The Body of Il Duce (25 page)

The survivors of Salò had a duty to ensure compassion toward the Salò dead: Domenico Leccisi built his political career on this principle. In the five years between his release from prison and his election to Parliament, Leccisi struggled as a sales representative for a chemical company, never forgetting the Fascists buried in the Musocco cemetery, where the graves were periodically vandalized by overzealous anti-Fascists. In the early years of the Italian Social Movement, the question of paying homage to the Fascist dead was an important rallying issue. Thanks to his role as Mussolini's undertaker, Leccisi was able to use it to launch himself politically, especially since he had a healthy appetite for skirmishes in the press. In September 1950, Leccisi's name was back in the papers with the launch of
Lotta d'Italia,
a new neo-Fascist weekly. The first issue was devoted to Leccisi's adventures in the Musocco cemetery, his dealings with Il Duce's body, “cold and stony in the naked composure of death.”
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After this new account appeared, the Communist Party challenged the government in Parliament and Leccisi was charged with promoting Fascism. This was just what the young neo-Fascist had hoped for: in 1951 his newfound notoriety helped elect him to the Milan city council, where he began a campaign to devote a section of the Musocco cemetery to the military and civilian casualties of the Republic of Salò.

Bodies in search of a grave and cemeteries missing their corpses continued to obsess the illustrated weeklies. In the spring of 1952,
Epoca
ran an article suggesting that somewhere in central Italy the remains of numerous Fascists were buried in an unidentified cemetery. A photograph showed a memorial plaque, a bunch of flowers, and a vineyard, but the magazine offered no proof that anyone was actually buried beneath the vines. Had eighteen Fascists and two Germans killed during the Liberation been buried in the Musocco cemetery and then secretly transferred to this vineyard in central Italy? Was it true that the bones of Mussolini's fingers, lost during the theft of his body, had been recovered and given a proper burial in that place? Roberto De Monticelli interviewed Leccisi but received no answers to these questions. Instead, Leccisi did reveal that he had kept a souvenir from his adventures in the cemetery—a “rather small scrap” of the great leader's trousers. Such medieval relics were cherished on all sides. In a last letter by a young martyr of the Resistance, Pedro Ferreira, condemned to death, wrote to his Action Party comrades that he had kept “a piece of the bloodied shirt” of Duccio Galimberti, the legendary military commander of the Piedmont branch of the Justice and Liberty organization. The following day, he planned to ask the commander of the execution squad to soak it in his own blood once he, too, had been shot. Ferreira hoped the scrap would then be preserved by the Action Party as a “historical souvenir of this bloody struggle.”
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“I stole the body of Mussolini.”—Domenico Leccisi (
Foto Publifoto/Olympia
)

At the end of June 1953, Leccisi went to Rome as a deputy for the Italian Social Movement from the district of Milan-Pavia, having gotten more votes than the local party boss. The neo-Fascist adventurer had become a figure to be reckoned with in his party, having established a national reputation as a leader of the movement's more radical faction and a reputation in Milan as the chief of the militant gangs. In general, the elections of 1953 marked the passage of the Italian Social Movement from a young party to a mature one. With twenty-nine deputies and nine senators, the party was solidly rooted in the lower middle classes of central and southern Italy. So the republic got its share and more of Fascists. Piero Calamandrei, one of the principal authors of the Italian constitution, greeted the parliamentarians with one of his famous “epitaphs” in his magazine,
Il Ponte
. He addressed his words to the partisan dead, telling them not to suffer because the Fascists were back. The reappearance of these “shameful ghosts” would only serve to remind Italians how evil they really were:

Too soon we forgot them

It is well they are out in view

On this stage

So that everyone

Will recognize their faces

And remember

That all that really did happen.
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The Fascists on the parliamentary benches were thus a sort of Piazzale Loreto of the living, a display of the enemy to the Italian public.

