Original subtitles

There is a trending retweet of yours.

You retweeted from @ilduce2016.

It was a Mussolini quote but you didn't know it was his.

It said: "It is better to live one day as a lion

than one hundred years as a sheep".

It's a famous Mussolini quote you retweeted.

Do you like the quote? Did you know it was Mussolini?.

It's OK to know it was Mussolini.

Mussolini was Mussolini. It's a very good quote,

it's a very interesting quote, I know who said the quote.

What difference does that make? Whether it's Mussolini or somebody else.

It's certainly a very interesting quote.

That's probably why I have, between Facebook and Twitter,

14 million people. - Do you want to be associated--

It's a very interesting quote and people can talk about it.

Do you want to be associated with a fascist?

No, I want to be associated with interesting quotes.

And I have almost 14 million people

between Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

and we do interesting things

and I sent it out, and certainly it got your attention, didn't it?

CINEMA IS THE MOST POWERFUL WEAPON

THE MARCH ON ROME

1. TO THE MARCH

Our story begins in Naples.

Italy's first female filmmaker shows us a market-place in Naples.

This lovely shot of a market seller.

THE TABLE OF THE POOR

Who do we see here?

Sailors, middle-class men and boaters.

Older people, seated. Street children.

It's the Festa Del Carmine.

On the left, who is that boy looking at us?

Who is she, on the right?

It's 1922.

The century is young.

It's recovering from a horrific war.

And it has this luminous, new art form:

Cinema.

Another Naples film now.

Its famous bay and mount Vesuvius.

This movie looks more romantic than Elvira Notari's.

But this pan suggests otherwise. Black shirts in Naples.

Then this caption:

"Special trains conduct to Naples the wonderful fascist forces."

Do we recoil at this?

I saw it in Rome, A Noi!

It made me happy to see the men, the blackshirts.

It's late October, 1922.

What became the National Fascist Party of Italy,

had been founded in Milan three years earlier.

We're here in Naples because there is a fascist rally

on the 24th of October, 1922.

It's late October, 1922.

About half of that number will show up.

The film is called A Noi!, "To Us".

It was directed by this man, Umberto Paradisi.

A Noi! has been extensively studied by historian Tony Saccucci.

It was presented as an accurate portrait of key events in the rise of fascism.

But it distorted the truth. A disturbing truth.

As people gather, we begin to realize what we're looking at here.

A kind of source of denial for far-right politics.

A Noi! is three years before

Sergei Eisenstein's repulsive propaganda film Battleship Potemkin.

And it's 13 years before Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will.

A Noi! started a ball rolling.

The fascist movement's leader was a 39-year-old former socialist and journalist.

The film mentions him, calling him il Duce.

But he's kept almost out of sight, or in long shot for some time.

The fascist leader is Benito Mussolini.

His absence at the start of the film is a hole in A Noi!.

It has lots of holes.

Holes that reveal its anxieties, its politics.

And despite Mussolini's near absence,

we know what he said here, in Naples, on the 24th of October, 1922.

"Either they give us the government, or we will take it."

It's more than 17 minutes before director Paradisi

finally shows him to us, in close-up.

Is this the right way to do so?

Isn't there something of horror cinema here?

His intertitle is backed by rods and an ax tied together.

The symbol of fascism.

Which is still on some drain covers in Trastevere, in Rome.

Just nine days later,

Mussolini will become Italy's youngest Prime Minister at the time.

What a nine days.

As we will see towards the end of A Noi!

Mussolini's ambiguous presence in the film will become more revealing

and it will have implications for Italy and for the world.

Italy was going in the wrong direction.

We all wanted... I wanted, a renewal in power.

Il Duce said that Italy wanted peace, tranquility, work and calm.

He said that he would guarantee all this,

with love, if possible, and by force if necessary.

Paradisi's film can't quite hide the fact

that the field of the rally in Naples on the 24th of October, 1922, was not full.

But he stacks people in his foregrounds to fill his shots.

And he frames crowds tightly in long shot to suggest massing.

It's here that A Noi! leaves Naples to tell the story of what happened next.

A march was hastily arranged.

The blackshirts in Naples and from elsewhere would walk to Italy's capital.

A march on Rome.

They wanted Rome's power to be their power.

It's antiquity would affirm their right and glory.

But again, Paradisi's film deceives.

When the march starts, this tells us that it's the 28th and 29th of October,

but what follows was probably shot on the 30th and 31st of October.

Why excise or lie about these two days?

For a number of complicated reasons, including this, rain.

It poured as the blackshirts marched.

