CHAPTER 6 Recycling the Past and the “Museum of Fascism”

The Politics of Scale

At the end of the previous chapter, I promised that I would fill out my description of what politics means in Predappio. In that chapter, we met some things politics often does not mean: it is not, or at least is not always, isomorphic with either kinship or economics, insofar as we met examples of Predappiesi deploying idioms of both relatedness and of self-interest in an effort to detach people from the politics of Fascism. I am also conscious that in describing throughout this book the various ways in which Predappiesi seek to scale themselves down and away from debates about their Fascist heritage, I may leave readers with the impression that these practices of scaling are a sort of “anti-politics machine” (Ferguson 1990), a way to depoliticize Predappio, a place that is nothing if not political to most outsiders.

That is not the case, as I will describe in this chapter. Predappiesi are capable of intense politicization. However, the issues that become political—that is, that become the subject of public debate, argumentation, and even near-violence—are not those an outsider would necessarily expect. Instead, as should come as no surprise by this point, they are issues—such as rubbish collection and recycling, as we will see in this chapter—that scale differently from that of Fascism and its legacies.

A range of recent work in the anthropology of politics has made important contributions to our understanding of the complex relationship between politics and scale-making. For example, building in part on feminist scholarship (e.g., Gal 2002; Benhabib 1998), Esra Özyürek has pointed to the ways in which the line between the public and private spheres is shifting and blurring in contemporary neoliberal Turkey, noting that familiar ways of hierarchically scaling the public and the private so that the former encompasses the latter are not sufficient to capture this phenomenon (2006). Similarly, James Ferguson, in line with earlier work by Timothy Mitchell (e.g., 1991), has troubled our assumptions about the scaled relationship between civil society and the nation-state in Africa by showing how many actors and institutions exist across such a simplistic divide and cannot be captured by a simple “above versus below” conceptual topography (2006). Other work, both new and old, has also shown the labor that goes into making politics look either local or global (e.g., Brenner 2009; Latour 2005; Smith 1992). Zoltan Glück, for example, describes how the Occupy Wall Street movement worked hard to produce itself as local, in contrast to the global investment banks metonymized in Wall Street (2013). One of the important things that all this work demonstrates is that the scaling of political questions is itself a political question: there is nothing intrinsic to certain phenomena that make them “public” or “private,” “local” or “global,” and work must be done by actors involved to produce a sense of such scales.

In similar fashion, in this chapter I aim to interrogate the relation between politics and scale in Predappio. In particular, I share the interest of such work in pointing to the ways in which scales are constructed and sustained by participants involved in political contexts, rather than just being there (a point made in depth by Summerson Carr and Lempert 2016 and earlier by Latour 2005; Candea 2012): that there is, in other words, a politics to scale. There are also many respects in which the relationship between debates over the Casa del Fascio project and those I will describe over rubbish and recycling in Predappio could map on to the scales of local versus global, civil society versus state, and private versus public, as we will see.

However, here I want to pick at the threads of a different scalar relationship. Ferguson notes in passing that the imagined topography of state versus civil society is one that undergirds many of our own preferred anthropological visions of political struggle, “as coming ‘from below’ (as we say), as ‘grounded’ in rooted and authentic ‘lives,’ ‘experiences,’ and ‘communities’ ” (2006, 48). It is to the construction of this (part anthropological and part ethnographic) distinction between the everyday, experiential, community-based politics of where and how often to dispose of your rubbish, on the one hand, and the highly ideologized and often rather abstract political debates about Fascist heritage, on the other hand, that I turn in this chapter.

The Chernobyl of History

It is difficult to date with precision the origins of the idea to turn the Casa del Fascio into something like a museum, or “documentation center,” of Fascism. As Storchi shows, the idea of doing something with the biggest derelict building in the town has certainly been around for some time (2019), and one of Giorgio’s predecessors has claimed credit for the original plan to me. What is certainly not in doubt, though, is that Giorgio’s energy and dedication to the project brought it closer to fruition than it had ever come before, winning him the public backing of the Italian national government, a Holocaust Memorial Award from Austria, and a meeting with and endorsement from then Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi.

