partisan dead had hardened anti-Fascist hearts until they felt indifferently or even pleased about Mussolini's posthumous treatment, while anyone whose grief extended to the Salò dead tended to feel compassion for Il Duce as well. “Historically, everyone has some merit, even the losers, those who were killed and those who were strung up by their feet,” Ansaldo wrote.
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Downplaying the conflict between Fascism and anti-Fascism, Ansaldo's historical relativism fit nicely with the line espoused by Christian Democratic prime minister De Gasperi. But Ansaldo's position annoyed those anti-Fascists who saw the centrist government as a Thermidor takeover of the Italian revolution. Thus Il Duce's story also involved competing versions of grief, one sort of sorrow pitched against another.

Article 1 of the Italian constitution declares the republic to be founded on labor, but it was also founded on grief. This was inevitable, given the deaths Italy suffered in World War II and the subsequent civil war. Even prior to the Liberation, when the partisans were still fighting, notices for the fallen took up a significant amount of space in the clandestine press. Afterward, and particularly after the Christian Democrats won the elections in April 1948, the most thoughtful spokesmen for the moral legacy of the Resistance wanted to go on remembering the partisan dead, even as the conservatives in power urged Italians to put the troublesome past behind them and move on. Anti-Fascist intellectual Piero Calamandrei wrote scores of partisan epitaphs, and his lapidary style established the spirit with which Action Party veterans would look back on their losses. One such veteran, Enzo Enriques Agnoletti, wrote the preface to
Letters from Resistance Fighters Condemned to Death
, a monument to the partisan sacrifice. Much of the writing by partisan survivors took the form of obituaries for their comrades. “The Casket” by Giulio Questi, a story published in Vittorini's
Il Politecnico
, tells of the odyssey of four partisans who have decided to give their comrade a proper burial. They have a cart for a hearse, the glow of the moon, which lights their way—but also risks exposing them—and the conviction of their grief. All the same elements, that is, that stirred the young Domenico Leccisi to steal Mussolini's corpse.

*   *   *

AFTER HIS ARREST
in the summer of 1946, Leccisi was sentenced to six years in prison for counterfeiting. He was in fact released on appeal just before the April 1948 elections, having served twenty-one months in all. A few weeks later, his memoir,
I Stole Mussolini's Body
, began appearing in serialized form in
Tempo
, the Milan illustrated weekly. Written in the best swashbuckling style, Leccisi's account told the exciting tale of digging up Il Duce's corpse, of seeing, and imagining, the body move, of handing the corpse over to the Franciscan friars, and of the body's discovery at the Certosa di Pavia.
Tempo
reproduced a map of the Musocco cemetery and another of the body's route. The magazine also published photos, including one of Mussolini's battered body as it lay in the morgue. “That's how Il Duce looked to me that night,” Leccisi informed his readers, “perfectly recognizable even though time had left its mark on his tough face.”
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More than once, Leccisi mentioned how well preserved he found the corpse, as if the lack of decay might suggest, according to time-honored Christian doctrine, a mark of sainthood. The high point of the story is the moment when the band of grave robbers moves the corpse to the waiting automobile. The cemetery, white beneath the moon, the naked body, the undertaker's cart used to transport it—despite their meager tools, the neo-Fascists conceived of their action in the boldest of terms. “Shakespeare,” wrote Leccisi, “never imagined a stranger and sadder voyage for the travels of his dead Hamlet.”
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On July 24, 1948, Leccisi shared the cover of
Tempo
with Antonio Pallante, the man who had just tried to kill Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti. There was no better example of how the popular illustrated weeklies, with their appetite for scandal, reflected the anti-Resistance position of the conservatives than the pairing of these two men. The musicologist Massimo Mila, a well-known anti-Fascist from Turin, reacted with fury. In the days leading up to the attempt on Togliatti's life, said Mila, all the Fascists who should have been “in jail or six feet under” were publishing their stories in pro-government magazines.
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Certainly, presenting individual Fascists as blameless men of conscience was a useful way for the moderate press to support the government line of “pacification,” leaving the past behind. But it would be wrong to infer from this that the centrist press was crypto-Fascist. True, the moderates were more indulgent toward veterans of the Mussolini regime than toward Communists, but this was because they believed that neo-Fascism was merely a residual phenomenon, destined to die out. Thus, in one issue that included Leccisi's recollections, there was an article by Vitaliano Brancati, a famous playwright and novelist, suggesting that the neo-Fascists were “men of the grave,” of greater interest to fiction writers than to historians. Neo-Fascism had no political significance, only poetic resonance: there was nothing more melancholy than observing a faith—“already dead in terms of history”—slowly fade away, said Brancati.
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