La Mussolini : An Encounter with a Neo-Fascist Spokesmodel

JUST BECAUSE SOMETHING IS SILLY DOESN’T MEAN IT ISN’T DANGERous; from time to time the world offers us proof that something altogether ludicrous may be altogether lethal. Think of Benito Mussolini, jackbooted, lantern-jawed, squeakily bombastic, posturing from the little balcony of his office on Piazza Venezia in Rome--that remarkably dopey stiff-armed Fascist salute, the absurd oratory. Think of that funny man, that consummate buffoon; and then think of Ethiopia, which he ravaged in conquest, and of anti-Semitism, which he introduced into the Italian body politic in 1938 (“Anti-Semitism has now been injected into the Italians’ blood; it will go on circulating,” he said); think of that other funny man, Hitler, with whom he made a suicidal alliance. . . . Not so funny.

Dalle stelle alle stalle , the Italians say: From the stars to the stables. After he was shot by partisans in 1945--together with his mistress, Claretta Petacci--on the western shore of Lake Como, the disgraced Fascist leader was carted to Milan and hung like a side of beef, head down, from the roof beams of a gas station on the Pizzale Loreto. Insensate, he was spat upon and stoned, hissed and reviled; and hanging next to the man who had vaunted (and flaunted) family values, was Clara, dressed in blue high-heeled shoes, a lacy blouse, a respectable gray skirt. Proof, both of them, of Augustine’s dictum that a disordered mind is its own punishment.

Alessandra Mussolini, an ex-actress (of sorts), and a onetime medical student, remembers her grandfather as a man so tenderhearted he cried when a Christmas tree was cut down.

Well, familial piety is hard to fault, I suppose, even if one’s paternal grandfather happens to have been a dictator who worked to plunge the world into darkness; and if Alessandra’s ill-informed love for Il Duce were kept decently under wraps, who would care? Dalle stelle alle stalle , after all.

But (as she would say): Eee-MAH-gine! La Mussolini is not just a private citizen exercising a private aberration; Benito’s blond and pouty and pulchritudinous 30-year-old granddaughter is a member of Parliament, representing Italy’s neo-fascist party, MSI (Movimento Sociale Italiano), which put her forward as a candidate. When she won a seat in Naples early in 1992, she called her victory “a shout of joy and anger . . . an act of love for my grandfather.”

Should we care?

One is tempted to answer neatly that it depends on whether one is addressing oneself to La M.’s looks or to her accomplishments. She hasn’t exactly covered herself with glory since she took office in May, having introduced little but sexual innuendo and noise into the Parliament. (Of proposed legislation for women’s equal-opportunity rights, for example, she remains divinely innocent.) But she’s kinda cute. Big green eyes. Nice bod. (Which, minimally clothed, a good part of Italy has seen.) Photographs well. Head maybe a bit too big for the shoulders it sits on; but, hey, so what? Nobody’s perfect.

Of course, there is that dread word, fascism, and fascism is rearing its ugly head in Germany and France, where it expresses itself at its worst in murderous attacks on immigrants, and in brutish marches and in vandalism, giving rise to a fear of renewed anti-Semitism . . . anti-Semitism, like Dracula, never having really died. It is estimated that in Italy, where they are called “Naziskins,” there are no more than 200 skinheads. (There are 35,000 Jews.)

No one I met expressed much fear of them on my last visit to Italy. That was in September. In November--reacting to an opinion poll that indicated that as many as 2 million Italians believed that Jews should be expelled from Italy, and to a proliferation of bright yellow signs inviting “Zionists (to) get out of Italy,” as well as to acts of anti-Semitic vandalism in Sicily--30,000 Romans marched, on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, chanting, “We are all Jews. . . . Never again.”

The MSI accounted for only 4% to 6% of the vote in April, and has only 34 seats in the 945-seat Parliament. But the neo-fascist party, which for nearly 50 years has been quasi-moribund, is showing disturbing signs of life. In October, 50,000 supporters of the MSI marched past the balcony where the barrel-shaped dictator postured for the crowds, many giving the Nazi salute and shouting “Duce, Duce.”

