The Body of Il Duce

by Sergio Luzzatto

  To the less superficial of foreign observers, Italy’s rapid switch after Il Duce’s death was evidence that its people were not serious: the American press, in particular, devoted a great deal of coverage to Mussolini’s execution and to Piazzale Loreto, and on the whole the reports were not very flattering. An army officer imprisoned in the United States sent a bitter letter to the Italian government after his release, deploring the image of Italy as it appeared on the front pages of several American newspapers in April 1945. Photos of Mussolini hanging by his heels in Piazzale Loreto were shown side by side with pictures of President Roosevelt, who had just died. Banner headlines compared “Italian civilization” with American, unfavorably.

  The reaction of foreigners to the end of a dictatorship does not necessarily correspond to the reactions of the people who lived under the dictator. It would be worth taking a closer look at the foreign press coverage of Mussolini’s death, perhaps comparing it with the reactions to Hitler’s demise. The press summaries that the Italian Foreign Ministry received after Mussolini’s execution offer a quick first impression. In neutral countries such as Sweden and Spain, newspapers judged his death inevitable but expressed uneasiness about the macabre scene in Piazzale Loreto. In Paris, the Italian ambassador, Giuseppe Saragat, a Socialist, quoted Le Monde, which strongly condemned the “rabble” that had “stepped on the beaten body and covered it in filth” after having admired it for twenty years.44 But the most significant comments came from Britain. It was perfectly right to carry out a summary execution of Mussolini and the others, argued the British papers: “But the subsequent sensational scenes, brutally evident in the chilling photographs that appeared in the newspapers, provoked disgust, especially because they came hard on the heels of the chilling revelations, documented in film footage as well as in print, about the atrocities in the German concentration camps.”45

  So Il Duce was to have the unlikely destiny of being compared to the Jews, whom he had failed to rescue from their fate in the Holocaust.

  3

  AN UNQUIET GRAVE

  The body of Il Duce displayed in Piazzale Loreto, the bodies of the Jews exterminated in the death camps—it was not only a few British journalists who thought of the two images side by side. Freed from the Gusen concentration camp, Aldo Carpi, an artist, returned to Milan with a vision that he rendered in an oil painting. Set in an urban square, the painting’s foreground showed ghostly figures engaged in a danse macabre; the figures looked much like the people Carpi had secretly sketched during his internment—prisoners selected for the crematorium. In the painting’s background, another dance took place; this time the figures were alive and dressed, and behind them were several corpses that had been strung up, one of which was more prominent than the rest. Sarabanda, Carpi titled the painting: mad dance.

  Indeed, there was much dancing in the streets in the summer of 1945, celebration of a joy that was as great as the grief and suffering had been sharp and painful. On July 14, Bastille Day, Giorgio Strehler, a young anti-Fascist and later Italy’s best-known theater director, returned from exile and organized a Festival of Fraternity in Milan. Seven dance floors were laid down in the public gardens, and the mayor, Antonio Greppi, who had lost a son in the Resistance, was to be seen among the crowd in his shirtsleeves. Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité was emblazoned on three hot-air balloons high above the gardens. At every street corner the people of Milan were invited to dance as the Parisians were dancing, and they needed little encouragement. On the outskirts of the city, working-class Milanese descended on Monza and Lambro parks, where they celebrated the entire night. Loudspeakers atop the trucks delivering the next day’s papers broadcast the refrain “Dance, citizens of Milan, it is your day, for Hitler and Mussolini are dead.”1

  A few weeks earlier, several dozen anti-Fascists had danced to the death of Mussolini in an even more literal way. They had assembled at section 16 of the Musocco cemetery in Milan, where Mussolini, Claretta Petacci, and the Fascists strung up in Piazzale Loreto had been buried in unmarked graves. There the anti-Fascists did a slow dance on the packed earth to the measured cadence of an accordion. Then a woman stood with her legs apart and urinated on one of the unmarked graves, to the general applause of her companions. Throughout northern Italy in the year of the Liberation, occasions were found to celebrate the victory with dance. In November 1945, the Communists of Novara, in Piedmont, held a festival to commemorate the Bolshevik revolution that would be a model for the annual party festival held all over Italy. First there were speeches, then a soccer match, then a party meeting, then dancing. But at that first festival, the dancing did not begin until a huge paper head depicting Mussolini had been put to the torch.

