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Imitating Mussolini with Advantages: The Case of Edgardo Sulis

With the new millennium and the fresh political and cultural atmosphere in Italy, the internationally distinguished1 historian Roberto Vivarelli has come out. He has frankly acknowledged his wartime loyalty to fascism to the very last. As a teenager he had been educated to believe without question that Mussolini’s dictatorship was ‘a regime above the highs and lows of history and destined to endure’. For his cohort, he has recalled, ‘Fascism was a myth, which filled our life and to which we gave our fervent commitment.’2 His loyalty was absolute and, he now admits, it blinded him to the evil of the Salò Republic’s atrocious Nazi ally, although he adds in somewhat predictable self-defence that most Repubblica Sociale Italiana (RSI) militants, including himself, had felt ‘no resentment towards the Jews’.3 He seems to view antiSemitism as the only absolute Nazi-fascist evil. So, while he was in a more ordinary world just another schoolboy (he was born in 1929), in spring 1945 Vivarelli had made a personal journey to the front to die for his Italy and, failing in that quest, had returned on 24 April to Milan. The following day, he was steadfastly serving in Party Secretary Alessandro Pavolini’s personal guard and hoping against hope that fascism would continue to fight.4 When the news spread of Mussolini’s death and the humiliation and disfigurement of his corpse at the Piazzale Loreto, the young Vivarelli was appalled and disgusted.5 Of course, the defeat and demolition of fascism had to be endured; its historical moment had ended. Over the next few months, as postwar life began, Vivarelli learned to conceal his past and was only converted to liberal ‘democracy’ in 1949. Nonetheless, he does not regard himself as in any sense pentito (repentant). Rather, he remains proud of his boyhood choices. He argues stoutly that he R.J.B. Bosworth