CHAPTER 5 Ordinary Skepticism and Fascist Family Resemblances

Dogs, and I Do Not Know What Else

Historical and political arguments over the proper meaning and definition of Fascism have been taking place since it first emerged as a phenomenon in the 1920s and show no immediate sign of abating. A range of definitions have been proffered by eminent historians of the subject in search of that so-called Fascist minimum (Eatwell 1996), while at least one prominent scholar became so frustrated by the ambiguous use of the term that he famously called for it to be banned from historical discourse (Allardyce 1979; see Holmes 2000, 13). Orwell, in raising the question of what Fascism is, was making nearly the same point in remarking that he had heard the word applied to “farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else” (1944). Historians and other academics have defined Fascism as, among other things, a class-based response to the development of socialism (see, e.g., Poulantzas 1974; Trotsky [1944] 1993), a psychological phenomenon resulting from a kind of mass hysteria (Reich 1933), a species of “developmental dictatorship” (Gregor 1979b), a palingenetic type of ultranationalism (Griffin 1991), and a form of religion as a political movement (Gentile 1990), to name only a few such definitions.

Recently these debates have become yet more fraught by, as it were, coming alive. They have moved from residing largely or entirely in the realm of scholarly journals and academic conferences (from being about the intension of the word, as it were) into the world that such journals and conferences aim to investigate, from the abstract to the concrete, from analysis to object (to being about potential extensions of the word). Slate, for example, recently printed an excerpt from Passmore’s Fascism: A Very Short Introduction as part of its academy series on Fascism, suggesting readers consult the extract to determine whether or not they were living in a “Fascist state” (Passmore 2017); the Atlantic, noting the “elusiveness” of definitions of Fascism, interviewed historian Robert Paxton in search of a checklist of features with which to assess the extent to which Donald Trump is a Fascist (Green 2016). The pages of international news and commentary have recently been filled with speculation as to whether and how far France’s National Front, Germany’s AfD, or Austria’s Freedom Party count or do not count as Fascist, and the word was even in the running to be Merriam-Webster’s “word of the year” in 2016.

The problem of definition is exacerbated by a number of factors in the case of Fascism, including the lack of any clear doctrinal text, inconsistency of practice and policy on the part of “Fascist” regimes (as I described in chapter 1), an apparent aversion to ideological or theoretical self-definition on the part of self-declared Fascists themselves, and the fact that Fascist movements have been, if they have been anything, usually ultranationalist in character, while also—arguably—forming a supranational object of some form.

All of these factors, as well as more traditional problems of definition, combine to make it extremely difficult to define Fascism, while apparently doing nothing to dispel the appetite of historians, political scientists, journalists, commentators, and ordinary people for attempting to do so.

These attempts have an especially complex history in Italy, where Fascism became, in effect, a criminal category after the fall of the regime. Article 30 of the Long Armistice between Italy and the Allies, signed on September 29, 1943, obliged the Italian government to “carry out all directives which the United Nations may call for, including the abolition of Fascist institutions, the dismissal and internment of Fascist personnel, the control of Fascist funds, the suppression of Fascist ideologies and teachings” (Domenico 1991, 22). At this point, Italy was the first major Axis power to surrender to the Allies and was thus in some ways a testing ground for what would take place in Germany two years later. Unlike the German case however, and—for different reasons—also unlike the case of France, Italy in 1943 was perched uncomfortably between the status of a vanquished enemy and that of a cobelligerent against the Axis. On the one hand, Italy had been at war with the Allies since 1940. On the other, Italians themselves had deposed Mussolini, and the new regime surrendered to the Allies and joined the war against Germany.

Furthermore, given the fact that most of the new, pro-Allied regime’s leaders had at some point or another held prominent positions under Mussolini, abolishing “Fascist” institutions and dismissing or interning “Fascist” personnel were in no sense simple proposals. These tasks were further complicated by the fact that the Allies were still fighting a war in Italy against Germany and the puppet regime of the Italian Social Republic (RSI), while also attempting to administer their own occupied territories in the country. Many of the initial Allied efforts at what was called “epuration” were haphazard and disorganized, as Roy Domenico recounts, targeting confused categories such as “Fascist sympathizers” or “those potentially dangerous to the security of the Allied Armed Forces” (1991, 27), while administrators also—with varying degrees of knowledge and satisfaction—collaborated with former Fascists in their efforts to govern the country (31).

