The Body of Il Duce (11 page)

Outside Rome, outside Italy, reactions to Il Duce's death ranged from joy to shame. In the Gross-Hesepe prisoner of war camp in Germany, the onetime apologist for Mussolini Giovanni Ansaldo saw anti-Fascism flower overnight. Word of Il Duce's end provoked joy among men who, only a couple of years earlier, “would have walked with their heads down and their heels up” to be received by the dictator at Palazzo Venezia.
40
The display of Mussolini's body, which Ansaldo thought abominable, dismayed his fellow prisoners only on behalf of the worms that had to eat the corpse's “rotten meat.” But in a camp near Atlanta, Georgia, the Italian POWs baptized the rations of pork trotters they received as “Mussolini foot.”
41
Italian officers freed by the Red Army near Dresden the day after Hitler died were astounded to see houses flying Nazi flags at half-mast, walls covered with pledges to Hitler's immortality in the German soul, soldiers in uniform playing a Wagnerian requiem for the Führer in a church tower. In shop windows there were no photos of the dictator disgraced, as in Italy, but rather portraits of Hitler wreathed in mourning and decorated with flowers. “Could anyone be more idiotic?” wondered a shocked Italian officer.
42

If any such Italian idiots were to be found, it was in a British POW camp in Kashmir. While the guards were distracted, the more nostalgic of the prisoners collected images of Il Duce hidden away in their baggage. The photos were pasted on a board in the camp sitting room, reconstructing Mussolini's biography from boyhood to Piazzale Loreto. In the same room, a plaster bust of Il Duce was mounted on the wall and an artist among the prisoners sketched a crowd of admirers on a screen. The bust, flanked by a pair of prisoners standing at attention, was lit by an oil lamp and, if we can believe one account, was saluted by hundreds who filed past “like a long thread through the eye of a needle.”
43
All night pilgrims in this camp paid homage to their Duce, much as the pro-Nazi citizens of Dresden had to Hitler. But there was also some soul-searching. In a book recounting his experiences in a POW camp in Texas, officer Gaetano Tumiati disapproved of the about-face that had taken place after Piazzale Loreto, accusing Italians of opportunism.

To the less superficial of foreign observers, Italy's rapid switch after Il Duce's death was evidence that its people were not serious: the American press, in particular, devoted a great deal of coverage to Mussolini's execution and to Piazzale Loreto, and on the whole the reports were not very flattering. An army officer imprisoned in the United States sent a bitter letter to the Italian government after his release, deploring the image of Italy as it appeared on the front pages of several American newspapers in April 1945. Photos of Mussolini hanging by his heels in Piazzale Loreto were shown side by side with pictures of President Roosevelt, who had just died. Banner headlines compared “Italian civilization” with American, unfavorably.

The reaction of foreigners to the end of a dictatorship does not necessarily correspond to the reactions of the people who lived under the dictator. It would be worth taking a closer look at the foreign press coverage of Mussolini's death, perhaps comparing it with the reactions to Hitler's demise. The press summaries that the Italian Foreign Ministry received after Mussolini's execution offer a quick first impression. In neutral countries such as Sweden and Spain, newspapers judged his death inevitable but expressed uneasiness about the macabre scene in Piazzale Loreto. In Paris, the Italian ambassador, Giuseppe Saragat, a Socialist, quoted
Le Monde,
which strongly condemned the “rabble” that had “stepped on the beaten body and covered it in filth” after having admired it for twenty years.
44
But the most significant comments came from Britain. It was perfectly right to carry out a summary execution of Mussolini and the others, argued the British papers: “But the subsequent sensational scenes, brutally evident in the chilling photographs that appeared in the newspapers, provoked disgust, especially because they came hard on the heels of the chilling revelations, documented in film footage as well as in print, about the atrocities in the German concentration camps.”
45

So Il Duce was to have the unlikely destiny of being compared to the Jews, whom he had failed to rescue from their fate in the Holocaust.

