An essay (Solferino) by Sergio Rizzo and Alessandro Campi on the conspicuous residues of the twenty-year period with which Italy is still unable to deal with is released on 13 September
“This Municipality / is consecrated / to the immaculate heart of Mary”. He got away with it like this, in the early post-war period when the Christian Democrats distributed leaflets like “Think, my girl / your dream of love / fight the madness / of the sinister agitator”, a Venetian municipality determined to stay away from post-war brawls. He picked up the old Fascist plaque full of bombastic Mussolini’s rhetoricshaved the marble slab and entrusted himself to the Pilgrim Madonna.
Others went further. Like in Pianura, Naples, where a 1936 marble slab against the sanctions of the League of Nations (there was the profile of Ethiopia and the inscription “The Italian people created the Empire with their blood. They will fertilize it with their work. and he will defend it against anyone with his weapons … ») was simply overturned. To host on the back, now facing, a dedication to the Four Days of Naples: “On 29 September 1943 / they fell in the Plains / kissed by the glory / of the people who rose up against / the fascist Nazi barbarism / Colimoro Pasquale / Mele Evangelista / Vaccaro Antonio / Fedele Mangiapia / Longobardi Giuseppina / Di Nardo Teresa / To the barbarian oppressors / eternal hatred / To the martyrs of the people / eternal glory / Plain 1-10-1944 ». Choice gradually covered by the dust of time but destined many years laterin 2015, to raise a forest of delayed-out controversy.
It’s Italy “double face, dublefàs to put it in the vernacular. On one side he is fascist, on the other he is anti-fascist », they write in the essay The long shadow of fascism. Because Italy is still stuck in Mussolini the political scientist, professor in Perugia e scholar of right-wing thought Alessandro Campi and the journalist and writer Sergio Rizzofor years at the «Corriere», author of successful books including Absolute power. The hundred magistrates who command in Italy.
An Italy that does not like, even if they come from political backgrounds and different professionals, to both. An Italy that has always “carefully avoided coming to terms with that fragment of decisive history” that was the Twenty-year period “, however, leaving it to continue to poison the politics and social relations of one of the largest free countries in the West, founder of the European Union. With regurgitations that are becoming more and more disturbing and that today feed the sovereign and populist impulses ».
For example, “the two tombstones placed one above the other on the same wall of his house in Grazzano, a town of six hundred souls in Monferrato, say it all. The highest plaque says: “Here he was born / Pietro Badoglio / Marshal of Italy / Hero of Sabotino / First viceroy of Ethiopia / Intrepid led to victory / The armed phalanxes / of our Italy / In that war in Africa / Which gave / to Rome / the Empire / The Grazzanesi May 24, 1936 ». The second one says below: “In this house / he was born on 9/28/1871 and died on 11/1/1956 / Pietro Badoglio / Marshal of Italy / Head of the government in a tragic hour / He ensured constitutional continuity/ He implemented the co-belligerence of Italy / Among the free nations against Nazi oppression / In the fiftieth anniversary of the historical events / The Grazzanesi remember with gratitude / The great fellow citizen … “A textbook example of circlebottism”.
An example followed, moreover, in hundreds of cases around Italy that Campi and Rizzo often list with disgust. As in the case of the name of the Comiso airport, disputed for years between those who proposed Pio La Torre and who (the leaders of the Air Force) General Vincenzo Magliocco, among the “material managers of the Ethiopian gas killings”, closed with a compromise: the name of the airport to the victim of the mafia, that of the main street to the general. All this almost twenty years after the general Domenico Corcione, minister of defense of the Dini government, had officially admitted the Italian responsibilities in the use of “aircraft bombs and artillery shells loaded with mustard gas and arsine”. Use “known to Badoglio” and obviously to that Rodolfo Graziani (do you at least remember the massacre of all the Ethiopian Christian monks and deacons of Debra Libanos?) To which the Filettino children’s playground, which remained so in 2017 always called that, I don’t see anything wrong with it, ”said the mayor, claiming to be“ leftist ”) after a 285,000 euro restoration. Unacceptable ambiguities.
After all, what did her niece Alessandra say in 1993? “To remove the traces of Mussolini’s work, Italy would have to be razed to the ground.” She was right. But in what sense? Because of the grandeur of his deeds, how do the most quarrelsome neo-fascists insist, or because of the arrogance with which the Duce wanted to brand his “his of him” twenty years of his? The immense M developed by the Casa del Fascio of Asti, now the headquarters of the Revenue Agency. The gigantic Dux inscription built in 1939 by planting thousands of pines on the desolate side of Mount Giano between Lazio and Abruzzo, not only never canceled but restored in 2018 by CasaPound militants. The disproportionate mountainous profile at Passo del Furlo, in the Marche region, which the municipality of Fermignano decided to change in 1935 (in America they were working for the famous Mount Rushmore) to take on the masculine appearance of the dictator, a profile that “He” did not like because he seemed to be sleeping.
And so on. The immense fasces re-emerged in July 2021 from the restoration of the covered market in Perugia. The immense fresco, covered for decades in the Coni hall of honor, which dominates the stage where all the official sporting ceremonies take place, even with the major international guests, “without a sign explaining what it is, when and in what context it was built, but above all because it is still there ». «Erase or keep?», The authors ask themselves, «Or keep explaining? The problem is that that dilemma has not only not been solved, but it has never even been tackled in a serious and organic way “. Of course, sometimes “retouching” is possible, as in the case of a fresco at the University for Foreigners of Perugia by the futurist Gerardo Dottori, The light of the ancient mother, where stood out among the builders of ancient Rome, such as Aeneas and Romulus, a robust worker with a clear head and a strong-willed jaw moving blocks of stone: what to do when the war is over? He pushes and pulls, the painter himself takes care of it, changing the face of the Duce, now blond and curly.
Even more interesting, perhaps, the bronze statue of two and a half meters at the Eur entitled The genius of fascism. A naked athlete doing the Roman salute. What to do? Idea: in 1953, as Fabio Isman will tell, they cover his hands with two “baskets”, those kind of leather gloves used by boxers in ancient Rome.
But where is any retouching impossible? The debate is still ongoing. Indeed, in terms of cancel culture, is more alive than ever. Perhaps the best solution, according to the political scientist and the writer, would be that of Bolzano where the immoderate bas-relief with the Duce on horseback (thirty-two meters by five!) Slammed in the face of the South Tyrolese on the Palazzo delle Finanze in Piazza Tribunale is still in place. But an impossible not to see neon sign carries a phrase by Hannah Arendt in three languages: “No one has the right to obey.” And there were too many Italians, scientists and magistrates, writers and engineers, journalists and bureaucratsas it demonstrates The long shadow of fascismwho settled into the often servile obedience to Mussolini and then tamed their past as if it were only
September 12, 2022 (change September 12, 2022 | 21:20)
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