People take part in a gathering called by the leaders of Italy’s three main opposition parties to protest against the constitutional reforms planned by the Right-wing government, on June 18, 2024 in Rome.
| Photo Credit: AFP
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.
Complicated situation
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.
The average Italian is worried more about the poor infrastructure and livelihood issues. Cab drivers turning the app off after accepting a ride — to be able to charge more on made-up grounds — or refusing to turn on the air-conditioning on a 40-degree day.
And there are assimilation issues. But there are two facets to what is seen as the locals’ resistance to the immigrants: there are Italians who do not like poor immigrants ad hominem and then there are those Italians who see them as the harbinger of all regressive value systems that the former fought hard to desist and discard. Women’s rights, for example, become a particularly sticky spot. Rapists and kidnappers in Italy could simply marry their victims and avoid any legal action till as late as 1981, thanks to the practice of matrimonio riparatore (rehabilitating marriage). Those who protested on the streets against this almost half a century ago may not be excited about the practice of young girls pushed into forced marriages, even if it is a culturally accepted practice in many immigrant communities.
The immigrants are not a homogenous lot either. Religion may or may not be a binding factor there. Look no further than a tourist hub. The tensions between the Indian and the Bangladeshi Muslims are often palpable. Coreligionists do not often band together.
Iqbal (name changed), an Indian ‘trip advisor’ from Andhra Pradesh working near St Peter’s Basilica, rues the fact that the aggressiveness of Bangladeshi tourists brings a bad name to everyone. A little later, Rahim, a Bangladeshi scarf-seller outside the Vatican Museums, shouted at a woman tourist “Indians not allowed [inside] Sistine Chapel” as if to balance the equation. These two immigrant nationalities are not the largest but appear rather ubiquitous in Italy.
Unlike what we know from The Roman Holiday, The Talented Mr Ripley or the many Dan Brown films, Rome has a subterranean flow of traumatic memories. The mafia, for example, is alive and kicking in the country in its white-collared avatar — a legacy of the Berlusconi years. A lawyer from southern Italy shares in a casual conversation that the mafia earn a lot more by cartelising illegal immigration. After all, the undocumented can be underpaid and exploited like cattle. They can also be disappeared when convenient. The raids on the manufacturing units of high-end luxury brands in Milan brought to the fore what Italians have known for years.
The trauma of the past manifests in Italy in multiple ways, many rather strange to the outsider. At the annual week-long fete of the democratic party this year, held right across the historical Caracalla Baths — a symbol of Roman decadence — a retrospective of singer Lucio Battisti was organised one night. Battisti, a supporter of the erstwhile communist party, was ‘cancelled’ decades ago by the partisans and followers for being a ‘fascist’. He is back as an icon.
If you go looking for traces of fascism in Italy today, it mostly exists in the form of imaginary scenes woven around the traumas of the past. The Left uses the F word to silence its critics and the Right is eking out a niche by playing on the livelihood and cultural anxieties of the citizens by making it about race.
(Nishtha Gautam is an independent journalist based in New Delhi)
