Predappio

Until the nineteen twenties Predappio was a small village up on the hills, grown around a medieval castle; two kilometres lower down, along the valley, there was Dovìa, a few scattered houses of peasants and sharecroppers, with a school and an inn. At Dovìa, in 1883, Benito Mussolini was born. A landslide was taken as the justification for moving the settlement from the hill to the valley floor: at Dovìa a new town was built to the architectural canons of the regime, and on 30 August 1925 the secretary of the fascist party, Roberto Farinacci, came to lay the first stone of the council houses and of the church. The year after, Mussolini came by to look at the works and had the bronze plaque removed that Farinacci had put on the front of his birth house: he wanted the places of his childhood kept as humble as possible. In 1927 a royal decree moved the town hall down there as well, and over the years the names changed places: the old village became Predappio Alta, and the new town, simply, Predappio.

Mussolini is buried in the cemetery of San Cassiano, and the tomb brings here both tourists and, every year, the pilgrimages of neo-fascists: something the comune has had to reckon with. In 2009 the town council forbade the sale of fascist souvenirs, and in 2014 the mayor announced a museum on the history of fascism, to make the town — his own words — a place for reflection, and to take it out of the hands of those who want to use it for something else. Of those years there is also a story from the other side: in May 1944, near here, three partisans of the Corbari band — Silvio Corbari, Iris Versari and Otello Sisi — pretended to negotiate their surrender, got into a car with the local commander of the fascist militia and executed him with a weapon Iris Versari was carrying hidden on her.