CHAPTER 4 Everyday Space and Walking in the Fascist City
The Rocca delle Caminate is a medieval castle, built on a hill looking over Predappio. It was given to Mussolini by local authorities to use as a summer residence in 1923, and at the top of its tower is a massive spotlight that could project the Fascist emblem onto the night sky when Mussolini was in residence. The emblem was visible from almost forty miles away, as far the Romagnole coastline.
The view from the top of that tower is breathtaking. Its platform is almost exactly the same height as the 110th floor of the original World Trade Center, from which Michel de Certeau famously described New York transforming into “a text that lies before one’s eyes” in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984, 92). The text that lies before one at the Rocca is very different from the “endless labyrinths” of New York City (92). Yet de Certeau’s point is that from the “Icarian” heights of the Twin Towers, such labyrinths became legible and knowable, as one looked down on the city “like a god.” The height “makes the complexity of the city readable” (92). Most of what one sees from the Rocca is a patchwork landscape of Romagnole countryside. But in the midst of this landscape is the town of Predappio, built to a grid plan, like New York and unlike all of the town’s older neighbors.
De Certeau’s point in placing the reader far above the streets of the city is that this god’s-eye view creates a fiction: “a ‘theoretical’ (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices.… The ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below,’ below the thresholds at which visibility begins” (1984, 93). This argument thus belongs within the family of arguments about ordinary or everyday life I have been describing, which find in everyday activities (walking and other spatial practices, in this case) something more real and more alive than the abstractions of theoretical fictions and other such simulacra.
The comparison with Predappio is almost too easy. Built to be a modernist paradise, it was self-consciously designed to look like the kind of “ideal picture” of a city that de Certeau describes (unlike, in fact, New York City; see Maulsby 2014a for a comparable account of the modernist transformation of Milan). While de Certeau’s “god’s-eye view” was at least putatively available to anyone who wished to pay the entrance fee to the World Trade Center, the Duce’s-eye view from the Rocca was only ever available to Mussolini and the select few who lived and visited with him. Mussolini built Predappio to look well planned, so it is no surprise that the perspective from which it most appears so was his own summer castle.
Today, the Rocca is closed to visitors, unless with special permission of the local authorities, and while it is theoretically a sort of business space, a potential home for new tech companies in the region, only one company has offices there, and they are sparsely populated. The Rocca is empty for most of the year, a panopticon with no one to enjoy the view. Predappiesi live “down below,” as de Certeau puts it, as ordinary practitioners of a space without a god to watch over them.
It would, in other words, be very easy to dichotomize two forms of experience of Predappio, as de Certeau does of city life more generally: on the one hand, a picture or simulacrum of modernism’s dream space, viewable as such by the man who created it; and on the other hand, everyday Predappio, the space as it is really lived in by those who see it not from above but from within and who create it as such through “murky intertwining daily behaviors” (de Certeau 1984, 93).
In many respects, the comparison is apposite. Predappio is “read” as a single text not only by those few who have been able to observe it from the Rocca but also by most of those who have heard of the town or encountered it. In the wider public imaginary, Predappio looks very much as it does from the tower of the Rocca or in Fascist-era picture postcards: a strange island of Fascist monumentalism, set apart both spatially and temporally from its neighbors and from the present day. Its urban fabric and its place in history make this narrative a compelling one. But Predappiesi work very hard to escape this story, and the ways in which they relate to the space of their home are no exception.
So there are also crucial differences between the case of Predappio and the argument of de Certeau. One is the part that history and memory have to play in experiences of Predappio. As Michael Sheringham describes, “for de Certeau (following Lefebvre) the ‘lieu pratiqué’ of the city street is a locus of accumulated, compacted histories” (2006, 234). In Predappio, by contrast, the situation is more akin to that described by another sociologist of the ordinary, Michel Maffesoli: “everyday space is associated with the attenuation or abolition of time: the quotidien is a haven from history” (Sheringham 2006, 234). There are spaces in Predappio that are suffused with the sort of “accumulated, compacted histories” to which de Certeau refers. But, as we will see, these sorts of spaces are actually far from being ordinary, and they are spaces that Predappiesi themselves, in general, avoid. By contrast, the public spaces most would accept as ordinary have been largely emptied out of their histories, purged of their connections to Fascism and indeed to any specters of the ventennio, as the two decades of Fascist rule are often called.
Another, and more fundamental, difference is one we have encountered before in this book in juxtaposing theories of the ordinary with its experience in Predappio. That difference resides in the fact that ordinariness is a marked category in this context. In other words, ordinary experiences of space in Predappio are not just ordinary because they are certain sorts of experiences that a theorist has categorized as ordinary (“walking, organizing living space, reading, telling stories” (Sheringham 2006, 230); these things exist, of course, but there are also experiences of spaces and spaces themselves that have been made to be ordinary.
The Rocca itself is an excellent example of this: once the summer residence of Il Duce and possessed of the most splendid views in the region, it is now a barely occupied business park, while local scouts use its grounds to camp in. Despite being reconstructed and remodeled in recent years, only a single plaque in an out-of-the-way spot marks its history. In this sense, it is not a ruin; it is more akin to what Marc Augé, drawing on de Certeau, has called a “non-place”: a place without history, which is geared to the production of anonymous, “average” subjects (1995, 100). But, as I will argue, this and other places like it in Predappio are not (or at least not wholly) made such by the forces of “supermodernity,” as they are in Augé’s account. Insofar as some aspects of spatial life in Predappio are like the experience of existence in an airport lounge, that, I will suggest, is for many Predappiesi because life in an airport lounge is preferable to life in a living museum to Fascism.
