Ordinary Exemplars: Cultivating “the Everyday” in the Birthplace of Fascism

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which “ordinariness” can come to be exemplified as a virtue. It does so by comparing the status of ordinariness in historical and present-day Predappio, the town in which Mussolini was born and is buried. It describes the ways in which Predappio was mobilized by the Fascist regime as an exemplar of an ordinary Italian town, rendered extraordinary by its wholesale reconstruction as a jewel in the crown of Fascist urban planning. In similar fashion, Mussolini’s ordinary rural upbringing was mobilized in the service of propagandizing his extraordinary and exemplary leadership. In contemporary Predappio, by contrast, ordinariness is what locals reach for to contest understandings of their home as irrevocably associated with the extraordinary Fascist heritage they have inherited. One of the ways in which they do so is to celebrate a local exemplar of this ordinariness, Giuseppe Ferlini, the town’s first postwar mayor. In contrast to Mussolini, Ferlini’s ordinariness is not a backdrop to future greatness, but exactly the quality for which he is celebrated. I assert that these cases demonstrate the need for vigilance in analytic usage of the category of “the ordinary,” which sometimes tacitly assumes the existence of “the ordinary” as a scale in itself, independent of human action. I argue instead that “the ordinary” may be the object of ethical labor, rather than its site, and that exemplification may be a form of such labor, in both our accounts and the lives of those we study.

Out of the ordinary: Everyday life and the “carnival of Mussolini”

“…Moreover, as I describe at greater length elsewhere (Heywood, 2021) and below, "any ordinary given day" in Predappio is not in and of itself very ordinary at all. Of course, Predappiesi have things to do that are ordinary that other people in other places do, too.…”

“…Partly for that reason, and partly for historical reasons related to Predappio's construction as an exemplar of Mussolini's own "ordinary" origins (Heywood, 2021), "ordinariness" as a category has become a marked object in Predappio, in a manner somewhat akin to the way in which I have described it becoming such a marked object in anthropology. That is, it is not the particular concrete, quotidian rituals of day-to-day existence that happen to be ordinary in Predappio that people there valorize, because they know that day-to-day existence in Predappio is not really very "ordinary" at all; it is rather the quality of ordinariness in and of itself that matters.…”

“…Elsewhere I have described at greater length some of the ways in which a similar concern for “ordinariness” of a particular form also inflected the history of Fascism in ways that dovetail with its contemporary importance in Predappio: the town was in fact reconstructed in part as a monument to Mussolini's early life as a humble member of the proletariat, an ordinary Italian (Heywood, 2021). Like some of the visions of ordinariness above, Fascism's vitalist and populist version of “ordinariness” was of course designed to be restrictive and exclusionary insofar as those not fitting its particular vision of an ordinary Italian could not belong.…”

“…In this article, I explore the place of ordinariness in Predappio not as a particular domain, site, or scale of life or existence but as a project, something it takes work to pursue (Heywood, 2021), work of the sort Marco is engaged in with his pointed lack of interest in an event he well knows would be of interest to others who encountered it (including his anthropologist companion). Moreover, I suggest this work takes on a particular inflection in Predappio, a place that to those who know it is far from ordinary, indeed.…”

Teaching the difficult heritage of Italian Fascism

“…All three authors took as the starting point for their teaching intervention a heritage-related contemporary controversy. Daly and Malone both focus on the controversy surrounding the proposed Museum of Fascism in the former casa del fascio in Predappio, Mussolini's birthplace (see Heywood 2022; Storchi 2019; Mira and Pirazzoli 2018), while Wilcox's assignment takes the future of the Foro Italico complex in Rome as its central subject (see Petersen 2020; Carter and Martin 2017). While Daly's assignment asks the students to imagine and design a Museum of Fascism, both Malone and Wilcox opt for a debate-style role-play to highlight the positions of diverse stakeholders.…”