An attempt was made to clarify matters somewhat in 1944 when a survey (scheda personale) was issued to all Italian state employees listing forty-three categories of questions (including asking respondents to declare whether or not they had ever held the position of national secretary of the PNF) regarding exactly how deeply the respondent had been involved in Fascist activities and for how long, in an effort to determine who should be prosecuted by tribunals. Again, because this was 1944, and the Allies were still fighting the Germans and the RSI in the north of the country, a crucial concern in the questionnaire was to establish whether the respondent had been a member of the Fascist Party until Mussolini’s fall from government in 1943 (more or less acceptable for the de facto reason that almost every state employee had been obliged or strongly encouraged to hold a party membership card during the regime) and had subsequently repented or whether they persisted in support of the RSI, which made one not only a Fascist but also a traitor to the legitimate Italian government in the south. This distinction and the effective definition of a Fascist as a repubblichino, as RSI supporters were called, became entrenched in both Italian and United Nations policy, despite the derisory attitude toward the questionnaire that many Italians held. The result was that epuration efforts were directed at a subset of individuals whose loyalty to the regime persisted after 1943, rather than at those whose participation in the movement ended—for whatever reason—with the coup against Mussolini in July 1943. That this particular definition served a number of purposes is well documented: it focused punitive efforts on those who were still hostile to the Allies (this was obviously the category which most concerned British and American administrators); it rescued the Allies from the need to purge the entirety of the Italian bureaucratic apparatus and the chaos that would result; and it allowed the royal government to avoid difficult questions about the relationship between Mussolini and the monarchy, the Catholic Church, and a range of other interests with which he had cooperated.

The twelfth disposition of the 1947 Italian constitution forbids the reorganization, “under any form whatsoever” of “the dissolved Italian Fascist Party.” This disposition was then clarified and somewhat extended in a 1952 law known as the Scelba Law, which forbids not only the reorganization of the dissolved Fascist Party but also “apologia” for it, as well as public demonstrations in favor of it. Yet these measures, too, have been undermined in a number of ways, most obviously by the 1946 Togliatti amnesty for convicted Fascist criminals and associated legal reforms, which led to the release of between twenty and thirty thousand people, as well as the electoral successes of the neo-Fascist MSI in 1948 (Domenico 1991, 212–214; Parlato 2006; Parlato 2017, 44).

Moreover, several Italian courts have, over the years, issued a number of decisions that very much restrict—or simply confuse—the scope of the application of the Scelba Law and its constitutional antecedent, as I have described elsewhere (Heywood 2019). For instance, already by 1958, at the trial of three men—two of whom were indicted for performing the Roman salute and wearing a black shirt at Mussolini’s tomb in Predappio—Italy’s constitutional court ruled that the law could apply only in situations in which there was a realistic and intended prospect of the reconstitution of the PNF, not simply in cases in which demonstrations were made in favor of it. Similarly, in 1994, the Consiglio di Stato ruled that use of the fasces as a political symbol could not in and of itself constitute a breach of electoral law, given the symbol’s longer historical association with ancient Rome (Maestri 2017). More recently, the criminal section of the Corte di Cassazione condemned two CasaPound militants for giving a Roman salute at a memorial day gathering and then, in 2016, absolved seven other militants for performing exactly the same gesture at a larger such memorial event. In Predappio, where Roman salutes are a regular occurrence, often in full view of police or carabinieri agents, no one expects intervention from the judicial authorities.

Policemen may not consider themselves experts on identifying Fascists, but other outsiders to Predappio do. On one October 28 anniversary march, I was watching a small group of men of varying ages wearing black Fascist military uniforms, led by a shaven-headed man in his forties. As the troop neared Mussolini’s mausoleum, its leader called out to the group to begin marching in military step. After a brief and obvious moment of confusion, a young man toward the rear of the group began to goose-step, before being instantly reprimanded by the troop leader: “No! That’s their [the Nazis’] thing! We’re Fascists, not Nazis!”

