After consulting with the Rome chief of police, Agnesina agreed to the friar’s demands. And so the following day, the travels of Mussolini’s corpse came to an end. Father Parini led Agnesina to the Certosa di Pavia, a well-known fifteenth-century monastery outside the city of Pavia where the Franciscans had taken the body after the neo-Fascists were arrested. According to the statement issued by the Milan police, Il Duce’s body had been sealed in a trunk, wrapped in two rubberized sacks, and placed in a closet in one of the monks’ cells on the ground floor. Along with Mussolini’s mortal remains (“no longer a corpse,” according to one newspaper, “but a skeleton falling to pieces”) the authorities found a declaration by the Democratic Fascist Party that spoke of the day when the august body would have the distinction of being buried on Rome’s Capitoline Hill.37 But these were feeble words, given to Agnesina’s success. After months of investigation, the government had triumphed over the ghosts of the past.
Journalists and photographers were summoned. What better occasion for political show than the public exhibition, if not of the body of Il Duce, of the receptacle that had held it? Years later, a reporter would recall the atmosphere that day in a little room on the third floor of the police headquarters: the brown trunk, with its black buckles encrusted with mud—a trunk so small that those present could only wonder how the body, even bent in two, had fit in it; the heat of the room, gradually filling with a pungent smell; the silence, broken only by the sound of cameras clicking. The scene was altogether surreal: “Everyone was looking down, looking at the trunk, and the magnesium flashes made the shoes of all those people standing in a circle seem enormous, all those dusty shoes of the police officers, the reporters, and the photographers.”38
The receptacle that held the body of Il Duce—a trunk so small those present could only wonder how the body had fit in it. (Foto Publifoto/Olympia)
Among the journalists covering Mussolini’s postmortem adventures was a reporter for l’Unità, Tommaso Giglio. Barely past adolescence, he had the ethical certainty of so many young people who had become Communists during the war. “To show indulgence means to pile hate onto hate,” he wrote in a poem published in Il Politecnico around this time.39 His articles avoided the pitfall of indulgence. Giglio described Father Parini and Father Zucca as favorites of a large circle of wealthy, idle Milanese ladies who hoped to get to heaven by aiding outlaw Fascists. This well-informed reporter named a number of such outlaws who had been protected in the Sant’Angelo convent. Besides Leccisi and his sidekicks, they included Vanni Teodorani, Mussolini’s right-hand man at Salò. According to Giglio, Father Parini was closely tied to Guglielmo Giannini, head of the qualunquista movement, and to the former king, Umberto of Savoy, while Father Zucca was dealing counterfeit money, if not actually drugs, to ex-Fascists and ex-Nazis who had taken refuge in the Alto Adige region, bordering Austria. The right-wing Corriere lombardo replied to l’Unità’s charges blow for blow. Its rebuttal relied heavily on the attorney for the two friars, who had been incarcerated on charges of aiding and abetting Leccisi and the others. According to him, the monastic order of the convent required the friars to be compassionate and forgiving. The right of asylum, he argued, was as valid for corpses as for human beings.
In a country with Italy’s churchgoing tradition, few wished to challenge the Church’s long-standing claim to the handling of corpses and commemoration of the dead. But in Mussolini’s case, the issue was not as simple as his body’s right to “return to legality” under the “great wing” of Christian mercy, as Father Parini argued.40 Behind the skirmishes in the press, the lawyer’s resonant pronouncements, and the friar’s pious statements lay the political question of where the Church stood on the epuration of Fascist officials from public office after the war. From 1943 on, following the Italian armistice, the ecclesiastical hierarchy had kept its distance from anti-Fascism as a political movement, embracing it only as a moral option. Father Parini made implicit reference to that position when he said, of the theft of Il Duce’s body, that “the act was, just as it seemed to the great majority of Italians, moral and not political.”41 Upholding the distinction between morality and politics, the Milan branch of the Pontifical Committee on Welfare was so active in helping veterans of the Republic of Salò that police reports began to refer to it as “ill-reputed.”42 On the whole, a large segment of the Church made little of what was a major transition from dictatorship to democracy. As for Father Parini, who claimed to be anti-Fascist, his actions were to prove more revealing, for the friar of Sant’Angelo eventually gave his public backing to a group of neo-Fascists called the Italian Liberation Army.
