Honorary citizenship in Mussolini, the hometown of the last fascist government in Italy
Author: Alvise Armellini
Rome (Reuters) – A small town on Lake Garda, Italy, is the last fascist government in Italy voted Wednesday night to cancel the honorary citizenship of Benito Mussolini.
Mussolini was the Italian leader from 1922 to 1943, but he also led the Nazi coalition government was confined to the north of the country and was headquartered in Salo.
The town, along with many other Italian municipalities, granted Mussolini honorary citizenship in the early days of his regime.
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The local council in Salo, chaired by the left-leaning government, voted for the symbolic title by a 12-3 advantage, following two other failed attempts in recent years.
Francesco Cagnini said: “No one wants to cancel a historic fact…but we want to add a new page with strong symbolic value” and shows that Mussolini has no place in Italy today.
Right-wing opposition MP Erminia Bonfanti retorted that the initiative against a dictator who had been dead for 80 years was “a useless and meaningless battle with the ghost.”
There is no official record of how many Italian towns and cities still regard Mussolini as honorary citizen, but at least a few hundred.
These include left-wing fortresses, such as Bologna. On the other hand, Mussolini’s citizenship was canceled in Florence in 2009, in Turin in 2014 and in Pisa in 2017.
The legacy of fascism remains a controversial topic in Italy, where fringe far-right groups often mingle with football hooligans to continue glorifying the late regime.
Giorgia Meloni, 48, was a sympathizer for Mussolini when she was young, but she tried to make the Italian party brothers more mainstream and considered herself a national conservative.
(Reported by Alvise Armellini; Edited by Crispian Balmer)