The ground was muddy, they were cold and miserable.

But soaking, cold and miserable is not heroic.

It wasn't the image the fascists wanted to send around the world,

so Paradisi removed the rain.

The march, the fascists were already calling it a revolution,

had to be golden, Virgilian.

It had to feel like a triumphal arch.

For history's sake, for power's sake, it needed to seem anointed,

elevated, rigorous.

They wanted the march to be like this, solid and awe-inspiring,

but these are movie sets in Rome's Cinecittà film studio.

The rain was too messy, too real,

so Paradisi faked it, in the way that cinema fakes it.

The blackshirts are in Rome now.

Some mud here, you can't keep reality out of a film entirely.

We'll hear more about the government, the background leader,

but what's relevant now is that on the 28th of October,

Liberal Prime Minister Luigi Facta eclared a state of siege.

He knew that the fascists were planning a coup.

But King Vittorio Emanuele the III refused to approve the declaration.

And, so, the same morning the siege was undeclared.

Why? Was there a bigger story here? A back-story?

Mussolini wasn't on the march, he stayed in Milan in case the coup failed,

in which case he could ump the fence to Switzerland.

But when things went his way, he got on a train, arrived here, in Rome.

Paradisi's film suggests that he arrived before he did,

so, back, inserting him into the action.

Mussolini stands impatient now in Piazza del Popolo.

The tall guy on the left with glasses is Giacomo Acerbo,

who will become under-secretary of the Prime Minister's office.

And he will promote a law,

that will guarantee Mussolini two-thirds of the seats in parliament.

16 seconds earlier, in A Noi!,

we see two cameras in the frame, on the left and right here.

And of course, a camera is filming, so we know that Paradisi had three cameras.

He could film from more angles now.

Mussolini walks to the Villa Borghese.

It's the 31st of October,

just seven days after the start of our story in Naples.

And yesterday, out of sight, unfilmed by Paradisi's cameras,

the compliant king who had been on the throne for 22 years,

transferred power to Benito Mussolini.

He strides ahead, he's Prime Minister now.

What's happening?

What was in Mussolini's mind as he walked to the Villa Borghese on this day?

The speed of events?

How easy it was?

How the center caved?

What did he not see?

He later said: "It was I who wanted this march.

I who imposed it. I who took the plunge."

But that's not quite true. There's a bigger story.

We are at the Quirinale Palace now. A crowd of people.

They are waiting for Mussolini to come out of the Quirinale.

The blackshirts are in Rome. But these are mostly civilians.

If we rewind, we can ee just a few fascists.

Actual Romans gathered to look. But they are mostly bemused.

They called the fascists "the black devils".

Actual Romans don't salute in large numbers.

The blackshirts want to create an uprising,

but the people do not rise up.

Some of them block this bridge to try to stop the march from entering the city.

Itching for a fight, the blackshirts don't get one.

And Paradisi tries to do invisible edits.

Here a match-cut on the street lamp.

And here the camera jumps backwards and re-shoots the same people.

Visually tripling the size of the crowd.

And another multiplication.

On the back of the truck is written "Viva il Re". "Long live the king".

On the side is chalked "Viva Italia". "Long live Italy".

And then in the next shot,

the same truck with the same writing, "Viva Italia" again.

But this time the writing is backwards. The shot is flipped.

And then the same truck with the same markings again.

And once they're in Rome, what will the blackshirts do?

A year previously, on the 4th of November, 1921,

An unknown soldier had been buried at the altar of the nation,

in the Altare della Patria.

The ceremony, the crowds, the ritual...

The 4th of November was the day World War I ended for Italy

and it became a landmark day, a national day.

The tomb of the Unknown Soldier is still guarded.

If you want to show your patriotism or mark your territory,

this is the place to go.

And so, the blackshirts marched to here. They will climb the famous steps.

The old soldiers.

Crowds lined the steps, waiting for the climb to this sacred place.

Waiting for Mussolini's ascent,

waiting for the fascists to visit the tomb of the Unknown Soldier,

the martyr.

But something isn't quite right.

These two blue shirts, nationalists, pass in front of the camera.

The Altare della Patria is behind us.

The blackshirts head towards it and then, one, two, three,

four, five shots later... There are the two blue shirts, again.

And then one, two, three,

four, five shots later, again there they are, again.

Paradisi's editing is tripling things, again.

And we see the leg of a tripod, here.

On the far right, a man is moved out of shot.

Italy has been renewed.

Back at the Altare della Patria,

we're still waiting for the climb to the Unknown Soldier,

more proof that there are at least three cameras,

as we can see two cameramen at the top here.

