Free The Body of Il Duce by Sergio Luzzatto

5
    T HE E XECUTIONER
    With their invented last words, imagined autopsies, and fantasized trials, the writers who put Mussolini’s case to the people swelled the ideological arsenal of anti-anti-Fascism and kept the dictator vividly present. But the history of Il Duce’s posthumous life requires mention of a third party, one that stood between the dicator and the country: the executioner. To reconstruct Il Duce’s existence beyond the grave during 1946–57, when his body was hidden from public view, we need to look sideways, at the man who shot him.
    The story of Il Duce’s body was shaped by living men, and the first to have made his mark was the executioner, Colonel Valerio. When Italians thought of Colonel Valerio, they thought of Mussolini. Grateful to him or not, they inevitably saw the dead man embodied in the live one.
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    WHO SHOT MUSSOLINI? In Italy in 1947, few people could have answered the question. Immediately after Il Duce’s execution, the Communist daily l’Unità reported the role of a certain Colonel Valerio, a Communist partisan. But just who stood behind the nom de guerre remained a mystery. What did he look like, the man who had erased Mussolini from the face of the earth? As we have seen, rumors had emerged from the shores of Lake Como that the executioner was as charismatic a figure as the one executed, that the action had been carried out by Cino Moscatelli, a famous partisan. When the rumor proved false, there was no further word on the man responsible.
    In Rome, the Communist Party leaders did nothing to solve the question. A young party member who worked at the headquarters recalled that “a special air of admiration and mystery” surrounded two functionaries in the party executive, Walter Audisio and Aldo Lampredi. 1 It was whispered that they had taken part in the action on Lake Como, but no one dared to ask direct questions. The ability to keep secrets seemed to be an essential requisite for an organization that was just emerging from twenty years of clandestine activity. But neither the economic and social imperatives of rebuilding the country nor the important postwar political issues kept Italians from being curious about the executioner. On the contrary, as Resistance momentum declined and the removal of former Fascists from office slowed, many ex-Resistance fighters were tempted to see Mussolini’s executioner as the sole winner in a civil war that had otherwise been lost. At the first Socialist Party congress following the Liberation, held in Florence in the spring of 1946, party leader Pietro Nenni was applauded when he said that only one man had really been successful in eliminating Fascists from public life—Colonel Valerio.
    A few months later, after the ballot to establish the constituent assembly, in which the Christian Democrats received more votes than parties of the left, ex-partisans felt less than enthusiastic about how the vote had gone. The amnesty for Fascists promoted by Justice Minister Palmiro Togliatti, Communist Party secretary, was also a source of rancor. To make matters worse, the Fascists were back on the scene with stunts like the theft of Mussolini’s remains. Perhaps it was no surprise that on the left, too, there was a desire for political action. So at the end of August 1946, a few dozen ex-partisans from Asti, in Piedmont, declared the “rebellion of Santa Libera,” after the village in the Langhe district where they barricaded themselves in. They called for the expulsion of Fascist functionaries from office and for Togliatti’s amnesty to be overturned. The prestige of Cino Moscatelli, acting as mediator, was required to persuade the rebels to back down.
    At this point, nobody still believed that Moscatelli had been Il Duce’s executioner, yet a year and a half after his death only a handful Communist leaders knew Colonel Valerio’s real identity. The habits of secrecy