A short, barrel-chested man with a round head and a neat beard, Giorgio was a geology teacher and local councillor before his first election to the mayoralty in 2009, on the ticket of the Democratic Party, formerly the Italian Communist Party and at the time the main center-left Italian political party. He smokes incessantly—mainly very slim cigarettes but occasionally an e-cigarette—and likes a drink and good food. He is charismatic, and it is easy to see how he won two local elections handily and became a favorite go-to source of interviews for the national and international press (figure 6.1).¹

Giorgio’s charisma sets him apart from his predecessors and is in part responsible for the amount of publicity the Casa del Fascio project has received over the years. He liked to couch his arguments in favor of the project in metaphors that he returned to time and time again in public speeches. The one I have heard him use most often is that Fascism is a virus (akin to Croce’s characterization of it as a moral sickness), and the only antidote to a virus is vaccination. “Culture” is what Giorgio argued constitutes vaccination, and he saw the Casa del Fascio documentation center as a place for people from around the world to come and learn from the mistakes of the past. But Giorgio laments his own lack of culture, with perhaps a touch of false modesty. He would regularly complain that he was just a poor geologist forced, by virtue of the office he held, to make pronouncements about complex historical questions. Yet he is clearly well read. He once said to me that if he encountered another book that cited Walter Benjamin’s famous image of the angel of history, he would throw it in the trash: “We are not rubble, you know, we also built things. And why does he always walk backward, like a shrimp? Look ahead, for God’s sake!”

Giorgio dates the origins of his own interest in the Casa del Fascio project to the time he was running for his first mandate:

It’s the most massive, the most representative and symbolic place in all Predappio, and it’s in a central position, right in the main square. But it’s completely abandoned, left to itself. So, what do we do with it? At first there was an idea to turn it into a museum of architecture and link it up to the University [of Bologna] faculty of architecture. But this was 2008, 2009, there was the crisis, and there was very little money around. So then I met Carlo, but even before that, I had this great idea: Why should I have to swallow just a little Fascism, when I could eat the whole lot?

Giorgio and his fondness for publicity thus overturned a decades-old tacit rule in Predappiesi administration: stay away from talk about Fascism. Indeed, he did the opposite; as his remark about “eating the whole lot” of Fascism instead of “swallowing just a little” suggests, his strategy was effectively to try to turn Predappio’s greatest liability into a strength. Despite his ubiquity in Italian public discourse about Fascism however, Giorgio himself still evinced some equivocation over this status. He regularly framed his public discourse on Fascism as a duty, imposed on him by his office rather than assumed out of choice, and would complain that the mayor of any other comune in Italy of the same proportions would never be subject to the same level of press scrutiny or be expected to be an expert on complex historical questions. At the same time, his enjoyment of the attention was palpable; he would pore over newspaper coverage of his speeches and often send to me anything in the press that touched on him.

Carlo also came to the project by making his voice heard on the uncomfortable subject of Fascism. In the early 2000s, he had been working for some time as a sort of cultural project manager, setting up and curating exhibitions and projects in empty spaces. He had come to Giorgio’s attention when Carlo wrote a newspaper article that was deeply critical of a project to install a sort of museum in the Rocca delle Caminate, Mussolini’s summer residence. The idea at the time was that the Rocca would be turned into a sort of upscale wine bar, restaurant, and guest house, complete with a small museum to memorialize famous figures from the Romagna (including Mussolini). Carlo thought this a ridiculous plan, almost guaranteed to end up attracting exactly the sort of tourists he wanted to see fewer of coming to Predappio. He suggested instead that it ought to be turned into a natural history museum (“then if the nostalgics come, all they have to look at is plants”). This plan, too, came to nothing, and as we have seen, the Rocca is now supposed to be a small business hub but is in fact largely empty, despite the money spent on its renovation.

Carlo’s intervention in the Rocca debate attracted Giorgio’s attention, and he asked Carlo to draw up a plan for the Casa del Fascio that Giorgio could use in his 2014 electoral campaign. In 2015, Carlo was made the project’s technical director, and the town council unanimously approved his plan. An academic historian affiliated with the University of Siena was drafted as the project’s scientific director, but Carlo and Giorgio remained the main driving forces throughout the project’s life span.

Almost as soon as the plans for the project were publicized, public polemics began. “As soon as it became public knowledge, pandemonium broke out,” recalls Giorgio.

And why is this? Why this pandemonium? This is exactly why the project is necessary! If this history was all settled, then nobody would have gotten so upset, see? This is exactly why our project was needed, because there’s nothing like it in Italy. All there is is this swampy world of historians who sit in their chairs and fiddle about Mussolini, but they never say anything useful. So, we said, “We’re going to rub this in your faces, in the faces of all Italians.” Because … look at what’s happening in Europe right now, look at the rise of neo-Fascism: if you know about this stuff, then you can fight it, but if you try and hide or suppress it then you’ll never fight it.

In line with his favorite analogy of virus and vaccination, Giorgio’s justifications for the project often relied on this idea that knowledge of Fascism would aid in the fight against it. Carlo took a similar position: “Giorgio is right when he calls Predappio the Chernobyl of history. Nobody wants to touch it, nobody wants to do anything about it, so you just leave it abandoned to its fate with the shops and the marchers. We want to change that.”