I was reminded of this minor display of technical discrimination (goose-stepping makes you a Nazi, not a Fascist, and the difference is important to some) a little later on the same day as I stood on the street with some anti-Fascist acquaintances of Carlo who had come to Predappio from Forli to witness the extent of the turnout and to take their dog for a walk. As we stood and watched individuals and groups of people pass by, some of whom were returning to town from the mausoleum, on foot and by car, one of Carlo’s acquaintances began reeling off ostensive definitions of her own: “That one’s Fascist … that one too … probably that one … that one might not be …” I asked how she was able to tell who was a Fascist and who was not, and she listed some of what she took to be indexical signs: black clothing (not an essential criterion, because anarchists wear black, too), leather (also not essential), biker paraphernalia, shaven head (also not an essential criterion), Fascist slogans printed on T-shirts, and origin of car license plate. Later on, Carlo gave me another example of a comparable practice from the 1970s, one adopted by leftist militants from Forli looking for visiting Fascists to attack: a volunteer would wait by the side of the road below a local hilltop for a bus to pass by; when it did, the volunteer would raise his arm to give the Roman salute, and if the busload of visitors did the same in response, he would signal to comrades at the top of the hill, who would promptly begin dropping rocks and boulders on the bus from above.

Ordinary Skepticism

The search for a “Fascist minimum” has an established history both in Italy and abroad. One might well imagine that Predappiesi would have elevated this search into a science: Where would one be more likely to find experts on what constitutes Fascism than in the birthplace of its founder and the Mecca for neo-Fascists across the world? Yet the brief examples I provide above involve outsiders: neo-Fascists seeking to distinguish themselves from Nazis and anti-Fascists looking to identify the enemy. Predappiesi themselves are remarkably reticent in applying this label.

That is not because of a shortage of candidates. The most obvious candidates are the visitors themselves, many of whom would quite happily self-describe as Fascist. Predappiesi, however, very rarely refer to their visitors with any variant of political characterization. In line with the wider response to the ritual marches, the most commonly used term for these visitors is nostalgici, “nostalgics.” This resembles Predappiesi descriptions of the marches themselves as “folkloric,” “traditional,” or “carnivalesque” and suggests that the visitors are more like a troop of historical reenactors than a political movement. As with the Crocean argument that Fascism was merely an interruption in the otherwise great history of Italy, the implication of calling the visitors nostalgic is that the object they venerate is dead and gone, a piece of history rather than a living political movement.

That is not to say that all the visitors are perceived in the same way. Massimo, the restaurateur described in chapter 3, for example, distinguishes between “historic” and “nostalgic” tourists. The former come because they are in the area, and Mussolini’s grave is simply a tourist destination to them like any other (“Like I’d go to Jim Morrison’s grave, wherever that is”). They come with their families, and if they stop at his restaurant they ask polite questions about the local area and leave again without further ado. The “nostalgic” tourists are those who come in uniforms, who come for the organized marches, and who tend to appear as large groups of men on buses. If Massimo does not attempt to stop them, they will perform Roman salutes in his restaurant after visiting the tomb, and of this group he is rather wary (though not necessarily unwilling to serve them, as we have seen). At no point does he use the word Fascist or any variant thereof to describe them. Massimo does not identify “nostalgics” with Fascists; he distinguishes them from “historical” tourists on the basis of the kind of feeling they have about Italy’s Fascist period and the intensity of such feelings. Both groups are defined by their feelings about Fascism as a thing of the past, rather than either being isomorphic with it.

There are local candidates, too. We have met Sergio on a couple of occasions, the former prisoner of war and founder of the local chapter of the MSI, the postwar reincarnation of the Fascist Party. I have heard him called an “old Fascist” on occasion but invariably in a jocular tone and in contexts—discussions of the past—that suggest the label refers more to his history as a soldier and his recalcitrance after the war rather than any present quality in him. He is a genteel and extremely elderly man and is treated with the respect accorded to age. Nothing about his politics excludes him from sociality with others in the town, and we have seen how he himself keeps a trove of partisan songs dedicated to Mayor Ferlini. Some of his stories appear with attribution in La fója de farfaraz, despite the left-wing politics of its authors.