Still, the perceived danger in Italy is not fascism, but the volatile, tribal right-wing Northern Leagues, whose members believe that Italy should be decentralized and separated into federated states in order for the industrialized north to slough off the dependency of what is widely regarded as the “shiftless” south.

But it was in a climate of economic stress and cynicism and despair that perversely romantic fascism took root half a century ago. And Italians are, by and large, more cynical about their leaders now than they have been for a very long time. The country’s economic crises have led to sweeping cutbacks in the welfare system, extreme austerity measures that affect health plans and pensions. The commonweal is threatened by drug traffic and the Mafia, which, no longer playing by its own rules, gets more cunning and more brutal in direct proportion to the bravery of the anti-Mafia investigators who prosecute it.

The venality of the Establishment is, what with news of corruption in the headlines almost daily, becoming harder and harder to ignore. For years, Italy has been governed by an uneasy social pact--jobs and favors in exchange for votes. Now even the Vatican, which has always supported the majority Christian Democrat Party, has advised the party to clean up its act. Italian politics is a mare’s-nest--one gets the feeling that in this most extroverted of countries, practical politics goes on clandestinely, somewhere underneath, where you can’t get your hands on it and your intelligence around it. . . .

And into this fragile social situation comes Alessandra Mussolini, smashing and thrashing, vowing to return her country to the “cultural roots” of her grandfather’s era. Her slogan, when she ran for office, was “The Flame Returns.”

When a miniskirted Mussolini entered the Chamber of Deputies, she rushed to sit in her grandfather’s old seat; almost anybody else would have slunk away from it in shame. When she doesn’t get her way in Parliament, she has been known to put her fingers in her mouth and whistle; if her fame spreads, it won’t be for any intelligence or zeal she brings to the Social Affairs and Welfare committee she sits on. She has called her political foes “transsexuals.” Later she revised that: “I said ‘transpolitical.’ I said ‘transpolitical’ to a young girl journalist. She reported ‘transsexual.’ What you have to do? When you are good-looking in this field, they don’t take you seriously. Especially the women don’t. This field is very masculist.” When the leader of another party says, “We have it hard,” she yells out, “You have it hard, but you have no balls.” (“I’m not sweet,” she says.)

How funny is this, how cuckoo, how dangerous?

Italians were at first inclined to shrug her off as just another political oddity in a land of political oddities. Because of an arcane electoral system that narrows the number of candidates a party may field, all parties in Italy look for high-profile candidates. Sometimes this makes sense, as when Italy’s former (bourgeois) Communist party fielded Jungian psychoanalyst Carole Beebe Tarantelli, a Wellesley-educated American-Italian who is the widow of assassinated economist Ezio Tarantelli. On the other hand, to get exposure (so to speak), parties also field such personalities as porn star Ilona Staller--La Cicciolina--and soccer players and pop singers and strippers who campaign topless and magicians and tennis players and Luciano Benneton.

Tarantelli, a feminist who is vice chairman of the committee on which Alessandra Mussolini sits, tells me that La Mussolini “has not contributed to the Chamber of Deputies in any way. She doesn’t know anything about politics or legislation; she is insignificant. There’s nothing to say about her.”

Nothing except, perhaps, that she manages to get her name and face (et cetera) into the papers quite often. Vulgarity isn’t precisely a crime. But Italy is suffering--more, perhaps, than at any time since World War II. The old social contract that held the country together, for better or for worse, is crumbling. It’s not a good time for troublemakers to be disturbing the endangered peace. She’s a troublemaker.