Objections, however, came thick and fast and on a range of different grounds.² A number of public figures and historians were against the very premise of the idea of a museum of Fascism, suggesting alternative topics instead, such as the Holocaust or the Resistance; others argued that Italy was far from ready for a historicization of Fascism, as it had failed to reconcile itself to its own history, with Germany often cast as an example of success in this endeavor (e.g., Bernabei 2014; Foa 2016). Still more disliked what they saw in the plans for the project, particularly the lack of focus on anti-Fascism and an apparent emphasis on the consent with which Mussolini governed for the majority of his time in power (e.g., Fondazione Alfred Lewin 2016).

The majority of the objections, however, and the ones that most infuriated Carlo and Giorgio, were the ones that questioned Predappio itself as a location for the project. A great number of commentators worried about the likelihood that the Casa del Fascio would simply become another pilgrimage site for neo-Fascist tourists. Some were also concerned about how such a museum could do its job properly when a hundred yards down the road were souvenir shops selling Fascist bric-a-brac (e.g., Schwarz 2016). “What would a teacher tell their schoolchildren,” ran a common line of reasoning, “if, after visiting the museum they want to go into the shops to buy some memorabilia?” (see, e.g., Fondazione Alfred Lewin 2016). Still other commentators simply asserted that Predappio was too small to handle a project of this size, and that if there were going to be a “museum of Fascism” in Italy it ought to be in a large urban center such as Rome or Milan (e.g., Luzzatto and Ginzburg 2016). These sorts of comments about Predappio as a location for the project would enrage Carlo and Giorgio, who would point out, first of all, that this was their idea, that nobody else had proposed such a project, and so where exactly should it be sited if not in the place they wanted it to be; and, second, that the whole point of the project was to change the broader public image of Predappio and that only by achieving this would you drive the shop owners out of business and the neo-Fascist tourists away.

Perhaps the most damning public intervention in these debates were three blog entries written by Wu Ming 1, otherwise known as Roberto Bui, a short man with a shaved head with whom I had lunch in nearby Bologna a month or so before the entries were published.

When we met, Bui was deeply cynical about the motivations behind the project:

The mayor doesn’t want to eliminate neo-Fascist tourism.… He wants to keep it, but to offer another kind of merchandise, and this kind of merchandise will be the museum. So, then he can say, “See, there aren’t just neo-Fascists here, there are also people with a real, serious desire for knowledge of that period.” But in reality, it wouldn’t replace neo-Fascist tourism, it would simply be an addition. It would be an integration of neo-Fascist tourism within this toxic frame. Because it’s not just a matter of Il Duce’s tomb at San Cassiano: the whole town is Il Duce’s tomb. From a symbolic point of view, the whole town is Il Duce.… There’s no other reason that it’s famous.

Later, couching his position on the museum more succinctly, he put it this way: “There will always be that gross stuff [neo-Fascist tourism in Predappio], and what we must absolutely not do is try to plant a daisy on a pile of shit.”

When I noted the argument that Carlo would make to such claims about Predappio—that doing something is better than doing nothing, as doing nothing will simply leave Predappiesi in the position they have always been in—Bui was dismissive: “This can’t be at the expense of everyone else. Because this is a national project, which will probably receive millions of euros from the government, so this can’t just be about Predappiesi. It concerns all Italians, and indeed not only Italians. The risks of this operation go far beyond Predappio: so, on one side of the scale you have six thousand villagers, and on the other side you have the whole country. I mean, really.”

Bui’s distaste for Predappio emerges even more clearly in the Wu Ming blog entries titled “Predappio: Toxic Waste Blues”: “Days later, I … still feel the aftereffects of the nausea [of his visit to Predappio],” it begins (2017). Much of the three blog entries is taken up by a forensic demolition of the Casa del Fascio project as poorly planned, motivated by the self-interest of Giorgio (who is painted as a duplicitous character who says one thing to the left-wing press and another thing to the right-wing press), and above all, impossible to execute in the “toxic frame” of Predappio.

A relatively small proportion of the blogs is dedicated to Predappio itself, but what there is is as caustic as Bui’s remarks to me about Predappio (all translation my own): “By dint of all the talk about it, Predappio seems bigger than it actually is, and much more glamorous than it actually is. When you get there, it shrivels up, and isn’t glamorous at all … sad little bars with a rarefied, aged clientele bent over their scratch cards.… The architecture of the twenties, designed largely by Florestano di Fausto, seems disproportionate to the town—it appears like a child in a man’s boots—and the buildings are less opulent and sparkling than they appear in the photos” (Wu Ming 2017).

