CHAPTER 2 Ordinary Exemplars and the Moralization of the Everyday

Predappio’s Greatest Son

Sergio is nearly one hundred years old. He nevertheless moves easily around his small house, refusing me permission to help him pour coffee, or grappa when we talk later into the evening. He speaks clearly and precisely, and possesses an extraordinarily detailed memory and a lively wit. Born in 1921, the year Mussolini came to power, in a small hamlet attached to Predappio, Sergio attended the same high school as Mussolini in the local town of Forlimpopoli. He and his family have run a small business in the town for decades.

Sergio has had an eventful life. After school and after working at a savings institute in Predappio for a brief period, he enrolled in the army, despite being blind in one eye and thus eligible for an exception to mandatory conscription. For a while, he had the unpleasant job of notifying the families of soldiers killed in action that their children, husbands, and brothers were dead. In part to escape this task, he volunteered for the Russian front in 1941. Fortunately for him—nearly eighty-five thousand Italian soldiers died fighting or in captivity on the Eastern Front—he was posted to North Africa instead. Wounded in 1943, he followed his battalion to Tunis, where he was captured by the British when the Eighth Army took the city. He is still annoyed that the British officer who captured him took his Longines watch and suggests he will keep valuables out of reach of whichever part of me is most English.

Sergio was in a prisoner of war camp in Mississippi when Mussolini was deposed in a coup on July 25, 1943. Almost instantly, he says, the majority of Italian officers in the camp—including those who had been fervent Fascists up until that moment—converted to the Royalist cause (King Victor Emmanuel III was now putatively in control of the Italian government and would soon bring Italy over to the Allied side). Sergio was asked to renew the oath he had signed when joining the army, pledging his allegiance to the king (the implication being that Sergio’s allegiance would no longer be to Mussolini). He refused.

“It was a political question,” he says, “and I was a fighter, a soldier, and I had done my duty. The Americans killed five men in my platoon, and now they were on our side? It’s a matter of pride. In that moment, the Americans were bombarding Predappio, so they were my friends who were bombarding my parents? I would be cheating the memory of my soldiers, of my friends and relatives who died, and I would be giving in to harassment.”

He was sent to a special camp for recalcitrant Italians, where, he claims, he and his fellows were given reduced rations and implicitly threatened with execution if they did not capitulate. “Gradually people gave in. We started with maybe around two thousand people. By August we had four hundred.” Sergio never signed the oath.

Pressed on why he refused to sign, Sergio would say it was a combination of factors:

There was the pride of not cheating, betraying. The belief that if I switched to the other side I would be cheating, and cheating myself too because I was a volunteer. Look, I thought, I still think—though maybe I’m wrong—that wars are supposed to be won. Yes, it’s true, I had seen things, including in Predappio, some things of the regime I didn’t like at all, I’d say quite plainly. But who has the right to change things in a war? And there were many good things, too, because there was respect. You know, in my elementary school there was a girl and her brother, and we called them Libero and Libera. Know why we called them that? Because their father was an anarchist, and we all knew it. The boy played soccer with Romano Mussolini. Was this persecution? So, when they tell me about Fascism—yes, it’s true, there were strict laws, but at the same time, there were ways of overlooking them.

Sergio was sent home in February 1946 and came straight to Predappio. He found a town that he felt no longer looked like his own. The Caproni airplane factory that had drawn thousands to live and work in Predappio had closed, and the vast majority of the tourism that brought enormous numbers of visitors to il paese del Duce had largely dried up. But according to Sergio, Predappio had changed in other ways, too.

I’ll tell you an example—there was a man who was the uncle of my fiancée, he was, what would you say, the president of the national commerce association, and a personal friend of Mussolini. When I came back, he had adapted. He had become a little Christian Democrat. Those who have money are always safe. At first, I do it, and then I don’t do it, you see? I repeat, it was a different town. People were not the same as in the past. I remember when we declared war, they summoned the people to Piazza Sant’Antonio. It was packed. Everybody was clapping. And all the chiefs were there, the big shots. So, I come back to Predappio, and many of them are dead, of course. But those who returned … there was this atmosphere of treachery, and the meanest of all were those who had been the most uncompromising Fascists. He who changes his mind, I don’t respect this person—he who at 6 p.m. is a Fascist and at 6:01 is an anti-Fascist.

Toward the end of 1947, Sergio founded one of the first local sections of Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), the successor to the Italian Fascist Party. He was beaten in the streets by political opponents, and before the 1948 elections, in which the PCI came close to victory, was told that the local PCI chapter had specified the pole from which he would be hung in the event that the elections preceded a revolution. The local police told him to keep a gun on his person at all times.

Fortunately, there were some individuals who were not like this, because in all things there is some good. Ferlini, the first mayor of Predappio, was like this. They sang songs about him then and still now, because he was a partisan. He was a good guy, a good man, an honest man. I keep recordings of those songs, you know. They call him “the liberator” in the songs. He stepped in to protect me, it’s true. They ousted him almost immediately though, the ones who had been Fascists and became Communists. He, poor man, was honest, too honest. One day, after the war and after he was ousted as mayor, I was seated there, and he called me. He says to me [in local dialect]:

“Sergio, come here, I want to tell you something—I’ve been to visit your friends!”

So I say, “My friends? Who are my friends?”

“Fascists, like you! I’m just coming back from there, I went to see them this morning.”

So, who were these guys? They were Repubblichini [Fascist soldiers of Mussolini’s post-1943 regime, the Italian Social Republic], and in the war they controlled the nearby mill, and the food that local people could access. So Ferlini had a deal with them to get food for people. He told me, “My problem was not fighting. They told you I fought against you and I liberated Predappio and so on, but really my problem was to give food to people who needed it. So, with the help of the priest and these guards, we brought flour to the town from the mill.”

