The Body of Il Duce (28 page)

No sooner had the burial taken place than the protests began.
L'Unità
accused Zoli of having “dared to do the unthinkable.”
8
By returning the body to the neo-Fascists, were the Christian Democrats laying the basis for a new clerical-Fascist regime? Less polemically,
Il Borghese
suggested that Zoli had needed to repay the debt of the neo-Fascist votes that had put his government in power. The long postwar rule of the center, it seemed, was finally coming to an end. Meanwhile, the prime minister's desk was piled high with letters about Mussolini's return to Predappio. Most were positive. Praising Zoli's gesture, a farm woman from the province of Mantua wrote that for years she had been tormented by the thought that Il Duce's corpse had no peace. A worker from Emilia-Romagna approved of the wonderfully Christian act of restoring the body to the widow and promised Zoli that “as a local boss, I can get out the vote for you, at least 200 votes at the next election, all for you.”
9
In the chorus of applause there were only a few dissenting voices, one of them a woman who decreed it shameful to have moved remains of Mussolini, “the greatest criminal of our times.”
10
The woman, who did not sign her letter, wrote that she had lost four sons in 1944 when they were all deported by the Fascists, never to return home.

The sarcophagus and guest book at the San Casciano cemetery. (
Michele Bella
)

Enzo Biagi, editor in chief of
Epoca,
took a stern position. Mussolini, he wrote, belonged to the category of dead people who bring votes, and that was why so many had hastened to give a decent burial to the man who had dragged Italy into World War II and why so few had acted to build a memorial to the nameless and blameless, the very victims of that war. But in general the pro-government press tended to be conciliatory toward Zoli. The local correspondent for the
Corriere della Sera
depicted the town of Predappio as united in its desire to see Il Duce's body return. An editorialist for the paper called Zoli's decision a gesture toward making peace with Italy's past. The editor of
Oggi
praised the Italian people for their “noble silence” about Il Duce's new burial place. Even the editorialists of the left—with the exception of the Communists—refrained from painting the events in too dramatic a light. In
Il Ponte,
noted intellectual Riccardo Bauer derided the clumsy way the anti-Fascists had protested the tributes at the tomb. Let the faithful stage their lugubrious ceremonies, but meanwhile young people should know something about Italian history and the “paper hero” who had for so many years deceived and poisoned the country, he wrote.
Il Mondo
offered several modest proposals of Swiftian inspiration. They included a tax on those who wanted to visit the San Casciano cemetery, higher postage for postcards sent from Predappio, and other ways of turning a profit for the public treasury from those who came to worship the remains of Mussolini.

In a more serious vein,
Il Mondo
observed that the political culture of Fascism had always been based on death. The Fascist path followed a straight line that led from 1919 to 1957, from the earliest militants who gathered in Piazza San Sepolcro in Milan to those clustered around the holy sepulchre of Predappio. It wasn't by chance, wrote
Il Mondo,
that in 1946 neo-Fascists made a hero of Domenico Leccisi. Nor was it insignificant that the young neo-Fascist had received twelve thousand votes, thereby defeating illustrious captains of the old Fascist regime: “To the neo-Fascist voters of Milan, the prestige of those who played an august role under Mussolini was nothing compared with the glory attained by an obscure young man who had come to attention for his mortuary high jinks.… It reminds one of the Ishmaelite sect, who pay in solid gold the living weight of the Aga Khan. The Fascists would like to pay the dead weight of their Duce in electoral votes.” The pilgrims who came from all over Italy to assemble at Mussolini's crypt, observed
Il Mondo,
were the genuine heirs of Domenico Leccisi, “the most sincere Fascist of all time.”
11

The cemetery quickly became a site of pilgrimage. On Sunday, September 8, 1957, thirty-five hundred Fascist faithful turned up to line the pathways of the little country graveyard. They came from all over but especially from Rome and Milan, the younger Fascists predominating over older veterans. Forty-two were charged with offenses under the Scelba Act, which outlawed neo-Fascist demonstrations, for wearing black shirts or making the Fascist salute. Among those arrested were two young men who would play an important role in the neo-Fascist movement: one, a young attorney from Bergamo, Mirko Tremaglia, would one day be a party leader; the other, a Roman militant, Stefano Delle Chiaie, would be implicated in terrorist activities.

