Mussolini in new edition

April 25. Italy’s day of liberation from Fascism.

I recently wrote about how Mussolini’s frasi celebri – quotes from his historical speeches, which, writes Umberto Eco, “marked all my childhood, and whose most significant passages we memorized in schools” – can still be read on many walls in Sicily. This may indicate that Sicilians still look with some nostalgia to the days that brought the island some economic boom and a harsh suppression of the mafia. Or also the fact that Italians are generally quite indifferent to political slogans, and actually don’t care if the inscription is there or not. This would probably be the most painful to Mussolini in hindsight. And finally, it also shows how the façades of many buildings have not been renovated for at least eighty years.

The problem emerges when they are finally being renovated.

Just ten years ago I wrote about those brush-painted or stenciled wall inscriptions in Budapest, on which the occupying Soviet army announced in Russian, in the spring of 1945, that Мин нет, i.e. the house had been searched and no mines were found in it. When I was a high school student, there were still plenty of such historical relics all over the city, but after the change of regime in 1990, they were not spared during the renovation of the façades, and they disappeared one after another. At the time of the 2013 post, I had only found two of them intact. Even a friend of mine, a restorer wrote me that he himself had removed one during the restoration of the façade of the palace at Andrássy út 4. While in Vienna, at the restoration of Bäckerstraße 13, special attention was paid to the preservation of the Soviet sign. Incidentally, this is the iconic house where The Third Man (1949) was filmed at the same time as the inscription was created.

Around this time last year, the owners of Lilie’s Café in Cefalù, roughly on the right edge of the panorama above, faced a similar dilemma. The façade of the building displayed for eighty years, increasingly worn, this quote of Mussolini:

«In sette mesi abbiamo conquistato l’Impero, in tre mesi appena lo abbiamo pacificato.»

“In seven months we conquered the Empire, and we pacified it in exactly three months.”

This quote is from Mussolini’s speech of December 18, 1936, given to the residents of Pontinia, the new town founded on drained Agro Pontino. It refers to the occupation of Ethiopia, which was conquered by brutal methods during the seven months between October 3, 1935 and May 5, 1936. In fact, Mussolini considered it to be part of the great Mediterranean Roman empire to be restored, so much that he was also willing to accept international sanctions for it (about which see the Gangi marble plaque, presented in the previous post).

For eighty years, the inscription did not disturb anyone, just like all the other ones throughout Sicily. But in October 2021, Harrison Ford came to Cefalù to film the last episode of the Indiana Jones series. The location was Lilie’s Café, which was renamed Clemente Cafè, and the sign on its façade was covered with a large Cinzano advertisement.

And when filming ended in January 2022, they left a generous sum of money to the bar to restore the façade. That’s when the question became relevant: what to do with the inscription? It is one thing to indifferently watch it disappear for eighty years, and another thing to intentionally remove it during restoration, or, on the contrary, to preserve it when there was an opportunity to remove it.

This question sharply divided Cefalù at this time last year. The local and provincial newspapers interviewed the residents one after another. These either feverishly demanded the removal of the inscription “reminding of the most terrible crimes in history”, or voted to keep it as a historical memento.

In the end, the second solution won, with the support of the local office of the protection of monuments, but in a rather contradictory way. The façade was completely repainted, and the inscription was subsequently repainted on it – with a modern typography different from the original, in a different color, and on a slightly different place.

“In this way, it’s worth nothing more than a graffiti hastily painted in the night”, says a comment in the Postazioni militari in Sicilia 1940-1943 Facebook group.

The result is actually worse than that. The action did not preserve the original historical memento painted in 1936, but merely updated the memory of Mussolini’s saying. At its sight, you don’t feel like seeing a historical ghost sign, but that this saying, which reminds us of a tragicomic “Empire” created through genocide and despite international public opinion and sanctions, is still important to someone there. Between the two original alternatives, removal and preservation, this third was certainly the worst choice.

Ethiopians greeting Mussolini’s portrait in occupied Mekele, November 1935