Deep beneath the historic Villa Torlonia, where Benito Mussolini lived for nearly two decades, a wine cellar repurposed in 1941 as a bunker to protect the Fascist leader was recently opened to the public. Even in a city stratified with centuries of history, where archaeologists are digging up the remains of an ancient empire, the damp underground space is a telling sign of how deeply Italy's relatively recent past can stay buried.
The opening of the bunker last fall was the latest step in the ongoing restoration of the sprawling villa compound, which the aristocratic Torlonia family rented to Mussolini and his family from 1925 until his arrest in 1943. Inside what is now a popular park, the complex of nine buildings erected between 1797 and 1920 also provides a unique window on the history of taste - and the Torlonias' ability to cozy up to whomever was in power, reaching back even before the family's bank, which was favoured by the Vatican.
After World War II the villa fell into ruin, a result of family inheritance battles but also of Italy's uncertainty about what to do with a site so closely linked to the dictator. In 1977 the compound, in a residential area just outside Rome's historic centre, was claimed by the city, which opened the grounds to the public the next year and, starting in the 1990s, mustered the funding and political will to restore the buildings.
"It took a long time - people weren't ready for it," said Alberta Campitelli, an art historian who, as director of Rome's historic villas and parks, has overseen the restoration. "There had been a cancellation of history," she said as she toured the compound on a sweltering afternoon. "It was still too painful."
Rome boasts some impressive Fascist-era architecture and landmarks. A plaque in the former Jewish Ghetto marks the deportation of around 1,000 Jews to Auschwitz in 1943 by the Nazis, who occupied part of the country, and in recent years commemorative cobblestones have been placed by the houses of deported Jews. But generally, Italy has been reluctant to come to terms with and call attention to Fascist sites, including Mussolini's headquarters in the Palazzo Venezia in downtown Rome. Partly that is a result of fears that neo-Fascists would flock to such sites, as happens regularly in Predappio, Mussolini's birthplace in northern Italy. Even if the bunker exhibition is fairly modest, Villa Torlonia has become a notable exception, especially the restoration of the Casino Nobile, the main house where Mussolini lived, which opened as a museum in 2006 under the left-wing Mayor Walter Veltroni.
"When it comes to actually talking about the history of Rome under Fascism and of Rome under Mussolini personally, there is nowhere like the Villa Torlonia," said Anthony Majanlahti, a historian and the author of two books on Rome under Fascism and one on the city's noble families. "It's the only place where you can find the city trying to come to terms with it, or bravely saying, 'Yes, we are talking about this.' "
The villa's grounds also contain ancient Jewish catacombs discovered in 1918 and not open to the public. It was at Villa Torlonia in 1938 that Mussolini announced racial laws stripping Jews of citizenship and removing them from many professions. The Casino Nobile now features a small museum dedicated to the Roman School of anti-Fascist artists active between the 1920s and 1940s, including the writer and painter Carlo Levi. Today, plans are in the works to build a Holocaust museum in a lot adjacent to the villa.
Mussolini's bunkers, which were never used, can be visited only by appointment in groups of fewer than 20 on regular guided visits organised by Sotterranei di Roma, a cultural association to which the city outsourced the tours for lack of funding, Campitelli said. While workers were restoring the bunkers - one had been opened to the public several years ago - they found three skeletons from the second century. "That's Rome, from the second century to 1943," Campitelli said.
The newly restored bunker features a small exhibition with gas masks, leaflets sent ahead of rare Allied bombing raids during the war and recordings of the sounds of air raid sirens. More than 1,500 visitors have come since it opened last fall, often older Romans who remembered the war, said Lorenzo Grassi of Sotterranei di Roma.
The villa was built between 1797 and the 1860s. The Torlonia family, originally the Tourlonais, were French arrivistes who became wealthy through an exclusive contract to supply uniforms to Italy's French occupiers during the Napoleonic years and grew richer after 1782 when they opened a bank that catered to the nobility and eventually the Vatican, which still has ties to the bank.
Construction of the Casino Nobile started in 1835, and it includes reliefs by the sculptor Antonio Canova and rooms frescoed in various styles, from the Egyptian to the Gothic. The bedroom used by Mussolini has an ornately carved wooden headboard and a ceiling painted with faux drapery.
©2015The New York Times News Service