  Even among those who didn’t dance, there were leaders of the Resistance who made it clear that they considered Piazzale Loreto a high point in the battle for the Liberation, a moment of catharsis in the civil war. Although the Socialist Sandro Pertini had disapproved of the way Mussolini and the others had been strung up in Milan, speaking in Rome two weeks after Piazzale Loreto he announced that “in the north we cleared the slate” because “in Milan there was Piazzale Loreto.”2 Pertini, who liked to tell how he had once tried to assassinate Prince Umberto of Savoy, embodied the contrast between northern Italy and the center-south—between the territory of the Resistance and the territory loyal to the monarchy. He also embodied the contrasts at the heart of the Committee of National Liberation. Pertini’s incendiary speech in Rome, condemned as thuggish by the moderate press, was light-years away from the thinking of Christian Democratic leader Alcide De Gasperi. While Pertini saw democratic politics as the extension of armed struggle, De Gasperi saw the fight against revolutionary tactics as part of the “permanent method” of democracy.3 To the moderate press of the center-south, Pertini was hardly the only Jacobin in the Resistance. When Ferruccio Parri, leader of the Action Party and a man of the north, was named prime minister, the satirical magazine Il Cantachiaro depicted him in a cartoon in which he tells King Victor Emanuel III: “Your Majesty, I bring you the Italy of Piazzale Loreto.”4

  Piazzale Loreto remained a place of memory in the postwar years, but only for part of the population. Beginning in December 1945, when De Gasperi replaced Parri as prime minister, the legacy of the piazza passed to the ranks of the opposition. From then on, it was kept alive by the most radical of the anti-Fascists. “In Milan there was Piazzale Loreto”: for at least thirty years, various versions of Pertini’s remark served as the rallying cry of left-wing militants, scrawled on walls and chanted in demonstrations by would-be revolutionaries. Indeed, the Milan piazza entered the political language of the new Italy immediately. Antimonarchy posters in Milan read, “Piazzale Loreto instructs us and awaits us.”5 One of the many angry letters the De Gasperi government received after pardoning a long list of Fascists who had been charged with a variety of crimes also came from Milan. It admonished “the most foolish prime minister in the world” for his servile obedience to orders from Washington (the left accused De Gasperi of being a tool of the Americans) and warned that “there is already talk of hanging you up in Piazzale Loreto.”6 When the field hands or metalworkers in the Po Valley demonstrated against the government, they often hanged an effigy of the prime minister. When the demonstrations took place in Milan, they were able to hang the effigy on the crossbar in front of the most famous gas station in Italy.

  In the bitter view of Orio Vergani, a journalist and sworn Fascist supporter back when the pro-Mussolini rallies were held in Rome’s Piazza Venezia, “the spirit of Piazzale Loreto” hovered over all of postwar Italy.7 Indeed, in the heat of the victory over Fascism in 1945–46, there were traces of the Milanese piazza in the most unexpected places. Oggi, a conservative family magazine, published comments of a sort that in only a few years would be unthinkable. Thus the following excerpt, striking in its outright cruelty:

  Mussolini was a madman who thought he was Mussolini: that was already clear the morning of Piazzale Loreto. Among
the bodies tossed in the piazza to sleep for all eternity, Mussolini lay on his back with his head tilted away, with the golden eagle Fascist pennant in his fist and a flash of the whites of his eyes against his yellow face, visible beneath lowered eyelids. He seemed still to be dreaming a crazy and distant dream: of cities to conquer, seas to dominate, battles to win.… Perhaps in the dream he really was the man of the legends that had held sway for twenty years.8

  With the Resistance still a vivid memory, Italians in the north considered themselves patriots and wondered if the same could be said for Italians in the south, who had escaped the rigors of the civil war. Meanwhile, Italians in the south, unashamed that they had been liberated without having to pay the price of war, questioned how civilized their fellow citizens in the north had been during the insurrection. Small skirmishes in the press reflected the deep political and social contrasts. Had not a Communist daily published a photo of Guido Buffarini Guidi, a minister of the Social Republic, looking on in terror as he was sentenced to death? The new right-wing populist magazine Uomo qualunque (“Everyman,” or “The Cynic”) lit into the Communist journalists, not the Fascist minister, portraying them as the equivalents of Polynesian cannibals. The qualunquista movement, which disavowed political engagement, generally expressed the spirit of the center-south, which rejected the Resistance’s rhetoric and criticized its supposed excesses. Besides Uomo qualunque, which sold widely in the center-south, there was another new paper along the same lines, Il Tempo, published by Renato Angiolillo.