Mussolini’s Ghost
“Wait, are you telling me you only got your driving license a year ago? And to drive on the other side of the road?”
Edoardo seemed to shrink back in the passenger seat next to me as we took the hairpin turns up the mountain road to the Rocca from Predappio. This road used to be a racecourse in the 1950s, and every hundred yards or so there is another extremely sharp bend.
This was my third visit to the Rocca. The first two were in the company of Giorgio, the mayor; Carlo, the director of the Casa del Fascio project; and two different groups of dignitaries. On the first visit, we went with some potential funders for the museum, and on the second with a pair of BBC journalists. On both occasions, Giorgio extolled the Rocca as an example of how Predappio could make good use of its past, though these speeches rang somewhat hollow given that the Rocca was almost completely empty, and after each visit Carlo would complain to me privately about nobody making any use of the space, despite its costly remodeling.
On this third visit I was with Edoardo, who owns a very small bed-and-breakfast in Predappio along with his wife. Short, balding, and in his late fifties, Edoardo was the custodian of the Rocca for a period of time and has managed to retain the keys to it (mainly because nobody bothers enough about the place to ask for them back). His father was a guard at the Rocca while Mussolini was using it and then a member of Sergio’s local chapter of the MSI. Edoardo tells me that he idolized his father, though he does not excuse the crimes committed in Fascism’s name. Growing up, he was an altar boy at the chapel in San Cassiano, where Mussolini is buried, and he would serve at masses for the “nostalgic” tourists and even for some senior and still-living Fascist hierarchs, come to pay their respects to their old Duce.
We were on our way to the Rocca because Edoardo had promised a family of tourists staying in his bed-and-breakfast that he would give them a tour of the place. They were disappointed to have arrived in Predappio the day before only to discover that the Mussolini crypt was closed to visitors, after a spat between Giorgio and the Mussolini family (see chapter 5). They were a young family, the husband and wife in their thirties, together with their daughter. They had long hoped to visit Predappio, they told me, because they were from Latina, another famous Fascist new town in Lazio, and felt a kinship for Predappio as a consequence (on Latina, see Miltiadis 2022). They had no interest in politics, the father insisted, and would never come for the marches. They just wanted their daughter to understand her history.
FIGURE 4.1. Saint Alexander with the fasces on his shield. Photo by author.
Edoardo had suggested I drive him while the visitors followed in their own car, and as we were halfway up the mountain I made the mistake of telling him that I had only recently acquired a license and that I was used to driving on the left-hand side of the road. Despite these impediments and the stomach-churning turns, we made it to the Rocca unscathed.
The Rocca was a rather ominous sight in February fog. At least a thousand years old, it is a squat, square stone building with a tall tower in the middle, barely visible from the road, surrounded by its own grounds and a high stone wall with two access points. It rises through the mist only as you come through one of these gates. Before doing so, you pass several outer buildings that housed Mussolini’s bodyguards, a now-deconsecrated chapel, and a prison in which a number of partisans were tortured and murdered during the last months of the war. The chapel is decorated with images of Saints Rosa and Alexander (Mussolini’s parents’ names), and Saint Alexander’s shield is adorned by a fasces (figure 4.1).
The only acknowledgment of the Rocca’s recent history is a plaque, set behind a building and locatable only if you know where it is or stumble upon it by accident, which notes that the Rocca was the site of the deaths of “noble spirits who courageously resisted brutal torture and gave their lives for a free Italy.” This plaque was first erected in 2009 in front of the Rocca’s main gates, before being defaced by persons unknown and subsequently relocated to its present position of obscurity near the prison itself.
Edoardo’s tour of the Rocca was notably different from those I had been on before. When I had come with Giorgio, we had been whisked straight past the outer buildings, and no mention was made of the chapel, the prison, the guards’ barracks, or the murdered partisans. Giorgio’s focus was on impressing our guests with the extensive remodeling carried out on the interior of the castle itself and its potential to host companies from a burgeoning Romagnole tech sector. There is no visible reminder of Mussolini’s occupancy in the interior of the Rocca after this remodeling. We were shown plush-looking conference suites, offices, and reception rooms, all filled with standard leather and aluminum seats and modular desks, and none of which were occupied. As long as you averted your eyes from the views through the window, you could imagine yourself in any modern office building. The only mention of the past came when Giorgio described how he used to play in the ruins of the grounds as a child and how happy it made it him now to see the castle “restored.”
Edoardo, on the other hand, told us rambling stories of his father’s time as a guard at the Rocca and recounted the tale of Antonio Carini, a well-known local partisan tortured in the Rocca’s prison and subsequently murdered. Edoardo went out of his way to show us the plaque in memory of fallen partisans and to point out the fasces on Saint Alexander’s shield. Edoardo’s tour was rather strange and disorganized, jumping from story to story with no discernible narrative arc, but partly for that reason it felt a great deal more like what de Certeau describes as the “anti-panoptic” experience of everyday life: “The dispersion of stories points to the dispersion of the memorable as well. And in fact memory is a sort of anti-museum: it is not localizable. Fragments of it come out in legends.… Haunted places are the only ones people can live in—and this inverts the schema of the Panopticon” (1984, 108).