They are also ready and waiting. And then we notice something.

Mussolini is not here, at the climactic moment,

The man who loves the limelight, who loves center-stage,

isn't even on the stage.

Why not? Where is he? What's happening?

Here is the head of the parade, the banner.

The fascists are walking towards the Altare della Patria,

which, again, is behind us.

Still, no Mussolini. He's probably at the Savoy Hotel.

This is the room where he stayed.

Doing deals, planning the next stages of, what we call, this unfolding event.

The formation of a government. A coup d'etat.

And now the leaders of the march have stopped. They are waiting. On what?

And then, a shot from the camera in the middle of the piazza that we saw earlier.

And we notice, on the extreme left,

that the banner at the head of the march has gone past the foot of the steps.

The march hasn't gone up.

It went towards the Altare della Patria,

but then turned left, like a horse refusing a jump.

And here, from the steps of the Altare, we can see the march turn.

and people and cameramen surprised that the marchers don't climb,

run to watch and film as the march turns.

Behind the scenes, out of view,

deals were being done, which would change Italy.

Here, in public, we were seeing something proxy.

The tired marchers had been denied a fight and instead were given a ceremony,

a strut through the Eternal City.

They were denied the climax of the ceremony

because, of course, if Mussolini wasn't there

to make the sacred climb, then no one would make the climb.

And so, they walk away, these men fueled by anger.

Could they have known the true backstory of their march?

It involves this man, Gabrielle D'Annunzio.

Dandy, poet, libertine, aviator,

death cultist, hyper-nationalist.

He lulled like a Hollywood starlet, desperate to be seen.

He lulled liken an Oscar Wildeian aesthete, desperate to be read.

And he was, he was famous and adored.

In his decorated and violent universe,

he articulated a macho, militant sense of Italy,

its myth and glory.

In 1919, he had seized the port of Fiume, now Rijeka in Croatia,

and claimed it to be Italy's.

D'Annunzio had been asked by the Italian government

to head a gigantic march on Rome.

A march of soldiers.

And the proposed date, probably the 4th of November, 1922.

The first anniversary of the symbolic burial of the Unknown Soldier.

Suddenly, this looks different.

These fascists walking away from the Altare della Patria

couldn't have known that they were stooges of a kind.

That their march had been hastily planned,

to torpedo, to preclude D'Annunzio's march.

Their rainy, wary, testosterone fueled theatrical coup

took place to deny D'Annunzio's glory,

and to confer it instead on Mussolini.

And Mussolini had his moment, of course,

finally he did step on stage, in the last 30 minutes of A Noi!.

The newly proclaimed Prime Minister. Where is he heading?

You know, of course, the Altare della Patria,

the tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

But Paradisi does not tell us explicitly

that this is the 4th of November, 1922,

seven days after the march on Rome,

after the blackshirts.

END

And there's a final revealing moment in A Noi!

In the version of it in the Milan cinemateque,

there's this brief shot of the Italian flag with the King's crest on it.

In subsequent prints, the flag and the crest are not there.

The National Fascist Party no longer need to defer to the king.

A Noi! was in many ways a grubby 44 minutes of cinema,

but it switched something on.

The march on Rome was not really a march.

It was certainly not an uprising.

The marchers didn't know that they were a kind of facade.

And the film itself was a facade, lies upon lies.

But A Noi! helped make waves. Waves that changed the 20th century.

Mussolini said that fascism was an oceanic cry

that had been heard around the world.

He was right.

FIERCE

"LIKE ROME, WONDERFUL DISASTER, YOU FILL MY HEART WITH LOVE AND BLASPHEMY."

A Noi! was first screened on the 7th of November, 1922,

just three days after the filming of the Unknown Soldier sequence.

What world was it born into?

What was Italy like in those days?

On the political front, Italy was in a vortex.

Worlds were colliding.

World War I had not long ended.

Italy was one of the victors,

but Mussolini, and the thinkers around him,

said that Italy was living in a "wounded peace".

Right-wing nationalists said that their government had been sold short,

by the international deal done in the Treaty of Versailles.

In 1919, a few months after the treaty was signed,

Italy's first national election under proportional representation was held.

The Socialists came first.

Populare, the Christian Democratic Party came in second.

And so a coalition was formed with liberals at its center.

They had political torrents on either side.

The right wing was furious, the center was weak.

How would this weakness affect the people in Elvira Notari's film?

Could they find jobs, feed their families?

A film from the 1970s, Power, directed by Augusto Tretti, sheds light.

Five lire... Five lire for this bony chicken.