Many other Predappiesi share this admiration for Ferlini. Elena, for example, lives in the same building as Valentina. She is middle-aged and moderately conservative in her politics, and she has very firm opinions about many issues. One of them is Ferlini. While describing her father’s experiences of postwar Predappio, Elena said to me:

Ferlini was a truly great man, and he was great in spite of his background and education.… He was a simple man and he became our mayor, do you see? And I believe Ferlini is Predappio’s greatest son, we need to tell others about him, and how he stopped all the fighting after the war … and you know he washed the stairs to the town hall when he retired? But they weren’t all like our wonderful Ferlini, you know, he was on the left from before, and I admire people who were consistently on the left, even if I’m not.

Sergio is an unusual man in Predappio. His military and MSI credentials mean he is one of the few inhabitants of the town—souvenir shop owners excepted—whom other Predappiesi will definitively characterize as “extreme right.” Yet he, too, along with Elena, shares the authors of La fója de farfaraz’s admiration for Ferlini.

I want to highlight two key elements in these narratives about Ferlini because they will form this chapter’s focus. The first of these elements is the suggestion that ideology was of much less importance in one of the most politically turbulent periods of Italian history than one might imagine. As in the case of Fascist ideology itself, as I described in chapter 1, Sergio and the people he describes, as well as Ciaranfi, have little time for theoretical distinctions. Nor even does the regime in his telling, allowing the children of anarchists to play football with Il Duce’s son, at least in Sergio’s telling. Sergio himself is fairly consistent in his adherence to some version or another of the creed he signed up to fight for in 1941, but even he has no interest in justifying this adherence with reference to ideas. His refusal to change his colors after the July 25 coup is, by his own account, more about stubbornness and a sense of loyalty to his erstwhile comrades than any feeling that there was something politically wrong with deposing Mussolini. He helped to found the local MSI chapter in part because he came to believe his military service was leading to him being passed over for jobs at the expense of the newly dominant left. As for almost everyone else in his narrative—the former Fascist “big shots,” the uncle who becomes “a little Christian Democrat”—they are far less ideologically consistent than he is: they are voltagabbana, turncoats, of whom everybody in Predappio has their favorite story, many of which are included in La fója de farfaraz.

Similarly, the authors of La fója de farfaraz argue that adherence to Fascism in Predappio did not stem from “political debates or ideology, but from normal citizens’ adjustment to the new regime. So, unlike in other areas, Fascism did not produce deep longstanding personal hatred” (Capacci, Pasini, and Giunchi 2014, 55). On local Fascists, they claim that “local anti-Fascists agree that even the most visible Fascists in Predappio did not behave badly, all things considered. Some even behaved rather well considering their role.… The cases of really hated Fascists are very few, and are those who were informers. In such cases the odium is really severe, as to political sins are added the betrayal of one’s own community, one’s own people” (53). In this last remark, the implicit hierarchy is notable: “betraying one’s own community” is more serious than any “political sin.”

Neither Sergio nor the authors of La fója de farfaraz offer up these sorts of narratives of turncoats in an attempt to make serious moral claims about the behavior of the people they describe. They would certainly agree that such behavior is less than virtuous. But their point is not that people who engage in such behavior are particularly immoral. The point instead is to puncture an appearance of special probity given off by those who proclaim strong ideological convictions. The point is not that some people are extraordinarily immoral because they are ideologically inconsistent; it is that more or less everybody is perfectly ordinarily ideologically inconsistent, including those who might appear otherwise.

The other factor that both of these divergent political narratives share, however, is a fervent admiration for Giuseppe Ferlini. How is it, then, that a man whose political life was apparently spent firmly on one side of the barricades—as a partisan commander and a Communist mayor—ends up an exemplar to both the left and the right? The answer is partly wrapped up in the issue of how a kind of anti-ideological pragmatism relates to what being an exemplar in Predappio means, as I will try to show in this chapter and as is hinted at by Sergio’s description of his fraternization with Fascist soldiers. But to get to those roots, we have to first return to the creation of Predappio as it is today, a monument to the biography of its other, more controversial, famous son.

Il Paese del Duce

Mussolini took power in 1922, three years after the first meeting of the Fasci di Combattimento in Milan described in the previous chapter. In Fascist mythology, this seizure of power was a “Fascist revolution” and followed the famous March on Rome on October 28, now one of the three key anniversary dates on which tourists come to Predappio. The reality was more mundane (more ordinary, perhaps) and, as Bosworth shows, “a change in government to be achieved by negotiation at least as much as by naked violence” (2002, 528).

Almost immediately after Mussolini became prime minister, he began the process of turning Predappio into a major site of mythmaking around his personality. He paid his first ceremonial visit there as head of government on April 15, 1923, accompanied by a selection of national dignitaries. For the occasion, the town’s main street was renamed in his honor (a name it would retain until the end of the war), and the house in which Mussolini was born was gifted to him, decorated with garlands and flags. Indeed, in pictures of the visit, the whole town can be seen draped in banners and decorations, with crowds of people, their right arms upraised, filling Piazza Cavour in Predappio Alta to hear Mussolini speak from a balcony. Local and national newspapers celebrated the visit with extensive coverage, and commemorative postcards were printed. Within months, reconstruction work had begun, and over the course of the next fifteen or so years, Predappio was transformed from a hamlet of a few hundred people into an entirely new town of more than ten thousand.

