Dressed in a black sweater, with “Propaganda” written in bold white letters across the back, Marco, 32, and his two friends had travelled to Predappio from their home in the Marche region to pay their respects at the grave of Benito Mussolini before the impending 100th anniversary of the fascist dictator’s march on Rome.
The ornate Mussolini family crypt, located in the tiny San Cassiano cemetery of the Emilia Romagna town, has attracted thousands of admirers since it reopened on an all-year-round basis in March, with the daily flow increasingly more consistent since the late September general election victory for a coalition led by Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, a party with neofascist origins, which was sworn into government on Saturday.
Marco and his friends hope Meloni, Italy’s first female prime minister, can repeat “the good things Mussolini did” and “make Italy strong again”. “We need a strong, authoritarian figure,” said Marco after saluting the white marble coffin, draped with the Italian flag, containing the body of the man known as Il Duce: The Leader.
Meloni, the 45-year-old firebrand politician from Rome who in August said her party had “handed fascism to history” decades ago, will make her first speech to parliament this week and must win votes of confidence in both chambers before a coalition, which includes Matteo Salvini’s far-right League and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, can formally take full power. The path to government has been rocky, amid simmering rivalries between Meloni and Berlusconi, the three-times former prime minister who described her as “arrogant” and last week sparked further tumult after telling Forza Italia parliamentarians that he blamed Ukraine for the war with Russia and had “rekindled” his friendship with Vladimir Putin.
Before receiving her mandate, Meloni reiterated that her government would be ardently pro-Nato and that anyone who rejects that “cannot be part of the government”.
Rivalries aside, the full assumption of power for Meloni’s administration will uncannily fall around 28 October, the date on which, in 1922, Mussolini and his armed fascist troops marched from Milan to Rome “to take by the throat our miserable ruling class”. Two days later, King Vittorio Emanuele III handed him power.
Brothers of Italy, which retains the neofascist symbol of a burning flame of the tricolour flag as its logo, also took the biggest share of the vote in Predappio, a town of about 6,000 inhabitants where Mussolini was born. Nestled among the hills of the Apennines, Predappio became a fascist pilgrim site from the moment Mussolini took power. The rustic house in which he was born, which can still be visited today, stood as a testimony to his humble roots and how far he had gone in life, although the prime site for pilgrims even back then was the family crypt, where admirers could pay tribute to his mother, a teacher who died in 1905, for having given birth to him.
Predappio, rebuilt by Mussolini in the 1930s, was liberated from fascism in 1944, but the cult of the dictator lingered despite the town being ruled by leftwing parties in their various guises until 2019, when Roberto Canali, an independent politician backed by Brothers of Italy and with close ties to Mussolini’s descendants, was elected mayor.
Predappio Tricolore, a souvenir shop teeming with fascist memorabilia, including copies of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, has always done brisk trade, especially since Canali maintained his election campaign pledge for the year-round opening of the crypt. He recently sparked controversy after refusing to grant patronage to a march organised by Italy’s anti-fascist association, ANPI, to coincide with the 78th anniversary, also on 28 October, of Predappio’s liberation from fascism. He argued the event would bring too much disruption to the town on a work day.
“The problem is, when you have thousands of people, as they expect, marching for at least an hour, it will completely block the town,” Canali told the Observer. “It’s not as if I unauthorised it. The march is still going ahead – I welcome Predappio’s liberation being celebrated – but not on that day and not in that way.”
But Canali has no qualms with Mussolini’s relatives hosting a series of events to commemorate the march on Rome, including two masses to be celebrated by Giulio Maria Tam, an ultrafascist excommunicated priest. An exhibition displaying more than 160 objects, including weapons, uniforms and photos related to the march on Rome, is being held until early November.
The date 28 October has always been a busy period for Predappio, but because of the milestone anniversary and current attention on the topic of fascism, Canali anticipates 1,000 to 2,000 Mussolini admirers converging on the town this week.
Meloni has tried to moderate Brothers of Italy, presenting the party as a conservative champion of patriotism. But the recent election of Ignazio La Russa, a Brothers of Italy co-founder who collects fascist memorabilia, as upper house speaker; and Lorenzo Fontana, an ultra-Catholic, Eurosceptic, and pro-Russia politician from the League, as speaker of the lower house, has raised concerns.
“Despite keeping the neofascist symbol in its logo, I really hope Brothers of Italy becomes just a normal rightwing party,” said Gianfranco Miro Gori, a local leader of ANPI. “But the initial signs are not good. They are already saying lots of unkind things about various civil rights. So we need to keep our guard up.”
Meloni will be in charge of steering Italy through one of its most delicate periods, dealing with challenges such as the energy crisis and high inflation while trying to avert a recession. “Italy was in a complicated period when the King gave Mussolini command,” said Franco Moschi, a distant Mussolini relative who collects historical documentation and curates exhibitions about the period. “He was the new soul of Italian politics. Today, with the great difficulties in Italy and Europe, Italians have taken a bet on Meloni.”
The reverberations of that gamble are reflected in some of the messages that have filled the tribute book in Il Duce’s crypt since the elections. “Today the flame of the tricolour burns in the Italian government,” wrote one visitor. Another said: “Duce, 100 years ago you started a glorious period. Today, we can finally remember it freely.”
