CHAPTER 3 The “Carnival of Mussolini” and How to Pretend It Isn’t Happening

The Body of Il Duce

I have already described the extent to which Fascism as a political movement was interwoven with the character and personality of its founder and leader. This was no less true of his body, as Sergio Luzzatto has shown in detail (Luzzatto 2014). Fascist propagandists obsessed over his masculine virility and tried their best to underplay his aging and becoming a grandfather. Anti-Fascists, meanwhile, were equally concerned with his body in attempting his assassination, identifying, as Fascism did as we saw in chapter 1, the body of the man with the power of the regime (Luzzatto 2014, 13–52).

On April 28, 1945, Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci were shot by a partisan firing squad outside the gates of the Villa Belmonte, having been captured trying to flee to Switzerland the day before. The next day their bodies were dumped in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto along with those of other executed Fascists. The choice of location was deliberate: Fascists had executed fifteen partisans in Piazzale Loreto in August 1944 and left their bodies in the square as a warning to others. After being similarly dumped without ceremony in the midst of a crowd in the square, Mussolini’s corpse was strung up, upside down, from a gas station roof, as masses of people thronged to see the proof of his death and to visit their own minor punishments on his remains.

The black-and-white pictures of Mussolini on display in Piazzale Loreto are the most famous image of the fate of his body and served as a rallying cry for the Italian left for some time afterward. Yet the strange story of Mussolini’s body only begins in Piazzale Loreto. It would end, in some respects at least, twelve years later, when the remains were returned to the Mussolini family crypt in Predappio.

After being displayed in Piazzale Loreto, Mussolini’s corpse was buried in secret in an unmarked tomb in Milan’s Musocco cemetery. Luzzatto claims the only attendant ceremony was a group of partisans dancing on top of his grave (2014, 82). The secrecy attending the burial was clearly rather less than absolute, however, because shortly thereafter, the location of the body became known to a young neo-Fascist and member of the “Democratic Fascist Party [sic],” an underground reincarnation of Mussolini’s Italian Fascist Party (PNF). On the day after Easter Monday, April 23, 1946, Mussolini rose again: along with two collaborators, Domenico Leccisi broke into the Musocco Cemetery under cover of night and stole Mussolini’s casket, leaving a statement from the Democratic Fascist Party in its place. For three hundred days, the body remained missing and the subject of intense public speculation, eventually turning up in a monastery outside Pavia, where it had been taken by a Franciscan Abbot to whom Leccisi had entrusted it. To get the body back, the Milanese chief of police had to agree to provide it with a Christian burial, so it was subsequently interred in a different convent, Cerro Maggiore near Milan.

Religious ritual focused on Mussolini’s body began even in its public absence, and indeed Leccisi’s escapade is a testament to the continued power Mussolini’s body exerted over his neo-Fascist inheritors. Secret masses were held on the anniversary of his death, with the ones in Rome 1947 drawing so many people that the police became involved (Luzzatto 2014, 147). In Predappio, one local amateur historian told me that people remember flowers appearing at the Mussolini family crypt as early as 1946. In 1950, a campaign was started called “Buried in Italy,” in which a substitute tomb for Mussolini was supposed to be created in each and every Italian town and city (149). Later in the decade a “spiritual confession” emerged, purporting to be written by Mussolini shortly before his death and attesting to the strength of his Catholicism at the time, though most historians consider it to be a fake (125).

Meanwhile, in May 1957, Predappio achieved the notable distinction of seeing a second of its native sons elected prime minister of Italy. Adone Zoli’s family were landholders in Predappio; Mussolini’s father-in-law had worked on these lands, his wife was born on them, Zoli’s own family tomb is just a few yards from the Mussolini crypt in the local cemetery, and I have toured the old family wine cellar beneath one of the town’s restaurants.

Zoli’s Christian Democrat government of the time was extremely precarious. To survive, it required the parliamentary deputies of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) not to vote it down, thus obliging a democratic government to come to some agreement with the neo-Fascist contingent in parliament for the first time since the war. Ironically, the deciding vote in parliament fell to Domenico Leccisi, who had first been elected as an MSI deputy but then left the party as it attempted to make itself more respectable.

As part of the deal with the MSI, Zoli agreed to have Mussolini’s remains reburied in the family crypt in Predappio. A story contemporary Predappiesi love to tell is of Zoli telephoning the then-mayor of Predappio, Egidio Proli, to ask his permission for the reburial. “He didn’t scare us when he was alive,” Proli is alleged to have responded, “so why should he scare us now that he’s dead?”

On August 30, accompanied by a substantial police escort and some of the monks from the Capuchin convent in Cerro Maggiore, Mussolini’s body arrived back home. Also awaiting his return were the national press corps and a small group of family members and devotees, who were photographed giving the Fascist salute at the cemetery.

Just a week later, three and a half thousand neo-Fascists turned up on Sunday to pay their respects, with several arrested by the local police for making the same salute. A week after that, a further seven thousand arrived. The police forced anyone wearing a black shirt to take it off, leaving the cemetery full of men in undershirts (Luzzatto 2014, 213). Egidio Proli may or may not have been afraid of Mussolini, dead or alive, but Predappio was certainly not prepared for the impact the posthumous return of its most famous son would have on its future.

