The Body of Il Duce: Mussolini's Corpse and the Fortunes of Italy - Softcover

Sergio Luzzatto is a professor of modern history at the University of Turin, Italy. He is the author of four works of history, and a regular contributor to the leading Italian dailies La Stampa and Corriere della Sera. He lives in Italy.

The corpse of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini has been a ghoulish political football. In addition to his capture and execution in April 1945, historian Luzzatto examines the body's display in Milan, its subsequent peregrinations, and the indelible impression of the death spectacle on the Italian political and literary imagination. As Luzzatto points out, for true-believing Fascists, Mussolini's propagandized image was not effaced by the degradation of Il Duce's body. One named Domenico Luccisi stole the coffin in 1946, but not for long, and it was secreted in a convent until 1957, when it was reinterred in Mussolini's hometown, replete with a shrine for his admirers. Luccisi parlayed his devotional stunt into a political career; likewise, Mussolini's executioner, Communist Walter Audisio, also entered parliament. Meanwhile Italian writers such as Carlo Emilio Gadda and Curzio Malaparte were tapping Mussolini's pre- and postmortem appearance for novels exploring the postwar continuation in Italian politics of neo-Fascism. A perceptive chronicle of a bizarre undercurrent in Italian history. Gilbert Taylor
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