In the years that followed, the anti-Fascist press depicted Domenico Leccisi as the foolish guardian of an abandoned temple.
Il Ponte,
in particular, made a point of tracking the high points of Leccisi's parliamentary career, among them a lively fight with Communist veteran Giancarlo Pajetta. “Silence, grave digger!” Pajetta shouted. “If it weren't for Audisio, you wouldn't be a deputy. Go back to stealing corpses and shut up.”
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Meanwhile, Leccisi showed that he was on the job by mounting an inquiry into the whereabouts of one of the boots Mussolini wore at the time of death and the rumor that the Milan prosecutor's office had ordered the other boot destroyed. These fetishist initiatives notwithstanding, the young deputy from Milan showed intellectual integrity and even some political courage. As the Italian Social Movement grew more cautious and conservative, seduced by the example of the right-wing Christian Democrats, Leccisi, just two years after his triumphant election, left the party to found the National Corporative Party, which aimed to perpetuate the radical “socializing” spirit of the Salò Fascists. This was the first step in a series of Leccisi's comings and goings—in and out of the Italian Social Movement—over the following decades, as the maverick neo-Fascist obstinately pursued “left-wing” Fascism.

Leccisi, however, was not the mover behind a petition, circulating in December 1954, calling for the return of Mussolini's body to his family and thus also to his devoted followers. The initiative was conceived by Vanni Teodorani, related to Mussolini by marriage, Il Duce's secretary at Salò, and later the founder of an association of Italian Social Republic veterans that had links to the most reactionary elements of the Roman Curia, the Vatican government. Teodorani's contacts made it possible for him to secure the signatures of various notable Christian Democrats. But he failed to obtain the blessing of Rachele Mussolini, who was opposed to exerting pressure on the authorities to return Il Duce's body, nor did he gain Leccisi's support. Teodorani also sought the backing of some anti-Fascist voices, and this step made Leccisi scornful of the whole effort, since it involved people who were directly or indirectly responsible for Il Duce's execution at Giulino di Mezzegra and the shameful spectacle of Piazzale Loreto. “We're of the opinion,” said Leccisi, “that the current state of regret by the Resistance bosses does not merit the consideration of the Fascists.”
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As long as Italy remained poisoned by the civil war, the appropriate degree of mercy was a matter of dispute.

*   *   *

“THE WAY A
man meets his death will be determined by his character”: in the golden days of the Fascist regime, Mussolini subscribed to his own demanding dictum.
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Fascism, born in the trenches of World War I, saw a “good death” as the great mark that separated one man from another. But as it happened, Mussolini's death was no boon to his posthumous reputation. Whatever one said of what happened at Giulino di Mezzegra, one could not say it fit the Fascist definition of a good death. To be credible, a martyr had to die with style. It was hard to point to the style of a man who had refused to surrender to the Committee of National Liberation—not in order to stage an eleventh-hour defense of Salò but so he could try to sneak across the border and escape.

In the early days after Mussolini's death, the most intellectually honest of the Fascists had confided this unpleasant truth to their diaries. “To lose one's life is serious but morally remediable,” observed Giuseppe Bottai, a onetime Fascist minister, of Mussolini. “But there is no remedy for the man who fails to keep a grip on his death.”
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Writing from Africa, where he was serving in the Foreign Legion, Bottai sketched a tender portrait of Il Duce before his arrest, as a man prostrated by fatigue, a man whose gaze was vague and whose jaw was slack. But Bottai did not allow his human, Christian tenderness to affect his moral judgment. What could possibly repair the shame of Mussolini's flight, disguised in a German overcoat and helmet and hidden in a truck? How could he possibly escape the “whorehouse judgment” he had himself invited by dragging Claretta Petacci along to Dongo? There was no way around it, Bottai wrote. Mussolini's last act had been played out without grandeur or nobility.

