A grave lesson from Mussolini

MEZZEGRA, Italy

FROM THE house on Lake Como where we are staying this summer, we walk past a place called Villa Belmonte on our way down the hill into town. The pale yellow stucco, the manicured grounds -- Villa Belmonte is a pleasant sight, and typical of the hillside homes hereabouts.

But on a low stone wall to the left of the main gates there is a black cross, 2 feet tall, with a simple inscription: "Benito Mussolini, 28 Aprile , 1945." It was here, on this unassuming spot, that the dictator and his mistress were executed by communist partisans, ending what was probably the saddest chapter in Italian history. The next day in Milan, an hour to the south, the bodies were strung up and mutilated by the mobs in Piazzale Loreto.

I was not yet born in 1945. My father's parents had long before left the poverty of southern Italy for the abundant possibilities of the North End of Boston, and yet, every time I walk past the black cross some deep feeling stirs in me. It might have to do with the almost impossible juxtaposition between the great natural beauty of this alpine lake (olive groves and inlets, green and gray mountains rising steeply from the tranquil water to 8,000 foot summits) and its horrible human history (from herbal healers tortured during the Inquisition, to Nazi officers ordering the murder of whole households in reprisal for Resistance assassinations).

Or maybe my feelings have more personal roots. At times, in the Italian-American enclave where I was raised, there was a faint reflection of Mussolini's grandiosity, a self-consciousness and strutting pride meant to compensate -- I now see -- for a sense of inadequacy as powerful as it was unwarranted. The worst of us needed to be loud, even brutal, in order to drown out a voice whispering that we had somehow deserved the abuse heaped on our ancestors when they arrived.

Then again, in another striking juxtaposition, the best of us responded to that abuse and its legacy with a warmth, a quiet dignity, and a remarkable generosity -- traits that I see here in our daily encounters with Italians.

Possibly, that twist of feeling I experience when I pass Mussolini's place of death comes from an appreciation for the fragility of any national culture. It does not take much time -- half a generation or so -- to turn a country upside down. It requires nothing more than a bad election or two, a small detour away from the logic of courage and toward the rationalization of fear, to transform a stable landscape into a nightmare.

I remember witnessing first hand the moral devastation and material privation of Brezhnev's Soviet Union. And I remember, in the winter of 1995, spending a few nights in Croatia during a pause in the war that was decimating what had once been Yugoslavia. The bombed out houses on the road to Opatia, the stories of rape camps and massacres -- within only a few months, centuries of bad history had flowered and borne bushels of evil fruit.

We are so confident in the architecture of our American democracy, and in the abundance created by our labor, sacrifice, and ingenuity. But the balance we have been able to strike and maintain is a work in progress, our reward for a continual resistance to the natural human tendency toward divisiveness, corruption, and viciousness.

Trace the arc of Mussolini from the inequities and urges for greatness of early 20th-century Italy, through his theatrical speeches in Piazza Venezia, his military adventurism, his alliance with Hitler, his last gasps in the Republic of Salo, and then, after hundreds of thousands of lives had been lost, all the way down to his battered, spat-upon corpse hanging in front of a Milan gas station, and you have one route on the psychological road map of a nation.

Strolling past the black cross of Villa Belmonte en route to my morning croissant at the pasticceria in Mezzegra, I am tempted to believe that America is so strong, so rich, so blessed, and so deserving as to be outside the riptide of history. But then, some deep, small knock of feeling casts my thoughts in another direction -- not toward paranoia, but toward caution, humility even.

Attenta! as the Italians say, when they see a friend crossing a street. Careful! Even in a great nation, given a few bad decisions, a few loud and convincing voices counseling hatred, so much can change so fast.

Roland Merullo is a guest columnist. His next novel, "Breakfast with Buddha," will be published in October.