It was Dovia, the small hamlet down the hill from Predappio Alta—the old town of Predappio—in which Mussolini was born, that was reconstructed as what is now Predappio (or Predappio Nuova), complete with a new municipal headquarters for the comune (in the schoolhouse in which Mussolini’s mother used to teach); an impressively sized church in the main square; a hospital; a carabinieri barracks; a post office; a primary and secondary school; the local headquarters of the Fascist youth movement and of its official trade union; a cinema; an airplane factory and flight-testing facility; extensive accommodation for associated workers; and a flagship party headquarters for the Italian Fascist Party, also designed to host visiting dignitaries.

This was a huge urban engineering project—effectively the construction of a whole new town from scratch. The reconstruction process was attended by much pomp and circumstance throughout, usually focused, unsurprisingly, on Mussolini himself. In 1925, for example, Fascist Party national secretary Roberto Farinacci and Quadrumvir Italo Balbo attended the laying of the foundation stone of a church named in honor of Mussolini’s mother in the town, declaring its inauguration an occasion for a “renewed oath”: “Duce, we are always at your command, in both spirit and body” (Duggan 2013, 35). The centerpiece of this visit was the installation of a commemorative plaque at the house in which Mussolini was born, declaring him a great statesman and “savior of the nation.”

The new town was constructed around two main squares, both of which were dominated by Mussolini’s heritage: the first framed the house in which he was born, and the second the former schoolhouse in which his mother taught, which became the town hall (figure 2.2), in front of which was created a garden with an enormous fasces made out of topiary.

The local cemetery was also reconstructed in monumental style around the tomb in which the bodies of his parents were placed (his father had died apart from Mussolini’s mother and had been buried in the nearby town of Forli, until his body was exhumed and transferred to Predappio).

As Sofia Serenelli has described, as early as 1919, Predappio had been a place of pilgrimage for Fascists, but from around 1926 such pilgrimages took on a national character, regulated and organized by the state and with a certain fixed form (2013, 94). Postcards depicting Predappio during and after the reconstruction process were mass-produced and sold throughout Italy. A propaganda office was opened in the new and monumental party headquarters building in the town, tasked with the organization of local tours and the publication of guidebooks and photo albums. Predappio, in other words, was from the outset at the very heart of the project of making Mussolini into a Sorelian myth.

In chapter 1, we encountered the relationship that thinkers such as Le Bon thought should obtain between “ordinary people” and their heroic leaders. Of course, in many respects, Mussolini fits this picture perfectly. As in other totalitarian regimes, the Fascist Party and government laid a great deal of emphasis on the exemplary qualities of its leader. Christopher Duggan, in a volume devoted to the “cult of the duce” (2013), notes that the notion of Mussolini as l’uomo della providenza (“the man of providence”) had been around since the birth of the Fascist movement in 1919. But it was in 1925, after the crisis brought on by the assassination of socialist parliamentarian Giacomo Matteotti (after whom the main street in Predappio is now named) that its development began in earnest. Several failed attempts on Mussolini’s life led to his being compared to Christ in parliament, to church bells ringing across Italy, and to the pope reportedly suggesting that Mussolini was being protected by God (Duggan 2013, 37). Though this was pragmatically convenient at the time for a regime suffering from a lack of ideological coherence and buffeted by the Matteotti scandal, later essays in the same volume attest to the persistence of the cult of personality both throughout the ventennio and into the postwar period, and it was in service of this cult that Predappio was transfigured into Predappio Nuova.

In a certain sense, then, Mussolini acted as what anthropologists might call an “exemplar” in the Fascist moral universe, as other dictators did in other totalitarian contexts (see Heywood 2022). In her landmark essay on exemplarity, Caroline Humphrey argues that ethics and morality in Mongolia inhere primarily in the relationship between persons and exemplars and precedents, rather than in rules or customs (Humphrey 1997, 25). More recently, Joel Robbins has suggested that exemplars may more broadly function as the embodiment of particular social values (2018). Perhaps unsurprisingly, though, this literature on moral exemplarity has not been put into sustained dialogue with that on ordinariness, though both share an interest in ethics. Surely if exemplars are anything, they are far from ordinary. They are military or political leaders such as Genghis Khan or Melanesian Big Men—or Adolf Hitler, Mussolini, Oswald Mosley, or Francisco Franco, as testified to by the personality cults that sprang up around them.

What I want to suggest in this chapter, however, is that, in different and particular senses, both Mussolini and Giuseppe Ferlini constitute what we might call “ordinary exemplars.” They reveal, in different ways, which sorts of visions of ordinariness as a form were at work in historical Predappio and which are at work today.

The myth of Mussolini constructed by the Fascist regime was in many ways of anything but that of an ordinary man. Nevertheless, as Simona Storchi points out in her analysis of one of the first biographies of Mussolini, written by his then-lover Margherita Sarfatti, his humble roots were an important part of this mythology (2013a, 52). This was especially true when it came to Predappio, which became itself a sort of “ordinary exemplar,” as I will try to show.

Predappio was built around Mussolini’s own biography, as a sort of giant, open-air museum to his early life (and to the prowess of Fascist urban engineering). Given that this early life was spent as the son of the local blacksmith and schoolteacher in comparative poverty, it was ripe for exploitation in the service of constructing Mussolini, “the man like you, with your qualities and faults, with all that goes to make up the essential elements of that special human nature that is the nature of Italians” (Sarfatti, cited in Storchi 2013a, 52). As Serenelli notes, some of the first items of propaganda based on Predappio were postcards depicting Mussolini visiting “the ‘humble’ grave of his mother, and surrounded by his ‘own people’ in front of the house in which he was born” (Serenelli 2013, 95). In his speech, quoted earlier, at the inauguration of New Predappio, Farinacci stressed “the social rank of Fascism … which is proletarian, and, above, all rural.” This, as Serenelli describes, “was the principle characteristic that Mussolini, who strictly supervised the quantity, quality, and location of the new buildings, intended to give to his home town” (2013, 97). In 1935, Mussolini personally unveiled a plaque at the house in which his father, Alessandro, was born that claimed the site would explain “what is meant by austerity of life” (Serenelli 2013, 102). This was a comparatively rare instance of attention paid to Alessandro, however, as his life as a local socialist politician made him a less than straightforward figure for the regime to draw on. Mussolini’s mother, on the other hand, an “ordinary” schoolteacher with no such political complications, was the focus of much attention, and had a church and a nursery school named after her in Predappio.

