Ferrara’s Palazzo Schifanoia, once a leisure retreat for the city’s great family, the Este, had been taken over by a tobacco baron in the 18th century. He determined that the palace’s defining space, the Hall of Months, a large room covered with murals depicting the months of the year, should be covered in plaster and whitewashed. Years later, restoration work recovered some of these priceless works of art, but many were irreparably harmed.
This was hardly the first example of whitewashing history, but as I admired the two walls covered with evocative murals, and then bemoaned the slate wiped clean across the other two, I couldn’t help but find this to be a particularly galling one.
Just before the Hall of Months, one passes through another room with an even more devastated mural; only the smallest of fragments survive. Amidst that tiny shard, though, one can see a symbol of the Estes, the triple-face. If being two-faced is a sin, their conception of the triple-face was a virtue, suggesting that it meant being focused on past, present, and future all at once–a sign of wisdom.
All of this happened in the afternoon of the second day of this post, though, so I should pause and set the table. The walking, it has to be acknowledged, has been unremarkable throughout this stretch between Bologna and Ferrara. It’s almost like being back in the Midwest. It’s flat, there’s an awful lot of pavement, and there are even some extended sections on roads with narrow shoulders and moderate traffic. Few towns of any size line the way. In fact, today was the first walk I’ve made entirely without coffee (not all heroes wear capes). I enjoyed my night in Malalbergo, where the priest welcomed me into the parish oratorio, where I had a comfortable armchair, an old mattress on a fold-up cot, and a cold shower, but I also beat a hasty retreat this morning, in order to reach Ferrara early.
After all, today is Liberation Day, April 25, a national holiday. I missed out on most of the Easter festivities, given that I spent nearly the whole week in very rural areas. This was my chance to have an urban festa experience.
I reached the Piazza della Cattedrale at 9:45, just in time to grab a front-row spot on the barricade, the duomo behind me, McDonald’s straight ahead, and the Palazzo Ducale, where all the dignitaries were lined up, to my right. A group of local organizations stood near the McDonald’s holding up banners. In the middle of the open space stood two soldiers, waiting to raise the Italian flag. The crowd was slow to arrive, but as the ceremony began, it was perhaps 2-3 people deep around the barricade; I’m useless when it comes to estimating size, but maybe 500 people were fully engaged as the event unfolded.
First, came the flag. Then came a wreath, laid before the memorial to the fallen. From there, it was all speeches. These were surprisingly accessible to a non-Italian speaker, a reality that underscored just how much generic political language was woven into these scripts. Freedom, fascism, valor, resistance, partisans, democracy, etc. Interestingly, I heard nothing about the role of the Allies in this Liberation process. (It has to be acknowledged that my comprehension level is far short of ideal.) Ultimately, it felt like four bands performing covers of the same song. All of that said, beyond the broader platitudes that are probably on display every year, a gloomier thread ran through the speeches, underscoring the fragility of democracy, the fleeting nature of peace. Alongside that was a palpable sense of loss, as most of the speakers also took the time to acknowledge the loss of Francis.
The crowd listened attentively, and clapped respectfully, but the event felt rather listless. The ending, in particular, stumbled badly, as the crowd stood confusedly for a full minute as the speakers began to disperse, before offering a belated and flaccid round of applause. From there, the event shifted into the cathedral, for a religious ceremony. Perhaps a quarter of the crowd made the transition.
In Italy, sometimes you get fetishistic bureaucrats, hyper-focused on protocol and process above all else, and sometimes you get anarchists, of both the apolitical and political varieties.
The anarchists–or, I should probably say, the activists–swept into the piazza a few hours later, following a march across the town that I first heard while I was in the shower. As one speaker railed energetically, a woman waved a Palestinian flag, while a large banner demanded “Free Anan.” (Anan, I later learned, referred to a Palestinian activist who was living in Italy when he was detained.) Another large banner simply stated ANTIFA. If the morning smacked of solemnity, the afternoon screamed urgency.
Through it all, I couldn’t escape a nagging question at the back of my mind. Liberation Day? Liberation from what? I need to step carefully here, because this involves a complicated situation that I could understand much better than I do. Let me set it up as best I can. Fascism, quite literally, began in Italy. Mussolini coined the term. Initially, it was defined as something completely different than it ultimately became, but that actually suits fascism perfectly. While this morphed into a dictatorship over time, Mussolini enjoyed significant popular support early on. In Duce: The Contradictions of Power, Peter J. Williamson devoted an entire chapter to this topic, striving to pin down just how broad-based that support was. Winston Churchill famously asserted that Mussolini acted as “one man alone,” practically absolving all other Italians of responsibility for Fascist Italy’s actions in World War II.