Bui also reiterates the sentiment he had expressed to me earlier about the relative importance of Predappio in contrast to the national problem of neo-Fascism: “The problem of neo-Fascism, of which the situation in Predappio is an epiphenomenon, has been replaced by the lesser problem of what to do in Predappio and for the Predappiesi. A dilemma that is mainly that of Frassineti and his constituents—‘How to break free from black [neo-Fascist] businesses without losing the money they bring to the town?’—was presented as an urgent problem for all of us, to be addressed as soon as possible with public injections of millions of euros” (Wu Ming 2017).

What I wish to emphasize here is the fact that many of these arguments, both for and against the Casa del Fascio project, turn on questions of political scale. For example, much of Giorgio’s public discourse around the project centers on its potential ability to speak to a “European” problem and to draw in visitors from across the continent. His visions of its success conjured up pictures of schoolchildren from Britain, France, and Germany coming to Predappio to learn the facts about Fascism. He delighted in pointing to his European connections—in addition to the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Prize, he had forged links with mayors of towns with troubled heritage across the continent, he had aligned the Casa del Fascio project with continental memory associations such as EUROM (the European Observatory on Memories) and European Cultural Route ATRIUM (Architecture of Totalitarian Regimes of the 20th Century in Europe’s Urban Memory), and he sought European funding for the project. He enjoyed reeling off a list of countries whose newspapers or television stations had interviewed him. The documentation center was deliberately planned to speak to European issues.

Bui is surely right to point to a degree of interested motivation here. Emilia-Romagna—in particular its interior—is starved of income from tourism in comparison to its proximate neighbors, well-known hot spots such as Tuscany and Umbria. The border with Tuscany is only a little way down the road from Predappio—and was even closer before Mussolini shifted it westward—and much of the landscape of this area is characteristically Tuscan. Yet very few tourists pass through the area, and Giorgio was certainly on the lookout for ways in which to increase the flow (putting a lot of energy into initiatives to promote local producers of Sangiovese wine, for example).

My interest is less in questions of motive, though, and more about the scalar imaginary at work here. I have no doubt that Giorgio really did believe in the possibility of using Predappio’s history to “scale up” the town to regional and international relevance. His own capacity to garner the attention of the international press, such as the Washington Post, was one of his proudest achievements. He stands apart from any of his mayoral predecessors because of his willingness to, as he puts it, “eat the whole lot” of Fascism: to use what previous administrations considered Predappio’s greatest weakness as its strength, to employ—rather than downplay—its Fascist heritage as a scaling device to magnify Predappio’s significance far beyond the boundaries of the town itself.

Questions of scale also intruded into other objections to the Casa del Fascio project. In 2017, for example, a collection of regional cultural and political associations issued a damning press release criticizing the management of the project for failing to consult and dialogue with them over the plans for the documentation center. In this failure, “instead of being a resource for the cultural and social development of the Forlì and Romagna areas, an opportunity for Italian and foreign students and researchers, [the project] risks being a sensational own goal, served on a plate of silver to nostalgic and ‘curious’ tourism” (Istituto storico della Resistenza e dell’Età contemporanea di Forlì-Cesena et al. 2017).

The objection here introduces another layer of scale in between the town of Predappio and the European and international arena: the “territory,” as the release puts it, in which Predappio resides. I know that a number of the authors behind this release had serious intellectual and political qualms about the Casa del Fascio project; however, there is also a disagreement about how Predappio should scale up at work here. Because of Italy’s centralized and integrated political system, regional branches of national associations (such as ANPI, the local chapter of which was a signatory of the press release above) have a considerable degree of clout within their particular area. So, for a town or comune to leapfrog over them directly onto the national and European stage, as Giorgio did with Predappio, was bound to result in a degree of ill feeling.

Bui’s logic, too, has a significant scalar dimension, like that of other opponents of the project. He takes some pains, in fact, literally to minimize Predappio—hence the contrast between its discursive and actual size in his introduction to his blogs and the image of it as a “child in a man’s boots,” its monumentalist architecture disproportionate to its size. The question of scale is also quite explicit whenever he addresses the issue of balance: neo-Fascism is not “just” a Predappiesi problem; it is, as he put it to me, a national problem, indeed an international one. So whatever claim Predappiesi (or Giorgio, at least) may have to a resolution for their problematic heritage is far outweighed by the Italian—indeed global—problem of the rise of the far right and the need to combat it. This scalar imaginary is mirrored in claims by other opponents of the project that if there is going to be a museum of Fascism in Italy, it ought to be in an urban center such as Rome or Milan. Yet unlike these other opponents, Bui’s problem with Predappio as a site for a documentation center is not just a matter of size; it is, as he puts it, about the “frame.” For Bui, as for others whom we met in the last chapter, Predappio is an index or a metonym for Fascism and Mussolini: “the whole town is Il Duce’s tomb.”