By contrast, Giorgio’s tour proceeded “as if space had been trapped by time, as if there were no history other than the last forty-eight hours of news, as if each individual history were drawing its motives from … an unending history in the present” (Augé 1995, 104–105). Like the foreigner Augé describes as feeling at home “in the anonymity of motorways, service stations, big stores, or hotel chains” (105), with Giorgio, our guests (and I) had no trouble identifying the form of an upscale office space: standardized desks with holes in them for wires to connect to telephones and computers, LCD TVs and projectors for displays, long conference tables surrounded by leather chairs, and the smell of carpet cleaner.
Which of these is an ordinary practice of experiencing space? The temptation is to see in Edoardo’s fragmented memories of his father’s stories and his conjuring up of the ghosts of the Mussolinis and dead partisans a more everyday experience of the Rocca, as de Certeau’s narrative suggests. Yet Edoardo was not simply “practicing everyday life” as if that were a natural exercise: he was performing for a very specific audience. His guests were not other Predappiesi, they were tourists, people he was in part dependent on for his livelihood but from whom most Predappiesi would distinguish themselves sharply. The tourists were there “to understand their history,” as the father put it to me. They had come to see Mussolini’s tomb, and instead they got his summer residence. In other words, Edoardo’s tour of the Rocca and its Fascist past was anything but ordinary in Predappio, where most people try to have as little to do with history as possible. Much more ordinary, in fact, was Giorgio’s fleeting reference to his childhood playing in its ruins, and his otherwise overwhelming focus on the Rocca’s transformation into a nonplace, outside of history, as something worthy of pride. As we will see in this chapter, this pattern is replicated in the case of a number of other Predappiesi public spaces.
“A House of Memories”
This contrast, between a historicized Predappio experienced by outsiders and the ordinary spaces of the town from which history has largely been exorcised, is echoed elsewhere. The Villa Carpena is a little way outside of Predappio, on the road to Forli. Its association with Predappio stems from the fact that it was the postwar home of Mussolini’s wife, Rachele (see Heywood 2024a).
The Mussolinis first bought the house in 1914 when Benito Mussolini was made editor of Avanti! It was one of the regular family residences during his time in power, and in 1957, after a period of time in confinement and with the return of her husband’s body to the area, Rachele Mussolini moved there permanently. It remained in family hands after her death until 2000, when it was bought and transformed into a “museum” by an entrepreneur who already owned a “souvenir” shop in Predappio.
The word museum is enclosed within quotation marks on the sign on the front gate of the Villa Carpena, as if to warn the visitor of what is to come (figure 4.2).
Below, without the quotation marks, are the words house of memories. The villa is advertised by large signs on a number of main roads around the area, all of which have been defaced by anti-Fascist graffiti (figure 4.3).
FIGURE 4.2. The “museum” at the Villa Carpena. Photo by author.
FIGURE 4.3. Every advertisement for the Villa Carpena on surrounding roads has been defaced. Photo by author.
The villa is a vast and almost entirely uncurated collection of objects related to Fascism and to the Mussolinis. Like Edoardo’s stories of the Rocca, it seems to have no guiding thread. The villa’s grounds are filled with stone plaques commemorating Fascists fallen for their country, busts of Mussolini of various sizes, some extremely unhappy-sounding peacocks, a haphazard and seemingly random array of agricultural machinery that Rachele Mussolini is said to have collected, a replica of the glider used by German troops to rescue Mussolini from imprisonment after the coup of 1943, and a life-size model of Father Christmas wearing Fascist black (figure 4.4).
FIGURE 4.4. Fascist Father Christmas. Photo by author.
To get in you have to pay an entrance fee, and to see the interior of the house you have to go on one of the regular tours; when I visited, the tour was run by a skeletal man in his eighties with a shaven head.
The interior of the house, he claimed, has been preserved as a shrine to the domestic life of the Mussolinis. If this is true, then Rachele Mussolini must have found it difficult to throw things away, because almost every wall and surface in the house is occupied by an object or a photograph with some tangential relationship to Fascism or the Mussolinis. During our visit, the guide picked up a perfectly ordinary man’s shoe from a shelf and told us simply, “This was Romano [Mussolini]’s shoe,” as if that was all we would need to know to understand its importance.
The trope of the museum (especially the biographical museum) as a space the subject has only just left, as it were, a preserved reminder of the ordinary traces of an individual life, is not in itself uncommon (see, e.g., Reed 2002). Fictionalized or literary versions of it can also be found, as in the Sherlock Holmes museum in London, for example. Yet the Villa Carpena is not quite the same sort of phenomenon. While it contains elements of this genre (for example, one of Mussolini’s uniforms laid out on his bed, as if he were just about to get dressed), its enormous range of hodgepodge objects is too excessive for one to imagine the house as an actual dwelling. Some of the walls are covered almost from floor to ceiling in pictures, plaques, and framed Fascist slogans; kitchen surfaces are nearly invisible beneath a plethora of cups, plates, and crockery of all forms. Yet the aesthetic of ordinariness is very much the target.