The evaluation is complicated in lots of ways, but the biggest challenge derives from Mussolini’s efforts to quash dissent, something that he largely accomplished by the early 1930s. Visible displays of pro-Mussolini sentiments can’t automatically be viewed as sincere; sometimes, they were merely a defense mechanism. Nonetheless, criticism increased as the years passed, particularly given Italy’s economic performance, but, in Williamson’s view, “most of this was laid at the door of the Fascist regime and not Mussolini.” Indeed, even as unhappiness became more widespread, “Mussolini continued to enjoy considerable immunity from accountability for the problems Italians experienced,” and “the more people suffered the more they often seem[ed] to look to Mussolini for hope.” Williamson proceeds to summarize the ~1500 letters mailed daily to Mussolini, and it’s worth an extended look: “He was ‘the embodiment of the nation,’ the guide to the nation’s ‘great future,’ forging a mark on the history of the world with ‘his genius and will of steel.’ His ‘judgements are never wrong and principles always sound,’ while his intelligence was ‘rational, very open and receptive, ready to express new ideas, of good memory, and of quick and gifted spirit.’”
While many Italians felt uneasy about war in 1939, they took comfort in Mussolini’s leadership, believing he could be a moderating force on Hitler, given that he was the only man Hitler would listen to. And once the war began in earnest, support for Mussolini expanded to moderate enthusiasm for the war itself, as displayed through “evident patriotism and a belief that Italy was able to fight such a war victoriously.” Even when Italy suffered setbacks, much of this rolled off Mussolini, instead generating claims of betrayal–poor Mussolini was being treated poorly.
Here’s how Williamson sums up the question of Mussolini’s base of popular support: “Until the close of Italy’s war, a significant section of the Italian population generally had favourable opinions of Mussolini even if there were earlier signs of it gradually dissipating. It is difficult to determine how widespread support for Mussolini was in the 1930s, accepting that inevitably it varied over time and place. The middle class represented a core support, but it seeped away more rapidly here than elsewhere. Faith in him held up longer in less urbanised areas. In rural areas among peasants and landless labourers—whose opinions were not so extensively recorded—there was always more of an apolitical outlook as people struggled with the vicissitudes of life.” By contrast, while it’s harder to gauge centers of dissent, given the covert nature of this in places, the most strident opposition to Mussolini was centered in the industrial north.
That was a lot of detail, but I think it’s important to be on solid footing. Even as we can acknowledge, then, that Italy has a long history of antifascist resistance, and that a significant portion of Italians opposed the Mussolini regime, it’s also indisputable that a large portion of Italians supported Mussolini’s rise to power, remained loyal to him throughout (and even after), and also endorsed the war effort. That included, of course, the alliance with Nazi Germany, which ultimately resulted in Nazi forces moving throughout Italy.
All of that flipped on September 8, 1943, when the Italians surrendered to the Allies–an event that also shifted the Germans into occupiers on the peninsula. They soon established the Italian Socialist Republic, a puppet regime under a weakened Mussolini. And in the midst of that, the Italian resistance movement, La Resistenza, came to the fore. What followed was essentially an Italian Civil War in the midst of World War II.
Interestingly, Liberation Day, April 25, is not the day when the war ended in Italy. On the contrary, that took place on May 2, with the Surrender at Caserta. April 25 is the day when the National Liberation Committee of Upper Italy pushed the pedal to the metal, calling for insurrection across all areas still under Nazi occupation, while also effectively demanding the deaths of all remaining fascist leaders, lest they surrender immediately. Mussolini finally met his end three days later.
In a way, then, Liberation Day feels like its own whitewashing of history, a transformation of a more convoluted and complicated series of events into a tidy triumph, the assertion of good over evil. The political liberation that occurred is from a dictatorship that was originally a popular movement, and from a tyrant that was an ally. Certainly, the staunch antifascist core had long resisted Mussolini and his ilk, so their liberation must have been heartfelt and profoundly satisfying, but I wonder how many other Italians in the moment were suffering from whiplash, as their sense of friends and foes made a sudden about-face.
But maybe that’s too narrow a conception of liberation. Perhaps what Italians also were seeking liberation from was the divisive rhetoric, the demonization of others, the embrace of simplistic and faulty solutions.
Such a consideration, though, brings me back to the present, and these two different Liberation Day rallies in the Piazza della Cattedrale. Jacobin Magazine, which is certainly an ideologically charged source aligned with leftist movements, published a piece on this subject nine years ago, noting that the original Liberation Day in 1946 was organized “as the parties of the National Liberation Committee (CLN) from Christian Democrats to Socialists and Communists sought to identify themselves with “universal” values of freedom, democracy, and national unity.” The article notes that 60% of the partisan resistance was associated with Italy’s Communist Party, the PCI. However, “as the intense antifascist mobilization turned into the foundation of a parliamentary democracy, old elites soon reasserted their control over the state.” The Christian Democrats quickly established themselves as the dominant party and a Cold War darling, a bulwark against the potential rise of communism in Italy, and in its rise to power it embraced some former right-wing elements. This is not the space to take a deeper dive into Italian post-war politics; the point I’d like to make here is that, from its origins, Liberation Day was already a narrative device, a tool to assert a very particular story about Italy.
The three faces of Este family are still on display in Ferrara, but I’m not sure how much wisdom is represented among them. The past–the story of Italian liberation, the complicity of the years prior to it, and the breakdown of the antifascist alliance–remains unresolved. The present–institutional solemnity vs. urgent calls for human rights in Italy and abroad–looks completely different depending upon who has the microphone. The closest we have to consensus is related to the future, and the growing concern about what lies ahead. What an odd world, when we can’t agree about the past or the present, but we see the future in the same light.
