Far from slipping away into history, Mussolini is presently enjoying a remarkable afterlife in Italian culture and politics, which neither Italian republicanism nor democracy nor integration into Europe has managed to dim. In 1996, Giorgia Meloni, then an active member of the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement, said that Mussolini had been a “good politician” who “did everything for Italy”. Silvio Berlusconi agreed, saying Mussolini “did well in many aspects”. Gundle’s explanation for why Mussolini still lingers so powerfully in the Italian popular imagination is that, as he puts it, “the fascist regime itself is no longer seen as wholly or predominantly negative”. Rather, it’s seen in a “rose-tinted light”, a modernising force compared to a backward-looking Nazism.
Take film, for example. Gundle, who is a professor of film and television studies at Warwick University, is particularly good at describing the way Mussolini has been treated by audiovisual media and in the press over the 81 years since his execution. George C Scott and Bob Hoskins both portrayed him on screen, but the best representation of the dictator was by Rod Steiger in the 1974 film Mussolini Ultimo Atto (The Last Days of Mussolini), in which Lisa Gastoni played Clara Petacci, his mistress.
The cult of Mussolini was “the first modern personality cult”, Gundle argues, predating even those of Lenin and Stalin. Those Soviet leaders, as well as Hitler, learnt from Mussolini about how to establish an almost religious devotion to the leader – “Il Duce” in Mussolini’s case – whereby their images were so ubiquitous that they attained a sense of omniscience. Many wall slogans still exist from the fascist era, such as one proclaiming “the power and glory of labour” and another about how “Rome is destined once more to become the leading civilised city in the whole of Western Europe”.