Throughout Italy there are more than 1,400 monuments, plates and names of streets that recall or celebrate the fascism and still dot the urban landscape. The Parri National Institute documents it in an interactive map, which can be consulted on the website called The places of fascism.
After the end of World War II, images, symbols and names connected to the Nazism they were totally cancelled from the entire administrative, monumental and road complex of the Germany. Swastikas, statues or portraits of Third Reich leaders were systematically destroyed or removed from public places, to be placed instead in museums, in a work by denazification also conducted by Austria.
For this in Germany it is unthinkable to be able to find a portrait of Adolf Hitler inside the Bundeskanzleramt, the seat of the federal government and the Chancellor. While in Italy, the photo of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini it is still quietly exhibited in two institutional locations: a Palazzo Chigi and Palazzo Piacentini, seat of the Ministry of Economic Developmenttoday of companies and made in Italy. But these are just two examples of the vast repertoire of fascism symbols still freely displayed across the country.
According to the census of the Ferruccio Parri National Institute, of the network of institutes for the history of the resistance and of the contemporary age, the “places of fascism” would be more than 1,400. The project started four years ago, but according to Igor Pizzirusso, history researcher and webmaster of the site interviewed by Reuters “it is still a census partiala work in progress, because we know very well that it is not yet complete”. The site will indeed be expanded as well with the proposals of the publicwhich can be sent through the appropriate section on the homepage and which will then be subjected to verification by the experts.
The presence in our urban landscape of so many symbols of the dictatorship represents proof of how Italy has never really come to terms with its fascist past, whose criminal legacy he seems unable to shake off. On the contrary, while in Germany Nazism is associated with the so-called “collective guilt”, in Italy there is still a tendency to to justify it’s at stick up for fascism. As if the fascists hadn’t killed 7,500 Jews, 10,000 political prisoners and 40,000 military internees in the concentration camps. As if the fascists hadn’t maimed and killed about 18,000 Ethiopians with the toxic gases of pyrite, shot in the back as they were retreating after their defeat in the battle of theAmba Aradam. A massacre so massive that the name of the place later became synonymous with “disaster” in the Italian language.
However, when it doesn’t justify it, Italy often presents itself as one innocent victim of fascism, despite the fact that no dictatorship can resist without the consent and complicity of its people. Thus, the absence of a work of defascistization capillary like the German one, with the maintenance of celebratory symbols of the twenty years, continued to delude us that, in the end, fascism would also do good things.