On my visit, our guide claimed to have known Rachele and spent a great deal of time extolling her merits as an ordinary Italian housewife, pointing out her inexpensive clothes and kitchenware. The whole point of this “museum,” he noted repeatedly, was to show visitors the “real,” private lives of the Mussolinis, as normal, ordinary people, away from politics. This did not stop the guide from also engaging in spirited debate with some on my tour group over broader political and historical questions regarding the merits of Fascism: he repeatedly claimed that the Holocaust was a myth and that more people were killed by partisans after the war than by Fascism in twenty years. He lamented the erasure of Fascism from Italian history, at one point holding up a street sign from 1930s Predappio, decorated with the fasces: “Why would you throw this away?” he asked rhetorically. “Look at how well-made it is!” he said, knocking it with his fist to demonstrate its durability. Unknowingly echoing some of de Certeau’s remarks on the affordances of street names as tools of power, he added, “Just so that everybody had to learn new street names!”
He was also very keen to suggest that the house was haunted by those whose memories it contains: one of his proudest exhibits is a mirror in which he claimed you could see the outline of Mussolini’s face. I could see only smudges, but an Italian TV program called “Ghost Hunters” has filmed an episode at the villa based on this mirror.
In the attic of the house is what the guide called a “documentation center,” full of pro-Fascist pamphlets and newspapers (most of them still in plastic wrapping) and decorated by amateurish murals of Fascist soldiers. Our guide argued that schoolchildren should be brought here to learn about their “real” history.
After the tour, one is gently guided toward a shop selling souvenirs of the sort one can find in Predappio, alongside Fascist-leaning history books and even some of Romano Mussolini’s paintings (though many in Predappio insist that these are forgeries). On the tour I attended, a special guest was wheeled out to meet us at its conclusion: a ninety-four-year-old woman with one of the most strikingly blue pairs of eyes I have ever seen. I had read about her in the local press before my visit: she had been a volunteer for the RSI (the Italian Socialist Republic, the puppet regime installed by the Nazis after Mussolini was deposed in 1943) in the last days of the war, and her continued devotion to the cause was so strong that she had decided to live her final days at the Villa Carpena. The owner and his wife were evidently proud of this living addition to their collection and encouraged me to talk to her in English. To my surprise, she spoke the language perfectly and with a cut-glass accent. This, she told me, was a result of having lived in England for a few years in the 1950s (“in exile,” she called it). She said she had decided to die at Villa Carpena because her happiest memories were of the RSI, and it brought them all back to her.
The Villa Carpena is not in any genuine sense a museum, as its owners themselves seem to acknowledge when they put the word in quotation marks. It is far more like de Certeau’s “anti-museum,” or, in the language of the owners, a “house of memories.” It is an uncurated assemblage of objects related not by any kind of master narrative but by fragmented associations (“This is Romano’s shoe”); the ghost of Donna Rachele, the ordinary housewife; and Mussolini’s outline in his mirror. This ordinariness, like others we have met, is created and constructed, and obviously so: if indeed Rachele Mussolini was a master of household management, she would certainly have disapproved of her kitchenware being strewn around her space as it is. The haphazardness and disorganization, whether deliberate or not, sit strangely beside the clearly reverential attitude of its staff, evoking an impression of bathos: Fascist slogans about Mussolini always being right sit oddly amid the chaos of what we are supposed to see as his ordinary life.
If there is anything ordinary or everyday about the Villa Carpena, it is not an everyday that most Predappiesi would recognize. When they speak of Villa Carpena, they will often snort or raise their eyebrows at what they perceive to be a cynical, money-spinning enterprise of the same genre as the souvenir shops (see chapter 5). Furthermore, the content of Villa Carpena’s everyday memorialization, like that of Edoardo’s tour of the Rocca, is geared toward tourists and outsiders because it is exactly what many Predappiesi go to considerable lengths to avoid. As I suggested at the outset of this chapter, in Predappio, pace de Certeau, ordinary and everyday public spaces are often not accumulations of microhistories and memories; they are public spaces—like the Rocca—in which history can be forgotten.
The House of the Fasces
Unlike the Villa Carpena, only a couple of signs point the way to the house in which Mussolini was born in Predappio, and they are small and colored brown for heritage, again unlike the large advertisements for the Villa Carpena that dot the roads around the town, which are banded by the Italian tricolor.
The house itself is completely unmarked on the outside, unless there is an exhibition inside (I am aware of three since it opened for this purpose, in 1999), in which case a small A-frame sign may be placed by the door, or a poster on the wall. To get inside, one climbs a stone staircase and enters through a door, in front of which is a reception desk manned by a municipal worker (the house is owned by the municipality). The house gets few visitors, largely because there is nothing to see inside of it. It is completely empty. Before my fieldwork in Predappio it had once hosted an exhibition about Mussolini’s early life, and while I was there it was briefly used to display the plans for the Casa del Fascio (see chapter 6 and below).
Similarly empty is the Casa del Fascio itself. This is the most famous building in Predappio. It dominates the main square of Sant’Antonio, and its tower is one of clearest sights from the top of the Rocca (figure 4.5).