There is, in other words, a normative dimension to both Bui’s and Giorgio’s scalar visions. Both in fact agree that Predappio represents something “more” than itself, though they disagree about exactly what that is: for Giorgio it is Fascism as history, whereas for Bui it is Mussolini himself and the neo-Fascist personality cult that equates a man with a political movement (Ginzburg 2016). But while Giorgio seeks recognition for that “more” and aims to use it to earn Predappio a place on the international stage, Bui seeks to diminish it. Like others I discussed in the last chapter, his antipathy to Predappio and his attacks on it as a “toxic waste dump,” as “smaller” than its place in national discourse, as a “child in a man’s boots,” or simply “a pile of shit,” are attacks on Predappio as a stand-in for neo-Fascism. To diminish Predappio is to diminish neo-Fascism.

However, the scale at work in these debates is not just that of comparative size (Predappio the comune versus Europe or the global problem of neo-Fascism). At stake, too, across many of these arguments is the relationship between the abstract and the concrete, the rarefied air of academic debates about the history of Fascism and the reality of life in Predappio. Carlo and Giorgio, for instance, would regularly point out that their critics in cultural associations of the region never actually came to Predappio, never experienced what it was really like, except perhaps to come to the anti-Fascist tagliatelle dinner on October 28 (hence their characterization as “colonialists” by one local council member—unable to understand the daily struggle of living with Fascist heritage). Giorgio would also often speak with derision of academic historians “fiddling,” as he put it to me, about Mussolini, instead of coming up with concrete solutions. Part of his justification for the Casa del Fascio project rested precisely on this distinction between the academic debates and reality; Predappio, according to Giorgio, could give concrete form to the history of Fascism, given that in many ways and to many people Predappio is Fascism in (literally) concrete form. Carlo would often argue in a similar fashion that the Casa del Fascio project would help solve an eminently practical set of problems for Predappiesi centered around the ritual marches: traffic congestion, the town’s public image, offensive behavior in the cemetery.

Yet the project’s opponents also drew on precisely the same distinction between the abstract and the pragmatic, positioning themselves, too, on the side of the everyday and the real. Bui’s blog is littered with references to the “concreteness” of neo-Fascism, in contrast to the “wishful thinking” of the Casa del Fascio project, an irresponsible gamble on the part of academics who fail to understand the “concrete, corporeal” reality of neo-Fascism in Predappio. He himself makes a clear effort to be “concrete” about Predappio, visiting it in preparation for writing his blog entries. In dialogue with an Italian historian, he contrasts the abstraction of the Casa del Fascio plans with the “individual stories” and “the concreteness of people’s lives” on which work on Fascism should really be focused but which is often neglected by “scholastics” and “academics” (Wu Ming 2017).

Both sides of these arguments, in other words, invoke the scale of the abstract and the concrete, the academic and the everyday, and both sides claim for themselves the same dimension of it. Nobody, it seems, wants to be on the side of abstraction (or academics), despite the fact that there is arguably much that is abstract on either side, as each was wont to point out of the other. While Bui clearly did visit Predappio, little of his writing concerns life in Predappio itself. He describes visiting two of the souvenir shops and the local cemetery, but beyond these brief narratives Predappio largely appears as a cipher, and no individual Predappiesi appear, except for a thinly characterized assistant in a souvenir shop. Similarly, in his public speeches and interviews on the Casa del Fascio project, I rarely if ever heard Giorgio invoke the town in any clearly concrete sense. As I have noted, his riposte to those who criticized the choice of Predappio as a site for the project was usually simply to say that it was his idea and so where else should it be sited; he might—depending on his audience—sometimes add that siting the project in Predappio would lead to new forms of tourism that would in turn eventually put its souvenir shops out of business, but this was clearly to be seen as a possible happy by-product, rather than a key rationale. What was important about Predappio was resignifying its existing symbolic status in such a way as to allow it to speak to an international audience beyond that of neo-Fascism.

I mean none of this as criticism. Bui’s intention in his blog entries was clearly not to write an ethnography of everyday life in Predappio, and Giorgio’s aims for Predappio obliged him, to a large extent, to speak in a language that would make him and his comune of six thousand people look relevant to national and international pundits and funders. My point is merely that the scale of concreteness and everyday life versus abstraction and wishful thinking is very much what is at stake in these arguments, not a premise for them.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, though, it was not just participants in these public debates who contested the meanings of concreteness and abstraction; it was also Predappiesi themselves. In contrast to the arguments of both Giorgio and his opponents, the concrete and the everyday that Predappiesi invoke have nothing to do with Fascism. They are an escape from Fascism. That they are not also an escape from politics per se is what I will endeavor to make clear below.

“Are You Going to Rifle Through My Sanitary Napkins?”