  Crude as its journalism could be, the qualunquista press must be taken seriously by the historian. Their publishers understood the mentality of a country that was too worn out by war to regret the passing of Fascism but too extraneous to the Resistance struggle to believe in the battle of liberation as an ideal. Even before the north began to produce mass-market magazines reflecting a conservative line, the press in the center-south was giving voice to an anti-Fascist but non-Resistance Italy. This voice was more than just reactionary journalism offered in consolation to Italians who had not fought in the North. It posed a challenge to the idea that the Resistance had been fought exclusively by partisan brigades and anti-Fascist politicians. In its confused and sometimes vulgar way, the qualunquista line represented certain perspectives that historiographers would arrive at fifty years later. Today, various historians have recognized other contributions to the Resistance against the German occupation besides those of the armed struggle. There were the farmers who hid and fed Allied soldiers, ordinary citizens who helped Italian Jews fleeing from persecution, and people in the cities who took care of their neighbors after the bombing raids. Then there were all the Italian soldiers imprisoned in Germany, tens of thousands of officers and hundreds of thousands of rank-and-file soldiers (many from the center-south) who refused to support the Republic of Salò’s army—today no one would dismiss their resistance as merely passive.

  From 1947 on, after the broad wartime political front of the Committee of National Liberation split apart, the Christian Democrats stepped into the breach occupied by the qualunquisti to represent the political and antipolitical moods of the center-south on a national level. But in 1945 the disagreement over how to interpret Piazzale Loreto was still taking place at the local level, inside the Milan office of the Turin publishing house Einaudi, for example. In the summer of 1945 the Sicilian Communist writer Elio Vittorini sent out an outline of Il Politecnico, a forthcoming weekly, to other consultants at Einaudi. Vittorini’s letter included the draft of an editorial evoking “Piazzale Loreto, with the figures of writers hanging upside down.” His memo asked, “Who should be hanging in Piazzale Loreto?… Who are the monsters of the contemporary literary scene?”9 Keen as Vittorini was on this question, it seems to have appealed little to his colleagues, for there was no mention of the events of April 29, 1945, in the first edition of Il Politecnico. That does not mean, though, that the magazine did not reflect the radical impulses then widespread in the intellectual left.

  In his celebrated inaugural editorial Vittorini did in fact provide a list of literary monsters. Benedetto Croce was the only Italian mentioned, flanked by Thomas Mann, André Gide, Johan Huizinga, John Dewey, and other foreign intellectuals. According to Vittorini, their culture—moralistic rather than socialist, consolatory rather than radical, defenseless rather than armed—had not halted the horrors of Fascism, including the supreme horror of the extermination of children in concentration camps. Il Politecnico’s art director, Albe Steiner, who invented the review’s extraordinary graphic style, accompanied Vittorini’s article not with a photo of bodies hung up by their heels but with a picture of a nameless dead partisan—an image of the “good” Italian rather than the evil one, but nevertheless an image depicting death.

  Good and evil are also sharply distinguished in Vittorini’s Resistance novel, Men and Not Men. Here, the corpses of anti-Fascists are human bodies, and they transmit their dignity to whoever happens to look at them. The corpses of Fascists are not human and thus elicit no mercy from the Resistance fighters. “Dogs,” says one worker. “Carrion by now,” another character replies. Not that the distinction between corpses and carrion was made only by the Communist Vittorini in his Resistance novel. In liberated Italy Fascists and anti-Fascists continued the battle over decent burial begun in the civil war. But now the power of burial was in the hands of veterans of the Resistance and it was the survivors of Salò who had to struggle to give their companions proper graves.