In the summer of 1946, Father Parini and Father Zucca were well known in Milan, and their trouble with the justice system threatened to cast the entire Church in a bad light. They were also respected and well liked, however, so any harshness against them risked casting the justice system in an even worse light. The interests of church and state thus came together, resulting in the friars’ release and the dropping of the charges against them. Domenico Leccisi counted for nothing and had no reputation. Thus there was no Machiavellian calculation nor were there any reasons of state to prevent Police Chief Agnesina from coming down hard on Leccisi in his report to the state prosecutor. In Agnesina’s view, the Democratic Fascist Party was as absurd as its name, a pretext, “a means of profit that never worked out,” Agnesina wrote. Leccisi was an ex-Blackshirt nostalgic for the “comfortable Fascist feeding trough” to which he had long been attached, a political zero, a parasite, a clever do-nothing. As for the theft of Mussolini’s corpse, Agnesina called it a tragic farce. While Lotta fascista boasted “with the usual upstart Fascist language” that Il Duce’s body had been safely guarded by the movement faithful, the corpse, “folded up for four long months,” had in fact been tossed around Lombardy inside a steamer trunk.43 Four months after Agnesina wrote his report, the courts confirmed the spirit of his version of events: Leccisi was sentenced not as a political criminal but as a common delinquent, receiving a six-year sentence for the phony banknotes and nothing for the theft of the body. Avanti! was then able to run the headline “Thieves of Supercorpse Bag Sentences as Counterfeiters.”44
We have seen enough of Leccisi to know that the Milan police chief’s judgment was not only politically mistaken but humanly unfair. The graveyard thief was certainly a fairly disreputable figure, a thug and a bomb thrower, but he was also a genuine believer, sincerely dedicated to the cult of Il Duce and the cause of neo-Fascism, not the petty crook with no principles whom Agnesina described. It is rather the Milan police chief who warrants closer examination because he is in many ways an example of what historian Claudio Pavone had in mind when he wrote of the long-term “continuity of the state”—the persistence of old Fascist officials in the new democratic republic.45 A series of snapshots of Agnesina, taken during his career as an exemplary civil servant, are revealing. In 1931, at the height of the Fascist system, Agnesina, as chief of the political section of the Naples police, sought to prevent the young Communist Giorgio Amendola from leaving the country (Amendola’s father, Giovanni, shared Matteotti’s posthumous role as a symbol of anti-Fascist martyrdom). A few years later, his repressive tactics were such that the Naples police earned the admiration of no less a Nazi figure than Heinrich Himmler. On July 25, 1943, when Mussolini was overthrown, Agnesina worked directly for the dictator as chief of personal security. He did nothing, however, to prevent Il Duce from being arrested. In 1947, as Milan police chief, Agnesina was secretly appointed by the Ministry of the Interior as an anti-Communist superprefect with broad powers. Finally, years later, in 1962, as deputy national police commissioner, he led a brutal repression of strikers in Turin. The evidence prompts the question whether, in 1946, Agnesina had any right to present himself as an anti-Fascist chasing down the thieves of the Musocco cemetery.
At the end of that year, Leccisi was in prison when an above-ground neo-Fascist party, the Movimento Sociale Italiano, or Italian
Social Movement, was founded. The party received the blessing of the Vatican and the approval of the Ministry of the Interior, both of which were eager to prevent the radical neo-Fascists—firm believers in “socialization”—from swelling the ranks of the Communists. Incarcerated though he was, Domenico Leccisi deserved a place among the founding fathers of the Italian Social Movement as the mastermind of the theft of Mussolini’s body; no other act had done as much to lift neo-Fascism from the private realm of self-pity to the public sphere. In fact, the first step taken by the new party showed that Leccisi’s investment in Il Duce’s body was neither madness nor folly to the fledgling political organization. On the contrary, his act helped define the neo-Fascists’ identity and ensure their future. According to the party’s unofficial gospel, the abbreviation of its name in Italian, MSI, also stood for “Mussolini Sempre Immortale”—Mussolini ever immortal. And in the party symbol, a flame sits atop a trapezoidal base—the shape of the casket Leccisi had the nerve to uncover, so that the body of Il Duce would continue as a historical actor.