Built not only to host the local party headquarters, the Casa del Fascio e dell’Ospitalità also originally held a theater, a library, and a bar and was used to provide facilities for the many visitors who flocked to Predappio under the regime (Storchi 2019; Tramonti 2014). With the fall of Fascism, it became state property along with all party-owned buildings (see Maulsby 2014b on the national legacy of Case del Fascio), and, as Simona Storchi has documented (2019), the subsequent seventy years saw a constant tug-of-war between the municipal authorities and the state over who should be responsible for the building’s upkeep. In the 1960s and ’70s parts of it played host to a manufacturing company and a socialist working men’s club (circolo), but already by 1968 the Casa del Fascio was beginning to fall to pieces (Storchi 2019, 144), and that decline has steadily continued.
FIGURE 4.5. The tower of the Casa del Fascio in Predappio. Photo courtesy of Hannah Malone.
To enter the Casa del Fascio today you have to be accompanied by someone from the municipal authorities, and you have to wear a hard hat. That is because the interior of the building is a wreck. There are piles of rubble everywhere and holes in the walls and ceilings where water comes in and forms pools on the floor. Bits of corrugated iron block access to various corridors, and in one of its main rooms the huge iron flagpole that used to fly the tricolor lies abandoned on the floor. Pigeons have made their home inside, and the hard hat protects one from more than just collapsing ceilings (figure 4.6).
Storchi has demonstrated that various municipal authorities have, over the years, sought to intervene in this process of decay, restore the Casa del Fascio, and put it to some kind of public use (2019). In chapter 6, I describe the most recent such attempt, namely the proposal to transform it into a museum (or documentation center) on Fascism. None of those attempted interventions, however—including, as of the time of writing, the museum project—have met with any success, and the building remains in a sort of spectral state: despite its ruined interior and apart from some graffiti and broken windows, it appears more or less undamaged on the outside, allowing it to blend relatively unremarkably into its surroundings.
FIGURE 4.6. The remains of the iron flagpole of the Casa del Fascio. Photo by author.
Storchi’s extensive archival research has shown that the problem of what to do with the Casa del Fascio preoccupied a number of successive municipal administrations over the decades. Yet part of the reason Storchi’s account is so valuable is that it flies in the face of everyday wisdom in Predappio, which holds that nobody has ever really cared for the fate of the building. Some people remember the manufacturing company, or the socialist bar, but nobody that I knew spoke of the Casa del Fascio as a great missed opportunity, with the exception of those involved in the planning of the present museum project. Most Predappiesi will pass the building on a day-to-day basis or sit at one of the two bars directly opposite it on Piazza Sant’Antonio, but they will do so without paying it the least attention. It has long become part of the fabric of ordinary life in the town, but what has become ordinary and taken for granted about it is that it exists in a kind of liminal state: not nearly ruined enough in its exterior to be noticeably different from its surroundings but utterly desolate inside, the whole building exists as a facade. Without any explicit trappings of Fascism on the outside or any marks of history bar a tiny plaque (erected only in the past few years), and with the inside safely empty and thus attracting even fewer visitors than Mussolini’s birth house, the building can pass as unremarkable.
In other words, though there may be no grand strategy behind the Casa del Fascio’s present status and though some few in municipal administrations may have wished things otherwise, its existence as a facade emptied of history is perfectly in tune with the wider Predappiesi attitudes to their history I have been describing.
Hannah Malone (2017) has shown in comprehensive detail how confused and inconsistent strategies for dealing with Fascist urban heritage have been at a national level in postwar Italy. While some aspects of this heritage, such as Predappio’s street names and signs (see Storchi 2013b), were marked for destruction in the immediate aftermath of the regime’s fall, much of it has since been simply neglected or recycled without attention to its past (see also Arthurs 2010; Mitterhofer 2013; Hökerberg 2017 for a counterexample; and Fuller 2007 on Fascist architecture in former Italian colonies) in what Nick Carter and Simon Martin call “uncritical preservation” (2017, 355), “which allows Fascist sites to blend into the urban landscape” (Malone 2017, 452).
This is in contrast to postwar Germany, where Sharon Macdonald has described the fate that befell the Nazi Party rally grounds in Nuremberg (2006, 2009). Macdonald notes the ways in which the Nuremberg grounds were designed by Albert Speer with their own ruination in mind, intended to look to a thousand-year posterity like the classical ruins of ancient Greece and Rome (see, e.g., Arthurs 2012 and Kallis 2014 on the importance of Rome to Fascist architecture). This led to an impasse in postwar debates over what to do with this material heritage of the Nazi regime: repair it, and you risk returning it to its former glory and resurrecting it as a site of pilgrimage for the far right; but abandon it altogether and you accomplish exactly what its Nazi planners intended, and risk imbuing it instead with the allure of ruins. Macdonald explains the solution arrived at by then–state culture minister Hermann Glaser:
What should be done, he suggested, was to let the buildings fall into a state of semi-disrepair but not total ruin. They should be allowed to look ugly and uncared-for. And they should be used for banal uses, such as storage, and leisure activities like tennis and motor-racing. Such uses were already underway, but they had been put in place unreflectively and for pragmatic reasons. In Glaser’s new vision, however, they became something more significant and subtle: they became forms of material resistance to the Nazi meanings and potential agency of the architecture. That is, their very form made them into modes of neutralising Nazi agency. Calculated neglect was understood as blocking the two dangerous potential triggers. Glaser called this strategy Trivialisierung—trivialization. (2006, 19)
The parallels with the fate of the Casa del Fascio are clear: “semi-disrepair” nicely characterizes its condition. Like the Nuremberg rally grounds, the more or less healthy condition of the Casa del Fascio’s exterior leaves it without the “allure of the ruin” and indeed allows it to blend in perfectly well with the rest of Predappio’s urban fabric; when it has been put to use, it has been to utterly banal purposes—a small manufacturing company and a bar; and its present emptiness makes it even less worthy of notice. Indeed, the term for the Nuremberg strategy, trivialization, in some ways echoes the notion of ordinarification I have occasionally been using here to describe other Predappiesi strategies of nullifying their past.
