{"id":40843,"date":"2026-08-18T08:07:13","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T08:07:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/40843\/"},"modified":"2026-08-18T08:07:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T08:07:13","slug":"mussolinis-ghost-by-stephen-gundle-4-star-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/40843\/","title":{"rendered":"Mussolini\u2019s Ghost by Stephen Gundle: 4-star review"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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, <a class=\"ck-custom-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/world-news\/2026\/08\/15\/giorgia-meloni-lurches-right-fend-off-insurgent-challenger\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Giorgia Meloni<\/a>, then an active member of the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement, said that Mussolini had been a \u201cgood politician\u201d who \u201cdid everything for Italy\u201d. Silvio Berlusconi agreed, saying Mussolini \u201cdid well in many aspects\u201d. Gundle\u2019s explanation for why Mussolini still lingers so powerfully in the Italian popular imagination is that, as he puts it, \u201cthe fascist regime itself is no longer seen as wholly or predominantly negative\u201d. Rather, it\u2019s seen in a \u201crose-tinted light\u201d, a modernising force compared to a backward-looking Nazism.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>The cult of Mussolini was \u201cthe first modern personality cult\u201d, 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 \u2013 \u201cIl Duce\u201d in Mussolini\u2019s case \u2013 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 \u201cthe power and glory of labour\u201d and another about how \u201cRome is destined once more to become the leading civilised city in the whole of Western Europe\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Far from slipping away into history, Mussolini is presently enjoying a remarkable afterlife in Italian culture and politics,&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":40844,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[26961,3596,5888,802,327,26960,5,19274,18906,1152],"class_list":["post-40843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-italy","tag-20th-century-history","tag-adolf-hitler","tag-book-review","tag-culture","tag-history","tag-history-books","tag-italy","tag-military-history","tag-non-fiction","tag-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40843\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}