With your salaries, we won't be able to eat.

SOCIALIST UNION

Put it on this hook, here.

CHICKEN - 3 LIRE OIL - 2.50 COFFEE - 1

That's OK.

CHICKEN - 5 LIRE

These damn unions and socialists...

It's a shame, the government should intervene.

What government? Everything is a joke.

The "reds" rule!

Good morning, I have a magnificent chicken, would you like it?

The 70s film also tries to show

what was happening backstage in Italian politics

by having three big cats plot the country's future.

The lion on the left represents the military.

The tiger in the middle is commerce.

And the leopard on the right stands for the landowners and farmers.

Let's execute the hotheads!

Hot-headed, that Mussolini, but... He works well!

Let's conclude, above all. Do we give him the power, or not?

But, will the King... be happy?

Certainly! It works on his favor too.

What if we support Liberals and Democrats?

Liberals and Democrats are good people but...

they're unable to go to the streets.

And revolutionaries are to be fought in the streets!

Then, we shall send Mussolini to Rome.

To Rome!

Tretti's film pulls back the curtain.

It evokes the sort of deals that Paradisi's film A Noi!...

could never, would never, show.

But if we go back to A Noi!,

we see a hint of what was behind the scenes.

We're back in Naples now, before the march on Rome.

The smaller bald guy at the top, Cesare Maria De Vecchi,

is a soldier and senior fascist operator.

He wanted to change the weak Prime Minister in 1922.

Not for Mussolini, but for this man, the conservative Antonio Salandra.

Mussolini is to De Vecchi's right, here. But look at the body language.

Mussolini isn't yet Il Duce. He's hesitant.

De Vecchi has to encourage him to step forward.

Only a few days before he becomes Prime Minister,

Mussolini doesn't exude power.

Italian politics were that uncertain, that shifting.

And does this moment hint at another backstory?

One in which Mussolini isn't in control? Possibly.

The moment involves the Freemasons,

the global network of male secret societies.

And one Masonic Grand Master in particular, Raoul Palermi.

Palermi met Mussolini at the Savoy Hotel in secret,

and then at the train station in Rome for two hours.

Of the meeting, Mussolini said: "That was Raoul Palermi,

he assured me that the officers of the command of the Royal Guard,

some department commanders of the garrison of Rome,

the king's first aide-de-camp, will help us in our motion.

They are all people of his Freemasonry.

Palermi's Freemasons gave three and a half million lire to the fascist cause.

And here "La Stampa" reports that Mussolini was given the highest honor.

in Palermi's Masonic order.

MOST HONORABLE MUSSOLINI WAS CHOSEN ELECTED TO THE 33RD DEGREE

(THE HIGHEST RANK) OF THE MASONIC LODGE OF RAOUL PALERMI

So the Masons probably weren't just assistants in the coup,

they're likely to have been much more.

At 7:30 a.m. on the 28th of October, 1922,

Raoul Palermi went with the leader of the syndicate of fascist cooperatives,

Ernesto Civelli, to the Quirinale to meet the king.

When they left an hour later,

the king had surprisingly decided not to sign the state of siege

that liberal Prime Minister, Luigi Facta, had issued.

And so, the march on Rome was allowed.

Facta resigned. Italy had no government.

When Mussolini went to the Savoy Hotel at midday on the 30th of October,

who was waiting for him? Raoul Palermi.

Palermi's role has seldom been mentioned.

The revolution that was not a revolution.

It was a transfer of power, it was in part organized by the Freemasons,

the backstage men, the puppeteers.

So, there it is, the new Mussolini government,

born of the shadows, forced on the country.

It set out to make Italy into a battleship.

Mussolini's new government met here, Palazzo Montecitorio,

which has bad acoustics and was freezing in winter, and boiling in summer.

The fascists had been violent from the start.

Newspaper offices were occupied or destroyed.

The "Corriere Della Serra" didn't publish on the day of the march on Rome.

22 deaths were associated with such attacks.

In this building, just 19 days after the march on Rome,

Mussolini made what has become known as the bivouac speech.

He said that; "with 300,000 youths armed to the teeth,

and almost mystically ready to act on any command of mine,

I could've punished all those who defamed or tried to sully fascism.

I could've transformed this drab, silent hall into a bivouac for my squads".

The march on Rome was a stunt. Macho-meaningless in a way.

But the speech givet an iron fist.

Some spoke against the new violence.

Reformist socialist Claudio Treves said in the Montecitorio debating chamber:

"You gentlemen of the government are like accomplices or powerless eunuchs."