There are interesting contrasts between the two cases, however. The most significant of these contrasts is one Macdonald points to in differentiating Glaser’s strategy from previously “unreflective” and “pragmatic” usage. By making trivialization into an explicit strategy, Glaser transformed pragmatism into resistance.
We should not, by now, be surprised to find that Predappiesi have not taken this step. As I have been describing for other aspects of the pursuit of ordinariness in Predappio, the point of this pursuit is not simply resistance to Fascism as a movement but resistance to everything associated with Fascism and in some ways to history itself. Put another way, trivialization in Nuremberg was a means to an end (resistance); in Predappio, ordinarification is both means and end. The point is not to disarm a specifically Fascist historicization, one that ends in the splendor of classical ruins, but to disarm any form of historicization whatsoever.
The Tomb of Il Duce
By contrast to the birth house and the Casa del Fascio, but like the Villa Carpena, Mussolini’s tomb is outside of the control of Predappio’s citizens, as it remains the formal property of the Mussolini family. Indeed, the inability of the municipality to exercise its authority over the tomb has been demonstrated on occasion when the family chooses to close the tomb to visitors in order to “punish” Predappio or its council for perceived slights, as I describe in chapter 5.
While there are official signs pointing the way to the local cemetery (it houses the relatives of many living Predappiesi), none of them name its most famous inhabitant. There is a small sign on the outside of the crypt itself, within the cemetery, placed there by the family. The crypt is at the end of the cemetery’s central path, in pride of place. All other graves in the cemetery are small standing mausolea or stone plaques.
As with the Villa Carpena, Mussolini’s tomb far more closely resembles de Certeau’s characterization of ordinary space and memory than any of the buildings over which Predappiesi or their elected officials have any control. It is a sort of a parody of a state-sanctioned mausoleum like the Pantheon.
The colors of the Italian tricolore are everywhere, as are the fasces of the regime. The sarcophagi of various close relatives of Mussolini are surrounded by somewhat incongruous photographs and busts of the relative in question: Rachele Mussolini is pictured holding a pair of birds, and her bust makes her resemble George Washington in a blouse. Mussolini’s own bust is the most prominent, in the center of the tomb and behind a wrought iron barrier in which can be seen a stylized version of the letter M (figure 4.7). Surrounding it are a number of relics in glass cases, which are impossible to identify from behind the barrier, and to its right is another, larger, stylized M, seemingly sited with no eye to symmetry or design.
Again, as in the Villa Carpena, small and uncontextualized objects related to Fascism are scattered about the tomb in seemingly haphazard fashion. In fact, an anteroom of the crypt could well pass for a storeroom for the Villa Carpena’s additional stock: it is filled with a jumble of pictures of Mussolini, of his father, flags, banners, scarves, Christian imagery, and a wooden statue of a priest in black that looks like it could have been—and perhaps was—carved by the same hand that made the Villa Carpena’s Fascist Father Christmas.
Leaving the tomb, one ascends another staircase, this one lined with plaques donated by visitors (figure 4.8). Once again, no single order or form of organization dominates the display: plaques of every size and shape have been nailed next to one another, seemingly in an attempt simply to jam as many of them in as possible, with no attention to their aesthetics or relationship. Some are cheap-looking gold plate; others are Fascist black; still others are made of clay, iron, or marble. Some include a photo of a deceased “comrade,” others a poem written in honor of Mussolini.
Directly in front of the bust in the center of the tomb is an open visitors’ book, often placed on top of an Italian flag. Entries in the visitors’ books express, like the tomb itself and the Villa Carpena, an odd assortment of sentiments. The majority involve some short endorsement of Mussolini or of Fascism (“Come back to us Duce!,” “Dear Benito, my faith and honor to you forever,” “History has proved you right!”), and many compare Mussolini to Christ (“Mussolini, you died for our sins!,” “Dongo [where Mussolini was executed] is our Calvary!,” “You founded my religion: Fascism,” “This is not a tomb, it is the repository of the holy grail”) or ask him to save Italy from some enemy or other (“Come back and rescue us from the dirty Communists who have ruined our country,” “You alone can save us from the pigs in government”).
FIGURE 4.7. The tomb and visitors’ book.
FIGURE 4.8. Commemorative plaques. Photo by author.
Amid these more orthodox sentiments, however, other curiosities emerge:
“Duce, please help Napoli to win the cup tomorrow!”
“One day in Predappio is better than ten days at the seaside.”
“You are our Mohammed, and Predappio is our Mecca, except we are not Muslims.”