“Di Chi Vegna”

In 2017, tensions had been running high in the region for some time in regard to Predappio before October 28, largely due to heated debates that had been taking place over the proposal to build a museum in the town’s former Fascist Party headquarters, the Casa del Fascio, debates that I discuss in chapter 6. A large number of prominent local politicians, dignitaries, and intellectuals had taken one position or another regarding this proposal (or one position after another, in some cases), and much discussion was taking place over exactly where various people and organizations stood.

The Assocazione Nazionale Partigiani d’Italia (ANPI) is the largest and most politically powerful of a number of organizations that represent partisan veterans from the Second World War. Formed in 1945 and originally intended to act on behalf of partisans from a range of different political formations (Communist, Catholic, Liberal), ANPI soon became much more closely affiliated with the powerful Italian Communist Party and has since remained firmly on the left of the political spectrum. ANPI now admits members of any age, provided they are willing to declare themselves to be anti-Fascist and in agreement with the organization’s aims. Today the majority of its membership consists of younger volunteers, with fewer than 10 percent being veterans of the war. Its lobbying power continues to be substantial, though; for example, it was credited with playing a considerable part in the defeat of former prime minister Matteo Renzi’s proposals for constitutional reform in a 2016 referendum.

After a period of vacillation and internal discussion between its national and local leadership, ANPI would come out in opposition to the Casa del Fascio project in December 2017, but already by October its provincial chapter, based in the nearby town of Forli, had decided that some display of anti-Fascist sentiment in Predappio was important in light of the town’s ubiquity in the media.

So, on Saturday, October 28, 2017, Predappio—or, more precisely, the provincial chapter of ANPI, in Predappio—hosted an event in celebration of the anniversary of the town’s liberation, for the first time in living memory, as far as I could discover. The plan settled upon was to hold a series of speeches and musical performances in the local cinema, before moving to the local left-wing social club (Casa del Popolo) for dinner, and so the evening was entitled a “Tagliatella anti-Fascista.” Even the planning for this event had already caused some degree of controversy, however: the original scheme had been for the music to take place outside in a public square, but ANPI was strongly advised by local and provincial authorities that this would risk problems of public order, given the likely presence of visiting neo-Fascists that same weekend, and so agreed to move the event indoors.

I arranged to attend with my friend Carlo, the technical director of Predappio’s Casa del Fascio project. Carlo is a tall man with slightly wild, Albert Einstein–like hair and a quiet demeanor that conceals a sharp mind and deep-seated political convictions. His biographical relationship to Predappio is rather singular and begins with another calendrical irony: October 28 is also his birthday.

Carlo was born, like most of my own family, in the nearest town to Predappio, Forli, in 1950. He became politicized, like many other young Italians, in 1968 and was a leading member of the Forli section of Lotta Continua, a famous left-wing extraparliamentary autonomist movement led by Adriano Sofri. Though at first Carlo’s Lotta Continua group paid little heed to the local neo-Fascists of 1968, things changed in 1969 when a bomb exploded in a bank in Piazza Fontana, Milan, beginning more than a decade of political violence in Italy that came to be known as the “years of lead.” The bombing has been the subject of three separate trials, the first identifying anarchists as the culprits and the second and third neo-Fascists. Sofri, the leader of Lotta Continua, would later be convicted of inciting the murder of a police officer who was himself suspected of murdering an anarchist in the course of interrogating him over the bombing (this latter murder was then famously dramatized by the Nobel laureate Dario Fo as Accidental Death of an Anarchist). Though no trial has produced a clear result in the Piazza Fontana case, it remains a widespread and credible belief in Italy that neo-Fascists, with the possible collaboration of elements within the Italian state, were responsible for the bombing, and in its wake “Fascism” suddenly became a critical political rallying call for young people like Carlo on the left. With the specter of Fascism awoken, the nearby town of Predappio also became, unsurprisingly, the focal point for a series of clashes between neo-Fascists and militants such as Carlo.

Things came to a head a few years later in the spring of 1971, when local media reported plans for a large neo-Fascist gathering in Predappio. Carlo and his Lotta Continua group, urged on by other extraparliamentary movements, planned a national counterdemonstration in the town on the anniversary of Italy’s liberation, to which two hundred or so militants came. Carlo chose as the title for their demonstration a phrase in local dialect (dí chi vegna) that can be roughly translated as “bring it on.” Carlo and his men took the same route Predappio’s contemporary visitors take, marching from the square to the cemetery, where they had a violent encounter with a party of neo-Fascists that ended with the latter’s ejection from the town.

This was on April 26, the anniversary of Italy’s liberation. April 28 is the anniversary of Mussolini’s death, and so three days later neo-Fascists came to Predappio again, only this time they came in force. They launched a planned assault on the Casa del Popolo, the same building in which Carlo and I would eat our “anti-Fascist pasta” forty-six years later. At the time of the attack, there were only seven or eight elderly locals inside, who nevertheless managed to fight off their aggressors, but not before arranging a rematch later that day at the Rocca delle Caminate, Mussolini’s old summer retreat on the hill above Predappio (and, so some claim, the site of the first government meeting of the Republic of Salò), where his widow, “Donna” Rachele, as she is often called, still owned a restaurant. Such was the anger at the attack on the old men in the Casa del Popolo that around three hundred people turned up at the Rocca, from Predappio and farther afield, to fight the neo-Fascists. In Carlo’s recollections, Rachele Mussolini’s restaurant turned into something like the scene of a Western movie, complete with flying bricks and glasses. The restaurant has never opened again since. Most of the Fascist contingent had to be taken to hospital by police, where they were beaten up again as soon as their escort had disappeared. They retaliated later by bombing Lotta Continua’s Forli headquarters. Later still, someone else set off a small bomb in the Mussolini family crypt itself.

