Between a fascist past and Right-wing present, Italy is fighting its many battles Premium

Explore Italy beyond the tourist attractions, delving into its complex history, identity politics, and societal issues.

What do we talk when we talk about Italy? Beyond the Modi-Meloni (now Team Melodi) memes, appropriations of food, and the deluge of travel bucket list items, there exists a country that knows how not to stay trapped in its history. Or the historical mistakes, to be precise. On July 25, 1943, Benito Mussolini, the man responsible for some of the worst crimes against his countrymen, was overthrown and less than three months later, Italy officially switched sides in the Second World War.

Rome was saved, literally and metaphorically.

In a three-storey flat on Via Tasso, at least 3,000 men and women were incarcerated, interrogated, tortured, and even killed during the Second World War. Their crime could be anything from being a partisan, a Jew, a thinker, or protesting peacefully or otherwise against the wanton killings in the streets by the fascists. If nothing else, they could have just been an annoyance to the fascist.

The flat is now a memorial to the fallen citizens who did not have a chance against this killing machine. Their ‘relics’— photographs, blood-soaked clothes, messages scratched on the walls by the prisoners or sewn into the hems of clothes delivered by their relatives, fake identity cards to hide their identity are all on display in this museum exuding a strong ‘never again’ vibe. The worst of this condemned lot were the Jewish partisans who were also thinkers. This flat, now called Museo Storico Della Liberazione (Liberation Historical Museum), is not very far from Rome’s Jewish ghetto.

“Save Ghaza,” says the graffiti on a wall barely 20 metres from the museum. Rome is a city of contradictions like this. Symbolically seen as the seat of civilisational and religious glory, real Rome exists in the twilight zone of irreverence and remonstrance. No matter how much tourism cash is generated by the Roman Catholic ‘industry’, Romans continue to be mostly nonchalant about religion.

Thousands of churches in the city, very few devotees. This is an easy observation: the separate entry passages for the believers barely have people passing through them while the visitor lines run into kilometres. Rome resembles many other European cities in this regard. Across Europe, churches of different orders and sizes have been converted into pubs, something the Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib would have been very proud of.

But why talk about fascism today? Bursting at its seams with immigrants from the Global South — thanks to its geography — and with a Right-wing government in power, Italy finds itself in the eye of the identity politics storm. What complicates the matter further is the country’s perception as being on the wrong side of the not-so-long-ago history. The F word, therefore, looms large. It does not help the average Italian that Prime Minister Georgia Meloni was a youth activist of Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), a now-dissolved neo-fascist political movement founded in 1946 hailing Mussolini.