Mussolini’s birth house is a particularly interesting instance of the emphasis on Mussolini’s humble roots. It sits directly above the second of Predappio’s two large squares and is the central vista of an elaborate ceremonial gateway. It was isolated from surrounding houses by the construction of a tree-lined avenue around it and was originally reachable from the square by walking through an arch and a gate decorated with the Fascist emblem. Serenelli describes how it was “refurbished with its reassembled ‘original’ furniture … (Mussolini’s only criticism was that the mattresses on the beds should have their wool stuffing replaced with more humble corn leaves)” and that, as I noted in chapter 1, before the visit to Predappio of King Victor Emmanuel in 1938, Mussolini “ordered the removal of the huge arch over the access steps to the casa natale [birth house] from the market square below” because he considered it excessively ornate (2013, 97).

So, much of the specific role Predappio had to play in the creation of the myth of Mussolini was focused on his humble, ordinary origins and proletarian, antibourgeois characteristics, and Italians were encouraged to see these—literally, by coming to Predappio to look at the corn leaves in his bed—as part of his exemplary nature. Predappio Nuova was constructed as both the paradigmatically ordinary Apennine village home of Italy’s humble Duce and also as a “cathedral in the desert” (Serenelli 2013, 99), a spectacular monument to one man and to Fascist urban planning and architecture. It was thus held up as an exemplar in two key senses: first, its reconstruction and transformation from a hamlet of a few hundred people into a bustling small town of ten thousand, a gem of Fascist architecture and urban engineering, the first of the Fascist “New Towns,” made it worthy of exhibition as one of the marvels of Fascist modernism, alongside the new towns of the Pontine Marshes, EUR in Rome, and so on. Second, however, this whole project of reconstruction was premised on the fact that this was the ordinary town in which the great Duce was born, and this ordinariness was crucial to the reconstruction itself.

The mythmaking focused on Predappio thus had two dimensions: on the one hand, Predappio was intended to be seen as extraordinary, a modern Fascist cathedral in a desert of small medieval villages (Serenelli 2013, 99); on the other hand, the regime’s determination to immortalize Mussolini’s poor peasant upbringing meant that Predappio also had to be seen as fundamentally ordinary, an Italian village like any other, with which the tourists who came to see it could identify. Under Fascism, in other words, Predappio was exemplary of both something very special (Fascist modernism) and something very typical (an average peasant life in the Romagna). Just like Mussolini himself, Predappio Nuova was ordinariness transfigured into exemplarity.

Here we see the intermingling of ordinary and exemplary life that I noted would arise in chapter 1. While for thinkers like Le Bon, the exemplary leader is distinct from “the crowd,” and it is this distinction that allows him to lead them, by the time we arrive at Fascism in practice and in government, that relationship between leader and masses has become more complex. Apparently “typical,” “normal,” or “representative” traits were deployed by the regime—as by other populist movements (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017, 78)—in the production of the leader as an exemplary figure. It was not that Mussolini acted as an exemplar of ordinariness as a value in itself, but that his ordinariness formed the crucial backdrop to the exemplary traits (strength of will, masculinity, vision, and so on) that made him a cult figure and thus made that exemplarity all the more striking. So, here, ordinary life as a form becomes tied up with exemplary life, rather than fully opposed to it. This intermingling is reinforced by the regime’s own commentary on its relationship to ideology that I noted in chapter 1, in which it explicitly elevates the practice of “one man alone” to the level of doctrine. This relationship between ordinary and exemplary life will become still more complex as we move to contemporary Predappio, but before doing so I want to highlight one more feature of this vision of ordinary life, one that will return us to the question of how important (or unimportant) political ideology is to it.

“Historic turncoat number one in Predappio was Benito Mussolini, Il Duce of Fascism, son of Alessandro Mussolini, anarchist socialist, and blacksmith of Dovia,” note the authors of La fója de farfaraz (Capacci, Pasini, and Giunchi 2014, 212). Many in the cheering crowds in Piazza Cavour on the occasion of Mussolini’s 1923 visit and the regular subsequent visits knew him personally. They remembered him as the firebrand socialist of his youth. They also knew that he had had many of his old comrades from the left in the village arrested in advance of the visit so that they would not cause him any inconvenience. So, the ordinary Mussolini conjured up in Fascist propaganda did not just mean, to Predappiesi, proletarian, rural, antibourgeois, and so on: he was also the first, and the greatest, of the turncoats who fill so many narratives of these years. Just as ordinary life in early Fascist thought was opposed to ideology or theoretical distinctions, so the ordinariness of Mussolini the local son in Predappio—and ordinariness more broadly, I will argue in later chapters—continued to develop in contrast to political principle or ideology.

La fója de farfaraz contains a number of stories of locals making their feelings on this subject clear to Mussolini himself. They may or may not be apocryphal, but they illustrate the sense of intimacy with “ordinary Mussolini” to which Predappiesi feel they are entitled. In one such story, on a visit to the town Mussolini stops a local character he recognizes from his days in the PSI to ask him what he thinks of the political situation, and the man replies (in dialect), that he has never liked the white poplar leaf (“La fója de farfaraz”) and turns pointedly away from Mussolini (Capacci, Pasini, and Giunchi 2014, 203). In another, a godson of Mussolini was baptized by Il Duce himself, when he was a socialist, with the name of “Rebel.” After the Lateran Pact with the Catholic Church, Mussolini tells the child’s father that he must change his son’s name, and the father replies coldly that since, after all, Mussolini gave his godson the first name, Mussolini had better be the one to change it (214).