People in Predappio have different memories of this period, though all are united in describing it as a contested and violent time in Predappio’s history. Ivo Marcelli, mayor of Predappio in the 1990s, told me he remembered the 1970s as a decade of beatings, roadblocks, and raids every weekend. Like Carlo, Ivo thought it was all necessary to send a message to the Fascists that their violence was not welcome. Franco, however, an entrepreneur who sat on the local council during this period, describes Lotta Continua and the Fascists as “idiots on one side and idiots on the other”:

I mean, there were those two factions that had nothing to do with the real world. When they put the bomb in the tomb, there was a city council meeting, four hundred people came to the meeting who wanted to reopen the tomb, nobody was of the right wing, very few of them. They were just working people who understood that there was damage and tourists wouldn’t come. A member of the MSI [Movimento Sociale Italiano—a reincarnation of the Fascist Party], Sergio Moschi [kin to the Fascist Moschi who greeted Ferlini at the liberation of Predappio—see chapter 2] intervened and said, “Let’s keep the tomb closed—he fed us for so many years when he was alive, do you want him to feed us even when he’s dead?” The situation was strange: the left wing wanted to reopen it, and the right wing wanted to keep it closed.

But Franco also remembers the attack on the Casa del Popolo as a moment of unity: “Everybody mobilized, even people who were not left-wing or anti-Fascist. When they beat those old men, the whole town united.” To Franco, then, the politics that inspired both neo-Fascists and left-wing militants were redundant, detached from “the real world.” Beating up somebody’s grandfather, on the other hand, was something everybody—setting aside their politics, in some cases—could unite to oppose and punish.

Giorgio Frassineti, mayor of Predappio from 2009 to 2019—and thus during much of my fieldwork—remembers Predappio in the 1970s as a “militarized town,” with armored police appearing on the streets periodically and his parents afraid of letting him play outside. Giorgio, like every other postwar mayor of Predappio until 2019, is from the party of the left, but he does not share Carlo’s nostalgia for the violence of the 1960s and ’70s: “I met this guy a few years back, a big Lotta Continua guy from Milan, who says to me with pride, ‘Yeah, I remember Predappio, I came to fight there.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, thanks: you came to my town to play war so I couldn’t go outside to play football.’ ”

The 1970s were a decade of political turmoil more broadly in Italy, and Predappio was a unique context for simmering tensions to boil over. But both nationally and locally these tensions would ease by the beginning of the 1980s. The centenary of Mussolini’s birth was 1983, and a very large gathering of neo-Fascists was expected to mark the July anniversary in Predappio. Despite the fears of some locals, the event passed without violence and is widely credited with ushering in a new era of peaceful—if still distasteful, for many—“nostalgic” tourism. The only interruption of this peace that I have heard discussed was an occasion in the 1990s, amid internecine disputes within the far right over the move toward the center of Alleanza Nazionale (AN; the inheritor of the MSI), in which Domenico Leccisi—then still living and still firmly opposed to any form of “defascistization”—is supposed to have punched an AN parliamentary deputy in the face during one of the anniversary marches.

Meanwhile, an illicit trade in Fascist souvenirs had sprung up in Predappio to serve the visiting tourists. Mostly this was men selling antique postcards out of the back of their cars in the cemetery parking lot, but throughout the 1980s it grew to include food and wine stamped with Mussolini’s face. In the early 1990s, Ivo gave a license to open a print shop to a man who would go on to become one of the biggest entrepreneurs of the so-called souvenir trade: “The problem is, this kind of license allows other things. From the very first day they started selling souvenirs. I went to the police and the prefecture, and I told them what was happening, and they said, ‘Mayor, you’re worrying for nothing, let them do it, they’re doing no harm … and aren’t you interested in making some money?’ ”

Ivo remembers his decision with some regret for its unintentional consequences, and Carlo remembers it with anger: “They were so stupid not to understand that the shops would come to be important for far more than just economic reasons.”

Carlo himself had more or less left the world of politics when Lotta Continua dissolved in 1976. He had become a cultural operator of sorts, helping to organize conferences, exhibitions, and concerts across the region, developing a reputation as a successful manager of such projects. He continued to follow news and developments in Predappio, including the periodic resurgence of debates over what to do with various neglected buildings in the town. He knew Giorgio before he was elected mayor of Predappio in 2009, and when Giorgio ran for reelection on a platform including the Casa del Fascio project, he recruited Carlo as the project’s technical director. So, forty-five years after his battles with neo-Fascists in the town, Carlo returned to Predappio to live and work. Now, however, he was fighting battles on two fronts: with the “nostalgic” tourists he still despised but also with his erstwhile friends from the left, who came to Predappio on October 28, 2017, in part to signal their opposition to the Casa del Fascio project he led.

