Paolo Heywood's "Burying Mussolini"

Paolo Heywood is Associate Professor of anthropology at Durham University. He is the author of After Difference, editor of New Anthropologies of Italy, and the co-editor of Beyond Description.

Heywood applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Burying Mussolini: Ordinary Life in the Shadows of Fascism, and reported the following:

Burying Mussolini is about how much work it can take to be "ordinary." The Fascist regime in Italy worked very hard to present itself as representing "ordinary Italians," partly by emphasising the "ordinary" youth and upbringing of its leader, Benito Mussolini, in his hometown of Predappio, in the mountains between Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna.

A century later, and Predappio itself looks anything but ordinary. Mussolini rebuilt the whole town as a sort of open-air museum to his early life, and after his body was buried in the family crypt Predappio became a pilgrimage site for neo-fascist visitors and "dark" tourists, drawing hundreds of thousands to it every year. All of this can make it look to the casual outsider like a kind of grotesque, fascist theme park.

Ironically, one of the ways in which people who live in Predappio – who themselves mostly have little sympathy with the politics of their visitors – cope with life in the shadow of this difficult heritage is by ignoring it and working hard to make their town "ordinary."

Page 99 of the book is pretty representative of this wider argument. It comes at the beginning of a chapter about the use of public space in Predappio, and draws a contrast with the famous arguments of Michel de Certeau about the ways in which "everyday" or "ordinary" spaces are accumulations of time and history.

The contrast between this argument and the way use of space often works in Predappio is twofold: firstly, de Certeau sometimes writes as if certain kinds of spaces – like bustling city streets from the pedestrian’s point of view – are "everyday" or "ordinary" by nature. Whereas because "ordinariness" is a marked quality in Predappio, there’s nothing natural about spaces that get designated and imagined as ordinary there. Often when people think about an "ordinary" space they think about a space cleansed of association with the heritage that’s otherwise so ubiquitous in Predappio – that means such spaces take work to create. Secondly, the work involved in making such "everyday spaces" is a kind of evacuation of history. A good example is the castle described on page 99, a mediaeval fortress on a hill above the town, which was given to Mussolini to use as his summer residence. Its interior was recently renovated to remove all trace of this past and turn it into a business centre. The result is that inside it looks like the kind of characterless commercial real estate you can find all over the world – but this sort of "non-placeness" is actually preferable for many locals to the places of history de Certeau imagines as "everyday" and "ordinary."

Learn more about Burying Mussolini at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue