Italy's resurgent interest ....defies the politically correct portrayal of 
his regime as an unmitigated disaster. That Cold War perspective was shaped 
by the Communists, Socialists and Christian Democrats who dominated the 
country's postwar politics.
 
Over the last decade, since corruption scandals brought down Italy's 
center-left and opened the way for right-wing parties to vie for power, a 
more complex view of fascism, emphasizing its benefits as well as its flaws, 
has gained ground.

...historians have emphasized that Mussolini was beloved...for modernizing 
the country, defending family values, suppressing the Mafia and making the 
trains run on time. That popularity broke down only with the devastation of 
the war...

A wide range of Italians, admire Il Duce as a stronger, more honest ruler 
than any Italy has had since.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--
Column One

A NEW DAY FOR IL DUCE

Half a century after his death, Benito Mussolini is fascinating many Italians 
again. Some say his reputation was due for a reevaluation. 

Los Angeles Times
By Richard Boudreaux
Staff Writer
May 10, 2002

PREDAPPIO, Italy -- It began quietly, without warning. One morning, three 
young skinheads on a secret mission entered the crypt, donned black capes and 
took turns standing at grim attention by their hero's tomb.

The next day, another stone-faced trio took up the 11-hour watch, and before 
many people noticed, the stealth vigil had become a daily routine. Today, 
nearly a year later, the ritual is an established fact: Benito Mussolini, the 
long-disgraced fascist dictator, has a posthumous honor guard.

Mayor Ivo Marcelli, a former Communist, is outraged. Having such an infamous 
native son is awkward enough, he complains, but the honor guard has this 
little town under a kind of paramilitary siege. Over the mayor's protests, 
the silent men in capes keep coming from all over Italy and now number about 
400.

Mussolini is enjoying a revival, and its strength is evident far beyond his 
grave. Fifty-seven years after he was shot dead by Italian partisans while 
trying to flee the country and strung upside-down in a piazza in Milan, 
Italy's shame about its vanquished World War II ruler is yielding to the 
curiosity and fascination of generations born since.

As a political force in Italy, fascism may be as dead as Mussolini himself. 
But with mainstream nationalists holding power in Rome and gaining strength 
across Europe, historians are reassessing his legacy, and restraints on the 
country's long-hidden fascist subculture are loosening.

Despite a law that bans public glorification of fascism, shops and flea 
markets all over Italy sell everything from T-shirts to bottles of wine 
bearing the boulder-jawed image of Il Duce. For those who love kitsch, 
there's a Snoopy dog with a menacing glare on his face and a black truncheon 
in his paw.

Exhibits of fascist-era art and schoolbooks draw crowds. Newsstands offer a 
15-video set of Mussolini's speeches, and a televised interview with his 
daughter drew 3.5 million viewers last fall--a huge audience here for such 
programming.

The dictator's homes are being restored and opened to the paying public. A 
dedicated traveler can now trace Mussolini's life from the farmhouse where he 
was born here in 1883; to Villa Torlonia, his Rome residence when he ruled 
Italy from 1922 to 1943; to Villa Feltrinelli, now a five-star hotel on 
picturesque Lake Garda, where he led a tiny rump republic under German army 
protection until his capture and execution in 1945.

And if Guido Costa, the mayor of Tremestieri Etneo, gets his way, nostalgia 
tourists will be able to add his Sicilian town to the itinerary and stroll 
down the proposed "Via Benito Mussolini--Statesman." Italy's resurgent 
interest in its most notorious 20th century figure defies the politically 
correct portrayal of his one-party regime as an unmitigated disaster. That 
Cold War perspective was shaped by the Communists who led the anti-fascist 
partisan struggle and the Socialists and Christian Democrats who dominated 
the country's postwar politics.

In that view, fascism was an unbroken plague of mass marches, Pharaonic 
public works, press censorship, secret police, imperial conquest and 
anti-Semitic laws, capped by a disastrous alliance with Nazi Germany that 
provoked an Allied invasion and left Italy in ruins. Mussolini's party was 
banned after the war, and a 1952 law prohibited any public call for its 
revival.

Over the last decade, since corruption scandals brought down Italy's 
center-left establishment and opened the way for right-wing parties to vie 
for power, a more complex view of fascism, emphasizing its benefits as well 
as its flaws, has gained ground.

Volumes by Renzo De Felice and other Italian historians have emphasized that 
Mussolini was beloved during most of his heyday for modernizing the country, 
defending family values, suppressing the Mafia and making the trains run on 
time. That popularity broke down only with the devastation of the war, they 
point out.

The election of a center-right government under media magnate Silvio 
Berlusconi last May has further eroded the anti-fascist taboos.

But it has also kept Mussolini's emboldened but tiny band of loyalists out on 
the fringe.

Gianfranco Fini, whose National Alliance is the reformed heir to the Fascist 
Party, has embraced the political mainstream to become Berlusconi's deputy 
prime minister. Seeking respectability as Italy's delegate to a European 
Union panel, Fini in January retracted his 1994 characterization of Mussolini 
as the century's greatest statesman.

Many Italians welcome all these changes as evidence that fascist political 
power is irretrievable and that a more balanced look at its historical and 
cultural imprint is now possible.

"Paradoxically, as fascism recedes over the historical horizon, it is 
becoming more of a folkloric phenomenon," said Franco Pavoncello, a political 
science professor at Rome's John Cabot University. "Before, it was 
unacceptable, hidden. Now you see people trying to establish a connection 
with the past."

To others, however, the fascination with Mussolini borders on a 
rehabilitation that would be impossible in Germany for Adolf Hitler, his Nazi 
protege and wartime ally.

"Even the heat cannot suppress the shiver provoked by the open respect given 
to Italy's biggest war criminal," James Walston, a British-born political 
scientist who is active in Italian politics, remarked after visiting 
Mussolini's tomb last summer. "The reason for this revival, this 
acceptability, is that younger people do not know what fascism was really 
like."

That's because Italy, which finished the war in the Allied camp, failed to 
come to terms with its own war crimes, as the Germans did, or prosecute its 
worst offenders, Walston said.

"Fascism was never fully defeated," he said.

Perhaps no place in Italy stirs such debate more easily than Predappio, a 
farming village that in 1925 was transformed by its native son into a model 
of town planning and that feels the conflicting impulses of a nation 
reappraising his legacy.

"Fascism was an important world event. It made Italy an international player 
and cannot be erased," said a 75-year-old retired Predappio bricklayer who 
identified himself only as Sergio. "But we cannot go back. No, no, no! 
Democracy is just fine. No one imposes anything."

Set in rolling vineyard country near Bologna, Predappio has 6,000 inhabitants 
and a single piazza, surrounded by the monumental Church of St. Anthony, a 
hospital, a police station, the old party headquarters and the Town 
Hall--five institutions that helped maintain fascist control.

"Everything you see here, Mussolini created," Pierluigi Pompignoli told a 
visitor during a drive through the square.

The 65-year-old merchant pointed proudly to an engraving of the fasci--the 
bundles of rods borne by magistrates in ancient Rome and adopted by the 
fascists as their party emblem--on the church facade. Right after the war, 
"the Communists wanted to get up there and erase it," he said, "but the 
brothers formed a cordon and saved it."

Predappio has been a battleground since. The main street, Via Roma, was 
renamed in honor of Giacomo Matteotti, a Socialist slain by a fascist gang in 
1924. Like much of Italy after the war, the townspeople elected leftists and 
tried to obliterate all signs of the dictator.

In 1957, however, the town's leaders reluctantly allowed the dictator's 
rotting corpse, which had been exhumed by supporters from a grave near Milan, 
to be moved to the Mussolini family crypt here. The remains were placed in a 
large granite tomb topped with a marble bust of Il Duce and a box containing 
part of his brain.

>From then on, Predappio has been a magnet for old comrades and young fascists 
in black shirts--the uniform of his party--who gather each year to sing party 
hymns and raise stiff-armed salutes on the anniversaries of Mussolini's 
birth, death and rise to power. A guest register in the crypt bulges with 
comments anticipating Mussolini's return--some expressing the sentiment that 
next time, there will be no mistakes.