I AM SITTING IN GIOLITTI, ROME’S BEST ICE CREAM parlor, with Mussolini’s secretary. Outside, in Piazza Colonna, protesters wave placards at the Parliament building--”Justice . . . Taxes.” A general strike has been called; the protesters are vociferous and unruly (being unruly is almost a point of pride in Rome). Mussolini’s secretary is wearing what is meant (I suppose) to be taken for an Armani; he is stubble-faced, unshaven; a cigarette hangs loosely from his lips. He looks like a thug who has contrived to look like a thug: fake tough-tender. After informing me that Bush is “big-time” and Clinton is “ antipatico ,” he tells me that to talk about his boss’s grandfather is vulgar and to talk of her acting is vulgar . . . which doesn’t leave us a great deal to talk about.

We are whiling the time away until La M. sees fit to see me. The day before, after I’d passed the sluggish security check in the deputies’ office building, she’d kept me waiting for an hour and a half and then announced, tapping her patent-leather high-heeled shoe and giggling and swinging her Chanel purse saucily, that she had only 15 minutes to spare for an interview. (What is it she does with her time?)

When at last I do sit down with her, under the beady eye of her secretary-thug, she is restless, compulsively vamping, tossing her elfin-cut hair. She has the look of a woman who, left alone in a room full of books, would either polish her nails or jump out the window.

She says she keeps her grandfather’s glasses and his pencils close at hand; when she touches them she gets “a feeling,” she says.

She seems not to know anything but that she is her grandfather’s granddaughter; and maybe it’s just as well. As an ideologue, this sultry little waif in designer suits would be insufferable. As it is, she manages, against all odds, to be periodically likable . . . which counts for exactly nothing, of course.

In a rather hoarse monotone (it is a wonder that she ever secured an acting job), she utters stunning generalities that do little to contradict the contention that she is a spirited ninny:

“My satisfaction is the people. They are very in love with what I represent for them. I represent what my grandfather did for Italy, a new generation, a future for the youth, a commitment in life, not just passing by. I don’t believe in political strategies. I believe only to do good for the people. I must look after the nation.”

Idealism is a mask narcissism wears; her hothouse narcissism is a magnet to Italy’s acedia , its bleached despair, its nostalgia for the cynical languors of fascism.

She was elected, she says, because, “first of all, the honesty of the family; because when you put at the top honesty and the commitment for the people, and also to be yourself.”

Say what?

When I ask her to repeat what she has said, this time in Italian (we have been speaking in English, for my benefit), she sounds like an Italian beauty contestant (who “loves people” and loves better to win).

“My grandfather created a big family in Italy. He protected the family, he helped them in hospitals and stuff like that,” she says. Indeed, on Christmas Eve of 1933, Benito Mussolini gathered together 93 of the most prolific women in Italy, one from each province--among them they had borne more than 1,300 children--and awarded them with bonuses for having eight, nine, 10 children each. “The strength of a people rests in numbers,” he said.

“In these last 50 years, they did a lot of bad things to destroy everything he did,” she says. It’s hard to know exactly what she complains of. While Italy no longer awards women so ostentatiously for fertility, Italian women enjoy generous maternity benefits--for six weeks before birth and three months after, a woman is entitled to her whole pay.

She’s big on family. Sort of. Alessandra--married to 31-year-old customs police Capt. Mauro Floriani, who is posted in Milan, and with whom she has “marvelous relation”--is childless. (After she knew Floriani for five years, Alessandra asked him to marry her. “It was the right moment. I said, ‘Want to marry me?’ He said yes. Eee - MAH-gine!” I find it endearing that she did this, and that she told me she did this. It’s all the more charming because of her prettily accented English, which makes her sound more adorable than she is.)

She’s not a feminist. “They want to make a man the model. I’m happy of my difference. I don’t want to be like him, I want to be like me. Women are strong. We are strong because we are used to the pain which comes every month. It forms character. I want to see the man who goes to the Parliament with the belly puffed out. They can’t do it.”

Alessandra Mussolini’s grandfather did not allow women in the Parliament, of course.

She has memories of her grandmother--her Nonna Rachele, Mussolini’s wife, “a strong woman” who died in 1979--in a huge villa in Predappio, in northern Italy: a big table in front of the fireplace, tortellini, risotto. And of Rachele, a country woman whom none hated, praying for her husband’s mistress, Clara Petacci. “Even if Claretta was the lover of Benito, she did a lot for him, and my grandmother loved her.” I do not believe this for a moment. “At home my grandmother Rachele commanded. Therefore in public my grandfather played the role of the lion.”

