Italy remembers its proud past with names on streets and busts in the piazzas. Streets are named for poets, composers, liberators, historical dates (XX Settembre), Communist thinkers (Antonio Gramsci), Machiavelli, and even Sacco and Vanzetti, the Italian-American anarchists executed by Massachusetts in 1927.

But you don’t see many monuments to Benito Mussolini or his era (1922 to 1943). He loomed large and pompous in those years as “Il Duce,” strutting around in military finery as the populi emotionally fell in line behind a revival of Imperial Roman grandiosity. Italy was all his, until he and his mistress were executed and hung upside down in public, humiliated, rejected, and officially forgotten. An Italian website had found some 1,400 monuments as a matter of history, but they are an embarrassment that even the conservative party of Prime Minister Giorgia Melona promises not to revive.

 One of Mussolini’s symbols from ancient Rome was the fasces, a bundle of rods with an ax, representing the power of the state. It once appeared on the back of the U.S. dime. Mussolini created the word Fascism for the political system he created “to make the trains run on time.” According to Google’s n-gram of printed words since 1800, “fascism” and “fascists” were virtually non-existent until Mussolini coined the terms in 1922.

You hear the word a lot today in debates about Trump. He’s a fascist, some say. Not, say the MAGA folk. 

To resolve that question, you need to watch a good documentary on Mussolini by Slice Who? on YouTube. No, Trump is not a fascist. He’s unlike Mussolini is so many ways. Let me count a few.

Mussolini was much better at stirring up fears of Communists. Trump calls every Democrat a crazy communist, and it means nothing. In Mussolini’s Italy, there really were organized Communists, and anarchists and bomb-throwers. He exaggerated the threat and fear much more effectively than Trump.

Mussolini had real machismo. He boasted of keeping a mistress, and having almost daily dalliances with other women. Trump is a wimp in this department. He says he’s a faithful husband, and even swore to it in a few court cases (that he lost).

Mussolini got rid of all dissent, and had vast multitudes organized to praise him in public squares. His thugs were well organized and saluted together with daggers held high. Trump’s dissenters continue their peaceful protests by the millions, and it’s growing. His thugs look pathetic by comparison. They failed to overthrow the government in 2022, and were thrown in jail (until Trump commuted their sentences).

The biggest difference is that Mussolini was seen as a powerful figure for years, then suddenly, was a clown, an executed, humiliated clown. The way he is depicted in Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” seems to be the way he is viewed by most Italians today.

A Swiss man having drinks with his girlfriend in a piazza told us Europeans view Trump as a clown. But opinion is still divided on that in America.