Who are these 'thousands of people' who hang a calendar with Mussolini on it???? I've never known anyone who had or has his calendar, except when used for target practice.
I'm from Emilia Romagna and I know full well there were some people (a very small number) - older people in their 60s - who used to go to Predappio and 'pay homage.' But they were considered to be anomalies and a very small fringe of crazy loons.
I've seen the Benito aprons and they are tourist novelties. Note that the one pictured above also includes his date of death, hardly something I'd like to mention if I were a fan of il Duce.
There are a couple of things that Italians acknowledge about Mussolini: (1) the Lateran Treaty with the Vatican - this treaty is still in effect and it essentially separated the Catholic church from Italian affairs. It also established a separate sovereign entity (the Vatican); (2) public transportation and services - the famous 'he made the trains run on time' phrase is because he did invest a lot of money to create and strengthen railways and transportation networks, still used today.
Mussolini's enigmatic political views evolved greatly after WWI. His father was a socialist who named him after Benito Juarez, the revolutionary who was president of Mexico. He was a member of the Italian socialist party. He was also an elementary school teacher who was unable to secure a tenured position. He then became a member of a masons' union and he began writing for various socialist publications and becoming active with some anarcho-socialists in Switzerland. Through this time, he begins to form a revulsion for 'positive' socialism - that is, social responsibility, equality, unions, etc. - and instead becomes more and more an authoritarian socialist.
At first, he espoused anti-interventionist views. Later, he became more pro-interventionist and served in WWI. He was an enigmatic person whose political views changed throughout his life. For instance, in 1925, he established new rules for companies, requiring them to provide health services to their workers, to ensure that women and minors were not given excessive duties and to list and disclose toxic or chemical substances with whom the workers may have contact. Moreover, national employment contracts became required and employers could only offer different employment contracts if workers were provided with better wages and benefits than those the national contracts offered.
However, his new views on interventions in foreign lands caused political and economic problems with his campaigns in Africa and his inefficiency in matters of finance was disastrous. Gandhi, who met Mussolini, revealed that he thought Mussolini was an enigma, that he had done a lot for the farmers and workers and the poor, but that he had used coercion and threats, punishment, imprisonment and other questionable and undemocratic means to get what he wanted.
In 1933, he created the predecessor to modern-day INPS (which is the Italian version of the Social Security Administration). However, he supported the racial purity laws adopted later and his alliance with Germany pretty much signed his downfall.
Soon, Germany was basically governing Italy and Mussolini became even more marginalized. Whatever ideals he had held in the early 1900s were replaced by a despotic authoritarian who did not resemble the young man he once was.
In the early 1900s, his party espoused rather progressive ideas like an 8-hour workday, universal suffrage, voting age set at 18 years, minimum wage laws, progressive taxation, etc. Later, all these lofty goals were replaced by the yearning for a re-birth of the Roman Empire - using symbols like the Roman salute (adopted by the Nazis), the Roman eagle, etc. -, a fervent nationalism founded on military force and the reduction of freedoms for the individual, authoritarianism, racism, and antidemocratic sentiments.
One of his sons, Romano Mussolini, was a well known jazz pianist. Ironically, jazz was censored because it was a 'foreign' thing, but Romano became a fan of jazz and even befriended Duke Ellington, who remained a friend for life. He used pseudonyms throughout a great part of his life so he could work. He ended up marrying Sofia Loren's sister and one of his children, Alessandra, is the infamous Alessandra Mussolini.
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