Other obvious candidates are the owners of the three main souvenir shops. Here the label Fascist is used more frequently, at least in one case. But even in these cases, waters may be muddied. The most obvious question—often raised by Predappiesi—is whether it is ideology or money (or some combination of the two) that motivates the shop owners.

Two of these proprietors are from Predappio, one of them now deceased. This latter is one whom a number of Predappiesi would willingly call Fascist: he effectively began the souvenir trade by selling postcards and relics near the cemetery on the days of the anniversary marches. “He was always a Fascist,” Chiara, a council employee tells me, “even before, even when he wasn’t selling gadgets [another common euphemism for Fascist paraphernalia].” Her father, a retired lorry driver, disagrees immediately: “No, I think it’s for the money. It’s not for the politics, it’s the money.” Angela, the café owner, says that when this proprietor opened the first souvenir shop, people in the town joked that he would be selling Che Guevara T-shirts if Predappio had been lucky enough to be Che’s birthplace. But Angela also adds Chiara’s point: “He was always a Fascist, though.”

Federica, a retired schoolteacher who has taught most of the town’s inhabitants, is similarly somewhat equivocal: “Let’s say that this guy was the most involved from the beginning, from the point of view of politics. But even he didn’t only do this; he did other, ordinary [sic] things, too [he owned a hardware store]. And I know his family, they are actually really good people. His wife bends over backward to help. When I needed a flag in school, she would always find one for me, and give me a good price. But it would really bother me every time I went to the shop and had to see all those other things.”

The second proprietor from Predappio, still living, is one about whom Predappiesi are much more cynical. “He was in a totally different business,” recounts Federica, “selling chickens, owning poultry houses. But then he went bankrupt, found himself without work, and had the idea to take advantage of this situation and open the shop. So he reinvented himself selling Mussolini souvenirs, but without, I think, any specific political inclination. I mean, it was a way to survive.”

Angela is less generous, and makes no mention of bankruptcy: “He had this poultry farm, and he made so much money, because it was a huge business, and his brother had an amusement arcade in Predappio. So, when he got old and closed this down, the other one decided to open this shop. He was, how would you say, a ‘busy bee.’ He knows where the money is. But there is no ideology there. If tomorrow someone else is popular, he will change his whole business.”

Chiara is similarly convinced: “There’s definitely more self-interest than ideology in his shop. He saw the business; he did it for the money. I know the family, they have never been Fascists, and he was never involved in politics his whole life before this.”

Though it is not the largest, this second shop is in some ways the most conspicuous, at least for pedestrians, because it sits in the middle of Predappio’s main street, and the merchandise spills out onto the pavement outside. The owner, a short, gray-haired man with a handlebar mustache, is often at work behind the counter or tidying up the displays, and his compatriots usually greet him politely as they pass. Even Giorgio, the erstwhile left-wing mayor, says hello.

The third proprietor is not from Predappio, as Predappiesi will happily tell you, and therefore not seen as their responsibility. He is the most widely known of the three outside of Predappio—even though his shop is the smallest and the least noticeable—because he is also the owner of the Villa Carpena, the “museum” I described in chapter 4. His pecuniary motivations are taken for granted by most Predappiesi, and there is a degree of resentment at the fact that an outsider is profiting from the town’s heritage.

Self-interest and ideological conviction need not be mutually exclusive, and my point here is not about whether or not these men are, in fact, really Fascists. It is that Predappiesi frequently deploy monetary self-interest as if it were mutually exclusive with political beliefs. When Predappiesi speculate about the self-interest of these men, they are not doing so in order to add greed to the men’s charge sheets. Predappiesi do so in order to dismiss these men, with a snicker or a guffaw and a wave of the hand. There is nothing really special about them, is the implication; they are simply businessmen, unscrupulous perhaps, but this is not an unusual assumption for Italians to make about businessmen in general. In other words, there is a degree of reluctance involved in attaching the label of Fascist even to those who might seem most obviously to merit it. But the way in which that reluctance is evidenced is by opposing something pragmatic or ordinary, such as “making a living,” being a “busy bee,” or knowing where the money is, to the high politics of Fascism.