Anti-Fascist Pasta

I arrived with Carlo by car that day, and as we drove down Predappio’s main street on our way to the ANPI event, it was clear that some people had already arrived in the town for a very different purpose. Groups of men dressed in black wandered between the souvenir shops and greeted one another in advance of their own anniversary celebration, which was scheduled for the following day. We turned off the main street and parked near the cinema, in front of which was gathered another kind of crowd. The color black was still in evidence but far less dominant, and a number of people sported red handkerchiefs around their necks. There were also considerably more women present, and three police cars were parked in front of the cinema. Inside, Giorgio was giving a speech, one with which I was more than familiar, as it was his standard media pitch in defense of the Casa del Fascio project: Predappio, as he liked to put it, was “the Chernobyl of history,” a town suffering unjustly from damnatio memoriae, and as a consequence of this silence about its history and the history of Fascism there were young men wandering around outside in black shirts; “culture” and “education” were the answer to this problem, and these were what his vision of the new museum would provide.

Giorgio was followed by ANPI’s national vice president (figure 3.1) and by Miro Gori, the president of its provincial chapter, who had organized the gathering. Miro spoke warmly of the continued need for anti-Fascist vigilance and then—somewhat less warmly—thanked Giorgio for hosting them, before making clear that ANPI’s position on the museum was that it needed to take a much clearer line on the evils of Fascism.

Carlo and I greeted some acquaintances from Forli outside the cinema, as the band struck up and a choral group from Bologna began singing partisan songs. Many of those who had come were prominent opponents of the museum project, and discussion turned swiftly to the speeches, as a few people complained that Giorgio only ever said the same thing and never bothered to address any of their criticisms. The discussion was not especially friendly. Carlo had known many of these men for decades, having worked with them in Lotta Continua in the seventies; the Casa del Fascio project had produced a significant political rupture, however, and though they spoke politely together, they no longer saw one another much socially. While we stood and talked, one younger ANPI member told me the story of how in the 1970s, his Communist father would lock him in his room and tell him, “Do your homework. I have to go to Predappio to beat up the Fascists.”

We soon moved to the local circolo (the site of the neo-Fascist attack in 1971) for some anti-Fascist pasta, and I sat, amid around a hundred others, with Giorgio, Carlo, and two other members of the local council. Giorgio was clearly uncomfortable and ill at ease—except when being interviewed by a German documentary crew who were making a film about Predappio.

Though the evening broke up with backslapping and apparent geniality and without any encounters with the black-shirted visitors outside, I had the strong sense throughout that nobody present that night really wanted to be there. Visitors I spoke with from ANPI and other left-wing groups felt as though they had entered a foreign country, and the sooner they could leave, the happier they would feel. Meanwhile, Giorgio and his local entourage were hosting them on sufferance and out of obligation and resented their visitors for the sense of moral superiority they brought with them. Some of these sentiments would spill out into the open the following year, when, to Giorgio’s fury, ANPI refused him permission to speak at the same event.

Back in 2017, on the day after ANPI’s event, I arrived in Piazza Sant’Antonio early in the morning to find it was already teeming with men (and some women) in black, some holding flags with Celtic crosses and fasces on them. Later estimates would put the number of people at around three thousand. A few carabinieri vans were parked in the square as well, and officers stood around them, talking and watching the crowd. Giorgio has told me with a knowing nod that another group of people who descend on Predappio on October 28 are Italian secret service agents, who are quite happy to find a whole host of people in whom they are interested gathered in the same place. That day I found Giorgio himself almost immediately—he was fairly easy to make out in a bright white shirt amid all the black—and we strolled up to the town hall together to get a more expansive view of the crowd. He told me it takes him a week to recover emotionally from this event, though he seemed focused on checking the opinion pages of various newspapers for their responses to his speech from the day before. I asked whether he could see any locals in the crowd, and he shook his head emphatically, barely even looking up: “There are no Predappiesi here,” he said definitively.

The marches begin with a crowd that gradually coalesces in Piazza Sant’Antonio, the square that hosts Predappio’s church and the former Fascist Party headquarters building and sits beneath the town hall (figure 3.2). The theoretical start time for the march is 9 a.m., but in the several years I have witnessed it, it has never begun before 10:30, and most of the early hours are spent with people aimlessly milling around, sitting in bars and drinking coffee, and taking photographs, until eventually a loose sort of cortege is formed out of the mass of people. There are usually a few men present wearing tricolor armbands whose job it is to corral the visitors into something resembling the right shape for a march, but beyond this they take no particular leading role. At the head of the cortege walk the most enthusiastic of the visitors; these are almost all men (unless a female member of Mussolini’s family is present). They usually carry a range of wreaths that they will go on to place on Mussolini’s tomb, or wave Italian flags or flags with a Celtic cross, which has become symbol of the far right across Europe (see Shoshan 2016) (figure 3.3). Almost all will be in some sort of uniform, either in all black clothes or in a Fascist military or party uniform of some sort (figure 3.4). Throughout the cortege will be various banners, more Italian flags, and placards with political slogans printed on them; these are rarely overtly pro-Fascist slogans, but more often calls to be proud of Italy’s history or attacks on censorship. Not all such slogans are quite so anodyne, though. In 2018, the national and international press focused their coverage of Predappio on a prospective parliamentary candidate for the far-right Forza Nuova who was wearing a T-shirt she had printed with a mock-up of the Disneyland logo, but with Predappio’s skyline and the word ‘Auschwitzland’ printed below. She seems to have thought this an attempt at humor, but it earned a public rebuke from the Disney Corporation and condemnation in the Italian parliament and senate.

