As the
far right surges around the globe, what can a new TV series about Mussolini
teach us?
Caroline
Moorehead
Joe Wright’s
new drama gives a theatrical take on the dictator’s flaws but there is so much
more history viewers need to know
Wed 26 Feb
2025 15.45 GMT
On 3 January
1925, Benito Mussolini delivered the most important speech of his life to the
Italian parliament. His career was about to be over. The body of the socialist
deputy and his bitter foe, Giacomo Matteotti, had been discovered in a shallow
grave near Rome and mounting evidence pointed to Mussolini’s responsibility for
his murder. With the king, the old liberal democratic elite, the left and many
of his own party pressing for his dismissal, Mussolini declared that everything
– the fascist violence, the immorality, the turmoil into which Italy had sunk –
was his fault, “because I, I alone, created it”. By the same token, he alone
was the man “capable of dominating the crisis”. Parliament, stunned, sat
silent. There was no voice of protest. The dictatorship was saved.
Based on the
first volume in a trilogy of the same name by Antonio Scurati and garlanded
with praise by Italian critics, the television drama Mussolini: Son of the
Century covers just six years in Mussolini’s life, from his days as a brawling
but highly effective journalist in Milan to his assumption of total power. Joe
Wright, better known for his gentle approach and light touch in Pride and
Prejudice and Atonement, has produced a series that is loud, provocative and
violent. The music that accompanies it is throbbing, incessant and often
intrusive, with occasional snatches of Verdi and Puccini. All is dark, deeply
gloomy and sepia-coloured.
The series
is presented as a “biographical historical drama” – that is to say, with
considerable licence to play about with the facts. It would be fair, however,
to say that for the most part the narrative keeps close to the broad sweep of
Mussolini’s rise. The gerarchi, the fascist leaders such as the flying ace
Italo Balbo and the gross and vituperative Roberto Farinacci from Cremona, are
portrayed in their greedy, strident, vulgar colours; and his mistress, the art
critic Margherita Sarfatti, is rightly seen as a considerable influence on
fascism’s emerging ideology. Rachele, Mussolini’s long-suffering wife, is
relegated to the shadows, and Bianca Ceccato, mother of one of his illegitimate
children, is made to stand for the many others he impregnated.
But the
details niggle. It is highly unlikely that Quinto Navarra, Mussolini’s valet,
saw Matteotti’s bloodstained wallet in the drawer of his employer’s desk. The
blackshirts never staged a vast, orderly rally along the Appian Way and
Mussolini surely never flung himself backwards into the arms of his yelling,
flame-throwing followers. Cesare Rossi, the regime’s press and propaganda man,
is shown here as the Duce’s main confidant – when that role was in fact
occupied by his brother, Arnaldo.
Does this
matter? Luca Marinelli gives a convincing performance as the narcissistic,
bombastic, insecure Mussolini who, when not addressing Rossi or a vast bust of
himself in the Palazzo Venezia, speaks directly to the camera, to us, his
audience. There are very few scenes in which he is not present, filmed a little
from below, glowering over us, confiding his thoughts, his triumphs, his
contempt for his companions. This is fascism as theatre, hectoring and loud.
More important than the details, perhaps, is the lack of subtlety, the crude
juxtaposition between the sanity represented by Matteotti and the noisy,
inarticulate barbarity offered by the fascists.
There are
few moments of respite. This series is not for the faint-hearted. Many people
were indeed bludgeoned, dosed with castor oil and killed by the fascists, but
not on this vast, orgiastic scale. The March on Rome was, in fact, concluded
not in widespread bloodshed, as the series suggests, but remarkably peacefully.
In Milan, Turin and Parma, where opposition was expected, the fascists took
control quietly and smoothly. Rome, on the day the king lost his nerve and
offered Mussolini the prime ministership, has been described as being in a
“fever of delight” and florists ran out of flowers.
Some of the
more interesting wider perspectives have been lost. Mussolini won friends
abroad: by 1923, Sir Ronald Graham, British ambassador to Rome, was reporting
to London that Mussolini was a “statesman of exceptional ability and
expertise”. And you get little sense of Italy itself in the early 1920s, a
country that felt betrayed by the allies, but was full of clever, articulate
people, such as the historian Gaetano Salvemini and the philosopher Benedetto
Croce, highly intelligent anti-fascists who, like Matteotti, fought hard to
save the country from the dictatorship.
The
miniseries aired in Italy before the UK release, and has attracted a great
number of viewers, many of them admiring. In contemporary Italy, Mussolini is
never far away. At the end of the war, the allies planned to rid the country of
all visible signs of the dictatorship. They discovered that Mussolini had
successfully imprinted fascist ideology on to the landscape, stamping his mark
on to houses, sports stadiums and entire towns.
Predappio in
Emilia-Romagna, where he grew up, remains a place of pilgrimage for Italians
who descend on the anniversary of the March on Rome, to raise their arm in the
fascist salute and buy replicas of the Duce’s various helmets and berets. On
Lake Garda, where he had his last government, the villas in which he and his
mistress Clara “Claretta” Petacci lived are now five-star hotels. The rooms
that bear their names are booked out years in advance. Books about him, his
family and the fascist leadership never stop appearing. Mussolinismo, as the
cult is known in Italy, is not illegal. Not surprising, then, that when Giorgia
Meloni, a former member of the neofascist MSI, was made prime minister, there
was much talk of Mussolini’s legacy.
It would be
hard to watch the series today without being conscious of the warning it
contains. When Mussolini boasts that his plan is to “make Italy great again”,
his words resonate.
Caroline
Moorehead is a writer and historian. She is the author of Edda Mussolini: The
Most Dangerous Woman in Europe
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