The socialist leader Filippo Turati said:

"We have thus reached an hour of collapse."

"The collapse not just of a ministry, nor a government or a regime."

"What we have is the collapse of civilization."

Order, discipline and pride are arriving.

I do believe so.

The march of the blackshirts.

Il Duce speaks! He speaks...

On May the 30th, 1924, in the Palazzo Montecitorio,

Giacomo Matteotti criticized the increasing violence of the fascist state

and revealed that an American corporation,

Sinclair Oil had bribed Mussolini's regime

to help it gain access to African oil reserves.

11 days later, on the 10th of June,

Matteotti was kidnapped and stabbed to death.

His body was found two months later.

It's not clear if Mussolini directly asked for the assassination.

But most accept that he was morally responsible.

The murder of an MP was a threshold moment.

And not even the Masons were spared.

In May 1925,

secret societies were banned.

Masonic lodges were destroyed and some of their members killed.

Nothing was allowed to stand in the way of Mussolini's ascent.

The violence and the new fascist times had roots.

Way back in 1912,.

artist and writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti paved the way for violence.

He said it was purifying.

"War is beautiful because it establishes man's dominion,

by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones,

flamethrowers and small tanks."

"War is beautiful

because it initiates the dreamt of metallization of the human body."

"War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow...

with the orchids of machine guns."

"War is beautiful because it combines

the gunfire, a stench of purification, into a symphony."

The imagery of the new fascist era was naked, muscular, phallic.

We understand its violence through Marinetti, Mussolini and Matteotti.

But other ideas were shaping these new years in Italy, a Fascist story.

Ideas about women, as well as men.

Mussolini said the multitude is female.

Why did he see crowds in that way?

Because of this book: Psychology of the Masses

Written by this man, the French conservative Gustave Le Bon.

It looks a world away from the 20th century. But what a role he played.

His admirers include Sigmund Freud,

Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Lenin and Benito Mussolini.

Le Bon said that a leader needs to keep the crowd mystified, entranced

and, therefore, pre-political.

He said that a crowd behave like beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution.

Children. Women. Savages.

"Crowds, like women, had tendencies to hysteria", said Le Bone.

Mussolini saw a kind of illness in his crowds.

He felt that the status quo was defective or feminine.

and that change was better. The change was masculine.

Distortion of the crowd, obsession with it.

Addiction to it, pleasuring it.

Ettore Scola's film A Special Day is about gender and fascism.

It's set on a day when Adolf Hitler visited Mussolini in Rome.

Sophia Loren is an ignored housewife.

Marcello Mastroianni plays a gay radio broadcaster.

I too, often, feel humiliated.

Considered less than zero.

My husband doesn't talk to me. He commands me...

Day and night.

We haven't had a laugh together since we were engaged.

Now he laughs elsewhere, with other women.

Is he unfaithful to you?

You seemed to me such a confident and happy wife.

Faithful...

to the motherland.

They want women to give birth to five children.

We only have our beautiful son.

They forced him to wear the black shirt from the age of four.

And why do they insist on talking to him about sacrifice and obedience?

I just wish he was free to be himself.

I've heard that women are being taken to madhouses.

Those who do not have many children are classified as deviants.

Is this Italy? Is that what Garibaldi fought for?

What is happening?

Fascism was becoming monumental.

It was building its ideas about violence, men and women, and even art.

In Milan, on October the 4th, 1922, Mussolini had said:

"Democracy has deprived people's lives of style."

"We play the lyre on all strings."

"From violence to religion, from art to politics".

And then he went further.

About the march on Rome, he was asked:

"Did you feel like an artist who starts his work of art?"

"Or a prophet who follows his vision?" Mussolini's answer: "Artist".

So was fascism an art, was it? And Il Duce its conductor, was he?

Mussolini had this theater in his garden.

Propaganda was everywhere.

Walls seemed to scream.

Mussolini is the first tractor driver, first hiker

First farmer.

First optimist. First bricklayer.

First pilot.

Second Caesar.

And Mussolini the lion, the action man, the artist,

had a kind of forum built to himself.

The ideas of fascism, violence, masculinity,

crowds, art, theater, and religion too.

Fascism borrowed the language of God and deference.

Mussolini the savior.

"Visibly protected by God."

But then we can't nod to God but to Mussolini.

The march on Rome was a key part of the story of Italian fascism.

A story about superiority, about a wound,

violence and masculinity, the crowd,

art and religion.

What did the story lead to...?

crimes, a contagion of crimes committed by Italy.

To make Italy great again, the fascist government wanted a place in the sun.

