The Legacy
“Houses are the most personal, intimate things that one can think of. Memory clings to them. Houses are marked by the absence of those who lived in them. Intertwined in these houses are legal relations, a history of feelings and passions, a narrative of upbringing, personal biographies, a constructed history of place, the history of violence.“
Karl Schlögel, In Space We Read Time
In the 1930s Benito Mussolini ordered the construction of the Casa del Fascio, the headquarters of the Fascist Party, in his home town of Predappio in Emilia-Romagna. He wished to create a monument to himself with the largest building in town. Predappio was a propaganda vehicle for his fascist regime. But what do you do with a building when fascism is officially over? The town continues to prosper from the worship of the fascist dictator and many Italians still praise Mussolini for his purported merits. Even today, there are people from all over Italy who make a pilgrimage to his burial site.
Giorgio Frassinetti, left-wing mayor until 2019, dared to dream big. His proposal for a redesignation of the seriously dilapidated former Casa del Fascio was to open a Documentation Centre on the history of fascism in Italy. He received the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Award for his plan – and was criticised by Anpi, the national association of Italy’s partisans, on account of his intention to dedicate part of the exhibition space to the lifestyle in the era of fascism. In the end, his ambitious project failed, and not only because the right won the 2019 municipal elections. The main reason for his failure was: there is no right life in the wrong one.
Short film, 2019.
Predappio’s current mayor Roberto Canali also has plans to restore the former Casa del Fascio. Like Frassineti, he dreams of an exhibition space for Italian history. But there the similarities end. In contrast to Frassineti’s concept, Canali has announced his aim to focus on the first half of the 20th century, the time when fascism came to power. First of all, however, he wants to make the building earthquake-proof – which now sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy: On September 25th the Italians voted in favour of a right-wing government led by Giorgia Meloni’s far right party Fratelli d’Italia. In October 2022, Mussolini’s March on Rome marks its 100th anniversary.