ROME (dpa) – If the figures provided by its publishers are to be believed, it is proof that nostalgia can sell better than sex.
A collection of yellowing photographs of an ageing man in bombastic postures is outstripping glossy models in seductive poses: the 2002 Benito Mussolini calendar is a national best seller.According to Pierluigi Pompignoli, the head of the Predappio Tricolore publishing company, a staggering 480,000 copies have already been sold and a further 300,000 copies are rapidly being re- printed.“That’s one hundred times what we used to sell until a few years ago,” Pompignoli told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.The astonishing success of his calendar, which draws heavily from Pompignoli’s private archive of fascist memorabilia, is partly explained by the fact that it is for the first time being sold in news-stands and bookstores.More importantly, perhaps, it provides the strongest evidence yet of the surge in popularity enjoyed by the fascist dictator among 21st century Italians.But the telling signs of this fascist revival are everywhere.On October 28, in Mussolini’s birthplace of Predappio, unprecedented crowds of up to 20,000 people attended commemorations marking the 79th anniversary of the March on Rome – in which 40,000 Fascist militia took control of the nation.And while honour guards vow to stand at his tomb until 3000, the dictator’s home of Villa Carpena is being turned into a hotel for Mussolini buffs; a winemaker in Udine adorns his labels with pictures of Il Duce and a perfume shop near Rome’s Fontana di Trevi sells “Nostalgia”, a perfume with the profile of the dictator on its box.In Sicily, a small town on Mount Etna has named a road after “Benito Mussolini, statesman.”Although the full rehabilitation of fascism may still be a long way away, critics say, it has never been closer.For the first time in 50 years, the Italian government includes members who openly flaunt their fascist past.Several prominent left-wing politicians, as well as President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, are now beginning to express more apologetic views about the country’s recent past.“In Italy, Mussolini’s dictatorship has partly been excused on the grounds that it fought communism,” says James Walston, a historian at the American University in Rome. “Italians tend to forget about the hideous side of fascism and argue that the really bad things were only done by the Germans.”Unlike Nazi criminals, hardly any Italian war criminal has been prosecuted.The lack of war trials partly explains why Italy remembers only the pain it suffered, not the pain that fascism inflicted, says Lutz Klinskhammer, of Rome’s German Historical Institute. Lack of guilt, Klinskhammer argues, facilitates nostalgia.For critics like Walston, the new popularity enjoyed by the fascist dictator is evidence that Italy lacks the kind of moral rigour that is usually taken for granted in other European countries. It also highlights the risk of a populist drift in one of Europe’s big four nations.For Pompignoli and his publishing house, it is nothing less than a gold mine.
