Television
The miniseries Mussolini: Son of the Century tracks Il Duce’s early years in the 1920s, uncomfortably reflecting the present-day far beyond Italy. By Kurt Johnson.
Mussolini: Son of the Century is a warning for our times
Throughout the eight-part miniseries Mussolini: Son of the Century, available on SBS On Demand, we almost never see the sky. The camera is instead pressed up against actor Luca Marinelli’s face, tracking every bead of sweat, every throbbing vein, as chiaroscuro warps and pivots across his features.
This is Mussolini as Iago, confiding his machinations against the teetering Italian democracy. “Make Italy great again,” he declaims in English, staring directly into the camera. Such a gleeful recognition of the present omnishambles in a historical drama is unnerving. We’re not laughing.
Directed by Joe Wright (2005’s Pride & Prejudice, Darkest Hour and Anna Karenina), the series arrived on Italian screens in January. When preparing for filming, which began in November 2022, “Make Italy Great Again” referred to a recent past rather than an unfolding present. Mussolini’s many soliloquies were originally written in English, but by the end of that October, the populist leader Giorgia Meloni had been appointed prime minister, and Wright decided they should be in Italian. His decision was informed by history imposing on the present.
Meloni has a political lineage back to Italian fascism. In 1996, she claimed that Mussolini was “a good politician, the best of the last 50 years”. She was only 19 at the time, but had spent three years with Movimento Sociale Italiano, the party widely considered to have inherited Mussolini’s legacy. She could have written off these decisions as youthful blunders but has never denounced her choices – she has only contested what they meant. Asked if she will be watching the series, she replied, “You will understand if I have other priorities.”
The series is adapted from the first novel in a tetralogy by Antonio Scurati, M: Son of the Century, written in 2018, and follows Mussolini’s early years. The author has had his own run-ins with fascism’s apologists. When he was booked for an anti-fascist monologue on state broadcaster RAI, Scurati’s appearance was cancelled at the last minute. Leaked emails said the reasons were “editorial”, but Scurati claimed it was censorship.
The series begins with the 1921 Fiume Crisis. Mussolini was then little more than an object of ridicule, from the mucky Milanese streets to the scoffing Weimar-style salons. He lives in the shadow of the poet, pilot and Übermensch Gabriele D’Annunzio, envying everything from the loyalty D’Annunzio commands to his bigger penis.
For the series’ 400 minutes, Mussolini schemes to become Il Duce, less puppet-master than arch-opportunist, bending every crisis to his advantage. His tools are the newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia, a mealy-mouthed deputy and his psychotic fascist thugs. Only his mistress, the contemptuous and nihilistic bourgeois darling Margherita Sarfatti (Barbara Chichiarelli), has our privileged access to the private man.
Displays of energy, youth and power are as seductive now as in the 1920s, otherwise advertising agencies would have moved on from their 80-year obsession with them. Seduction, however, is only half the story for Mussolini. The synchronised crunch of jackboots, the torchlit ceremonies and the exquisite tailoring all have an ulterior motive: to distract the rational mind with spectacle and trigger the reptilian fear beneath.
Wright’s maximalist production goes where the novel cannot. The symbolism is rarely subtle. Every event unfolds in a theatre of some sort, from opera halls or torchlit ruins hosting a fascist congress to the violently sloped parliament, a perilous construction on the brink of toppling. Sonically, it’s bombastic to overwhelming. The electrifying soundtrack by Tom Rowlands of The Chemical Brothers includes references to ’90s rave. It’s appropriate to hear drum and bass tracked to blackshirts as they break into a communist newspaper to pound the carefully set pages with black truncheons, the type bursting like teeth.
Mussolini is only ever half in control of his thugs. Just as vainglorious as he is, they regard planning as an unwanted distraction from cruelty and violence and are as likely to upset as to execute his carefully laid plans. Mussolini: Son of the Century makes plain the many squandered opportunities that could have checked Mussolini’s rise, such as when King Emmanuel didn’t order the army to quash the march on Rome. Time and again, in the sights of machine-gun and floodlight, Mussolini bluffs, sulks and bullies his way to victory. The moral is clear. Power isn’t won: it is surrendered.
Marinelli’s Mussolini is both brutal and brutish. He reeks of toxicity, especially in his dealings with women: he rapes his secretary, lies to his long-suffering wife and clutches his genitalia after an aggressive fuck with his mistress. Yet his sardonic humour, the brazenness of his designs and his savage ambition are fascinating despite our immediate revulsion. Wright – who has said empathy is dangerous because it is unthinking – toys with the viewer’s identification with Mussolini and then, when he feels we’re too close, yanks us back with violence.
The rendering of fascism’s brutality without ellipses is important. Even before the end of World War II, revisionism was firmly under way in Italy. The Western Allies needed a reliable bulwark against communism as relations with the Soviet Union iced over. Italy never had an equivalent to denazification, and the continuity in its politics can be startling. According to historian Richard J. Evans, as late as 1960, “60 of the country’s 64 regional prefects and all 135 of its police chiefs had begun their careers under Mussolini.”
Here in Italy, brava gente, or good people, remains a popular myth: Italians are simply too humane, too noble to ever become full-blown fascists, and any tendency that way was due to the Germans. The notion of brava gente has been cultivated through stories such as Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and even Hannah Arendt went easy, saying that Italians possess an “almost automatic general humanity of an old and civilized people”, a curious statement that needs weighing against fascist Italy’s zealous bombing of civilians in Republican Spain, their brutal invasion of Ethiopia and the concentration camps in Yugoslavia. Mussolini: Son of the Century confronts these worn-out platitudes, graphically revealing fascism’s capacity for evil.
“Now, tell me, what was the point? Look around you,” says Mussolini in the opening monologue, to newsreel footage of fascism’s crimes. “We’re still here.” Again, Wright is reaching into the present. “Make Italy great again” was the only English that survived in the script.
In the end, writing for Italian audiences and those comfortable with subtitles might have been a sound strategy, given American streamers haven’t picked it up yet. A representative from one said, “We love the show … However, it’s a little too controversial for us.” Perhaps this is the firmest endorsement of its relevance to the mess unfolding now.
Mussolini: Son of the Century is streaming on SBS On Demand.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on April 19, 2025 as "Il Duce vita".
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