3

A
N
U
NQUIET
G
RAVE

The body of Il Duce displayed in Piazzale Loreto, the bodies of the Jews exterminated in the death camps—it was not only a few British journalists who thought of the two images side by side. Freed from the Gusen concentration camp, Aldo Carpi, an artist, returned to Milan with a vision that he rendered in an oil painting. Set in an urban square, the painting's foreground showed ghostly figures engaged in a
danse macabre
; the figures looked much like the people Carpi had secretly sketched during his internment—prisoners selected for the crematorium. In the painting's background, another dance took place; this time the figures were alive and dressed, and behind them were several corpses that had been strung up, one of which was more prominent than the rest.
Sarabanda
, Carpi titled the painting: mad dance.

Indeed, there was much dancing in the streets in the summer of 1945, celebration of a joy that was as great as the grief and suffering had been sharp and painful. On July 14, Bastille Day, Giorgio Strehler, a young anti-Fascist and later Italy's best-known theater director, returned from exile and organized a Festival of Fraternity in Milan. Seven dance floors were laid down in the public gardens, and the mayor, Antonio Greppi, who had lost a son in the Resistance, was to be seen among the crowd in his shirtsleeves.
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité
was emblazoned on three hot-air balloons high above the gardens. At every street corner the people of Milan were invited to dance as the Parisians were dancing, and they needed little encouragement. On the outskirts of the city, working-class Milanese descended on Monza and Lambro parks, where they celebrated the entire night. Loudspeakers atop the trucks delivering the next day's papers broadcast the refrain “Dance, citizens of Milan, it is your day, for Hitler and Mussolini are dead.”
1

A few weeks earlier, several dozen anti-Fascists had danced to the death of Mussolini in an even more literal way. They had assembled at section 16 of the Musocco cemetery in Milan, where Mussolini, Claretta Petacci, and the Fascists strung up in Piazzale Loreto had been buried in unmarked graves. There the anti-Fascists did a slow dance on the packed earth to the measured cadence of an accordion. Then a woman stood with her legs apart and urinated on one of the unmarked graves, to the general applause of her companions. Throughout northern Italy in the year of the Liberation, occasions were found to celebrate the victory with dance. In November 1945, the Communists of Novara, in Piedmont, held a festival to commemorate the Bolshevik revolution that would be a model for the annual party festival held all over Italy. First there were speeches, then a soccer match, then a party meeting, then dancing. But at that first festival, the dancing did not begin until a huge paper head depicting Mussolini had been put to the torch.

Even among those who didn't dance, there were leaders of the Resistance who made it clear that they considered Piazzale Loreto a high point in the battle for the Liberation, a moment of catharsis in the civil war. Although the Socialist Sandro Pertini had disapproved of the way Mussolini and the others had been strung up in Milan, speaking in Rome two weeks after Piazzale Loreto he announced that “in the north we cleared the slate” because “in Milan there was Piazzale Loreto.”
2
Pertini, who liked to tell how he had once tried to assassinate Prince Umberto of Savoy, embodied the contrast between northern Italy and the center-south—between the territory of the Resistance and the territory loyal to the monarchy. He also embodied the contrasts at the heart of the Committee of National Liberation. Pertini's incendiary speech in Rome, condemned as thuggish by the moderate press, was light-years away from the thinking of Christian Democratic leader Alcide De Gasperi. While Pertini saw democratic politics as the extension of armed struggle, De Gasperi saw the fight against revolutionary tactics as part of the “permanent method” of democracy.
3
To the moderate press of the center-south, Pertini was hardly the only Jacobin in the Resistance. When Ferruccio Parri, leader of the Action Party and a man of the north, was named prime minister, the satirical magazine
Il Cantachiaro
depicted him in a cartoon in which he tells King Victor Emanuel III: “Your Majesty, I bring you the Italy of Piazzale Loreto.”
4