The marchers proceed along the road from Piazza Sant’Antonio to the cemetery of San Cassiano, where they gather in the large parking lot immediately outside it for brief speeches in celebration of Mussolini, punctuated by Roman salutes from the crowd (all illegal, strictly speaking—see Heywood 2019). Afterward, a sort of flag-bearing guard of honor is formed along the pathway to the Mussolini family crypt, and visitors queue up to descend into it to leave a wreath, flowers, or a message in the visitors’ book (figure 3.5.).

These days, that is mostly the end of things, as the era of violent clashes with the left is gone. Most of the marchers return to the town in straggling groups, perhaps stopping to eat at one of its few restaurants, before heading home, as there is very little else for them to do. I have been told that a very hardcore group of attendees is hosted for lunch at the nearby Villa Carpena—which I describe in the next chapter—but nobody I knew in Predappio knew much about this or expressed any interest in it.

The marches in Predappio have a particular place in the galaxy of contemporary neo-Fascist Italian politics. They are primarily associated with Forza Nuova, a direct descendant of Mussolini’s PNF. Forza Nuova emerged as a political force in Italy in the early 2000s, having splintered off from Fiamma Tricolore, itself the product of a sectarian split within the MSI over the centerward drift of Alleanza Nazionale. Forza Nuova was founded by Roberto Fiore—presently the party leader and an erstwhile Member of the European Parliament—and Massimo Morsello (who died in 2001), two former members of violent far-right activist groups from the 1980s who were alleged to have played a part in the bombing attack on a Bologna train station in which eighty-five people died. Both of them spent time in exile in the United Kingdom after warrants were issued for their arrest, but returned to Italy in the late 1990s. Since its founding in 1997, Forza Nuova has failed to elect a single representative to either of Italy’s houses of parliament, but it is among the most prominent of Italian neo-Fascist political groupings and is linked to other European far-right movements such as Hungary’s Jobbik and Greece’s Golden Dawn. Members of the group are known to have taken part in violent criminality, and in 2021 they were in the news for rioting against compulsory COVID vaccination certificates.

Forza Nuova differs somewhat from another of Italy’s most well-known extreme-right political parties, CasaPound, named for poet and Fascist sympathizer Ezra Pound, and the object of a fascinating ethnography by Maddalena Grettel Cammelli (2015, 2017). CasaPound began life as a social movement, rather than a political party; it was founded by a far-right activist called Gianluca Iannone, who had once been jailed for punching a policeman at a march in Predappio. Today, however, Iannone and CasaPound have distanced themselves from those they call the “clowns” who come to Predappio, with one leading CasaPound member describing the marchers as “monkeys trained by anti-Fascists” (La Repubblica 2018). They have set themselves in opposition to what is perceived to be Forza Nuova’s more conservative, nostalgic politics and cast themselves as “third millennium Fascists,” inspired more by Fascism as a style of life than an ideology or a specific historical period. As we will see, this perception of the marches in Predappio as “clownish” and “folkloristic” is not confined to CasaPound alone. Indeed, Italy’s government at the time of writing is led by the Brothers of Italy, a cousin of Forza Nuova formed mainly by former members of Alleanza Nazionale. Its leader, Giorgia Meloni, has been careful to separate herself from Predappio’s visitors, declaring the marches “politically something very distant from me in a very significant way” (ANSA 2022).

I left Giorgio to his newspapers and followed the marchers along the route to the cemetery. On the way I found Sergio, whom we met in chapter 2, sitting in a chair outside of the gas station he owned, watching the crowd go by. I greeted him and he responded, asking politely after my work. I asked him what he thought of the march—given his background in the MSI—and he made a face, saying, “This isn’t my sort of thing at all. If you have strong political opinions, that’s fine, but live by them on your own, keep them to yourself. You don’t need to do all of this to make your point.”

October 28, on which fall these two anniversaries with very different connotations and during which two very different sets of people make their presences felt to the inhabitants of this tiny Apennine town, nicely encapsulates some of the contradictions that characterize both contemporary Predappio and its history. There are literally two Predappios, one old and one new, one high and one low; but more than this, Predappio is also a place in which two opposite poles meet—again literally, as on this weekend and other similar occasions, but also symbolically—and, depending on one’s perspective, clash or blend. To their participants, an anti-Fascist pasta dinner and a march to commemorate Fascism’s one-time triumph could not have been more distinct from each other, heirs to the time when the two sides would physically clash in the town; but to many Predappiesi, they were in some senses two similar incursions into their ordinary life, distinguished by their scale and, sometimes, by the color of the clothes on display.

