ROME, June 17 (JTA) — Organizers of an exhibit on Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini plan to go ahead with the show despite a flood of protests against it, according to Italian news reports. The show, “Man of Providence: Iconography of the Duce, 1923-1945” is due to open July 13 in the small Tuscan town of Seravezza. The daily Corriere della Sera newspaper reported that left-wing political parties, former anti-fascist resistance fighters and schoolteachers had mounted a campaign against the exhibit, which includes propagandistic pieces from the fascist era that idealize Mussolini. “Such an exhibition is inappropriate and in very bad taste,” one schoolteacher wrote in a letter to the local mayor. Local townspeople and residents of other towns in the area said that any exhibit on Mussolini should also show some of the atrocities carried out by the fascists and Nazis in the region during World War II. Curator Giorgio Di Genova, who conceived the idea of the exhibit, rejected the criticism, calling it “superficial.” He told Corriere della Sera he was simply presenting a display of art.
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