These and other stories that Predappiesi tell of the occasional knowing remark directed by locals at Il Duce have the same form and purpose as the stories we met at the outset of this chapter. In a strange twist of the regime’s own narrative of Mussolini, “the man like you,” the point of these stories is—usually—not to blame Mussolini for no longer being a socialist, but to “ordinarify” him, to reveal him as just as human, and just as inconsistent, as everybody else, in spite of his elevated status.

While exemplarity and the ordinary come to intertwine in the development of Predappio, in contrast to the distinction between the leader and the masses we met in chapter 1, the formal contrast between ordinary life and political ideology remains constant and indeed is reinforced by local perceptions of Mussolini in his ordinary guise as the greatest voltagabbana of all.

In sum, here again we can see the ordinary as a form taking on special and marked characteristics and being situated in specific relations to other concepts. Mussolini and his regime instrumentalize it in opposition to Italy’s existing aristocratic parliamentarian leadership, and in the service of elevating him to the status of Fascism’s prime moral exemplar, the man who is always right (ha sempre ragione). In addition, this very ordinary exemplarity of Mussolini itself also functions recursively, as I described in chapter 1, to undercut alternative, nonordinary or nonpractical visions of politics based on principle or ideas, because its whole point is that the actions of “one man alone” are the basis for political judgment. That recursiveness is intensified and takes on a particular character in Predappio, where the inconsistency of that one man’s actions was especially plain for all to see. As in the story of Ciaranfi, and as Sergio might put it, everybody had seen Mussolini wearing red at 6 p.m. and black at 6:01.

“A Practical Man of Good Sense”

In the following section, I provide a brief summary of the life of Giuseppe Ferlini, drawn from oral histories and from La fója de farfaraz (Capacci, Pasini, and Giunchi 2014; all translations my own). The value of this narrative lies in its status as evidence for how contemporary Predappiesi relate to a man they are much more eager to celebrate than their more famous co-citizen. It also continues the story of Predappio’s recent history through the war and immediate postwar period.

Ferlini was born to a peasant household seventeen years after Mussolini, in 1910, on land owned by Sergio’s family. Ferlini’s father was a socialist and was on at least one occasion apparently forced to drink cod liver oil in front of his family (a traditional Fascist punishment) by the regime’s thugs (Capacci, Pasini, and Giunchi 2014, 122). Giuseppe shared his father’s politics, joining the underground Italian Communist Party shortly before the war, though his actual participation in its activities was limited to distributing a few leaflets to close family and friends (126). Called up to fight in 1940, Ferlini was deployed in Rovigo in 1943 when the armistice was declared and, with others of his unit and like many Italian soldiers across the country, left his battalion in order to avoid capture and imprisonment by the German army. He then made his way, by train and by bicycle, back to his home in Predappio. There, at first, he simply returned to his old trade as a cobbler (129). Soon, however, he started to believe that the fall of Mussolini could finally augur his “dream of a free Italy” (130), and Ferlini began to try to convince others around him in Predappio of this, too (including Fascist acquaintances).

In late September 1943, Ferlini made contact with local representatives of the CLN (the National Liberation Committee, an umbrella organization formed to coordinate partisan resistance to the German occupation) and, soon after, left the town for the mountains west of Predappio. Billeted with an old friend who told him, “You’ll be a great leader, Giuseppe,” he is said to have responded, in an early hint of the modesty for which he is now renowned, “Gianni, you are far greater than me, to take me into your house like this” (Capacci, Pasini, and Giunchi 2014, 131). In the mountains, Ferlini worked in the fields and as a cobbler by day, while in the evening he sounded out locals for potential partisan support. Thus, for a period he lived “an almost ordinary life,” as he himself put it (132).

Years later, when asked by his granddaughter why he had become a partisan, Ferlini responded by recounting the humiliations and beatings meted out to his father. “And all this because Domenico [Giuseppe’s father], a peasant who didn’t know how to read and write, was a member of an agrarian league, with a tiny band of five or six other peasants” (Capacci, Pasini, and Giunchi 2014, 133).

In 1944, Ferlini was made a lieutenant in the Eighth Garibaldi Brigade of the partisans and put in command of around fifteen men. By this point, more and more young men from the area, having escaped from the army or from German capture, were seeking to enroll in partisan units, and it was Ferlini’s task to decide who could join and who could not. He was apparently a prudent man and took some pains over the selection of recruits. This was necessary in part because some of these men were former members of the Fascist militia and Black Brigades, and among the turncoats there could also have been spies. Later in life, Ferlini would claim that these former Fascists would go on to become the most bloodthirsty of his partisans, perhaps to demonstrate the strength of their new convictions: “They always wanted to shoot things, and I’d have to keep them in check, because the most important thing we were really doing was trying to feed everybody” (Capacci, Pasini, and Giunchi 2014, 135).

Sometimes Ferlini’s men would capture Fascist soldiers from the area, whereupon, so locals claim, Ferlini would give them a good telling off, threaten them with death if they were captured again in uniform, and then “send them back to their mothers at home” (137). It is also said that Ferlini came to an arrangement with the marshal of the local Fascist militia, through a priest, to the effect that Ferlini would be warned about German troop movements and patrols and could thus avoid “useless and potentially fatal” conflicts (140) and the inevitable civilian repercussions that would follow from the deaths of German soldiers. A similar arrangement—the one recounted by Sergio above—led to the provision of grain to both civilians and partisans from a local mill under the guard of the Fascist militia.