The Carnival of Mussolini

It would be easy to cast Predappio and its inhabitants as unfortunate victims of history and the fetishes of the far right, and in many respects they are exactly that. Carlo would make this point to me forcefully by calling Predappio an “abandoned place,” gesturing to the same images of desolation called up by Giorgio in his favorite Chernobyl analogy. On this view, Predappio has been deliberately forgotten by most of Italy, left in embarrassment to its fate in the dustbin of history along with those who march in its streets. The implication here is that there is a certain convenience to Predappio’s existence as a kind of “Fascist parenthesis,” as if by condensing Italy’s Fascist heritage and depositing it in a single place, the rest of the country will somehow escape its taint. This is a travesty, to Carlo, because Predappio is not just a sad monument to the nation’s shameful past but a living place with real inhabitants, people like Valentina, who do not deserve to meet neo-Fascists on the streets while they do their shopping. Carlo’s political passions have evidently been tempered by the years, but he remains sincerely anti-Fascist in his convictions, and it is clear that he feels that Predappio’s fate is an injustice to its inhabitants. “Where are they?” he would ask rhetorically of the regional left. “Why aren’t they here? They never come. Predappio is an hour’s drive from Bologna [the pride of the Italian left] but you never see them here.” He was particularly frustrated by the friends of his youth and others on the left who were happy to speak up in opposition to the Casa del Fascio project but unwilling to show their faces in Predappio or to do anything else to rescue the Predappiesi from their plight beyond staging anti-Fascist pasta evenings.

But this narrative of a left-wing heart beneath Predappio’s Fascist skin does have its limits. We have already met them in some of the memories Predappiesi themselves have of the 1960s and ’70s, when Carlo and other outsiders would come to Predappio to fight off the visiting neo-Fascists. It is very easy for an outsider to imagine—and perhaps to sympathize with—the intentions of Lotta Continua and other such groups in these endeavors. But many Predappiesi, like Franco and even Giorgio, an erstwhile Communist politician, remember these visits as traumatic incursions, not heroic rescues. Suddenly their home was not only a pilgrimage site for one political extreme but also a battlefield, thanks to the other. Predappiesi themselves seem to have taken little to no part in the fighting, hiding out at home instead and waiting for things to die down. The only exception to this, so far as I can gather, was the battle at the Rocca delle Caminate, and this, as we have seen, was prompted largely not by political feeling but by anger at the beating of elderly locals—not outsiders—by neo-Fascists. Giorgio sums up local attitudes to this period neatly in his anecdote about meeting the old Lotta Continua militant: like any ordinary Italian boy, all he wanted to do was play football, not look through his windows at the armored police cars outside.

As we have seen already in this chapter, this feeling of resentment at the hyperpoliticization of their home—as if it were not politicized enough to begin with—continues today. The ANPI event I have described, billed as a modern-day liberation, a re-creation of the partisan victory over Fascism, and composed of many of the people who came to Predappio with Carlo in the 1960s and ’70s, was not attended as far as I could tell by a single local resident, beyond the councillors present as somewhat uncomfortable guests. At the anti-Fascist dinner afterward, it was as if a bubble enclosed us at the table; all around there was singing, cheering, embracing, people moving between friends, and in the midst of this our table sat quietly, no one approaching, its own little dark parenthesis amid a sea of partisan red. At one point, one of the local officials present turned to me with a look of disgust on his face and said, sotto voce: “These people come here once a year and think they can teach us about democracy, and then they go home and leave us to deal with the guys who’ll come tomorrow. Look around you—the people on this table are the only people present who are actually from Predappio. This is practically colonialism.” I asked him whether he felt the same way about the black-shirted nostalgici who would arrive the day after, and to my surprise he told me that he thought these visitors were worse: “At least the nostalgici don’t come here because they think they can teach us anything.”

So, while it is no doubt true that Predappio constitutes a sort of island, abandoned to history by a long succession of Italian governments without the willpower or the inclination seriously to confront Italy’s Fascist heritage, it is not the case that its inhabitants seek refuge or liberation in some other, more palatable form of ritual politics. Anti-Fascism has always been a potential source of solace for Predappiesi, and some few have embraced it. But the majority have found alternative solutions to their problem, ones involving, not a different form of political ritual, but an attempt to escape from it as far as possible altogether.

No one I have ever met in Predappio has anything positive to say of the Fascist ritual marches or attends them. Even Sergio, as we have seen, whose politics are far to the right of most Predappiesi, sits and watches them go by with disapproval. Those more politically moderate remember with pleasure how, when tensions were running high in the 1960s and ’70s, they would deliberately misdirect anyone dressed in black asking for directions to the tomb. Valentina, whom we met in chapter 1, is offended by their use of Christian symbols: “They come with wooden crosses, but it was him [Mussolini] who put us on the cross! It makes the blood boil in my veins.” Elena, whom we met in chapter 2, along with many others, dislikes the ways in which they behave in the cemetery: “Three days each year they come and cause chaos in the cemetery, among the dead who should be respected.” Many object to the presence of uniforms or overt Fascist paraphernalia. Angela, a middle-aged woman who owns a small café in the town, remembers tanks and soldiers in the streets every weekend in the 1970s and being kept at home by her parents: “It was so annoying, such a pain in the ass.… Those people [neo-Fascists] would deliberately provoke violence. Like, they’d go into the Casa del Popolo and order a black coffee very loudly. My parents would say, ‘Stay home, the bad people are coming again,’ because we lived near the cemetery, too. And I just wanted to go out and play. They should have just made his [Mussolini’s] body disappear.”

