My night with Mussolini’s ghost

I came to Italy to write a biography of Benito Mussolini in the summer of 1998 and never left because in the bar next to the fascist dictator’s abandoned castle I met a woman who became my wife.

The castle in the foothills of the Apennines looks down on the small town of Predappio, where the revolutionary socialist who invented fascism was born and is buried. As a result, I have had many meetings with members of the Mussolini family and have, I suspect, even talked with the Duce himself. Mussolini is a name that continues to torment Italy, just as the word ‘fascism’ continues to torment the world. And it all began there in Predappio.

Yet in London, before I left, people in the bars I used to haunt did not seem to know who Mussolini was. So when women asked me, as they always did so swiftly and surgically, ‘Yes, but what do you do?’, I’d find myself replying: ‘I’m writing a biography of Mussolini, the famous fashion designer.’

I’ve been thinking about this again because just before Christmas, Mussolini’s 22-year-old great-grandson, Romano, scored his first goal as a professional footballer in a second division match. In videos of the event posted on social media a voice in the stadium shouts through the PA system: ‘Romano!’ And each time, several hundred people in the crowd raise their right arms as one in a fascist salute and shout: ‘Mussolini!’

I knew quite well the young footballer’s grandfather, also Romano, the fourth of Mussolini’s five legitimate children, once married to Sofia Loren’s sister. We used to discuss the Mussolini diaries, about which we were both experts. Like me, he was always short of money, and used to churn out paintings of clown faces to sell as if that was all he had to say about his father.

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It is striking that Romano the footballer uses the Mussolini surname of his mother – Alessandra, the former right-wing MP who once stripped off for Playboy and with whom I once shared a cigarette – rather than his father’s, Floriani.