The nationwide ban on such pro-fascist expression was never lifted, but 
strict enforcement is not the Italian way. As the trickle of pilgrims became 
a flood, town officials abandoned efforts to keep out tour buses and fascist 
memorabilia.

"You can call this a rehabilitation" of the dictator, declared Pompignoli, 
who quit the poultry business 12 years ago to cash in on the revival. His 
Predappio Tricolore, one of the town's three purveyors of fascist kitsch, 
features the Mussolini 2002 calendar; Il Duce graces the cover, a strong man 
in a pith helmet astride a white horse.

Mayor Marcelli has a different take on the growing crowds. According to his 
surveys, 30,000 people visited Predappio in 1990, and 29,000 of them were 
Mussolini admirers. Today, more than 70,000 visitors come each year; most are 
still fascists, but a growing proportion--at least 20,000-- are "merely 
curious about our history," he said.

Seeking to invert that ratio against the black-shirted pilgrims, Marcelli has 
announced plans to reinvent Predappio as a laboratory for examining 
Mussolini's two-decade grip on Italy.

He made a modest start in 1999 by opening the dictator's birthplace to the 
public--not as a shrine but as an instructive museum featuring exhibits on 
the regime's use of postcards, art, architecture and sports as propaganda. 
Now he's asking Parliament for funding to create a research center.

"We want to become a venue for analysis and debate on the risks and dangers 
of fascism," the 51-year-old mayor said. Could fascism revive? "No, I don't 
believe Italy is ripe for another old-style dictator. But we could succumb to 
anti-liberalism, an era of extreme intolerance."

One sign of that threat, he warns, is that politicians on the left and right 
are blocking his proposal.

"The left is afraid that the right will exploit our project as an apology for 
fascism, and the right wants to wait until it gets control of Town Hall," he 
said. A more telling sign was the deliberate omission from an art exhibit in 
Predappio last spring of any reference to Mussolini's alliance with Hitler. 
Organizers said they wanted to avoid inflaming passions during the national 
election campaign.

Such was the edgy political mood that greeted Mussolini's honor guard in 
June, a few weeks after Berlusconi's landslide at the polls.

The all-male guard began with a core of young skinheads from social clubs 
tied to Fini's National Alliance and the tiny Forza Nuova party, then grew by 
word of mouth. The participants chose capes to evade Italy's rigid rules 
about who may wear uniforms and black "to show respect" for a dead hero, said 
Arinaldo Grazziani, the guard's 41-year-old vice president.

Berlusconi's government has denied supporting the guard but ignored the 
mayor's call to ban it. Under the constitution, the mayor argues, the state 
has exclusive domain over honor guards and has authorized just two in 
Rome--one for the unknown soldier, one for a pair of 19th century kings 
entombed in the Pantheon.

To Mussolini's heirs, the guards are volunteers on private property.

"What harm are they?" asked Guido Mussolini, the dictator's 65-year-old 
grandson, who received 3,497 votes last year as Forza Nuova's candidate for 
mayor of Rome. "They are not armed. They stand in that crypt for hours and 
hours and hours. They meditate. They come out changed, completely for the 
better. They don't hate anyone anymore."

Besides, he said, "who is greater? Those kings, or Mussolini?"

Among outsiders, the guards are nearly as silent off duty as on. One, a 
48-year-old businessman, said they are sworn to secrecy about their politics, 
the better to "keep this act of love for Benito Mussolini unspoiled" by any 
appearance of partisanship. A wide range of Italians, he said, admire Il Duce 
as a stronger, more honest ruler than any Italy has had since.

Anything said about the guards can be provocative. In response to the mayor's 
protests, Guido Mussolini once made the claim that the silent skinheads 
foster a mood of reverence in the dictator's crypt and discourage vandalism.

An anonymous vandal rose to the challenge, slipping into the crypt on a cold 
February morning and stealing the guest register.

Aha! cried the mayor. Unguarded, the tomb had been trouble-free since a 1971 
bombing.

"Now the book has been taken from right in front of their eyes," the mayor 
said. "This is ultimate proof that this so-called honor guard is nothing but 
a folkloric stunt."