Despite the economic benefits she might accrue from tourism as a café owner, Angela retains her disgust at those who come for the marches:

I try not to look at them because it makes me angry. One of the ritual days, I was sitting with some friends outside my café, and this man arrives. He’s a dwarf and old, over sixty, and he’s dressed in the uniform of the Balilla [Fascist Youth Organization], shorts and all! And he gives the Roman salute to everyone and clicks his heels, and says “We will be back!” Normally I’m very respectful to the elderly and disabled but that time I couldn’t contain myself. I said, “You should be grateful they’re gone, what do you think they would have done to you? You’d have been the first to die, and where would you have come back from then?”

Massimo is another restaurateur, originally from Forli, the owner of a surprisingly grand and rather chic eating house on the road from the town to the cemetery. Because of its proximity to Mussolini’s tomb, Massimo’s restaurant takes in considerable trade from the tourists who visit the tomb, and unlike Angela, he has no intention of turning this trade away. He takes bookings for coach parties months in advance of October 28 and remembers his shock when ten thousand people descended on the town that day the first year in which he opened. “They all ask me, ‘Which side are you on? Are you one of us, comrade [camerata—the regime’s preferred form of address]?’ Obviously, I just grin and bear it. ‘Yes of course!’ I say, but only because I can’t say no.”

Massimo is an outsider, having been born and brought up in Forli, and unusual in his willingness to pay lip service to his customers’ ideology, but his generally pragmatic outlook is typical, in spite of the equally widespread distaste and dislike of the ritual marches. As we saw with Mussolini himself in the last chapter, the most characteristic Predappiesi response to the marches is simply to ignore them as far as is possible. This is true for most of the year, in which they are simply not discussed, even in the run-up to the anniversaries when the press is, in any year, full of speculation about what outrage to public decency will take place in the town.

Predappiesi are prepared for the questions of outsiders like me and naturally unsurprised to find the marches are an object of extreme curiosity. Predappiesi are fully aware of the extraordinary status of their home as far as the rest of Italy is concerned. Nobody is under any illusions about whether or not the sight of a dwarf in a Fascist youth uniform is an ordinary occurrence. In response to questions, Predappiesi will likely express some sense of disapproval or dislike of the continued existence of the marches. They may well also recall the violence and chaos of the 1960s and ’70s as a time in which the ritual marches made a real difference to their lives. But they will usually do so in order to draw a contrast between the past and the present: then, the marches were a serious inconvenience because of the associated violence and public disorder (not because of their political implications); now, the typical Predappiesi response to the marches is to treat them as a joke and a minor inconvenience, at worst, as if an English village were temporarily occupied by an army of Morris dancers.

Angela’s story of the dwarf in the Balilla uniform is characteristic. Even more so is the idea that the ritual marches constitute a sort of “carnival,” a typical feature of life in Italian towns and villages. “Folkloric” is another ubiquitous term locals use to describe the neo-Fascist marches. Gianni, a well-known local artist in Predappio, put it this way: “It’s just like a carnival: instead of being in the Carnival of Viareggio [a well-known event in the adjacent region of Tuscany], we’re in the carnival of Mussolini. Let them be and they’ll just go home afterward. They’re ridiculous: forty-year-old kids dressed up as senior Fascist officers.”

The carnival is a particularly apt notion to use to discuss the relationship between the ritual marches and ordinary life in Predappio, given its extensive role in social scientific debates about everyday life. Perhaps its most well-known invocation is in Bakhtin’s work on Rabelais (1984), but it has also been employed by other theorists writing on the everyday, such as Henri Lefebvre (1947) and Georges Bataille (1949), among others. The point such writers often make about the carnival is that it is an inversion, or subversion, of everyday life: the world turned upside down, a time for a king of fools instead of a king, and of potlatch and excess instead of hunger and want. Though in Lefebvre’s use it is supposed to be in some sense both external to but also arising from the everyday, it is nevertheless a moment of radical promise, of hope for those alienated by the normal rhythms of capitalist life ([1947] 2014). For that promise to be fulfilled, the carnival must become more than just a moment and itself become integrated into everyday life. Bakhtin is more insistent on a distinction, arguing that the carnivalesque “is outside of and contrary to all existing forms of the coercive socioeconomic and political organization, which is suspended for the time of the festivity” (1984, 255). In any case, and as in some of the other writing on the everyday we met in earlier chapters, the carnival is invoked in this literature as a special form of human action, a kind of willed and ephemeral escape from the strictures of an everyday life that by contrast is simply there, with all the weight of oppressive regularity.

In Predappio, however, the situation is exactly the other way around: it is the carnival of Mussolini that weighs on its inhabitants, and it is in a cultivated sense of ordinariness that Predappiesi find respite (see Heywood 2023a).

“We don’t let it bother us,” Silvana says of herself and her husband, who are agriculturalists living just up the hill from Predappio on the way to the Rocca delle Caminate. “Sure, in the old days we would lock ourselves in, but now it’s just a day like any other day. I’m not going to stop doing my shopping because of them!” Andrea, an office worker whose parents live in a hamlet a few kilometers on from the cemetery and who visits them every Sunday, makes a point of sitting in his car waiting for the police to allow traffic to pass when the march is finished: “Why should I not see my parents on this Sunday, like any other Sunday? So I have to wait for a bit while they waste their time on this stuff, I don’t care.”

