The shops that line the main street of Predappio, a small town in Italy’s Sangiovese countryside, seem innocent enough—the biggest one is simply called “Predappio Souvenirs.” But it’s what’s inside that makes them remarkable: a vast collection of fascist memorabilia, including statuettes, towels, books, posters, and postcards covered in fascist symbols; and images and busts of fascism’s founder, former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. The window displays feature batons bearing Mussolini’s name or quotes, while pink and pale blue baby rompers are adorned with the dictator’s portrait and most famous slogans (“I don’t care!” and “We shall march forward!”), casually arranged as if they were any other kind of merchandise. [...]
A visit to Predappio can feel like an excursion into an alternative reality, one where fascism is displayed as a folkloric episode, and where revisionist history is displayed as fact. You wouldn’t find this type of scene anywhere else in Italy. Of course, fascist graffiti pops up from time to time in the country’s biggest cities; extreme right-wing soccer fans will raise their right arm straight in the air in the Roman salute while chanting their team’s name; and a neo-fascist group called Casa Pound (from the name of the British poet Ezra Pound, a fascist sympathizer) has attacked refugees, immigrants and left-wing opponents, while also developing an ideology that openly admires fascism. And yet, none of this compares to what a visitor sees in Predappio. [...]
A few things have contributed to this eagerly pursued amnesia. To start, Italians have chosen to focus on the resistance movement that helped to overturn the fascist regime rather than on its supporters, explains Giulia Albanese, professor of Contemporary History at Padova’s University. And Italy has also avoided reckoning with its own crimes by concentrating on “the comparison with Nazism, which has always been used to justify, and minimize, fascism’s crimes,” making what happened in Italy look more benign, Albanese says. Add to all this the fact that Italy became one of many pawns during the Cold War, meant to fight a further spread of communism, delaying indefinitely the day of reckoning.
No comments:
Post a Comment