One might imagine that this sort of distinction would at least lead one to a certain set of criteria with which to identify who is, in fact, a Fascist. If self-interest is a characteristic that excludes people from this set, then presumably there are nevertheless other, less self-interested, individuals who fit more comfortably within it.

The problem, however, is that self-interest is frequently perceived to be at the heart of apparently genuine political convictions more generally. This is a broader Italian phenomenon, but it takes on a specific character in Predappio, as I noted in chapter 2 of the fascination with stories of voltagabbana, or turncoats. The implication of such stories is that political affiliation usually runs only skin-deep and that beneath the color red or black is simple self-interest (hence the “poplar leaf” insult from which the title of La fója de farfaraz is derived). There are a number of such stories that Predappiesi like to tell.

One concerns a repubblichino returning to Predappio after the Axis surrender and being stopped on the road outside the town by a band of anti-Fascists looking to exact punishment on any returning RSI soldiers they encountered. Among this band, the repubblichino was very surprised to find his former battalion sergeant, who had deserted from the army of the RSI only a month before the end of the war (Capacci, Pasini, and Giunchi 2014, 216–217). Another favorite is very similar: In the early 1920s, a local man refused to sign up to the PNF and was regularly beaten up by local Fascists as a result. Finally, he converted, and with a convert’s zealotry he even went on to fight for the RSI after the fall of Mussolini in 1943. After the surrender in 1945, he went back to Predappio, and as in the previous story, was seized by a band of anti-Fascists in the town upon his return. Upon realizing that one of the men about to beat him for being a Fascist was one of the men who used to beat him for not being a Fascist, he said calmly to the group, “All of you can punch me as much as you want, except him. He’s already had his turn.” (217).

But as I also suggested in chapter 2, it is Mussolini himself who is perceived as a sort of “turncoat in chief,” given his own switch from red to black between leaving the town as an “ordinary man” and returning as Italy’s Duce. In other words, at the very heart of Predappiesi conceptions of Fascism is an even deeper skepticism about identifying it than that expressed by doubt over any particular characteristic. In these conceptions, there is a sense in which Fascism was never, in fact, anything more than a cloak for self-interest.

Eco describes Fascism as an all-purpose term. His point, broadly speaking, writing about both an Italian and an international context, is that anti-Fascism is a vital and important cause and that we know, in some sense, to what it is opposed. This is revealed not by some fact about Fascism, but by the ways in which we use the word Fascism in ordinary language. “Who are They?” Eco asks, posing the skeptical philosopher’s question, and then gives us the ordinary language philosopher’s answer: “They” are those whom we call Fascist.

But who are we? In Predappio, it is far from clear that a sense of the indefinability of the word either stems from a feeling that people know a Fascist when they see one or serves the purpose of allowing them to pick out the family resemblances between different kinds of Fascist. Ironically, Predappiesi ordinary language about Fascism instead looks like that of the skeptical philosopher. Either it questions the application of the term based on a particular characteristic or set of characteristics (“he’s not Fascist, he’s just self-interested,” “they’re not Fascists, they’re just nostalgic clowns”), or, as in the stories of Mussolini and other turncoats, it implies an even more profound skepticism: if a man wears a Fascist uniform, serves the Fascist regime, holds a Fascist Party membership card, and yet later is to be found proclaiming his anti-Fascism and beating returning soldiers, what hope is there of ever answering Orwell’s question? If Mussolini himself is thought to have founded Fascism in part because the French bribed him into supporting the Entente in the First World War, then what does it even mean to be a Fascist?

My argument here is that the “underlying feelings,” as Eco puts it, revealed by Predappiesi ordinary language about Fascism revolve not around some unspoken notion of “Ur-Fascism” revealed by a we-know-it-when-we-see-it mentality. Instead, they revolve around a deep-seated and profound skepticism about whether or not anyone is really identifiable as a Fascist (see Heywood 2024b). Yet the ordinary skepticism produced as a result is not simply ordinary in the sense of being common and everyday in the town but also ordinary in that its effect is to scale Fascism down to the color of a shirt one wears for the convenience and benefits it confers. In this vision, the high politics of Fascism and of accusations of Fascism come down simply to where people think their interests lie.