The minister of the interior, Christian Democrat Fernando Tambroni, had sent an order barring entry to anyone “dressed in a black shirt.”
12
But outlawing black shirts did not resolve the problem. A neo-Fascist from Tuscany was charged with having distributed the text of a poem entitled “Piazzale…” The walls of the town were plastered with posters predicting that Il Duce's spirit would rise again. On Sunday, September 22, some seven thousand neo-Fascists converged on Predappio, arriving in fifty buses and hundreds of private cars. Many wore black shirts and most waved neo-Fascist pennants, raised their arms in the Fascist salute, and chanted songs from Mussolini's day. The police, following Tambroni's orders, stopped all those in black shirts at the gates of the cemetery, so that soon the place was crowded with men in their undershirts.

It was hard to ignore the numbers arriving at Mussolini's tomb, especially when their rituals were so explicit. Nevertheless, the anti-Fascist press generally avoided using the occasion to denounce the neo-Fascists. Rather than attack head-on, anti-Fascist opinion makers chose to muse ironically on the celebrations at San Casciano. In the long run, maybe the real beneficiaries of Mussolini's move to Predappio would be the vendors of
piadine
—a kind of local sandwich—and those who sold Fascist memorabilia,
Il Mondo
wrote; in that case, Mussolini could finally take credit for having done something for Italy's humble classes. But comments of this sort—which ultimately proved correct—did not convince everyone. In the fall of 1957, a number of anti-Fascists rallied against the pilgrimages to Predappio, convinced the neo-Fascists were sullying the memory of the Resistance. Their protests were but a tiny ripple in the complicated history of postwar Italy, but these scuffles sowed the seeds for the furious anti-Fascist demonstrations that would erupt all over Italy in 1960 when the government embraced the extreme right. The protests at Predappio were at once spontaneous and organized. On September 29 local Socialist and Communist parties called out their militants to demonstrate at the Predappio cemetery. According to the police, the Communists even went so far as to infiltrate neo-Fascist ranks with provocateurs, hoping to incite trouble. The local Christian Democrats, although they deplored the left-wing militancy, were concerned enough to call for an end to the neo-Fascist reunions.

More daunting than their organized protest was the spontaneous anger of the anti-Fascists at Predappio. Lining the road to the cemetery, local Resistance veterans and left-wing activists had greeted the buses of arriving neo-Fascists with a hail of stones. The effect was such that the local secretary of the Italian Social Movement sent out a letter to neo-Fascists all over Italy advising them how to get to the cemetery without incident—and, above all, how to keep up a vigil rather than running away after fifteen minutes. “Otherwise our visits to places of Mussolini memory will appear hasty and elicit the usual unflattering comments about us,” the neo-Fascist party secretary wrote.
13

The prefect of Forlì, responsible for Predappio, banned anti-Fascist demonstrations planned for September 29 “because of the heated atmosphere created by activists, extremists, and provocateurs of the left.”
14
That Sunday, some three thousand Fascists turned up to pay homage at Mussolini's tomb, and the police were mostly able to keep order. In his telegraph to the interior minister, the prefect was able to claim a victory for democratic freedom over the machinations of “Communists and their satellites,” who were determined to disturb “the influx of visitors to the famous tomb.”
15
For the pilgrims of San Casciano, the prefect of Forlì was the perfect defender, for like other prefects of the 1950s he saw his role as defending Italy from the Communists. When several Communist deputies asked Interior Minister Tambroni why he had not charged Predappio's neo-Fascist visitors with violating the law against forming military associations, the prefect of Forlì offered a helping hand:

