Rome

short words, so the food itself had become absurdly elaborate, far beyond the reach of any domestic kitchen, and none too edible in any case. And yet, if one reads its descriptions, it does seem to have something in common with the crazier fantasies of extreme New Cuisine, as practiced by such celebrity cooks as the Catalan Ferran Adria. Gustatory fantasists like Fillia represented an absurdist revolt against the vernacular food-philosophy of the great normalizers of Italian cuisine, such as Pellegrino Artusi, whose book Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well had gone through numberless editions by then and was regarded as the bible of authentic cooking.

One may well ask, what part did the city of Rome play in the development of Italy’s one and only important modern-art movement? In fact, a very important one. To Futurists, it represented the Enemy—historical consciousness, and all that was summed up in the term “passeism,” worship of the past. The Futurists hated the place for its immense authority, its age and continuity, and of course for its beauty, which they were most reluctant to recognize. Of course, to rail against the long achievements of thought, feeling, and technique that were summed up in the monuments of Rome was inevitably to look like a beetle whining about a pyramid: it was going to stay in the way, so get used to it. But they could indulge their fantasies. One Futurist publication ran a drawing of what Piazza di Spagna might look like without such passeist encumbrances as Bernini’s Barcaccia Fountain—in the background, the familiar shapes of Santissima Trinita dei Monti and the obelisk above the familiar three-stage rise of the Spanish Steps; in the foreground, an ugly blank piazza full of electric streetcars and overhead wires. This was supposed to be Progress.

Of all places on earth, Rome was the one where operatically phrased invective against the past sounded tinniest. The Manifesto of Futurist Architecture said its authors (mainly Sant’Elia, with input from Marinetti and probably Boccioni) would “combat and despise” all classical architecture, along with “the embalming, reconstruction, and reproduction of ancient monuments,” all perpendicular and horizontal lines, all cubical and pyramidal forms. That more or less took care of everything from the Etruscans to the Vittorio Emanuele monument—2,500 years out the window. No wonder Marinetti and his allies preferred the industrial cities of the north, Milan and Turin.

If Cola di Rienzo, in the fourteenth century, was the first proletarian to rise to great political power in Rome, then Benito Mussolini in the twentieth century was the last.

The parallels between the two men are irresistible: the humble working-class origins, the force of character and oratorical power, the belief in oneself as the chosen figure of destiny. Cola was obsessed with the belief that the ancient glories of the Roman Empire could be reincarnated in him and revived under his rule. So was Mussolini, on an even more grandiose scale. Both men had strong charisma and called forth surging, weeping extremes of fanatical loyalty from their massed followers.

Both regarded themselves, and were for a time seen by their fellow Italians, as inspired tribunes of the people, although Mussolini (astutely, for his own political purposes) refused to promote the kind of class hostility to the rich and titled that marked Cola’s politics, because that idea reeked of communism and he needed the support of the rich and powerful.

Each had his intellectual allies and supporters: Cola had the (episodic) backing of the greatest of Italy’s humanist writers after Dante himself, Petrarch; and whereas no Italian writer of that stature was at work in the 1920s and ’30s, Mussolini had a mentor and literary figurehead in Gabriele D’Annunzio. Both came to sticky ends: Cola lynched by a mob under the shadow of the Ara Coeli in Rome, Mussolini shot by communist partisans and strung by the heels from the awning of a gas station in Milan. And although there is little doubt that Cola (in his less spiritually exalted moments) was a nicer guy than the ruthless and staggeringly narcissistic Mussolini, the two men incarnated a style of operatic, self-dramatizing populist leadership that still seems peculiarly Italian and, truth to tell, still makes many Italians feel nostalgic.

Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was born under the sign of Leo on July 29, 1883, in Dovia di Predappio, a small village in Emilia-Romagna. His father, Alessandro Mussolini, was a blacksmith and a committed anti-clerical socialist. His mother, Rosa Maltoni, was a schoolteacher. He was the eldest of three children. His names bore a heavy load as political emblems: “Benito” after the Mexican radical Benito Juarez, “Amilcare” from an Italian socialist, Amilcare Cipriani, and “Andrea” from another Italian socialist, Andrea Costa. Predappio only figures in Italian popular culture because Mussolini was born there, and various canzoni on the later left stemmed from that:

Se Rosa, illuminata de alma luce,

La notte in cui fu concepito Il Duce,

Avrebbe, in lo fabbro predappiano,

Invece della fica, presentato l’ano,

L’avrebbe preso in culo quella sera

Rosa soltanto, ma non l’Italia intera.

“If Rosa, lit up by divine light/The night The Leader was conceived/There, in the forge at Predappio/Had presented her anus instead of her twat/The one who got it up the ass would be/Just Rosa—not the whole of Italy.”

Young Benito helped his father in the forge; just as there had been nothing false about Adolf Hitler’s claims to have served devotedly and bravely at Ypres, so Mussolini’s frequent accounts of being a son of the working class were quite true. Just as his father was a passionate socialist, so the son was stubbornly rebellious and a sometimes violent delinquent at his priest-run boarding school. One gesture that made him particularly unpopular with the local citizens was to station himself in plain view outside the village church in Predappio and pelt its worshippers with stones as they filed out after morning Mass. He was bright, his grades were good, but because of his surly and easily inflamed temper, he had difficulty finding and keeping work as a schoolteacher when he graduated. In 1902, he moved to Switzerland, with no better luck. His adherence to socialism and his general rowdiness caused him to land briefly in jail, and finally to be deported as an unemployed alien. Back in Italy, he at last fetched up in journalism in 1908, editing the Trento Socialist Party’s newspaper, L’avvenire del lavoratore (The Worker’s Future). Trento was under the control of Austria- Hungary, which did not take an indulgent view of either Mussolini’s anti-clericalism or his choleric attacks on Austrian royalty. Eventually, Mussolini was deported from Trento, back to Italy proper, where he got a writing and editing job with the socialist newspaper Il popolo, followed by another with the more leftist organ Avanti! But, despite his opposition to the war with Austria, Mussolini was called up by the draft in mid-1915. In all he served about nine months under fire in the trenches, until he was severely wounded by an accidental mortar-bomb explosion and, in 1917, invalided out of active service.

It took the Great War to disabuse young Mussolini of his father’s dreams of socialism. This catastrophically divisive conflict, this huge international machine for the production of corpses, had put paid to the ideals of voluntary class cooperation across national boundaries that had suffused the socialism of a previous generation. There would be no peaceful internationale in the bright future. Instead, there would be struggle, unremitting and pitiless, whose result would be the abolition of the idea that class war could or should define society’s shape. “Socialism as a doctrine was already dead,” Mussolini later wrote. “It continued to exist only