As with the other instances of ordinariness, such scaling operations are not simple. While this way of speaking of Fascism may be ordinary in Predappio, it is not so ordinary elsewhere, and of this most Predappiesi are perfectly cognizant. As I noted at the outset of this chapter, outsiders who have heard of Predappio rarely share Predappiesi skepticism about identifying Fascism—indeed, instead they often take the town itself, its inhabitants, and its appearance as emblematic signs of the regime. Roman neo-Fascist restaurateurs provide cheap dinners to Predappiesi tourists, policemen forgive speeding tickets to Predappiesi drivers, and army sergeant-majors hand out the best jobs to Predappiesi conscripts. Meanwhile, others consign the whole town to the “toxic waste dump of history” for its associations with Fascism (Wu Ming 2017). Newspaper reports about the ritual marches in Predappio are much more likely to call the marchers “Fascists” than “nostalgics,” and non-Predappiesi are usually shocked to discover that the town consistently elected left-wing mayors until 2019. The sorts of fine distinctions Predappiesi make to distinguish their visitors and themselves from Fascism are usually of little interest to outsiders.

Fascist Family Resemblances

There is one respect in which Predappiesi speak of political affiliation—and even occasionally of Fascism—in a manner somewhat similar to Eco’s characterization. Interestingly, this respect involves relations of kinship—actual family resemblances, in other words.

A number of recent anthropological studies have pointed to the importance of kinship-related phenomena to economic and political life in a range of contexts (e.g., Bear 2007; Herzfeld 2007; McKinnon and Canell 2013; Yanagisako 2002). This runs counter to classic anthropological arguments that divided nonmodern societies from modern ones on the basis that only the former assimilate their political systems and their lineage systems. It also runs counter to what some of this literature describes as a “taboo” in “modern societies” on blurring these boundaries between domains, even if, as Sian Lazar points out, “they are in fact constantly experienced and held together in … everyday practices” (Lazar 2018, 259).

Lazar’s is one of the most powerful and convincing recent calls for us to appreciate the interconnected nature of kinship and politics (2018; see also 2017). Her work on trade unions in Argentina shows how a range of kinship-related practices and metaphors such as “blood,” consubstantiality, sociality, and care are important in creating something that looks very much like a kin-group in trade union life. Though she retains something like the distinction between kinship and politics as a heuristic device of her analysis (2018, 259), her point is that in everyday life this distinction is very much blurred.

Interestingly for present purposes, one of the main targets of Lazar’s argument is the assumption—not very common in contemporary anthropology but arguably more common beyond it—that politics is driven primarily by self-interest, rather than by sentiment, say. She is of course arguing, not that self-interest has no role to play in political life, but that in some contexts, some versions of “everyday life,” it may be less important than other drivers of action.

Though Lazar points out that the assumption that self-interest determines politics is in part derived from notions of Homo economicus and the “rational actor,” she makes relatively little of the fact that this is itself another instance of domain-blurring, this time from the economic into the political. This is worth remarking on in the case of Predappio because distinguishing between the domains of the economic and the political, self-interest and conviction, is part of what allows people to express skepticism about whether people are really Fascist or not. So, Lazar’s point that we ought to be ethnographically sensitive to the relative importance of self-interest as a motivation for politics is borne out.

But what about kinship? Lazar makes a thoroughly convincing case for the blurring of kinship and politics in her own fieldwork context. But if one of the risks of utilitarian analyses of politics is that they presume a subsumption of the political into the economic, might there be contexts in which it may be similarly mistaken to assume that kinship and the political are exactly isomorphic? What if sometimes, in some versions of “everyday life,” politics must be distilled from kinship, just as Lazar distills it from economics?

There are some respects in which kinship and politics are very clearly intertwined in Predappio. A number of Mussolini’s descendants are famous in contemporary Italy, though none of them live in Predappio. Most well-known of all is Alessandra Mussolini, an erstwhile member of both houses of Italy’s parliament and the European parliament, as well as a former actress and Playboy model. She has regularly defended her grandfather in public, as have other grandchildren such as the writer and television presenter Edda Negri Mussolini and the one-time candidate for mayor of Rome Guido Mussolini. The political affiliation of the family has never been in doubt. In a manner akin to Lazar’s description of how one is “born,” not made, a Peronist in Argentina, Benito Mussolini wrote of his son Bruno after his death in a flying accident that he was “Fascista—nato e vissuto” (born and lived a Fascist), and that could aptly describe Benito’s more distant descendants as well. Though they do not live in Predappio, they do sometimes attend the ritual marches, and they retain control over the family crypt.

This fact led to public spat between the family and Mayor Giorgio Frassineti in 2017, over a TV interview he conducted alongside Miro Gori, the local head of ANPI, the partisans’ organization, inside the crypt itself. Alessandra Mussolini declared the crypt to have been “violated,” and the family closed it to visitors, in a gesture that most thought was intended to punish Predappio by depriving it of its main source of tourist income. Alessandra Mussolini ceremonially reopened the tomb in 2019 while campaigning for the right-wing candidate to replace Giorgio as mayor, a candidate whose victory made him the first right-wing mayor of Predappio since the end of the Second World War. It would be a mistake, though, to think that politics precluded any kind of relationship between Predappio’s former left-wing local administrations and the Mussolini family; before the spat, in 2016, Giorgio got into hot water with ANPI, this time by appearing as a speaker at a book symposium for Edda Negri Mussolini’s biography of her grandmother, Rachele Mussolini.

Nobody seriously doubts the political affiliation of anybody whose surname is Mussolini (although the word Fascist is still used relatively sparingly in Predappio even with reference to the family). The Mussolini family is an extreme case, but some version of the notion that one is “born” into one’s politics is more broadly common in Predappio (and elsewhere in Italy). Relatives of Mussolini’s widow, Rachele, for instance, who do live in the town, are known for their continued loyalty to their affinal kin. More generally, people in Predappio are for the most part aware of the political affiliations of any particular family. There is a “left-wing” bar (the former working men’s club, or Casa del Popolo) and there is a “right-wing” bar, and most people know in which bar any particular family belongs. This idea of politics as inheritance was particularly brought home to me on one occasion when I first met Giovanni, a retired man with a large collection of Fascist memorabilia who also acted as a general factotum for a prominent local right-wing politician. As we were looking through his photos of Predappio in the 1930s, I happened to mention that I had affinal relatives of my own in the town and gave him their name. “Ah!” he said, looking sharply at me, “but they’re of the left!” Then, smiling, he added, “But it’s not your fault.” As in Lazar’s account, kinship seems thus to play a significant role in political life.

Yet there is a sense in which things are also more complicated, one hinted at in Giovanni’s comment that my family’s politics were “not your fault.” To return to the Mussolini family, for example, Edda Negri Mussolini and her sister led the ritual march on the anniversary of their grandfather’s death in April 2017. Watching them with Predappiesi friends from a nearby bar, I was struck by how much of the conversation among locals here and afterward was focused on kinship—indeed on literal family resemblances—instead of politics.

Edda and her sister Silvia bear a remarkably striking resemblance to their grandfather. They share the same round face and prominent nose, and their eyes are unmistakably alike. It is impossible not to notice the similarities once you know who they are. It was upon these family resemblances, rather than metaphorical political family resemblances, that many Predappiesi I knew chose to focus.

“Don’t you think it’s incredible how much they look like him?,” remarked Marco, as we watched the marchers coalesce around the sisters. “Look at the shape of the head and the eyes! It’s like looking at a picture from a history book. Imagine growing up with that!”

“Ah, it must have been hard,” responded his partner, Eleonora. “Poor things. They had nothing to do with any of that, they weren’t even born, but what can you do about it? It’s their blood.”