Alessandra is now trying to raise money to buy the Predappio house. She is afraid it “will end up in the wrong hands, and, who knows, become a restaurant,” she says. Her opponents, naturally, are afraid that she will turn it into a shrine--the sale of Benito Mussolini souvenirs is already a thriving little industry in the town.

She compares Italy’s entry into the European Community to the relationship of a man to a woman: “We want to enter Europe, but not to be submissive,” she says, garbling her metaphor, a fact owing not to any deficiency in English but to the mental sluggishness that accompanies her verbal aggressiveness. “We have now a trembling,” she says. By “we” she means “I,” she means the MSI, she means Italy. “We need a strong man, a dictator who enforces law and order. Not a tyrant. We need a man who first he loves, then he punishes. Like my grandfather.”

Listening to this, to the cry of her blood, I am reminded--I am not sure why--of a story Mussolini’s daughter Edda once told. The family was in their villa in Rome, where Il Duce tended vegetable gardens and kept his pets--an eagle, young lions, thoroughbred horses--and Edda fell down the stairs, bouncing all the way. Benito Mussolini stood at the top of the stairs, swearing, not helping, watching her fall, roll, into the dark at the bottom of the stairs.

HER NAME, WHICH SHE HAS steadfastly refused to change, gives her identity and absolves her of any obligation to discriminate, judge, reason, resolve, cohere. She is a Mussolini--La Mussolini-- punto . And it saves her from being a nonentity, as her position in Parliament does. As an actress, she could not hope to have cut a very wide swath . . . which must have irked: Sophia Loren is her aunt. Alessandra’s father is Romano Mussolini, the jazz musician; her mother is Romano’s ex-wife, Maria Scicolone, Loren’s sister.

Once she accused Loren--whom she called “demon aunt”--of sabotaging her acting career. Now she is more politic. Now she says, “I have a good relation with her, I see her often, I call her, and”--now, I am quite sure, she is embellishing--”she calls me every day. Now the friction is finished because I am no more an actress.” (When Mussolini scored her electoral victory, Carlo Ponti, Loren’s husband, called to congratulate her; Loren did not.) “I didn’t enjoy the world of acting. Because it’s very cheap. You think it’s that you do movies because you are talented? No. Eeeh, and even if you go to bed, it’s not sure. Eee-MAH-gine! You go to bed with an old man . . . and then no movie! I am very experienced . . . but not in bed!”

Pictures of her from her acting days--bellybutton exposed, breasts saucy--appear in the press whenever she does or says something deemed outrageous. She doesn’t seem to mind this. But she sued a magazine called Playmen, which suggested that she had appeared in a hard-core porn film: “I won. They said me and another woman, eee-MAH-gine, in a hard video. Eee - MAH - gine. That’s too much. When you are an actress--now, fortunately, I don’t have to do this--you are dealing with the body. Every actress does topless and stuff like this; you have to. I have won the suit and I will ask for a lot of money, and I will give it all to Naples for the hospitals.”

She is outrageous: “Homosexuals, most of the time, are people that are unadjusted,” she told Giordano Bruno Guerri in the weekly magazine Sette. “I can understand real, genetic homosexuality, because they are sick. Otherwise it’s like announcing, ‘I am Napoleon.’ One’s sexuality doesn’t matter to others.”

Her grandfather rounded up and imprisoned homosexuals. (The “demon aunt” once starred in a lovely film in which Marcello Mastroianni played a homosexual persecuted by the Fascists.)

La Mussolini refuses to grant that her grandfather was in any way violent or racist, any more than she will concede that he was crude and stupid. He wasn’t, according to her, “against homosexuals or against Jews. That is completely a distortion of the historic point of view. Nonna Rachele said that he helped thousands of Jews. I receive letters from Jews even in Israel saying, ‘Of course your grandfather was not like Hitler.’ They know, they know.”