In 2017, in the midst of the most heated period of debates about what to do with the Casa del Fascio, at almost exactly the same time as Bui’s blog about Predappio as a “toxic waste dump” was published, the majority of Predappiesi were wholly occupied by a rather different political firestorm. As I sought to gauge local reactions to the plan to put Predappio at the center of global debates on neo-Fascism, I soon discovered that conversations that I might try to begin on the subject of the Casa del Fascio would very swiftly segue back to what most Predappiesi really wanted to talk about: recycling.

My account above of the debates over the Casa del Fascio project has its own scale. Wu Ming and many of the other critics I have noted are internationally renowned commentators, and I have described Giorgio’s defenses of the project to the outside world, as it were. What, one might ask, did Predappiesi themselves think?

That is exactly one of the questions I sought to answer when I came to Predappio. I had arrived in the town the year before, with the aim of investigating how Predappio’s complex and contested heritage made itself felt in everyday life in the town. Now, thanks to the plans for the Casa del Fascio project, debates about that heritage had spilled out onto the global stage. Colleagues back in the United Kingdom, or across the ocean in the United States, were following these debates, had been asked to sign petitions for and against the project, and were keen to hear what I thought Predappiesi themselves felt about these plans. Yet in the town itself, despite its name ringing in the ears of readers of the Washington Post and the New Yorker, despite the recent visit by Bui and his controversial blog, very few people wanted to talk about the Casa del Fascio project; what most people wanted to talk about was their rubbish.

As ethnographers sometimes do, I dealt with this problem at first by simply butting my head against it. I would persist in raising the topic of the Casa del Fascio project at every opportunity, seeking in vain for some flutter of interest or excitement on the part of a friend or interlocutor. With Carlo and Giorgio, I could speak about it endlessly, but conversation on the topic with anyone else in town would be exhausted in a matter of minutes. Some people might nod and say it would be good thing to rescue the old building, though they would doubt the likelihood of the project coming to fruition. Others would wonder about where all the money would come from. Others still might have some opinions on what sort of content the museum should include. But nobody I met had opinions on the sorts of questions that Giorgio and the project’s critics raised, such as how the town’s heritage might speak to global concerns regarding the rise of the far right. And soon enough any conversation about the local administration would turn away from the Casa del Fascio and back to what my friends felt was a much more pressing issue: recycling.

Recycling in Italy is a complex and controversial topic, and in some areas, thanks to the involvement of the Mafia, a matter of life and death (see e.g., De Rosa 2018). This is not the case in Predappio, though, as we will see, that did not prevent tensions on the subject from reaching a fever pitch and near-violence.

The controversy in Predappio concerned the introduction of a new waste disposal system in the town and in another twelve neighboring comuni. Prior to 2017, Predappiesi, like many other Italians across the country, disposed of their waste by dumping it in large communal containers positioned throughout the town. There were specific containers for certain sorts of recyclables—glass, paper, and plastic—but nothing beyond conscience obligated villagers to make use of these particular bins, and many residents simply disposed of their waste in the nearest bin of whichever variety.

In 2017, thirteen comuni in Emilia-Romagna, including Predappio, banded together to create their own autonomous waste disposal company, called Alea. The foundation of Alea would herald the arrival of what is called “differentiated” or “door-to-door” waste disposal, in which each household is allocated its own separate bins for different sorts of waste—in Predappio’s case, of no fewer than five different types—that would then be collected directly from the household by Alea on a regular schedule. Tariffs for waste disposal would be calculated on a household basis, depending in part on exactly how much nonrecyclable waste the household produced. The aim of the project was to increase the amount of differentiated waste to 74 percent, to reduce the amount of nonrecyclable waste produced by more than 400 pounds per inhabitant per year, and to pay less than the comuni were paying to the contractor they had employed up until then. The result, however, was furor and engagement on a scale I never encountered in relation to the Casa del Fascio project.

Take two contrasting examples of public politics in Predappio that year. The first was the official presentation of the Casa del Fascio project in Predappio in December, marked by the opening of an exhibition of the plans for the project in Mussolini’s birth house and a public discussion in the town cinema. The event had been heavily billed in local press for some time and followed hot on the heels of the national presentation of the project in Rome. On the morning of the event, I drove to pick up one of the historians on the project’s advisory committee from the local railway station in Forlì. Driving back carefully through the winter snow, I listened as he insisted on the importance of local support for the project and that it would be this that would decide its success. We arrived in Predappio in time for lunch at the town’s oldest osteria, with Giorgio, Carlo, and a number of other participants in the project. As Giorgio sought to get through to the local president of ANPI on the phone, we ate beneath displays of wine bottles with Mussolini’s face printed on the labels. After lunch we walked over to the birth house, which was surrounded by members of the press, with telephoto lenses and TV cameras in tow, and Giorgio donned his mayoral sash to open the exhibition officially. His speech, as usual, was calibrated for the ears of the national and international media: Predappio, he said, was the shame of Italy, a symbol of Italy’s collective failure to confront its past. The Casa del Fascio project was the only antidote. As we stood in the cold listening to words we had often heard before from Giorgio, the historian I had brought from Forlì leaned across to another technician on the project and asked how many people from the town he thought had come. “Two or three, maybe” came the reply, with a sigh.

