Mussolini fait courir les foules!

Il y a de ces phénomènes qui m'échappent... Trois fois par année on rend hommage à l'ancien leader: pour commémorer sa naissance, sa mort et la marche sur Rome de 1922.

"The dress code was rigorously black. The chants nostalgic, a medley of Fascist truisms peppered with clipped bursts of “Duce, Duce, Duce” that was sharply shushed when the straggly parade entered the cemetery in this central Italian town late last month to arrive at its mecca: the tomb of the former Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini.

“Why, why do you come here, who is this man Mussolini?” asked the celebrant, Giulio Tam, a priest with the Society of St. Pius X, a traditionalist Catholic sect that broke with the Vatican 20 years ago.

“We come to thank this man for the most European, most Mediterranean, most original of ideas,” answered Father Tam, a familiar figure in right-wing circles, before he began reciting the rosary.

So it goes in Predappio, three times a year, to commemorate the day of Mussolini’s birth (on July 29, 1883, in a house not far from the cemetery), his death (at the hands of partisans on April, 28, 1945) and the so-called March on Rome, which brought Mussolini’s party to power in Italy in October 1922.

“I’ve been coming here, at least once or twice a year, since Aug. 31, 1957, the day they brought the corpse of the Duce here,” said Marcello, a personable 85-year-old veteran who asked that his last name not be used. “My faith in him has remained intact.”

They came in busloads, from Turin to Palermo, on a pilgrimage of sorts.

“Like Christians going to St. Peter’s, except that here some wear a fez,” said Gianni, a man from Turin, of the black felt hat in the shape of a truncated cone that became part of the uniform of the Fascist black shirts worn here by a handful of meticulously groomed young men. “But we’re not anachronistic; we have credit cards. We don’t want to restore that era, we just don’t want to deny it either.”

Still others came to signify an epoch in which they believe that Italy, in contrast to today, counted for something in the world. “Italy needs a distinct change, we’re in the hands of politicians who are unworthy to have been voted,” said Enrico Cozzani, the owner of a security firm based in Lucca. “We’re the laughingstock of Europe.”"

La suite:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/world/europe/tourists-still-drawn-to-tomb-of-mussolini-il-duce-in-italy.html?hp