In Europe

For years, Mussolini himself had a Jewish mistress, and as late as 1932 he appointed a Jew as his minister of finance. During the first years of German persecution he granted asylum in Italy to at least 3,000 Jews. The Germany Nazi-pioneer Anton Drexler openly expressed his suspicion that Mussolini was himself a Jew.
    Fascism, therefore, was an essentially Italian movement. ‘Italy knows no anti-Semitism, and we believe it never will,’ Mussolini wrote in 1920. Italians never cultivated any nostalgia concerning a lost ‘Italian’ tribe the way the Germans dreamed of a ‘Germanic’ tribe and an ethnically pure ‘folk community’. Throughout the centuries, Italy had been populated by a shifting mixture of Etruscans, Celts, Greeks, Visigoths, Lombards, Franks, Saracens, Huns and other peoples, some of them original inhabitants, but most of them conquerors who had stayed. When Italy became a unified nation in the nineteenth century, there was no way Italians could forma ‘conceptual community’ by applying such terms as ‘folk’, ‘race’ and ‘tribe’. The Italian symbols of unity were completely different: language, culture, the liberty of the French Revolution and
virtù
, that form of creative civilisation that had for centuries allowed the Italians to feel superior to the barbarians from the North.
    There was yet another way in which Fascism did not resemble National Socialism: unlike the Germans, the Italians were not particularly enamoured by the phenomenon of ‘the state’. From the sixteenth century, Italy had been exploited almost incessantly by Spain and Austria. In addition, the country's spirit had long been held in the iron grip of the Vatican, which had skilfully succeeded in stifling all joy in the Renaissance and the baroque. For three long centuries, in other words, the Italians had been learning to hate the state. To the average Italian, the state was an alien, an oppressor, usually corrupt, always inefficient, an institution that should best be avoided unless one could somehow profit from it. What is more, no distinct entrepreneurial class had ever developed in Italy: trade and industry had always remained closely intertwined with politics and the state, every business was part of a system of protection and preferential treatment, every businessman had some political connection, sometimes reaching even as far as the president himself. Against this background, the family was the most important place of refuge, the only alliance one could truly trust.
    The Italian image of the state, based as it was on suspicion, was the polar opposite of the Prussian one, within which a central position was reserved for total surrender to ‘the fatherland’. Hitler, therefore, was a very different kind of leader than Mussolini. The former had access to a finely tuned government apparatus of which the latter could only dream. Hitler led a movement of frustrated military men and merchants, while Mussolini, at least in the early years, had recourse largely to gangs of angry farmers. The roots of the National Socialist movement lay in the city. Those of Italian Fascism lay in the countryside.
    In the film
Novecento
, Donald Sutherland played the definitive Fascist: big hands, nasty eyes, ugly teeth, a villain through and through. One encounters no such wonderful Fascists in Predappio. These days it is largely seventeen-year-old boys who press their noses against the shop windows andpolitely excuse themselves for reaching past you to pick up a copy of
Mein Kampf
or
The Fable of Auschwitz
.
    For 150 euros here you can buy a Waffen-SS jacket, for 20 euros you have a brand new black shirt, but it will cost you twice that much for a cap and a Sam Browne belt to go with it.
    One can also visit Il Duce himself. Mussolini's crypt is close to the church. He lies in a big sarcophagus, topped by a bust of his own massive head, handfuls of candles at his feet, two dozen fresh bouquets all around, amid a constant stream of visitors.
    To his left and right lie his mother and his wife. ‘He liked sturdy women,’ his widow, Rachele Mussolini, announced after the war. ‘Today I can tell you that Mussolini's conquests were just as numerous as those of the average Italian man who is attractive to women.’ She insisted, however, that the truth be told: her husband had always slept at home, except when he was travelling. So when and where did he do it? ‘Where? I think I know: at his office, where he had a sitting