Meanwhile, earlier that year on a Wednesday evening in August, more than two hundred Predappiesi filled the same cinema that would go on to host the panel discussion on the Casa del Fascio in December. It was rubbish, rather than Fascism, however that brought people together that night. Giorgio and the then-director of Alea had invited Predappiesi to the cinema in order to respond to a growing chorus of opposition to the plan for door-to-door recycling. Giorgio, who as mayor had signed Predappio up for the Alea initiative, was very much in favor of the new recycling system. A significant constituency of his electorate, however, were not, and it swiftly became clear that Predappiesi had not come to the cinema that night to listen. Within moments of the Alea director beginning to speak, an elderly man stood up and threatened to punch him. Shortly afterward, as Giorgio was trying to explain the rationale behind the project, a woman of eighty shouted that she considered him a delinquente (literally a “delinquent,” but commonly used in Italy as a pejorative term for someone who behaves badly or criminally), despite knowing him since he was a young boy. Soon the meeting became so raucous, with accusations and insults hurled at Giorgio and the director from the audience, that it had to be closed, and even then the crowd surrounded Giorgio and the director outside the cinema, threatening violence.

Angela, the café owner and a nearby neighbor of mine, was one of the organizers of the vocal opposition movement against Giorgio and Alea that grew steadily over the course of 2017. We sat in her kitchen one Saturday afternoon in August, drinking coffee and discussing the latest town gossip. It was, as usual for this period, recycling that dominated conversation: “I am ignorant, Paolo, I went to a hospitality industry high school, I’m not an engineer or an accountant. Neither are my friends. But we have studied, and we have read up—and now we know they have lied to us.”

Angela and others had by this point gathered together more than 1,300 signatures to a petition demanding a number of reforms to the Alea proposal, a petition they delivered to Giorgio in person. They had a range of objections to the project. They argued, for instance, that it had been brought in with no consultation. According to Angela, Predappiesi simply woke up one day to find different bins outside their doors, along with a note demanding payment for the bins and explaining that the new system would come into force soon. They also criticized the way in which Alea was set up, arguing that if cost savings were really a motivation for the new system, then a request for bids on a contract for waste disposal should have been put out, rather than simply awarding the contract directly to a new entity with no experience in the business. The protestors also objected to the new charging system, one that would penalize most those who generated the most amount of nonrecyclable waste. This, they argued, would unfairly discriminate against poor households of large families. Angela and others pointed out with some venom that Giorgio could afford to eat out for dinner at restaurants all the time, and so he would not have to pay as much as they would.

Many of their most vehement objections were eminently practical and extremely specific. For instance, some of the bins provided to householders were large and heavy even when empty. Predappio has a substantial population of elderly residents, many of whom live, like Valentina and her sister, in flats in one of Predappio’s many apartment blocks, few if any of which are equipped with elevators. How, Angela and others asked, were octogenarians supposed to carry a different bin up and down flights of stairs on an almost daily basis? Giorgio’s suggestion that the local scout troop would help was met with derision. A similar objection was made on the behalf of rural farmers living out in the countryside around the town. Many of their farms are set far back from the road. Were they to be expected to ferry their bins to and from the roadside in their cars every day? Questions were asked about what would happen if someone had an accident while moving one of these bins or if bins in the road caused a car crash: Who would be liable, Alea or the household? Some residents were incensed at the cost of disposing of diapers. One of the most talked-about objections, which surfaced in the August meeting at the cinema and was much reported on in the press, was to the idea that Alea could inspect people’s rubbish to ensure that they were correctly distributing their waste. “What,” Angela is proud to have asked indignantly at the meeting at the cinema, “are you going to rifle through my sanitary napkins? What if I’ve thrown away a vibrator?”

Over a period of months—the same months in which national and international furor over the Casa del Fascio project was at its peak—Predappio was consumed by these questions. It was anger over the Alea project that led the man I described at the outset of this chapter to physically threaten Giorgio at the restaurant at Predappio Alta. Many people I knew attributed the subsequent election victory of the first right-wing mayor in Predappio’s postwar history to persistent anger at Giorgio over the rubbish issue: “He behaved like a Ducetto [a ‘little Duce’], and we haven’t forgotten that,” Angela told me, years later. Giorgio, too, invoked Mussolini as we ate that night in Predappio Alta: “Mussolini is a curse, a bringer of bad luck [porta sfortuna]. That’s why nothing ever changes in this place.”

