Bottles of wine that bear labels of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini are not too popular with a small Jewish community in northern Italy.
Luciano Guiato sells the red wine from his bar in Bolzano, the capital of South Tyrol, near the Austrian border. The region was part of Austria until World War I, and its population is mixed with German and Italian speakers.
The wine with Hitler’s face on the label is called “Fuhrer’s Wine.” The Mussolini wine is called “Camerata,” a fascist term for “Brother in Arms.”
Federico Steinhaus, president of the Jewish community of South Tyrol, said labeling wine with the faces of the Nazi and fascist dictators was a banalization of history.
“It takes away all the crime and horror that they represent,” he said.
Guiato, who sells the wine for $3.50 a bottle, said his reasons were purely commercial. “People buy them as a joke or out of sympathy,” he said.
Guiato was quoted by the daily La Repubblica as saying that he had “sympathy” for wartime fascist dictator Mussolini.
He had received orders for the Hitler label from Germany, he said.
Several months ago, the South Tyrolean People’s Party, which represents German speakers in the region, tried to have Guiato prosecuted for selling his Mussolini wine. But a judge ruled that the wine label did not break Italian law.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
