The history of Saló is long and complex. A long journey from Roman times to the birth of the Italian State, passing through the traces of the Republic of Venice. For most people, however, it is the place where fascism died and died. A town in northern Italy, on the shores of Lake Garda, where the last death rattles of the regime fell against the Italian population, but also against its own promoters. Benito Mussolini, “a walking corpse”, in his own words those days, obediently followed Hitler's orders and from September 23, 1943 he tried to prolong the melody of a system and an ideology that was becoming extinct as the two of them would do: one hanging upside down in the square Loreto of Milan and the other, killed by a gunshot to the temple in his Führerbunker. The problem is how to count those days, from what perspective and from what place. Saló, trapped for years by her past, decided at the end of 2023 to take it on and incorporate an entire floor dedicated to those dark 600 days into the city museum. But many wounds remain open in Italy and controversy has accompanied him ever since.
On Friday, February 23, it rains heavily and there is practically no one on the streets of a town of 10,375 inhabitants, in the famous Riviera dei Limoni, which suffers in winter from the inclemencies of tourist seasonality. At almost every roundabout, what was announced at the end of last year was the great event that once again put the municipality on the international map: The last fascism 1943-1945. The Italian Social Republic. The MuSa, the city's wonderful civic museum, decided to dedicate its top floor to a permanent exhibition that commemorates what happened here at the end of World War II. But not everyone understood this historiographic and museum initiative. Some considered it unnecessary, dangerously celebratory. The National Association of Italian Partisans (ANPI) protested and called it a “hagiographic operation.” Others simply saw it as another episode of this Lombard town that should be shown with historical coldness. The only thing clear today is that there was nothing like it in Italy. And it has been a success that has allowed the museum to double its visits.
The Italian Social Republic was Hitler's desperate attempt to prolong the life of a dying regime. After his release, Mussolini became a puppet of the German, a kind of sad and depressed Italian Marshal Pétain, controlled at all hours by Nazi soldiers in the Feltrinelli villa, a mansion in Gargnano (north of the lake), today transformed into a hotel. luxury. The territory, a kind of German protectorate chosen for its strategic location, covered almost all of northern Italy and its de facto capital was in Milan. However, that ghost state, only recognized by Berlin, was popularly called Saló because the Ministry of Propaganda, as well as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, were located in the small town and all the communications issued those days were signed with the city name. Hence, among other things, Pier Paolo Pasolini imagined his film Saló or the 120 days of Sodom, an allegory of what that invention and those days caused to the emotional health of the population. “Of course that was not the place where I live,” says Gianpiero Cipiani, mayor of the city for a right-wing citizen list, who accompanies EL PAÍS during a visit to the exhibition. “That film did not give a good image of the city and nothing that is reported happened here,” he insists.
The exhibition is extensive, interactive and contains many fascist documents: pamphlets, recordings, propaganda posters, figurines and busts… It begins with the release of Mussolini from the Campo Imperatore prison (Abruzzo), on September 12, 1943 through a German operation with paratroopers and ends with the death of the Duce and the display of his corpse next to that of his lover, Claretta Petacci. One of the spaces allows you to feel a bombing by the Allies in an air raid shelter and in another the posters of Nazi propaganda against the Jews appear. The look is neutral and rigorous, but whoever wanted to see it from a nostalgic perspective would inevitably find some elements. “I disagree,” says Lisa Cervigni, director of the museum. “A committee of historians worked for two years to give a narrative to these 600 days. We expected the criticism because we are all sensitive to these arguments and in Italy this story perhaps has not yet been metabolized, and we have seen it with the people's response. I think it is a curiosity that is born from an open wound.”
The historiographic technique itself is not enough to convince some of the detractors. Antonio Scurati is the author of the acclaimed trilogy on Mussolini and one of the greatest authorities today on that period. He is about to launch the fourth volume and is already preparing the fifth and final volume, which will be based, precisely, on the Saló chapter. “The problem with these commemorations is that they come at a time when the Government launches a revisionist offensive on history, starting with the president of the Council [Giorgia Meloni], who does not miss the opportunity to show himself on his side. And these samples in this historical context, beyond what they propose to visitors, support this revisionism and prevent reckoning with the past,” says Scurati.
“What raises the most suspicion is where it takes place. A historical museum of fascism should be done with rigor and a critical reading of the past, with the mark of evil. But if you do it in Predappio [donde está enterrado Mussolini y se forman cada año peregrinaciones de nostálgicos] It takes on a different meaning, even if your intentions are different. And the same thing happens in Saló.”
The perspective from which the events are told determines the controversy that will surround any portrait of a period such as the fascist one and also influences the process of overcoming these episodes. Italy has postponed that pacification for years, at least emotionally and politically. And this lack of collective awareness, Scurati believes, is influenced by having always reported the events from the perspective of the victims. “It is a narrative that underpins our democratic constitution. A necessary and sacred narrative, but one that has left in the shadows the question of responsibility and the sense of guilt, which is constructed only from the perspective that we were fascists, and not from the symbolic position of anti-fascism. Otherwise, the ghost is still there. And this is demonstrated by the democratic elections, in which a group from neo-fascism has taken power.”
The mayor, who decided to maintain honorary citizenship for Mussolini, disagrees with this idea and defends that the museum can tell its past without any suspicion. “Here we collect all the passages of history. And it is clear that there are also the 600 days of the Italian Social Republic. We couldn't not tell it. It would be a deficiency. We have used a scientific technical committee with scholars from that period with different ideological origins. We believe that we have done it in a serene manner, without embracing one party or the other. It was a dramatic period in which mistakes were made, but that should not prevent us from telling it. Otherwise, we would be like the Taliban.”
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