As they were having this conversation, we were watching the sisters lead a parade of thousands wearing Fascist uniforms and holding up slogans in praise of their grandfather and his politics. Yet the only hint of politics in this exchange is Eleonora’s comment that the sisters “had nothing to do with any of that,” that presumably being the many things that people find objectionable about Fascism. The sentiment of sympathy (“poor things”) was often expressed in Predappio toward members of the Mussolini family on the basis that they had inherited a legacy over which they had no real control, a situation with which Predappiesi are more than familiar.

In other words, there is a sense here in which literal family resemblances and kinship phenomena such as “blood” actually serve as political alibis of a sort, substitutes, like self-interest, for “true” politics. The implication of this view is that people such as Edda Negri Mussolini and her sister have no real choice about their affiliations, thus placing such affiliations beyond the question of political conviction. If it is choice inspired by self-interest that puts the shop owners out of the realm of politics and into that of economics, here it is lack of choice determined by “blood” that puts the Mussolinis out of the realm of politics and into that of kinship.

This sort of idea is also replicated on a smaller scale in cases much less extreme than that of the Mussolinis. It is there, for instance, in Giovanni’s remark that my affinal kin’s political affiliations were not my fault. He was not suggesting that I might differ in my own politics from my kin network. Indeed, he assumed that I did not and went on to make frequent jokes about “Communists like you” throughout our acquaintance. He was suggesting instead to an outsider—and a foreigner—that he would not blame me for my politics precisely because he knew of my family connections.

Not everyone follows their family’s politics. Angela, for example, relates having blazing rows with her father when she was young and now believes her left-wing politics are in part a reaction to her father’s right-wing beliefs. Chiara and her father—both of whom we met earlier commenting on the shop owners—are less extreme in their political divergences, but they do have differences. She is quite forthright in her left-wing politics, whereas he is more quietly circumspect but certainly more conservative in his views; whereas Chiara abhors the souvenir shops, for example, her father has a more live-and-let-live attitude. He is much more comfortable attributing pecuniary motivations to all the owners, whereas Chiara is confident in her claim that at least one of them really is a Fascist. Interestingly, given her own differences with her father, Chiara cites her knowledge that the family of one owner has never been Fascist as evidence for the fact that he himself cannot be. If this were always true, then Mussolini would have remained a socialist, like his own father.

My point in this section has been that though Predappiesi seem to adopt a form of Eco’s you-know-it-when-you-see-it attitude to Fascism in this particular sense, the family resemblances they pick out to identify a shared politics often do not, in fact, have anything to do with politics at all in the sense of ideological conviction. They are literal family resemblances, or shared surnames, as in the case of the Mussolinis. While to some extent this makes sense as an instance of Lazar’s description of a form of politics underlain by kinship-related phenomena, there is also something slightly distinct about this case. Predappiesi deploy kinship-based concepts precisely because their understanding of politics is not largely kinship-based, and talking about kinship-based political resemblances can be a way of avoiding talking about actual shared political convictions. To speak of affinal or consanguineal resemblances and loyalties is another way of rendering ordinary the continuing presence of Fascist politics.

Predappio has long been synonymous with Fascism as far as most outsiders are concerned. From the mass production of picture postcards of its construction under the regime, to the photographs of men wearing black that adorn the pages of contemporary newspapers every October, it is indissolubly linked in a wider public imaginary with its most famous son and the movement he created. Yet Predappiesi themselves go to great lengths to scale apparent Fascism down to more ordinary motivations: basic self-interest and family loyalty. Thus, ordinary language about Fascism in Predappio in fact looks rather skeptical, prone as it is to doubt about the category’s applicability. As I have noted before, this is a very particular vision of ordinariness, as any will be, but it is not hard to imagine why Predappiesi might see pecuniary motivation or kinship allegiances as more ordinary than Fascist political convictions.

But what is it that these ways of talking about Fascism scale down from, as it were? What constitutes the domain of Fascist politics, to which that of kinship or economics may be counterposed? So far in this book, my concern has been largely with establishing the various ways in which people produce a sense of ordinariness in Predappio. The next and final chapter will aim to describe some of the controversies, local and national, that erupted over an initiative that put Predappio squarely back in the headlines of global news: a proposal to install a museum of Fascism in the ruins of the old Fascist Party Headquarters.