The most striking demonstrations of this attitude are visible on the days of the ritual marches themselves: the café on Piazza Sant’Antonio is open for business, its taciturn proprietor equally silently polite to all customers; it is packed with men in black, standing or sitting in groups, eating and drinking, waiting for the march to begin. Yet amid this mass of black sit the café’s regular Predappiesi customers, quietly talking among themselves, reading the newspapers, and generally behaving as if there is nothing unusual going on at all by avoiding interaction and exchange with the outsiders, while nevertheless pursuing their normal routines. On one occasion as I sat with my friend Marco, an agricultural worker, we saw a group of black-shirted visitors standing at the bar break out into a rendition of “Giovinezza,” the official hymn of the PNF. In the midst of the song Marco got up from his chair, walked calmly up to the bar until he was standing next to the group, and ordered an espresso at a volume calculated to supersede that of the singing, which faltered briefly before continuing on. Beyond making his coffee order heard, he paid absolutely no other form of attention to the group next to him.

The same attitude is visible in the cemetery. During the tense years of the 1970s, most locals would have avoided going to the cemetery on the days of the ritual marches, even though they take place on a Sunday, a day on which many would normally go to tend the graves of their relatives. Now, on the other hand, locals are as likely to go on these Sundays as on any other. Elena visits her father’s grave, despite her strong disapproval of the behavior of the marchers in the cemetery. I have seen her push her way through a crowd gathered on the cemetery steps to listen to speeches, seemingly oblivious to the fact that she stands out in a floral dress instead of black. Valentina, too, goes to visit her parents’ graves. As we have seen, she reasons that tourists who go to the Mussolini crypt are there to visit a dead person, just as she is, and there is nothing out of the ordinary in that. She is far less understanding of the ritual marchers, however, with their uniforms, their speeches, and their singing. But that will not stop her from doing her regular duty to her parents, even though their graves are only steps away from the Mussolini family tomb.

Predappiesi also have other rituals and festivals, including church festivals and others focused on food and on wine. In these, many Predappiesi participate with enthusiasm. Such festivals are common throughout Italy (and so are in that sense perfectly ordinary), whereas the carnival of Mussolini happens only in Predappio. One might also wonder whether Predappiesi attitudes to the ritual marches are simply a consequence of the fact that this is not “their” ritual; but that would beg the question of why exactly that is the case. One could, as I noted in the introduction, very easily imagine a different Predappio, in which its most famous son was an object of pride and anniversaries associated with him were the subject of celebration for his fellow citizens. Instead, even Sergio frowns as he watches the marches pass.

In Predappiesi attitudes to the carnival of Mussolini, in other words, we find the reverse of what we might expect from the standard narrative about the relationship between a carnival and everyday life. It is not everyday life that weighs heavy, but carnival time: three times a year, regular as clockwork, people in Predappio know that what passes for a sense of normality in a place so very far from normal will be punctured by thousands of men and women carrying out a ritual that will splash Predappio across the pages of newspapers once again. Their response to this, in line with the broader argument I have been making in this book, is often to reach for precisely that sense of ordinariness that the ritual marches so obviously disrupt.

The specific literature on the opposition between the carnival and everyday life is also echoed in a broader distinction to be found in recent anthropological writing on the relationship between ethics, ritual, and everyday life. On one side of this distinction are authors such as Veena Das (e.g., 2007) and Michael Lambek (2010), who, as we have seen, tend to locate ethics in the tacit, more or less unreflective practices of everyday life; on the other side are those, such as Robbins (2016), who point to the ways in which rituals express and to some extent realize collective moral values in transcendent fashion. Meanwhile other authors point to situations in which this distinction appears to hold less purchase: thus, James Laidlaw and Jonathan Mair describe a Buddhist religious retreat in which the contingencies and shortcomings of everyday life are incorporated into an intensively ritualized environment (2019).

In the case of Predappio, there is clearly an operative distinction between the ritual marches and ordinary life. But ordinary life here consists of anything but tacit and unreflective practices. It is not a level of existence to which one can descend, nor is it something one might want to escape. A sense of ordinariness in Predappio is not the basic ground of existence, but the outcome of the kind of work I have been describing so far in this book: it takes effort to make ordering a coffee look normal when people next to you are singing a Fascist hymn; you have to consciously decide to go to visit your parents, even if it means sitting in your car watching black-shirted marchers stream past you, or to tend the graves of your relatives on the same day in which their cemetery is turned into a parade ground.

All of this is also why ANPI’s anti-Fascist pasta dinner failed in its attempt to “rescue” Predappio from the Fascists. Predappiesi reactions to anti-Fascist ritual are just like Predappiesi reactions to Fascist ritual. Just as Predappiesi do not, by and large, reach for heroic exemplars of anti-Fascism to counter the cult of personality still evident around Mussolini, neither do they welcome left-wing rituals to counter the right-wing rituals associated with that cult. Instead, just as they counter Mussolini’s personality cult with Ferlini’s pragmatic common sense, so they counter the ritual marches with the practices of ordinary life. But this is not the ordinary life that we find in social scientific literature. It is not an unmarked category, or unthinking and unreflective routine, or marital disputes, or petty crime, or any other thing that an analyst has decided is ordinary. The practices of ordinary life opposed to ritual here are not so much ordinary because they are practices, but practiced at least in part precisely because they are ordinary, defined in opposition to the politics of Fascism. They constitute a category that exists in opposition to ritual, not in an abstract analytical sense, but in the life of Predappiesi themselves.