At the time I was rather baffled. In 2017, everybody in the world seemed to want to talk about Fascism, and indeed plenty of people wanted to talk about Fascism and Predappio, thanks to the Casa del Fascio project. There I was, in the heart of things, the birthplace of the founder of Fascism, the site of his grave and the center of the Italian neo-Fascist tourism industry, and the proposed locale for Italy’s first and only museum of Fascism. But all anybody in Predappio wanted to talk about was rubbish.

After an initial and fruitless period of trying to elicit some interest in the Casa del Fascio from Predappiesi, it finally struck me that this imbalance was itself an interesting phenomenon, and I began to ask instead why people in Predappio could become so virulently politicized over the issue of recycling and yet appear entirely uninterested in their town’s place in debates about the politics of Fascism. The response of Chiara, the council employee whom we met in chapter 5, was typical: “Listen, that stuff is not our lives. Let them come and have their Mussolini pantomime, who cares? This is our lives,” she said, pointing to the array of shiny new plastic bins by her door. “How is my uncle going to carry those things down the stairs? What are my bills going to be like now? This is politics, local politics, for normal people.”

In hindsight, this fits well with the pattern in Predappiesi attitudes to their heritage. Chiara’s claims about the nature of politics sound as definitive as the anthropological assumptions James Ferguson notes about politics being “from below,” “ ‘grounded’ in rooted and authentic ‘lives,’ ‘experiences,’ and ‘communities’ ” (2006, 48). But both Chiara’s and our own anthropological claims about the scale of politics are just as normative as the scalar claims of Giorgio and Bui we met earlier. Set against the backdrop of a contested and often violent history of political clashes over Fascism in Predappio, not to mention the town’s regional, national, and international reputation—“the whole town is Il Duce’s tomb,” as Bui put it—all of which Chiara is well aware of, her claim looks in many ways aspirational, rather than simply descriptive: let rubbish disposal be politics, not Fascism; let us be “normal people.” That is not to say that the concerns Predappiesi had about the recycling system were in any way performative or disingenuous, or a way to somehow distract attention from the debates over the Casa del Fascio. But assertions such as Chiara’s about the nature of politics make sense only against the wider background of life in Predappio.

There is nothing per se that is everyday or ordinary about the politics of rubbish and recycling in Predappio. Such politics take on the weight of ordinariness, of “reality,” “experience,” and “life,” only in contrast to the politics of Fascism that Predappiesi work so hard to avoid. Fascism can be just as everyday as recycling, as the arguments of Bui and Giorgio suggest, albeit in very different ways, and as some historians of Fascism have argued (Arthurs, Ebner, and Ferris 2017; Bosworth 2005; Passerini 1987). Indeed, to an outside observer, life in Predappio is “everyday Fascism,” given how suffused simple and ordinary activities are by the symbols and remnants of the regime and its contemporary admirers. As I hope is clear by now, however, the everyday that Predappiesi valorize and strive to give form to has nothing to do with Fascism and indeed is given meaning precisely in opposition to Fascism (“that stuff is not our lives”). It is a very particular vision of everydayness: in some ways, it looks like social scientific versions of the idea of the everyday (one would not have to look far in the literature to find an analytical claim comparable to Chiara’s about the “realness” of local political issues such as recycling); yet its distinctive character emerges from the way it is invariably opposed to the politics of Fascism that most people associate with Predappio.

At stake across debates about the politics of both recycling and Fascist heritage are a set of scalar questions that are as political as the debates themselves but that have little or nothing intrinsically to do with either issue: Who is more real, more concrete, more grounded, more ordinary than whom? Such questions are not confined to the context of Predappio. These sorts of scalar notions, as Ferguson implies, are often invoked and deployed in anthropological arguments, with little by way of interrogation as to their specific meaning or their potentially contested status in any given political context. We ignore the politics of our own scaling practices when we think it enough to attach one of these adjectives to a concept in order to win an argument.

Predappiesi lost their specific political argument about recycling. The Alea door-to-door system persists, despite ongoing grumbling, and in fact the town was recently praised for achieving a higher level of waste differentiation than many of its neighbors. But in many ways Predappiesi won their broader argument about what should and should not constitute “the everyday” in the town and its politics. In May 2019, for the first time in its postwar history, Predappio elected a right-wing mayor, Roberto Canali. Within six months, he had unceremoniously fired the administrators and technicians involved in the Casa del Fascio project, citing concerns over its architectural plans. Carlo was heartbroken, and Giorgio was resigned. The project’s future is now uncertain. Most Predappiesi that I know barely batted an eyelid at the news. The Casa del Fascio will probably remain desolate and empty for decades more to come, looming over the town square, pointedly ignored by all but the black-shirted tourists and the pigeons.