By far the most memorable edition of the Italian newspaper Il Giornale’s front page, on the anniversary of the Milan massacre in 1943, was the anti-fascist icon Zio Cito looking up his nostrils.
The Daily Telegraph has gone exclusive with the newspaper for a special weekend issue, reported with art by its photographer Davide Meloni. It is the only Italian newspaper in a special edition offering a wider look at the ongoing legacy of fascism, featuring contributions from Franco B. Gabarra, a professor of European history at Columbia University; Anna Maria Alvini, a professor of Italian Italian at Columbia; Matteo Orsina, a historian at the University of Bonn; and Fiorellino, a historian at Chiesa San Francesco of Assisi.
Il Giornale has always been an almost sardonic voice about Italian politics, and on 31 October 1943 it was publishing the photos of the Campari Brothers (son and brother-in-law of the murdered fascist leader Benito Mussolini) firing into the crowd at the burning of the Beppe Deida house in Milan, the hotbed of fascist activity in Italy during the wartime years. Among the dead were two prominent women: prominent journalist Tito Mantina and Zio Cito’s editor, Graziella Horet.
Following the attack, it took a week for there to be charges against the Antrim Brothers, two former members of the Italian army who, together with their uncle Julius II, were accused of making Molotov cocktails and of having burned the Beppe Deida home. A military court charged the Antrim Brothers with the “display of arms”, and they were convicted of collaborating with the enemy during the war. No trial was ever held for Zio Cito, and in 1946, after nearly half a century of courts’ decisions, Zio Cito and its editor sued the journalists charged with smearing the Antrim Brothers.
In the week following the massacre the international press covered the events in Milan with far greater interest than in the days immediately after the fire. Il Giornale instead used the event to mount an attack on the Italian press, asserting that their coverage had been “biased and inspired by subservience to a new fascism”. Rather than immediately focusing on the fire or the victims, the newspapers had dealt only with the introduction of fascism in Italy, the paper argued. Zio Cito, the paper accused, was “condemned to death for the simple reason that it questioned the very facts that the anti-fascists accepted”. The indignation of the Italian press, the paper declared, amounted to “[a] manipulation and bloodlust”.
Today, despite the gravity of what happened in the Beppe Deida house on 31 October 1943, or of the terrorist attacks of a couple of weeks earlier in Rome and Milan, a debate is currently taking place in Italy about the establishment of a national memorial for fascism, which has now transformed into a massive (and rather ugly) fight between the far-right League and Italy’s main Communist party, Cgil.
On 28 October, the memorial plaque unveiled in Piazza Vittorio Emanuele in Milan was cut down by the Cgil, who claimed that the plaque was made by the Italian state without their consent. On 28 November, the cut-down plaque was replaced by the League, who said that the original plaque should have been renamed with the adjective “past it”, given how fascism has passed over into academicism. Today, the number of the monument stands at 600 – only 200 of which have survived the subsequent decades – with the overwhelming majority in Piazza Vittorio Emanuele.