Piazzale Loreto remained a place of memory in the postwar years, but only for part of the population. Beginning in December 1945, when De Gasperi replaced Parri as prime minister, the legacy of the piazza passed to the ranks of the opposition. From then on, it was kept alive by the most radical of the anti-Fascists. “In Milan there was Piazzale Loreto”: for at least thirty years, various versions of Pertini's remark served as the rallying cry of left-wing militants, scrawled on walls and chanted in demonstrations by would-be revolutionaries. Indeed, the Milan piazza entered the political language of the new Italy immediately. Antimonarchy posters in Milan read, “Piazzale Loreto instructs us and awaits us.”
5
One of the many angry letters the De Gasperi government received after pardoning a long list of Fascists who had been charged with a variety of crimes also came from Milan. It admonished “the most foolish prime minister in the world” for his servile obedience to orders from Washington (the left accused De Gasperi of being a tool of the Americans) and warned that “there is already talk of hanging you up in Piazzale Loreto.”
6
When the field hands or metalworkers in the Po Valley demonstrated against the government, they often hanged an effigy of the prime minister. When the demonstrations took place in Milan, they were able to hang the effigy on the crossbar in front of the most famous gas station in Italy.

In the bitter view of Orio Vergani, a journalist and sworn Fascist supporter back when the pro-Mussolini rallies were held in Rome's Piazza Venezia, “the spirit of Piazzale Loreto” hovered over all of postwar Italy.
7
Indeed, in the heat of the victory over Fascism in 1945–46, there were traces of the Milanese piazza in the most unexpected places.
Oggi,
a conservative family magazine, published comments of a sort that in only a few years would be unthinkable. Thus the following excerpt, striking in its outright cruelty:

Mussolini was a madman who thought he was Mussolini: that was already clear the morning of Piazzale Loreto. Among the bodies tossed in the piazza to sleep for all eternity, Mussolini lay on his back with his head tilted away, with the golden eagle Fascist pennant in his fist and a flash of the whites of his eyes against his yellow face, visible beneath lowered eyelids. He seemed still to be dreaming a crazy and distant dream: of cities to conquer, seas to dominate, battles to win.… Perhaps in the dream he really was the man of the legends that had held sway for twenty years.
8

With the Resistance still a vivid memory, Italians in the north considered themselves patriots and wondered if the same could be said for Italians in the south, who had escaped the rigors of the civil war. Meanwhile, Italians in the south, unashamed that they had been liberated without having to pay the price of war, questioned how civilized their fellow citizens in the north had been during the insurrection. Small skirmishes in the press reflected the deep political and social contrasts. Had not a Communist daily published a photo of Guido Buffarini Guidi, a minister of the Social Republic, looking on in terror as he was sentenced to death? The new right-wing populist magazine
Uomo qualunque
(“Everyman,” or “The Cynic”) lit into the Communist journalists, not the Fascist minister, portraying them as the equivalents of Polynesian cannibals. The
qualunquista
movement, which disavowed political engagement, generally expressed the spirit of the center-south, which rejected the Resistance's rhetoric and criticized its supposed excesses. Besides
Uomo qualunque,
which sold widely in the center-south, there was another new paper along the same lines,
Il Tempo,
published by Renato Angiolillo.

Crude as its journalism could be, the
qualunquista
press must be taken seriously by the historian. Their publishers understood the mentality of a country that was too worn out by war to regret the passing of Fascism but too extraneous to the Resistance struggle to believe in the battle of liberation as an ideal. Even before the north began to produce mass-market magazines reflecting a conservative line, the press in the center-south was giving voice to an anti-Fascist but non-Resistance Italy. This voice was more than just reactionary journalism offered in consolation to Italians who had not fought in the North. It posed a challenge to the idea that the Resistance had been fought exclusively by partisan brigades and anti-Fascist politicians. In its confused and sometimes vulgar way, the
qualunquista
line represented certain perspectives that historiographers would arrive at fifty years later. Today, various historians have recognized other contributions to the Resistance against the German occupation besides those of the armed struggle. There were the farmers who hid and fed Allied soldiers, ordinary citizens who helped Italian Jews fleeing from persecution, and people in the cities who took care of their neighbors after the bombing raids. Then there were all the Italian soldiers imprisoned in Germany, tens of thousands of officers and hundreds of thousands of rank-and-file soldiers (many from the center-south) who refused to support the Republic of Salò's army—today no one would dismiss their resistance as merely passive.