By October 1944, the front had advanced to the Romagna, and Predappio was poised for liberation. By this point, Ferlini was in command of around seventy men from the Fourth Battalion of the Eighth Garibaldi Brigade and was advancing down the Apennines from the west. By the night of October 25, they were in Predappio, though so also were German and Fascist troops still, and the town was subject to significant aerial bombardment. On the morning of October 26, Ferlini took thirty of his partisans to the Caproni airplane factory, Predappio’s biggest employer, where, in its wind tunnels, he found around a thousand of Predappio’s inhabitants taking shelter from the bombing. At seven in the morning, Ferlini entered the wind tunnels, saying “I’m Ferlini, Giuseppe Ferlini of Predappio, the partisan. At last you get to meet ‘Ferlini the butcher’ [the name Fascist authorities had given him]”:

And the people of Predappio, who had heard Ferlini declared a dangerous killer and a bandit by the Nazi Fascists, looked him in the face, knew him, and went to meet him and his men with open arms. ‘It’s me, it’s me, Ferlini,’ he said. Giuseppe Ferlini, peasant until the age of twenty-six, simple worker and artisan, anti-Fascist, Communist, and partisan fighter, became a symbolic character for the changes to come in Predappio.… Among those who came to him then was Augusto Moschi, one of Mussolini’s closest relatives in Predappio [and known for his affiliation to the regime]. Moschi greeted Ferlini with pleasure, saying, “Come here, look at me, I’ve been persecuted, too!” In fact Moschi had been exiled from Predappio for a brief period by the regime, but certainly not because he was an anti-Fascist! But Ferlini accepted his greetings nonetheless. (144)

Fighting continued in Predappio for two more days, until its liberation on October 28. Local legend has it that Ferlini waited deliberately until the anniversary of the Fascist March on Rome to liberate Mussolini’s hometown, but according to the authors of La fója de farfaraz, the reality is that he was simply waiting for the arrival of Allied troops, being, as he was above all else, “a practical man and of good sense” (Capacci, Pasini, and Giunchi 2014, 145).

On December 9, Ferlini was declared the mayor of Predappio by the British commander of local Allied troops, with the support of the CLN and local Predappiesi dignitaries. Among his local councillors was Angelo Ciaranfi, whom we met at the beginning of this chapter, by now a member of the Italian Communist Party. Ferlini would serve until the first postwar democratic elections were held in Predappio in 1946. The stories of his pragmatism as mayor begin almost immediately:

In this period a number of Predappiesi Fascists were arrested and imprisoned in the Carabinieri barracks.… Ferlini came to them and reassured them: “Stay calm; if you haven’t done anything wrong, no one will do anything to you.” By this he meant that if they weren’t guilty, they would be treated with respect. And so it was … other Fascists were in hiding, afraid of what the partisans would do to them.… Ferlini went to their wives and told them to tell their husbands, “If you want to eat and live in peace, you mustn’t hide but come out with a shovel and a pickaxe instead, to help repair the town.” Thus it was that in those days, Fascists worked alongside partisans to help repair the damage of war. (Capacci, Pasini, and Giunchi 2014, 154)

Other stories of Ferlini’s postwar mayoralty reiterate this theme of pragmatic beneficence to representatives of the defeated regime. He is said to have set some of the prisoners to work moving wood into the town to keep locals warm. Among these was Mussolini’s godson, Rebel, now rebaptized and a Fascist army officer, who thought himself too important to carry wood like his men. Ferlini is said to have simply smiled at him and set him to work overseeing the operation (Capacci, Pasini, and Giunchi 2014, 155). Another story relates Ferlini’s visit to the former Fascist podestà (mayor, in effect) to request some of his cattle to feed locals. The podestà agrees without hesitation, afraid of repercussions, but Ferlini treats him with courtesy and pays him for the cattle from the town coffers (155). Another tells of him approaching two captured repubblichini and, to the astonishment of his comrades who have been screaming insults at them, offering his hand, saying, “You fought on one side, we on the other, you lost and we won, but now enough, the war is over” (158). In another story, he saves the life of a Black Brigade leader from Predappio who is set to be killed by a mob (160–161).

Another favorite theme of stories about Ferlini is his modesty and humility. One that Predappiesi enjoy telling is of his visit to Milan to see Count Caproni, the owner of the Caproni factory, in autumn 1945. Caproni is said to have lived in a splendid and large house, with a reception room complete with waxed marble floors. Ferlini, wearing, as he always did, poorly made studded boots, takes two steps into this room and immediately slips on the floor and ends up beneath the desk at which Count Caproni sits.

In the elections of March 1946, Ferlini chose—“with perfect discretion” (Capacci, Pasini, and Giunchi 2014, 164)—not to stand as a candidate for mayor: “He wanted no public honours or payments. Perhaps he had also been somewhat marginalized by some leading Communist partisans, who were upset by his magnanimity toward Fascists. Ferlini, a practical man of good sense, dedicated himself to his artisanal work and to his family” (164). The man who replaced him, ironically, was another of Mussolini’s godsons from his time as a socialist. People say, as I noted of Elena earlier in this chapter, that Ferlini spent the mornings of his retirement washing the stone staircase that leads up to Predappio’s town hall.