It wanted to claim parts of Africa,

to rebuild its ancient empire over years, decades.

But other people lived in Africa,

Fascism decided they needed modernizing these other people.

They needed to be shown the European way.

They needed to be taught to cultivate those others.

They were stuck in the past.

Fascism looked at them and could see what they needed.

They needed civilization.

With love, if possible. And with force, if necessary.

Eritrea had been colonized since 1890, but Fascism brought a new template.

Italy had been in what is now Libya since 1911,

but again, Fascism brought a new urgency.

They called it "pacification".

On the 2nd of October, in 1935, Italy invaded Abyssinia, now Ethiopia.

The Emperor of Ethiopia,

Haile Selassie, in 1936 he goes to the League of Nations.

Today, Haile Selassie comes to plead for his lost empire.

He wants them to make Mussolini give up Ethiopia.

Italian journalists cheer, boo and protest.

Trying to quell the disturbance, lights turned out.

Again, lights out.

The disturbers, ejected, arrested, and he is able to make his appeal.

There were other atrocities.

Three years later, 22,000 Italian soldiers invaded Albania.

Fascism said that Italians and Albanians were ethnically the same.

Not Slavs.

In Italian newsreels, the locals were welcoming.

Later, Albanian films had a different take.

THE IMPERIAL DOMINION IS SUPREME AND INVIOLABLE

Italy invaded Yugoslavia in April, 1941.

When there was resistance, they created concentration camps.

The march on Rome deceived,

Fascism built its body, its muscles,

everything within the State, nothing outside the State,

Nothing against the state.

It's the 1940's now, many years after the march on Rome,

Il Duce is older.

Many years of Italian fascism, its glory and spiritual uplift.

What are they thinking?

How much more of this is there to come? The well is running dry.

It didn't last... It didn't last.

The things I believed in did not correspond to me.

and they dragged me down with them.

With love, if possible. By force, if necessary.

Did you hear? It can't be possible...

The OVRA forced its opponents to drink castor oil

and made them eat live frogs.

What kind of cruel imagination did they have?

And they called themselves Italians. Catholics.

Eventually, the tide turned.

World War II put a post to the march.

Italy was defeated, the walls no longer screamed.

Public opinion turned.

Attention. Attention.

His Majesty the King and Emperor accepted the resignation

from the positions of Head of Government,

Prime Minister, and Secretary of State,

presented by His Excellency, Knight Benito Mussolini,

and appointed Head of Government, Prime Minister and Secretary of State,

His Excellency the Knight, Marshal of Italy, Pietro Badoglio.

The new Prime Minister Pietro Badoglio used mustard gas in Ethiopia.

He was never tried for his crimes.

When he leaves his meeting with the king, Mussolini is arrested and imprisoned.

Two days later, Prime Minister Badoglio dissolved the Fascist party.

ARMISTICE - END OF HOSTILITIES, ITALY, ENGLAND AND THE UNITED STATES

Two months after his imprisonment,

Mussolini is rescued by the Luftwaffe,

and the German intelligence agency.

He meets Adolf Hitler,

who puts him in charge of a new Italian Social Republic: Salò.

Mussolini is its nominal boss, but Adolf Hitler pulls the strings.

Rough, handheld footage now,

when Mussolini surveys the troops in a field.

Gone are the pulpits, gone is the theatricality.

After the allies arrive,

some of the Italian public got angry with the old fascists.

Fascist women with their heads shaved.

A crowd again.

They're not here to worship fascists this time,

but to see their dead bodies.

Killed by partisans.

And amongst the bodies,

Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci.

This is where the march on Rome led.

This is where the march on Rome led.

Or is it?

The end of Italian fascism was not the end of it.

The march on Rome was a spreader event.

Fascism was the center of attention.

Rewind to the autumn of 1922,

and we find that other countries liked what they saw.

The American ambassador in Rome said:

"We're having a fine, young revolution,

no danger, with a lot of enthusiasm and color."

The "New York Times" and the "Washington Post"

were equally enthusiastic.

The "New York Herald" wrote that Mussolini was regenerating Italian nationality.

US money flowed into Italian businesses.

In Britain, Winston Churchill called Mussolini the greatest living legislator.

The Swiss newspaper "St. Galler Tagblatt"

said that Il Duce had an extraordinary temperament

and a marvelous ability to dominate.

Sigmund Freud sent Mussolini a book with a dedication:

"To Benito Mussolini: from an old man

who greets in the ruler the hero of culture".

In Portugal, inspired by the march on Rome,

the military organized a march on Lisbon.

