Plan for fascism museum in Rome dropped amid concern it would attract supporters of Mussolini
A proposal to establish a museum in Rome dedicated to Fascism has been shot down amid fears that it could become a focus for admirers of Mussolini and a place of pilgrimage for neo-Fascists.
A small but vocal minority of Italians openly praise the Fascist era and the rule of Il Duce, and the proposal reopened a national debate over to what extent the country has come to terms with its dark past.
Politicians from the anti-establishment Five Star Movement were planning to formally table a motion in Rome’s Renaissance town hall on Tuesday about creating the museum.
The councillors said it would be critical of Fascism, but those assurances failed to assuage criticism.
The National Association of Partisans – representing resistance fighters who battled Italian Fascist and German Nazi forces during the Second World War – said it was “alarmed” by the proposal.
The association said there had been no assurances that the museum would be “explicitly a museum about the crimes of Fascism, along the lines of museums in Germany (regarding Nazism).
“We can only imagine how many people will be eager to show that Fascism also did some good things for Italy.”
Sympathy for Fascism was alive and well in Italy, the association said, pointing to the fact that there are people who “have no shame in quoting Mussolini” and that there are politicians who look back on Fascism with nostalgia.
The mayor of Rome – who is from the same party as the politicians who proposed the museum – announced on Monday that she was shutting down the idea.
“Rome is an anti-Fascist city. There must be no misunderstandings about that,” said Virginia Raggi, a senior figure in Five Star. The proposal was criticised by politicians from the centre-Left Democratic Party.
"It would be a slap in the face for a city that was awarded a resistance gold medal as well as to the many victims of the Fascist regime," said Bruno Astorre, the party secretary for the Lazio region, which encompasses Rome.
The Five Star councillor behind the idea, Maria Gemma Guerrini, had envisaged a museum being built in an old industrial building in the capital.
It would have been of interested to scholars and Italians as well as “tourists from around the world,” she said.
Neo-fascists are regularly drawn to Predappio, the town in the northern region of Emilia-Romagna where Mussolini is buried.
A handful of shops in the town do a brisk trade in Mussolini memorabilia, including Mussolini busts and keyrings, statues of Il Duce on a rearing stallion, pasta in the shape of his helmeted head and even Mussolini-themed babies’ bibs.
Neo-fascists gather in the town three times a year – on the anniversaries of Mussolini’s birth, death, and his March on Rome, the 1922 putsch which brought him to power.
Reminders of the Fascist era are never far away in Italy - in Rome there is a towering stone obelisk that still bears the words “Mussolini Dux”, Latin for Duce.
Mussolini ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943 but two years later met an ignominious end – he and his mistress were shot dead by partisans in northern Italy and their bodies hung upside down in a piazza in Milan.