  During the German occupation of Rome, workers at the Verano city cemetery carried out a courageous act of civil disobedience. Opening the caskets of Italians shot by the Nazis and condemned to burial in unmarked graves, they noted the features, the clothes, the wounds, and anything else that would help identify the bodies. After the Liberation, whole villages took part in the work to identify fallen partisans, digging up mass graves where they had been thrown and transporting the bodies to proper cemeteries. In Castelnuovo al Volturno, in Molise, the farmers, women, and children of the town turned out as undertakers for a renowned Resistance fighter, the anti-Fascist intellectual Giaime Pintor. The bodies of veterans of the Republic of Salò did not receive the same kind of spontaneous mercy, in part because the authorities tended to apply different standards to the Resistance and the Social Republic dead. Because of postwar logistical problems—mainly a shortage of railway transportation—it was forbidden to transfer bodies from military cemeteries to their places of origin. In practice, with the help of Resistance-aligned town councils, partisan organizations, and even the prefectures themselves, many families were able to bring home their fallen Resistance fighters. But the authorities were not disposed to bend the rules for supporters of the Social Republic. According to the caustic comment of one observer, there was more interest in “the national cadaver industry” in democratic Italy than there was respect for the dead.10

  In the case of the Social Republic dead, there was often no one to exhume the bodies, particularly those of the numerous Fascists and collaborators who were killed in the “triangle of death,” part of Emilia-Romagna. At the beginning of 1946, for example, mass graves of Fascists were discovered in the towns of Casina, Campagnola, and Poviglio, in the province of Reggio Emilia. But according to the prefect, the exhumation order was met with resistance by the local population, which included many partisans. Nor were people willing to work as grave diggers, despite the high level of unemployment in the area. The local authorities themselves refused to cooperate with the Carabinieri and the prefecture in the search for other suspected mass graves nearby. Not until 1947, when the local partisan resistance softened, were officials able to exhume the bodies and proceed with burial.

  In the letters they were allowed to write before being killed, some partisans expressed concern that their bodies would be put on display after their death. Writing to their families for the last time, some of the condemned of the Social Republic also imagined in detail the unpleasant fate awaiting their corpses. Eighteen-
year-old Giulio Bianchini of the Second Light Infantry Regiment of Salò, shot in Piedmont on May 6, 1945, an only son, wrote a letter to his parents four days before he died that illustrates how the civil war tragically continued into the postwar period:

  Don’t come to search for my body, for not everyone in the world is like our people, and seeing you here there would be those who would laugh at you. They would be the ones who wanted me dead, who condemned me, killed me, perhaps even the mothers of those here who have died. I know you would not behave like this, Mother, but the people here would, for they don’t understand the meaning of forgiveness. But you will be capable of pardon, my dear parents, won’t you? I am sure you will. You will do it for me, and so that your feelings don’t sink to the level of a vendetta.11

  A letter like this reminds us that Mussolini was not the only Fascist denied a proper burial, nor was his the only case in which personal grief and collective mourning came together. Postwar Italy conducted a no-holds-barred battle over the bodies of Resistance fighters and Salò veterans, a battle to have a monopoly over memory and the civil war.

  A tragicomic chapter of this battle took place in Barlassina, near Milan, in November 1946. During the German occupation the five bells of the local church had been confiscated and melted down. When the war was over, the townspeople took up a collection so that the priest could cast five new bells. The smallest of these, weighing a respectable six hundred kilos, was dedicated “To the dead of 1915–18 and 1940–45.” The cost of casting this bronze bell, seventy thousand lire, was paid in its entirety by a local notable, Mario Roncoroni, who was able to get the priest to agree to inscribe the bell with the name of his eighteen-year-old son, who had died fighting for the Social Republic. The bishop came to consecrate the new bells and then they were ready to be hung in the bell tower, which had been restored for the occasion. At this point some Socialist and Communist ex-partisans, scandalized by the inscription of the name of a Fascist soldier, threatened to destroy the bell, and teams of young Catholics organized a night watch to protect it. The mayor of Barlassina, a Christian Democrat, sided with the priest and the donor. The Socialists and Communists seized the occasion to accuse him of trading in war goods abandoned by the Germans. The controversy was finally resolved when the Carabinieri intervened and the partisans decided to desist. The bell with its inscription to the dead Fascist soldier was finally hung in the tower with the others.12