Some comments in the book depart substantially from Fascist orthodoxy, occasionally provoking responses from other visitors:
“You know, your original ideas weren’t so bad, but then you made some pretty serious mistakes.”
“You died but you left us with the spirit of Fascism. Please come and take it back to hell with you and leave us in peace with democracy.”
“Can I say something? Have any of you idiots ever read a history book or do you only listen to what your Fascist granddad tells you?”
“You should have died sooner, piece of s∗∗∗!”
“Here lies a murderer with his symbols of death and shame. [Underneath:] Stay at home then idiot, instead of coming here!”
“I am utterly ashamed to be here! [Underneath:] Then don’t come, you ∗∗∗∗”1
Like the rest of the crypt, the visitors’ book appears uncurated, simply a repository of fragmented and at times incoherent feelings about Fascism, which sometimes even—as above—become a dialogue between opposing viewpoints.
Walking in Predappio
The examples I have been describing thus far in this chapter illustrate two key points about Predappiesi public space. The first is that, pace de Certeau, ordinary spaces (at least public ones over which the municipality has control) in Predappio tend not to be spaces suffused with history and memory; quite the opposite, they are spaces that have been emptied of history and memory. The second, related, point is that such places are not ordinary in this way by nature. The Rocca, Mussolini’s birth house, and the Casa del Fascio have all had history and memory extracted from them during the seventy years since the end of the war: the Rocca has been rebuilt and transformed into what local authorities imagine a globalized business space ought to look like; the birth house has been emptied of its contents; and the Casa del Fascio has been left to its pigeons on the inside. None of these spaces has anything individual or idiosyncratic left to it. Even the Casa del Fascio’s rotting interior has been stripped of anything that marked its former uses, leaving only gray stone and peeling plaster.
Yet for most Predappiesi, it is these dehistoricized public spaces that are ordinary, not the Villa Carpena, or Mussolini’s tomb, despite the fact that these latter spaces, in their haphazard and disorganized failures at curating some form of Fascist memory, look much more like de Certeau’s “anti-museums” and “haunted places,” the opposites of the panopticon.
But what of Predappio’s more private, more intimate space, or of normal life beyond these particular public spaces? After all, it is not only spaces of memory that de Certeau opposes to the simulacrum of the grid-plan imaginary of city life; it is also the simple quotidian experience of walking the streets.
Yet we have already seen in my depiction of Valentina and her shopping trip in chapter 1 that walking the streets of Predappio is a far from straightforward experience. In many ways the perspective on the town it generates is just as much a simulacrum as the god’s-eye view one gets from the Rocca. Predappiesi have cultivated an ability to ignore aspects of the urban fabric of their home that would leave an outsider open-mouthed.
This is not simply a question of habituation, because what is at issue is not merely aesthetics. After all, the urban fabric in question is simply not one to which one could easily become unwittingly habituated. For example, I am writing this chapter at my desk in my home in Cambridge, England. Cambridge is a city to which tourists flock from around the world and throughout the year. King’s Parade, the site of the iconic King’s College Chapel, can be hard to navigate in the summer because of the sheer quantity of people stopping to photograph or simply stare at the inescapably striking Gothic architecture. I have often felt frustration as I weave between tour groups and families and spare hardly a glance for the fabric of a city in which I was born and in which I have lived for most of my adult life.
I know, however, that it is there, and I know that if I stopped to speak to some of these visitors, I would no doubt share their feelings as to its beauty and majesty. Sometimes, particularly if the sun is setting and if I am not in a rush, then I might even stop myself and bask in the pleasure of the same sight that outsiders to my home are enjoying, aware that I am fortunate to have the opportunity to do so on a daily basis, even if I do not always take advantage of it.
None of that is possible for most Predappiesi. Of course, many of them are habituated to the aesthetics of their home, just as I am to those of Cambridge. But what they have to learn to “unsee” that I do not are the political connotations of those aesthetics. They cannot stand and share in the admiring gaze of a black-shirted visitor at their church or at the Casa del Fascio, because they know or guess that what is being admired is not, or at least not wholly, aesthetic. They know that the aesthetics of their home are iconic of a politics that most of them want nothing to do with.
To illustrate the potential perils of walking in Predappio, take the case of Elena, whom we met briefly in chapter 2 as an admirer of Mayor Ferlini. Elena is not, however, such a fan of Predappio’s present-day mayors.
She has had a rather complicated personal life, and although her father and her father’s family come from Predappio, she herself moved to the town only in the early 2000s, making her a relative outsider as far as others are concerned. She moved to Predappio, despite never having lived there previously, because of the way it made her feel close to her now-deceased father. She feels that she is still sometimes unjustly treated as an outsider, given her family’s roots in the town. But she also feels that her father was poorly treated by some in the town, too, largely as a consequence of his right-wing political leanings. Her memories of her father, and the narratives of her father’s memories she cherishes, often revolve around this fact and around a changing sense of place and space in Predappio after the war. For instance, she recalls him telling her of an episode from his boyhood immediately after the war. Locals were busy removing door signs and street signs with the fasces on them (some of which presumably ended up in the Villa Carpena), and Elena’s father came across the father of one of his friends from the Fascist youth movement chiseling the sign from outside the family house. He stopped to stare, and the man asked him what he thought he was looking at, pointedly calling him a Balilla, as those in the youth movement had been known. Elena’s father replied that the man’s son had been a Balilla, too, whereupon the man descended from his ladder and proceeded to give Elena’s father a beating, the recounting of which still causes Elena to turn red with indignation.