4
MUSSOLINI, DEAR DEPARTED
Rescued from its posthumous embrace with Domenico Leccisi, the body of Il Duce was hidden away between 1946 and 1957 for reasons of state. On orders from the prime minister and with the agreement of Cardinal Ildefonso Schuster, archbishop of Milan, Mussolini’s remains were kept in the chapel of the convent of Cerro Maggiore, near Milan, honoring the commitment that Police Chief Agnesina had made with Father Parini to give Mussolini a Christian yet secret resting place. For that eleven-year period, only a very small group of politicians, religious figures, and civil servants knew the exact location of the tomb.
By declining to return the body to the Mussolini family, the Italian government wanted to prevent Il Duce’s grave from becoming, for better or worse, a shrine. The authorities did not want the cemetery at Predappio, Mussolini’s birthplace, to turn into a pilgrimage destination for neo-Fascists, nor did they want any of the vandalism inflicted on the Musocco cemetery while the body was buried there. The secret resting place did not, however, stop Italians from wondering about the fate of Il Duce’s corpse. On the contrary, the fact that nobody knew where the body was stimulated the popular imagination. Italians were free to fantasize about the most likely places the dictator’s remains might be hidden. The physical absence of the body guaranteed it would be everywhere, in the imagination.
Mussolini’s posthumous legacy was hardly limited to his corpse. The legends of Il Duce’s ghostly peregrinations were not the only means through which Italians grappled with his symbolic afterlife. In the early postwar years, Mussolini’s posthumous vitality was perpetuated by a great deal of journalism and literature, by no means all banal. Distinguished writers, not just obscure Fascist nostalgics, wrote about the body of Il Duce. Mussolini’s life after death went beyond remaindered copies of books by passionate neo-Fascists. It is found in some of the classics of modern Italian literature.
In the first decade of the Italian republic, anti-Fascists preferred not to dwell on the “sad figure” of Mussolini, as they saw it. So the word on Il Duce was left to writers who stood aloof from the ideals of the Resistance. In various genres, at various levels of quality, this literary production was remarkably consistent in what it had to say, since its necrology was informed by ideology.
* * *
LENIN, MUSSOLINI, HITLER, MAO: when leaders who have had large followings die, posterity asks whether they left a political last will and testament. The question differs depending on whether the death marks the end of a regime, as in Italy and Germany in 1945, or whether the system survives its founder, as in the Soviet Union in 1924 and in China in 1976. In the two Communist systems, the deceased leaders’ intentions posed a lively political problem, since the fate of the country rested on how well the candidates for succession were able to interpret them. For the two Fascist regimes, the dictators’ last wishes represented more of a symbolic legacy. To Germany, in ruins after the war, Hitler’s testament was a melodramatic final assertion of the Nibelungian ties the Führer felt linked him to his people. In Italy, determining the last wishes of Mussolini did not seem very urgent because Il Duce had repeatedly insisted that he would never leave a final testament.
But with the passage of time, many Italians began to wonder whether Il Duce had indeed left any parting wishes. The question had little political weight in the republic born of the Resistance, because Prime Minister De Gasperi showed no interest in courting Mussolini’s political heirs, even after the birth of the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement. The concern with Mussolini’s will for the future emerged not from the political arena, but from the collective imagination. Italy of the late 1940s was a country that looked forward to the ethos of consumerism and, at the same time, backward to the rituals of Fascism. Like the characters who live in Italo Calvino’s Laudomia, in Invisible Cities, early postwar Italians felt the need to turn to the cemetery to find explanations for themselves. Above all, they needed to understand the reasons for their recent Fascist past. But after the trials of Mussolini’s body in 1946, there was no cemetery—not even a metaphorical one—where Italians could ask their questions at the tomb of the leader. If conversation with the dead Mussolini was impossible, perhaps the live Duce’s last words could provide some enlightenment.