An Ordinary Exemplar

In this brief summary of Ferlini’s hagiography, we meet a number of elements that recur again and again in contemporary accounts of Ferlini’s exemplary status: his humble origins as a peasant and a shoemaker; his lack of ideological pretense (though a Communist, he had no real involvement in politics before the war and his justification for becoming a partisan centered on the treatment by Fascists of his even more humble father); his “good sense and practicality” as a soldier (he was focused more on feeding people than fighting and avoided armed conflict where possible); and his pragmatism and magnanimity in dealing with representatives of the regime, with whom he made deals when a soldier and whom he pardoned and “sent home to their mothers” as a mayor.

Admiration for Ferlini among contemporary Predappiesi transcends the political gulf that divides Sergio and those on the left because it does not center on his military or political abilities. One could easily imagine his celebration as the Communist equivalent of Mussolini, the heroic partisan leader, and its first post-Fascist mayor. Instead, this admiration is focused precisely on the quality I argue that Predappiesi work hard to produce: his ordinariness, as “a practical man of good sense.” Yet the form this ordinariness takes, Ferlini’s character as an ordinary exemplar, is not the same as that of Mussolini under the regime. Rather than act as a backdrop for other exemplary qualities, in Ferlini’s case it is the value of ordinariness itself that he exemplifies.

Contemporary Predappiesi spend very little time talking about Mussolini. Aside from the special case of the souvenir shops (see chapter 5), images or mentions of him in public discourse are hard to find in the town. One or two small street signs point the way to the casa natale (Mussolini’s birth house), but until recently it was an empty exhibition space (see chapter 4). Nothing advertises the location of the family crypt, which is why one is very likely to be stopped on the street to be asked for directions to it by visiting tourists. The only person in the town who regularly talks of Mussolini is its mayor, and that is, as the last incumbent of this position was wont to point out to me, because the mayor is obliged to do so as the public face of “extraordinary” Predappio, the man to whom the news networks and journalists go for a quotation.

Earlier on in this chapter, I argued that despite its extraordinary status, ordinariness was an important dimension of Predappio’s exemplarity under the Fascist regime: Mussolini’s putatively ordinary origins helped frame both him as an exemplary leader and Predappio as one of the jewels in the crown of Fascist urban engineering. While vestiges of this interest in ordinary Mussolini remain today—for instance, in a focus on “young Mussolini,” when he appears in public discourse—for the most part, ordinariness has shifted in meaning and focus. What had made Predappio a positive exemplar under the regime is now what makes it a negative exemplar to many outsiders. Its spectacular appearance and extraordinary heritage are now deeply problematic, symptoms of Italy’s “difficult heritage” (Macdonald 2009), not objects of pride. It is this extraordinariness that is now the backdrop to the ordinary that Predappiesi reach for in contrast to it: stories of Ferlini’s pragmatism, poverty, and humility do not serve to set the stage for greatness; instead, they serve to scale him and his town down and away from grand ideological and historical narratives that focus on Predappio’s relationship to Mussolini. These stories do, in short, exactly what many anthropological arguments about the ordinary and the everyday do. They concretize ordinariness in particular phenomena—nepotism, petty crime, marital disputes—or figures such as Ferlini, so as to set them against some putatively “larger” class of phenomena—politics, ideology, great men, transcendence—or figures such as Mussolini.

Ferlini, by contrast to Mussolini, is thought to be ordinary because he is humble, he is pragmatic, he lacks political ambition—because he retired to wash the town staircase. But the reason he is exemplary is that these are anything but ordinary (in the sense of “typical”) characteristics in Predappio, in which ordinariness itself has come to take on a particular salience. Predappio’s entire existence depends on its original mythical status as the ordinary town in which “humble” Mussolini was born, yet that same fact now marks its existence as quite extraordinary: it is a Fascist “cathedral” in a desert of medieval architecture, an island of black in the political sea of Romagnole red, and its inhabitants are habituated to outsiders defining them almost entirely with reference to the high politics and ideology of debates around Fascism, for good or for ill. In an extraordinary place, whose very urban fabric seems to demand that one take a position on Fascism, being thoroughly ordinary may itself be seen as extraordinary and indeed exemplary for this reason. Ferlini is not exemplary in spite of his ordinariness, but because of it. Again, I emphasize this is an ethnographically specific vision of ordinariness, as any will be: to be ordinary in Predappio today means to be—like Ferlini—somehow outside of and apart from ideological debates about Fascism.

Most Predappiesi take no public pride in their town’s status as the birthplace of Il Duce. Neither, however, do they contest this status, for example by inhabiting the opposite pole of political exemplarity: they do not trumpet their socialist heritage any more than they do their Fascist heritage, as we will see in more detail in chapter 3. Instead, for the most part, they deal with this extraordinary heritage, their equally extraordinary place in the Italian popular imaginary, and this unique form of “cultural intimacy” (Herzfeld 2016 [1997]), by scaling themselves down, and out of history, in all the ways that they can. Ordinariness, as exemplified by Ferlini, is a prized virtue in this context.

The notion of exemplarity has been helpful to anthropologists in showing how particular values are seen to be concretized and instantiated in specific individuals and thus rendered tangible (e.g., Humphrey 1997; Robbins 2018). In my account, however, what takes the place of a value such as leadership, strength, or generosity is ordinariness, something we are more wont to think of as a given property of something or someone. Indeed, there is something unlikely about the category of the “ordinary exemplar,” in that one might well assume that ordinariness should require no exemplification.

I have argued, however, that it does, and sought to describe two different instances in relation to Italian Fascism in which the ordinary and the exemplary have intersected. In the first and more straightforward case, both Mussolini’s “ordinary” peasant upbringing and Predappio as an “ordinary” Italian town served to frame the work done by the regime to turn both into quite extraordinary objects of attention. Mussolini, of course, became Il Duce, the object of a cult of personality. Predappio, meanwhile, was transubstantiated into Predappio Nuova, the paese del Duce, rebuilt as a monument to him and to the regime’s modernity.