Imprisoned in Italy, Vincenzo Costa—sentenced after the Liberation for having served as a
federale,
a high-ranking Fascist official, in Milan under the German occupation—also reflected on Mussolini's last days. He wrote of the terrible disappointment Fascists felt in Il Duce's behavior before his death. A few days after Mussolini's excecution, Costa had gone to the shores of Lake Como with other unrepentant militants of Salò to pay homage to Il Duce. “It shouldn't have ended that way,” he wept, “it shouldn't have ended that way.”
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While a source of embarrassment and shame for the Fascists, the squalid circumstances of Mussolini's death were a consolation to anti-Fascists. This, they felt, was certain to squash any posthumous mythmaking. The end of Il Duce also stood as a cautionary note: his pathetic finale was emblematic of a pathetic life. Gaetano Salvemini spoke for most anti-Fascists when he turned Mussolini's bold declaration about the way a man meets his death against Il Duce himself:

Il Duce … really did die in keeping with his character, that is, he died as he was hightailing it to Switzerland dressed up as a German soldier and hidden under a blanket, with $149,365, 203,705 Swiss francs, 16,593,300 French francs, 10,000 pesetas, 11,000 Portuguese escudos, 27,113 pounds sterling in banknotes, 2,150 pounds in gold, and many, many bundles of Italian lire. Not to mention his girlfriend.… She had stuffed precious stones into the seams of her underwear and they had to dig her up later to get the gems back. Nero, in keeping with his character, died a far more dignified death in his day.
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From the very first hours and days after the Liberation, that Luftwaffe overcoat worn by Mussolini to escape capture became the symbol and material proof of Il Duce's treason, not to mention one of the spoils of war of the Resistance. One partisan went up and down the shores of Lake Como showing everyone the shameful German greatcoat, and newsreel makers and photographers trained their lenses on it. Mussolini's flight so fueled the collective imagination that fables began to circulate about it. In one, Il Duce ran away dressed in women's clothes; the idea was picked up by a British cartoonist, who depicted Benito and Adolf trying on ladies' garments in preparation for escape to Argentina. There were even those who, before the event, had predicted that Mussolini would don a disguise and flee. On the morning of April 27—twelve hours before Il Duce was apprehended dressed up as a German—
l'Unità
imagined the dictator trying to run away concealed as a country priest. In the mental hospital where he had been forced to take refuge from the Racial Laws, Renzo Segre, an Italian Jew, reacted to the news that Mussolini had been arrested at Dongo “with all but a fake beard” with disgust.
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“No one expected Mussolini's get-up would be so pathetic,” commented a longtime opponent of the regime.
36
As it turned out, the anti-Fascists could not have hoped for a better outcome, because Il Duce in disguise embodied the Il Duce who had betrayed Italy.
Mussolini, the Traitor
was in fact the title of a 1945 book by the Russian Socialist Angelica Balabanov, who had once been Il Duce's lover before becoming a fierce opponent.

The money Mussolini and his Fascist cronies were carrying was proof of another crime—larceny. While Il Duce was not known as greedy, journalists could not be expected to let this go. One book published in 1946 was titled
The Morality of Mussolini: A Hand in the Till
. As for the gems sewed into Clara Petacci's underwear—“how pitiful the details,” wrote Giovanni Ansaldo—what better emblem of the late-empire atmosphere of Il Duce's final days? Even the exhumation of Petacci's body failed to put the legend of the stolen gems to rest. Although the jewelry recovered from her corpse was worth only a paltry sum, a man of Salvemini's stature continued to spin fables about the riches hidden in Claretta Petacci's brassiere as late as 1953.

Then there was the crime of adultery. After tirelessly promoting the sanctity of marriage, the Fascist chief had run away with his mistress, sparing not a thought for his wife. “Mussolini's offense cannot be excused in any way,” a former Fascist leader charged.
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Of course, anti-Fascists were ready to depict the episode in the harshest key. One reporter traced the couple's immorality back to the days when the two would meet at a great pretentious villa on the Via Camilluccia in Rome; according to the reporter, their bedroom was “covered floor to ceiling with mirrors”—a room worthy of a brothel. Long after the war, even civilized left-wing intellectuals persisted in humiliating Claretta Petacci by calling her names. Historian Giorgio Spini deemed her “a slut,” while Salvemini confined himself to “lover girl.”