The mayor of Latina, a city south of Rome, has stirred controversy with his plan to rename the city park in honor of the brother of wartime Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.
Mayor Aimone Finestra is a member of the right-wing National Alliance Party, which grew out of the now defunct, neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement party.
He wants to rename the city park, currently undergoing a major clean-up operation, in honor of Arnaldo Mussolini, a journalist who died in 1931. “It is proper to name the park for a man of culture and considered counselor of his illustrious brother,” Finestra was quoted as saying by the Milan daily Corriere della Sera.
Corriere della Sera published a sharp editorial on the affair, saying that moves such as that of Finestra hampered the attempt by National Alliance leader Gianfranco Fini to rid the party of its old neo-fascist associations and place it within the mainstream right.
“For heavens sake, let’s not cry that there’ a black [ultra right-wing] danger, let’s not raise alarms out of time and out of place,” Corriere wrote. “Let’s limit ourselves to recall that every Aimone in bloom, however little, is a blow to the difficult process of transforming the National Alliance into a force of the democratic, modern, European right.”
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.
