By Alvise Armellini
ROME (Reuters) – A small town on Italy’s Lake Garda that was home to Italy’s last fascist government voted late on Wednesday to cancel an honorary citizenship for Benito Mussolini.
Mussolini was Italy’s leader from 1922 to 1943, but he also led a Nazi-allied administration limited to the north of the country in 1943-1945, which was headquartered in Salo.
The town, along with a large number of other Italian municipalities, granted honorary citizenship to Mussolini during the early years of his regime.
Salo’s local council, held by a left-leaning administration, voted by a 12-3 margin in favour of scrapping the symbolic title, after two other failed attempts in recent years.
“Nobody wants to cancel a historic fact … but we want to add a new page with strong symbolic value” and show that Mussolini has no place in today’s Italy, Mayor Francesco Cagnini said.
Right-wing opposition councillor Erminia Bonfanti retorted that the initiative against a dictator who had been dead for 80 years was “a useless and senseless battle against a ghost”.
There is no official record of how many Italian towns and cities still count Mussolini as an honorary citizen, but there are at least several hundred.
A left-wing bastion such as Bologna is among them. On the other hand, Mussolini’s citizenship was cancelled 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 mixed with soccer hooligans, continue to glorify the long-dead regime.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, 48, was a Mussolini sympathiser in her youth, but she has sought to make her Brothers of Italy party more mainstream and considers herself a national conservative.
(Reporting by Alvise Armellini; Edited by Crispian Balmer)