In this first, historical case, Mussolini’s ordinariness was defined by its generic nature. He exemplifies the ordinary in the sense of a general, typical, type: “rural,” “impoverished,” “working-class,” and so on. His ordinariness in this sense is quite distinct from his exemplarity as a cult figure; it is the background against which his status as l’uomo della providenza emerges, rather than the cause of it.

In contemporary Predappio, however, things are somewhat different. It is impossible for locals or outsiders to take any putative ordinariness about Predappio as a backdrop for granted, because it is clearly not very ordinary at all. Its place in the popular imaginary is completely founded upon its extraordinary status as the place of Mussolini’s birth and the site of his tomb, and this is constantly reinforced by Predappio’s appearances in popular culture, in the press, and on television, which all tie it to this status, as do interactions Predappiesi have with outsiders, who make assumptions about them on the same basis. In this context, a sense of ordinariness takes a great deal of work to construct and sustain. One form that work takes is exemplification through the figure of Ferlini. Unlike in the historical case of Mussolini, it is precisely Ferlini’s ordinariness that makes him exemplary. Here, ordinariness is a concrete value: it is not that Ferlini is exemplary because he stands for or is typical of some set of other things, but because, like Humphrey’s Mongolian exemplars, he is taken to exhibit certain specific (and unusual) characteristics of ordinariness that can be drawn on by those around him, used to concretize the idea that their home—despite its history, its architecture, and its place in contemporary political polemic—is really just another ordinary Italian town, filled with ordinary Italian people. He is, in a sense, a “scaling-device” (Summerson Carr and Lempert 2016), whom Predappiesi can deploy to scale their home and themselves “down” into the everyday and out of the grand historical narratives of Fascism into which they have been unwillingly enmeshed.

I want to close this chapter by returning to the question I raised at its outset, namely the relationship between ordinariness and ideology, through one last comparison between Ferlini and Mussolini. Both Ferlini’s and Mussolini’s ordinary exemplarity function in opposition to ideology. Mussolini is an exemplar of ordinariness in a manner that is anti-ideological both in his self-proclaimed pragmatism and also in the sense in which Predappiesi know him concretely to be ideologically inconsistent, “historical turncoat number one.” This is thus a continuation of the points I made in chapter 1 about early Fascism’s framing of ordinary life as in opposition to ideology; but contextualized in Predappio, Mussolini’s childhood home, that framing takes on a particular salience, because Predappiesi in the 1920s and ’30s had an intimate (one might say ordinary) knowledge of just how unimportant ideology seemed to be for their socialist-turned-Fascist compatriot.

Ferlini’s ordinariness is also, in some sense, opposed to ideology. This is evidenced in the fact that the ordinariness he exemplifies appeals to Predappiesi across the political spectrum; in the way in which, despite their own politics, the authors of La fója de farfaraz consistently downplay Ferlini’s Communism; in the ways in which he himself repeatedly understates his role as anti-Fascist liberator and claims only to have been trying to feed people; in the stories people love to tell of his work rebuilding Predappio with former Fascists after the war; in the insinuation that other Communists—the implication is often that these “other Communists” are voltagabbana, those who switched sides and thus needed to demonstrate the strength of their convictions—punished him for this practical attitude to ideological difference.

Yet there is an obvious difference between the ways in which Mussolini and Ferlini are ordinary, as opposed to “ideological”: Ferlini’s pragmatism is admired, while Mussolini’s is ridiculed. This is for a range of reasons. One difference is that Mussolini’s pragmatism—like that of other “turncoats”—is usually cast as self-serving, in a way that is not true of Ferlini. Indeed, this is arguably another reason for Ferlini’s status as an exemplar. While he is not ideologically driven, neither is he a voltagabbana: his “good sense” is cast as a form of moral, rather than political, consistency, directed at the well-being of his home instead of himself. Yet there is a more complex distinction at work, too, I suggest.

This difference, between Mussolini’s pragmatism and Ferlini’s “good sense,” mirrors the distinction we met in the introduction, between “ordinary life” (the formal category, deliberately invoked) and ordinary life (the things the category is supposed to capture). Mussolini’s pragmatism is not the unmarked pragmatism of “a practical man of good sense,” just as invoking the notion of “ordinary life” is actually far from the realm of ordinary language; Mussolini’s pragmatism is a deliberate stance. His Fascism is ideologically anti-ideological, committedly uncommitted to principle. In contrast, Ferlini is the quintessential “practical man of good sense”: he has no theory for why he ought to be practical, he simply is. He is not, as it were, “a pragmatist,” he is pragmatic. His lack of ideological commitment is described in a manner that leaves it unmarked and unstudied, natural rather than cultivated.

This, I suggest, is another reason why Ferlini is so easily cast as exemplary in contemporary Predappio: his ordinariness, unlike the semblance of “ordinary life” that contemporary Predappiesi reach for through him in studied and deliberate fashion, seems to take no work.

Of course, this is not really true; as we know, it takes work to do all the things that people might count as ordinary life. But that is not the same as the work Mussolini and early Fascists had to do, and the work many contemporary Predappiesi do, to pursue the form of ordinary life, in which the quality of ordinariness itself is at stake. In other words, and ironically, the very fact that Predappiesi require an exemplar of ordinariness is indicative of the chasm that separates him and them.

I hope that, by now, the historical reasons for this have become clear. Predappio’s urban fabric, its economy, its ritual calendar, and its people are all inextricably tied up in a history that makes it anything but an ordinary place, a history of which its inhabitants and outsiders are fully conscious. Having described some of this history, in the next chapter I discuss some of the ways in which this life continues to intertwine with the afterlife of its most famous son.