Feeling Political in Military Cemeteries: Commemoration Politics in Fascist Italy

Abstract

Rome, 28 October 2020: Italian neo-fascist groups meet, as they have done on this date for the last four years, at a chapel built by Benito Mussolini within Rome’s main cemetery in order to commemorate those who gave their lives for Fascism. 1 Right arms outstretched, they march in procession and lay flowers in memory of the Fascist ‘martyrs’. In Italy and beyond, today’s far Right has inherited from interwar fascism a political strategy that uses the commemoration of the dead as a powerful source of emotions. Now, as in the early twentieth century, feelings elicited by death are seen to offer a direct route to political persuasion.