General Gomes da Costa, who, like Mussolini, liked balcony speeches,

entered Lisbon on May the 28th, 1926.

The Prime Minister resigned the next day.

The result was a 48-year conservative dictatorship.

Antonio de Oliveira Salazar was Prime Minister from 1932 to 1968.

On his desk he had a photograph of... which politician?

He established the Colonial Act to show people in the Portuguese African colonies

of Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau the superiority of European civilization.

Japan's ambassador to Italy,

Hidaka Shinrokuro, visits Mussolini in Salò.

Mussolini trusted Hidaka deeply.

Japan had been developing its own version of fascism.

Ultramilitaristic and colonial.

But there had been kabuki plays about Mussolini

and, in 1932,

one popular Japanese newspaper alone mentioned Italian fascism 72 times.

This man, Nakano Seigo,

was a far-right political leader in Japan.

He met with Mussolini in 1937

and had pictures of two European leaders on his wall:

Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

On the 13th of September, 1923,

Spain's General Primo de Rivera staged a coup,

he said that the march on Rome was his model.

Then came Spain's dictator, General Francisco Franco.

A Mussolini avatar, though less revolutionary.

Franco liked a balcony, too

His regime killed at least 40,000 Spanish people,

in concentration camps and shooting galleries.

Mussolini sent Italian soldiers to fight in the Spanish civil war.

To help his friend Franco.

And when the Italian soldiers came back, there was quite a display.

And of course, they went to the Altare della Patria.

Their march was rather more regimented than the march on Rome.

A walk up the steps,

which the blackshirts on the march on Rome didn't get to do.

And Mussolini's vast wreath.

And then... who's that?

It takes a moment and then we realize.

It's Rudolph Hess. A hyperlink to another country.

Germany.

Hess had been part of the Nazi attempt on Munich in 1923

to take over the Bavarian government,

which was intended as the start of march on Berlin.

Inspired by the march on Rome.

In a speech in Milan, Mussolini said:

"The Germans are astonished and amazed

at seeing before them all these young fascists."

"Physically beautiful and morally magnificent."

"Morally magnificent."

Hitler got the VIP treatment in Italy.

May 1938,

less than a year before Germany occupied the Sudetenland.

They lit the Colosseum for Hitler.

Italy was a kind of tracking shot.

To impress Hitler even more, the fascist government put on a military display.

There's the king and Heinrich Himmler, one of the devisors of the Holocaust,

Hitler, Mussolini, a shooting party.

The balcony boys.

This is just four months before the Kristallnacht attack on Jewish life.

You have to climb to the Unknown Soldier, of course.

Is Leni Riefenstahl watching?

They lit up the Altare.

This is less than four years before the Wannsee Conference,

which established the final plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe.

Balcony boys.

Physically beautiful and morally magnificent.

Naples now, where our story started.

Could they have seen Majdanek from up there?

Or Treblinka? Or Dachau?

Or Auschwitz-Birkenau? Or Babi Yar?

Or Sobibor? Or Chelmno? Or Belzec?

ROME IS ANTIFASCIST VALERIO IS STILL ALIVE

AFRICAN SPECIALTIES ERITREAN CUISINE - ETHIOPIAN

FOOD - AFRICAN - AMERICAN LATIN AMERICAN - ASIAN

WELCOME TO TUFELLO A FREE AND REBEL NEIGHBORHOOD

MARCH 8 - GLOBAL FEMINIST STRIKE FLASH MOB - ROME IS A FUCHSIA AREA

HE LIVES, HE FIGHTS!

Saturday afternoon in Rome,

fans are going to see a football match in the Olympic Stadium.

An enjoyable event.

But we notice the word DUX on the left of the screen.

We are in this place, the plaza built to the glory of Mussolini and fascism.

The fans walk over the macho mosaics.

There's no wall plaque to tell supporters or tourists the historical context.

Should there be?

Or should this place be destroyed?

In Germany most Nazi equivalents were destroyed.

Or should it be renamed the Piazza of Shame? Piazza Vergogna.

Or Piazza Fallica. Or Piazza Narcissismo.

And talking of narcissism, the EUR district in the sight of Rome.

Building works started in 1937. A fascist dreamscape.

Its central building has six stories,

because the word Benito has six letters.

And each story has nine arches because Mussolini has nine letters.

Fascism and its builders made us look in straight lines, symmetry and geometry.

It seems to force its straightness, its conformism on us.

It's an effort to turn your head sideways,

in a place of such control and order. To do so destabilizes.

A NATION OF POETS, ARTISTS, HEROES, SAINTS, THINKERS

And A Noi!, which also tries to make us see things

in a certain way, what should be done with it?

