The Christian Science Monitor

As ban on 'Il Duce' trinkets looms, Mussolini's hometown eyes educational future

The items on display are as varied as they are sinister – Mussolini busts, Mussolini keyrings, statues of “Il Duce” on a rearing stallion, and Mussolini propaganda posters. There are even Mussolini-themed babies’ bibs and pasta in the shape of Mussolini’s helmeted head.

The bizarre objects are crammed into a shop on the main street of Predappio, a town in northern Italy where Benito Mussolini was born in 1883.

In the past few decades it has become a place of pilgrimage for Italy’s unrepentant neo-Fascists: unabashed admirers of a man who led Italy into disastrous colonial adventures and an alliance with

Telling Italians what really happened'History should not be hidden away'

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