L'Italo-Americano

L'Italo-Americano THURSDAY, JULY 13, 2017 www.italoamericano.org 8 FRANCESCA BEZZONE T he very symbol of con- temporary Italian history, the man who led the coun- try into the most tragic and grue- some of wars. A charmer and an orator, a devoted father and, according to mythology, an insa- tiable lover. A ll this w as Benito Mussolini, a figure known by history in depth, but that still holds some secrets. Secrets that may be brought to light, if only those diaries he religiously kept throughout the mid to late 1930s and up to the fall of his regime resurfaced somehow. Indeed, Mussolini's private diaries are among the hottest "phantom" documents historians could lay their hands on: their existence is virtually certain, yet their fate after the end of the war is unknow n. M us s olini w as known to keep a daily journal, pages of which were even gifted to his own son, as Il Duce him- self wrote in his autobiographi- cal work Parlo con Bruno (one of his children, who lost his life during the war), published in 1941. Edvige Mussolini, his sis- ter, for years maintained to have them, yet they're still shrouded in mystery. In spite of it, a number of documents claiming to be Mussolini's very own private journals have been surfacing with regularity since the very end o f the w ar. H is w idow , Rachele Mussolini, was adamant fake vers ions w ere already around as early as 1950. In the late 60s , pages of w hat w as believed to be Il Duce's own pri- vate logs appeared in the news- room of The Times, in London. A more complete version was offered once again to the British daily in 1980, but after detailed analysis they were deemed a fake and never acquired. In the 90s , they res urfaced at Sotheby's, where once more they were analyzed and decreed a fake. Later in the same decade, they were offered to Italian pub- lishing house Feltrinelli, which refused to publish them for the same reason. In 2004, Italian current affairs magazine's L'Espresso also had the possibil- ity to acquire them, but refused to do so. In 2007, Italian S enator Marcello Dell'Utri claimed to have received the originals of Mussolini's diaries, dating from 1935 to 1939, from the son of a former "partigiano." In spite of having been told by several his- torians and paleographers the documents were most likely just another fake, Dell'Utri keeps on being sure about their authentici- ty. These diaries are a true mys- tery, a mystery extremely hard to clarify, especially for a small scale researcher like me. Let us try to get things in order by going back in time to 1957, in the middle class kitchen of the P anvini family, in V ercelli. Giulio, the pater familias, had a past in the Repubblica Sociale Italiana, with important contacts in its higher echelons. Panvini senior, according to his very own words, was given a number of relevant documents by Internal Affairs minister Paolo Zerbino: among them, possibly, Mussolini's own diaries. Panvini contacted typographies around the city and managed to get his hands on a series of notebooks and diaries produced with 1930s materials. His plan was simple: creating a full collection of Mussolini's diaries from what- ever document he had inherited from Zerbino. When he died, in the mid-1950s, his wife and daughter allegedly continued his work, producing thirty hand- written volumes of Mussolinian memoirs. Thanks to the support and cunning of their lawyer, the two had a large chunk of their handiw ork trans ferred in Switzerland, in the impregnable caveau of a bank. In 1957, the Panvinis decided to try their luck and offered the diaries to an important American newspaper: as soon as the name "Mussolini" was uttered, the Italian secret services hit the road and headed to Vercelli to understand what the two beyond- suspicion women kept in their doilies-and-porcelain-figurines filled living room. What they found was only a minimal part of the forged diaries, as most had been already transferred, as said, in Switzerland. The Panvini affair became immediately a national mystery: one of M us s olini's s ons , Vittorio, declared he felt the diaries were real and, certainly, some passages did sound legit: mentions to private meetings with German politicians, for instance, or even the presence of "tournures de phrase" typical of Mussolini strengthened the case for their authenticity. Historical incongruences, however, along with numerous anachronisms, made it obvious to most special- is ts the documents w ere a forgery. In 2011, M immo Franzinelli, an archivist and his- torian who analyzed the docu- ments bought by Dell'Utri in 2007, did pen an interesting vol- ume on the subject which, how- ever, hasn't been sufficient to write the final word about it. Aspects of the diaries, in fact, did hint at the possibility there was something real about them, to the point s ome his torians advanced the theory the Panvinis may have had the originals in their hands at some stage and copied parts of them in their forged version. In other words: there may be some truth in the lie. Many specialists believe that most of the documents regularly appearing for sale throughout the decades – from those offered to The Times in the 1960s and 1980s, to the copies offered to Sotheby's and Feltrinelli – are likely part of the monumental work of the Panvinis, the very s ame w ork s ecured by their lawyer in Switzerland at the end of the 1950s. Even the volumes acquired by Dell'Utri in 2007, later published in installments by the Italian daily Libero, may be part of the forgery. In 2015, in yet another out- standing coup de théâtre, history monthly Storia in Rete published extracts of what is believed to be the 1942 volume of Mussolini's diaries. The magazine's director, Fabio Andriola, acquired them from a Swiss private collector who had bought them decades ago from an Italian. Andriola is hones t about this important acquisition: the diaries are plau- sible, yet proving their authentic- ity may be hard, as it has been shown by the decades-long dia- tribes on the many other copies we've discussed in this article. Forgeries, forgeries and more forgeries, then. Yet, one truth seems to surface among their lines and pages: there was an archetype, a mother document upon which all the copies were based, maybe the real thing, the true w ords and thoughts of Benito Mussolini. Mussolini's private diaries are among the hottest "phantom" documents historians could lay their hands on What you See is not What you Get: Italy's Forgers and Forgeries throughout the Centuries : Mussolini's Diaries (Part III) LA VITA ITALIANA TRADITIONS HISTORY CULTURE

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