It would be useful to point out that because of the small number (155) who have so far come wearing black shirts, representing just 6 percent of the visitors (a total of 25,510) in the period from August 31 to September 29, and because of the variety of styles of clothing worn and the absence of pins and buttons, it cannot be said that conditions have been met to apply the aforementioned law.”
16

The battles of San Casciano, with stones hurled and legal codes brandished, was not fought only in the province of Forlì. All of Italy had an opinion on the matter and the telegrams flew. Fascists sent Rachele Mussolini a deluge of condolences, as if Il Duce had just died. Anti-Fascists directed their missives to Tambroni, urging him to apply the spirit and the letter of the constitution and stop the pilgrimages to Predappio.

The clash was also played out on Italy's walls, in the form of political posters. Il Duce, who had controlled the walls for years with Fascist slogans, was back with the controversy over his afterlife. The most violent exchanges took place in Terni, in central Italy. Posters celebrating Mussolini's burial at Predappio were covered with fresh bulletins from the Communists, deploring the “macabre” collusion between Christian Democrats and Fascist followers. The neo-Fascists accused the Communists of wanting to rekindle the civil war “in the name of an anti-Fascism that is by now dead and buried.”
17
Each side claimed to smell decay in the other. In Verona, Christian Democrat ex-partisans promised to fight anyone seeking to “draw putrid breath from a corpse to infect the conscience of Italians.”
18
Local neo-Fascists replied that Catholics should not forget that the Church commanded mercy, including burial of the dead.

Clearly the Italian Social Movement intended to prolong the Predappio pilgrimages right through the spring, thus putting Il Duce's body to work in the 1958 election campaign. Interior Minister Tambroni decided it was time to intervene. Appealing to the transportation minister, Armando Angelini, he said that he did not want to take extraordinary measures, but urged him to move quickly to stop bus companies from facilitating trips to Predappio. So Tambroni appeared to guarantee freedom of travel around Italy, including freedom to travel to Predappio, while behind the scenes he was maneuvering to stop the visits to Mussolini's grave. On Sunday, October 6, only three buses arrived at San Casciano, but many visitors came in automobiles, so there were still eighteen hundred of them. Still, the number of visitors dropped as the weeks wore, which may well have been due to dropping temperatures rather than to Tambroni's cleverness.

As
Il Mondo
had suggested, the Christian Democrats who laid Mussolini to rest did not get the far right's full approval, nor did they escape the left's furious protests. The neo-Fascists were unhappy about the sneaky, semi-clandestine way the body had been returned to Predappio. The left was convinced that Zoli and especially Tambroni were overriding the constitution and hence were dangerous enemies of the Resistance's achievements. A letter from the National Association of Partisans of Parma to Tambroni seemed to anticipate resentments that would, by 1960, trigger far more significant anti-Fascist uprisings. The veterans of Parma did not protest Mussolini's burial in Predappio. Rather, they challenged the Fascist license to travel across Italy wearing black shirts and singing “Giovinezza,” the Fascist hymn. The ex-partisans urged Tambroni to heed the constitution, including the rule forbidding the reconstitution of the Fascist Party. If the police, always ready to block “legal, peaceful, and harmless democratic demonstrations,” continued to stand by while the neo-Fascists carried on, the National Association of Partisans would gladly take on the job of “enforcing respect for the constitution and the law.”
19

In the long odyssey of Il Duce's body, the last chapter—the return to Predappio—is of interest for its element of premonition. Tambroni decided to ignore anti-Fascist protests in 1957–58. Three years later, in a historic moment, Tambroni, now prime minister in a government backed by neo-Fascists, defended the Italian Social Movement once more, allowing the party to hold a national congress in Genoa. He did so despite the furious rebellion of that part of Italy which clung to the Resistance. Stones tossed against some buses at San Casciano in September 1957 escalated to war in the streets throughout Italy in July 1960; Tambroni sought to impose his rule—and lost. The anti-Fascist demonstrations were so significant that never again would the Christian Democrats govern with neo-Fascist backing, preferring to seek partners on the left.