Maybe it should be burned.

Or is it precious history?

Visual history that can be taught.

And A Noi! can be mocked, of course. Has been mocked.

Augusto Tretti's film, the one with the three wild cats,

shows the march on Rome as ramshackle.

Marchers are afraid of the rain.

- We must hurry, it could rain. - You're right.

Mussolini like a puppet.

I respect the freedom of the press!

But if the newspapers talk bad about me,

I will abolish the freedom of the press!

There are just a few marchers.

They double up.

Quick, take off your caps.

Now dress like Alpini.

Good. Change the emblems.

Mount the fourth cannon!

Improvised cannons.

It's like toy time, amateur theater.

Machismo hates mockery, so these punches land.

But there are other creative ways of treating the sting.

A former fascist building in central Rome.

Its inscription is still clear.

The building had a cinema in it.

In recent years the cinema was threatened with demolition.

And so a group of activists, Piccolo America, protested.

SAVE THE CINEMAS

They occupied another cinema. Claimed it for movie lovers.

Challenged right wing ideas about ​​culture and immigration.

They had famous supporters from the film world.

Some of their actions were unpopular with the film industry.

Then they took over what was now called the Troisi.

Over a six-year campaign they refurbished the cinema.

They unveiled something. There's a study center.

There were fascist symbols on some beams, they were kept.

Preserved the toxic past, teach it mock it, reimagine it.

Are they the options?

At the end of Pier Paolo Pasolini's hell on earth film

set in the fascist republic of Salò,

Two young men, who witnessed atrocities, dance.

- What is your girlfriend's name? - Margherita.

The day that Hitler visits Mussolini,

two people demeaned by fascist machismo, dance.

Elvira Notari's Naples in 1922.

È PICCERELLA, 1922, DIRECTED BY ELVIRA NOTARI.

Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist,

a repressed fascist encircled.

He knows about discipline, but can't submit to joy...

Filmmaking has changed so much in the last hundred years.

We shot some of this movie on a virtual set.

But in back in 1921, 1922,

the best movies were also inventive and expressive.

In one, La Roue,

a mirror is used to reflect light

and simulate movement.

We tried to film actor Alba Rohrwacher in the same way,

but when we were putting up the lights, the

electrician Francesco passed by with his flashlight

and we saw this, a happy accident.

The expressivity of the movies.

A Noi! under-imagined cinema.

But other movies from 1921, 1922, didn't.

In Denmark...

The great director Carl Theodor Dreyer showed hatred and its audience.

A film looking honestly at bigotry and the dark side of life.

But movies in 1921 and 1922 were good, very good.

At the lighter things in life, too.

Here, Charlie Chaplin is a builder.

Earlier today he got his pay and has been at the pub.

He and the other guy are so drunk that each wear half of each other's coat.

And then the rain, which the march on Rome hated.

And behind this expressivity is an interest in real people.

The semi-documentary Nanook of the North.

An Inuit man in Canada carries a piece of ice.

What will he do with it?

His igloo.

And then the ice becomes a window.

Nanook of the North was partly staged,

and is a foreigner's take on Inuit life.

With a scene like this, isn't it curious about life?

Isn't it trying to be honest?

You're cold.

Or you're enjoying getting your hair done,

but then the guy becomes a dick.

Old and young together.

Or tired, you walk to a bar.

We are all these people.

They walk into the world of 1921 and 1922.

A world to which Giulietta Masina was born,

and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Eva Gardner, and Judy Garland.

A world of flapper girls.

A world where Niels Bohr wins the Nobel Prize for Physics.

Where Tutankhamen's tomb is opened.

Where Johnny Weissmüller breaks the one minute barrier for swimming 100 meters.

Where Josephine Baker dances.

I died in October 1943. I think.

In Campania. I think.

Even though I have no memory of the last few months.

Months lived in weakness, fear, desperation.

With love, if possible. By force, if necessary.

What will happen to my son?

What will happen to my son?

People say that Rome is a stage set.

In 1922, unto that stage walked an actor.

He told his audience that it was on its knees,

that the world was against them.

Backstage, behind the curtain, his writers watched.

Up front, in the footlights, the actor reassured people.

Men are men, women are women.

The state is strong, Julius Caesar knew that.

The audience would be great again.

You could feel the emotions swell.

The story was a lie, but it entered the repertoire.

For years afterwards, new actors played the part.

Or stole some of the best lines.

History demeans and destroys, so why has it lasted so long?

Because, like horror movies, it knows what scares us.