For ten years after Mussolini’s death, the debate over the dictator’s parting vision—whether this or that document qualified—periodically occupied the popular press. There was one statement, though, that was so evidently an invention that nobody wasted time arguing its legitimacy. My Good Man Mussolini, as it was called, was published in 1947 by journalist Indro Montanelli, who in his postliberation novel Here They Do Not Rest (1945) had established himself as an able interpreter of post-Fascist sentiment. In 1946 he and writer Leo Longanesi coauthored Memoirs of Mussolini’s Manservant, in which they imagined the life of Il Duce’s doorman in the days when the dictator held court at Palazzo Venezia. This retrospective keyhole view allowed them to show Fascism not as a totalitarian regime but as a bonfire of the vanities in which Mussolini was not a terrible tyrant but merely the most fatuous of Italians. Now, in My Good Man Mussolini, Montanelli was ready to speak for Il Duce himself.
My Good Man Mussolini pretends to be the dying wishes that Il Duce entrusted to a faithful priest at Lake Como and that the priest then passed on to Montanelli in his role as journalist for the Corriere della Sera. The hundred-page text was immediately taken up by the popular weeklies. “All of us,” the book’s prologue asserts, “have felt the need for a will left by Mussolini.” This was true both of his Fascist defenders, who sought reasons for self-justification, and of anti-Fascists, who looked for new cause to attack the regime. “Well, here it is,” Montanelli proclaims—Mussolini’s long-awaited final testament.1
Montanelli’s audacity was matched by that of one other distinguished journalist of the regime, Curzio Malaparte.2 Montanelli’s book and Malaparte’s novel The Skin—a best seller of higher literary quality, published in 1949—shared the same paradoxical message. In My Good Man Mussolini, Il Duce declares that he meant for Italy to lose in World War II because Italians show greatness not in victory but in defeat. In Malaparte’s work on defeated Italy, he too depicts the losers as superior to the winners. Among the country’s most influential commentators, “young” Montanelli, who was thirty-eight when he published his book, and “old” Malaparte, fifty-one when he published The Skin, were united in playing the contrarian. But they also shared a desire to give voice to “Italy’s bad conscience,” writing in the service of an ideology that might be called anti-anti-Fascism. Their efforts represented a glossy bourgeois version of the more vulgar, plebeian qualunquista protest; they were a rebellion against the ideals of the Resistance and the system’s desire to punish those who had served under the Fascists. What were they so guilty of, anyway, Italians who had believed in Il Duce? And what was Mussolini himself so guilty of? Paradoxical, part-serious, theatrical, or qualunquist
a—whatever they intended, with their polemics, the two journalists helped push the ghost of Mussolini onto the new republic’s stage.
Leaving Malaparte aside for the moment, let us look at Montanelli’s invocation of Mussolini. His short book concentrates all the historical and political arguments that for half a century after the Liberation constituted the anti-Resistance arsenal. Mussolini’s defeat on July 25, 1943? The Fascist Grand Council’s decision that day to oppose Mussolini was courageous—perhaps the only act of courage against Fascism in the history of the regime. The anti-Fascist celebrations of the following day? They didn’t amount to much, says Montanelli-Mussolini. And why should Italians hate Il Duce, anyway? After all, “the worst thing about him was the faces he made.” For over twenty years the Mussolini government was marked by its “mildness,” having only punished a few hundred opponents with internal exile.3 It was significant that all the victims of the antiregime marches after Mussolini’s fall were symbolic—monuments, plaques, busts. In a gentle dictatorship, these were the objects of hate. As for the epilogue of his political career, Montanelli’s Mussolini speculates as to what might have become of him had the Nazis not rescued him from his prison at Gran Sasso. Perhaps he would have gone on to be a Hollywood actor (as the great Neapolitan actor and playwright Eduardo De Filippo once said of Il Duce). Perhaps he would have found himself the defendant in a war crimes trial at the United Nations. “More likely, though, the commander of a partisan band, like so many of my officials.”
The Body of Il Duce Page 11
