ANZIO – Mussolini’s honorary citizenship revoked

“Today’s vote sends out a different message. It is the first step towards restoring historical justice.” This was the mayor of Anzio (near Rome), Aurelio Lo Fazio, commenting on the Municipal Council’s decision to revoke the honorary citizenship conferred on Benito Mussolini by the Prefect Commissary on 14 May 1924. On May 27, the assembly approved the proposal presented by the municipal groups of the Democratic Party, #Unaltracittà (Another city), the Five Star Movement and APA (Alternative for Anzio) with 16 votes in favor and 5 opposed.

“It is an overdue act in a city that was awarded the gold medal of civil merit for the suffering endured during WWII, a war that the Fascist regime dragged us into. The names of our citizens who were victims of that regime and Nazi barbarism are impressed upon our memory, and today we pay tribute to them once more,” said the mayor.

“Eighty years have passed since Italy’s liberation from Nazi-fascism. Conferring honorary citizenship on Mussolini was an imposition, whilst today we took a democratic vote. This clarifies what the Fascist regime has been and what conquests the liberation has brought us.”

Mayor Lo Fazio highlighted that the return to democracy was also made possible by the Allied landing on the coast of Anzio, “which, a few months later, liberated Rome, a city reduced to starvation and ravaged by Nazi troops and Fascist squads”.

On this occasion, Lo Fazio renewed the invitation to Anzio for the writer and Holocaust survivor Edith Bruck, who had previously declined.