After I talk to her, I walk to the old Jewish ghetto in Rome, where, on a plaque on a medieval house, I read this inscription:

” On October 16, 1943, here began the merciless gathering of 2,091 Jews, Roman citizens who were sent to a ferocious death in the Nazi extermination camps, where they were joined by 6,000 other Italians, victims of infamous racist hatred. The few who survived the extermination, and many people, in solidarity, cry out with fervor for love and peace, and ask from God forgiveness and hope. “

The Nazis set in motion the machinery Alessandra’s grandfather erected when he enacted the punitive anti-Semitic rules of 1938, which effectively kept Jews out of any participation in the government of a country they entirely loved. But she will have none of it; she feigns not to believe it. She worships a false god; worse, she dishonors the thousands of Italians who aided and sheltered Jews; and she maligns the memory of the Jews.

A creature thrown onto the shoals of today’s distress by her history, she is at the same time determinedly ahistorical; and that is scary. “She has read neither texts written by her grandfather nor the most important history books on fascism” says Guerri, author of the Sette article; she has not even read the published diaries of her Uncle Galleazzo Ciano, Benito Mussolini’s son-in-law and his minister of foreign affairs, whom he had executed for conspiring against him.

And it’s scary that she knows exactly how far to push her case. After congratulating neo-fascists (“It’s wonderful!”) for giving the outlawed Fascist salute in November, she apologized for her grandfather: If he had not imposed anti-Semitic laws, she said, “all Italians would have suffered greater violence.” Implicitly recognizing his role in the persecution of the Jews, she said: “My grandfather can’t (apologize),so I’m going to regret it for him.”Her remorse, offered during a recent MSI campaign swing, is not convincing.

TALKING TO ALESSANDRA, I feel exactly as I did when I used to interview starlets dumb as twigs. If fascism (God forbid) comes back with a vengeance, surely it will be in spite of La Mussolini, not because of her. She delivers herself of the following random opinions:

The Pope is fine, only he is Polish, so “of a different mentality.” (She sent him a telegram when he was sick.)

She likes Clinton’s face.

She is against the death penalty “in general.” (Eee-MAH-gine!)

She would like to see stiffer penalties against the Camorra, Naples’ Mafia.

Italians don’t have the “German mentality” but “immigrants have to be subject to laws. If they don’t have money or work, or an Establishment way of life, it is problematic. We have a law that if they are caught stealing or selling drugs, they have 15 days to go away. Fifteen days is too much. In 15 days you can hide anything you want.” Her party demands strict immigration limits.

Mussolini, she says, with that lack of specificity that is her trademark, “created power in Italy. Before my grandfather, Italy was very, very weak. He created cities in Sardinia. It is important to remember. Now only to create a monument takes 10 years.”

Like her grandfather, she believes power is an end in itself. He made the trains run on time. Benito Mussolini’s tangible legacy in Rome, mother and womb of civilization, is a handful of impertinent, stupid buildings and incoherently excavated ruins. And those Sardinian cities! Arborea and Fertilea they are called, where he reclaimed, it is true, swampland for farmers. He considered shepherds happily anarchic, and therefore feared them, so he turned their pastureland into farms settled by men and women from the Veneto, in the north. In the interior of Sardinia are deserted Fascist villas, frosted with putti and garlands; art nouveau houses; thatched Tennyson huts--empty; English-style gardens gone to seed. Failed romanticism. And now even to make a monument it takes 10 years.

SOON AFTER I LEFT ROME, I read of a new scandal involving Mussolini: She was said to have paid the lire equivalent of $800 to buy her way to passing Roman history and moral philosophy exams at the University of Rome. It didn’t surprise me. And it almost doesn’t matter whether she did or did not--it doesn’t matter to her ambition, that is. The old brownshirts of the MSI will still give her the Fascist salute; the conservative pre-Vatican II Catholics who believe God speaks only in Latin will still support her . . . and heaven will protect the working girl.