A few years before my fieldwork, Elena decided to put her recollections of her father’s memories to use and organize cultural walking tours of Predappio. She would not go to the cemetery, she decided, because that was too politicized, but she would show people around the important sites within the town and tell them of her father’s stories of Predappio in the war and after. She arranged the walks in cooperation with a representative of a Romagnole tourism association. The arrangement sounds a lot like Edoardo’s tour of the Rocca, only somewhat more formalized and focused on the town itself (cf. Reed 2002 on walking tours and memory in London).
Within a short period of time, however, she says that the association received a telephone call from the mayor’s office claiming that they required official permission to operate this sort of tour (permission the association claimed to Elena it had never required elsewhere). “I understood,” she says, “They never said it, but I understood: ‘You’re touching too sensitive topics,’ they meant. All I was doing was talking of my dad’s memories, and I was with someone with an official tax number, no funny business, so they couldn’t have stopped me even with the police, but to avoid the arguments I stopped myself anyway. I would never have talked about Fascism; instead I would have talked about what Predappio represents, as the beginning of the history of this statesman, who would later become Mussolini. Who knows that Mussolini lived with Rachele nearby, that he would get drunk and play the violin? Who talks about that? Nobody.”
Elena’s project and her reaction to the attempt to shut it down perhaps explain why she may still be perceived as an outsider by many in the town. As a project, it seems to condense a lot of what de Certeau approves of in the ordinary experience of city life: a bottom-up, personal initiative led by an individual in collaboration with a local association, designed to allow tourists to walk in the footsteps of an everyday man of Predappio and to hear about his memories of quotidian life in the town. But, as the reaction to the project suggests, this is not the sort of “walking in the city” that many Predappiesi wish to encourage.
The sort of walking in the city that most Predappiesi engage in involves, instead, as in Valentina’s shopping trip, a sort of studied avoidance of exactly the sorts of memory that Elena wishes to evoke. People do not, as a rule, have any desire to reminisce about the days when the flowers in front of the town hall were shaped to look a giant fasces or to pick out the place where a miniature fasces used to sit in the facade of the old hospital. Predappiesi know these things are there, just as I know that King’s College Chapel is there; and they know, as I do of King’s, that tourists will come to take pictures (or, in some cases in Predappio, stare in horror at some still-present reminder of the regime). But Predappiesi are not habituated to these facts; they are highly attuned to them (cf. Candea 2013). A really ordinary Predappiesi walking tour is like those Giorgio gave me at the Rocca, when he walked straight past the guardhouse in which partisans were tortured and murdered without a word, heading instead straight for the Rocca’s newly anonymized interior.
The problem with Elena’s walking tours, with Edoardo’s unofficial trips to the Rocca, with the Villa Carpena, and with Mussolini’s tomb, is not that they are not “really” ordinary. In their fragmented, haphazard, and uncurated form, as we have seen, they much more closely resemble what theorists of urban space such as de Certeau assume is ordinary than, say, the passionless remodeling of the Rocca and Mussolini’s birth house, or the spectral life of the Casa del Fascio, normal on the outside and ruined on the inside.
The problem is that the form of the ordinary is not enough. Left to itself, uncurated and uncultivated space and its experience in Predappio might share the formal properties that social scientists are wont to attribute to ordinary or everyday space, but there is in truth nothing in those properties alone that is sufficient to make something ordinary. Indeed, there is very obviously a great deal that is extraordinary, astonishing, and grotesque about spaces such as the Villa Carpena and Mussolini’s tomb and even, at least for some, in Elena’s walking tours and her desire to remember the Mussolini who would get drunk with his wife and play the violin. Making space ordinary in Predappio, as with the other aspects of Predappiesi life, takes work. In this case, the work involved may take the form of an emptying out of history and memory, the transformation of public spaces into “nonplaces,” empty like Mussolini’s birth house or reconstructed to resemble an image of an anonymous office space. Or it may take the form of a practice or experience of space, a learned avoidance of those aspects of home that conjure up the ghosts of history.
The ordinary Predappio produced by all of this is certainly not the same Predappio as the one you can see from Il Duce’s perch at the top of the Rocca’s tower. But in many ways it is just as much of a simulacrum, to be achieved rather than discovered.
In this chapter and in chapter 3, we have looked at how a sense of ordinary life in Predappio emerges in relation to ritual and to space. In the next chapter, we turn to language: What, after all, could be more ordinary than language? Yet ordinary language too, as we will see, may be a strategic choice and an object of cultivation, rather than simply a fact of existence, particularly when it comes to debates about how exactly to define Fascism. Such debates have a fraught history in general and particularly in Italy. One easy way out of them is to take the view that there simply is no single definition of Fascism and that it is a sort of “family resemblance” term, an argument put forward by Umberto Eco among others (1995). It is a mistake, though, to see this as a resolution to such debates, rather than the intervention it actually is. In Predappio in particular, taking this sort of ordinary language position on Fascism serves the broader project I have been describing: of ordinarifying a place that is anything but ordinary.