As the far right surges around the globe, what can a new TV series about Mussolini teach us? | Caroline Moorehead

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On 3 January 1925, Benito Mussolini delivered the most important speech of his life to the Italian parliament. His career was about to be over. The body of the socialist deputy and his bitter foe, Giacomo Matteotti, had been discovered in a shallow grave near Rome and mounting evidence pointed to Mussolini’s responsibility for his murder. With the king, the old liberal democratic elite, the left and many of his own party pressing for his dismissal, Mussolini declared that everything – the fascist violence, the immorality, the turmoil into which Italy had sunk – was his fault, “because I, I alone, created it”. By the same token, he alone was the man “capable of dominating the crisis”. Parliament, stunned, sat silent. There was no voice of protest. The dictatorship was saved.

Based on the first volume in a trilogy of the same name by Antonio Scurati and garlanded with praise by Italian critics, the television drama Mussolini: Son of the Century covers just six years in Mussolini’s life, from his days as a brawling but highly effective journalist in Milan to his assumption of total power. Joe Wright, better known for his gentle approach and light touch in Pride and Prejudice and Atonement, has produced a series that is loud, provocative and violent. The music that accompanies it is throbbing, incessant and often intrusive, with occasional snatches of Verdi and Puccini. All is dark, deeply gloomy and sepia-coloured.

The series is presented as a “biographical historical drama” – that is to say, with considerable licence to play about with the facts. It would be fair, however, to say that for the most part the narrative keeps close to the broad sweep of Mussolini’s rise. The gerarchi, the fascist leaders such as the flying ace Italo Balbo and the gross and vituperative Roberto Farinacci from Cremona, are portrayed in their greedy, strident, vulgar colours; and his mistress, the art critic Margherita Sarfatti, is rightly seen as a considerable influence on fascism’s emerging ideology. Rachele, Mussolini’s long-suffering wife, is relegated to the shadows, and Bianca Ceccato, mother of one of his illegitimate children, is made to stand for the many others he impregnated.

But the details niggle. It is highly unlikely that Quinto Navarra, Mussolini’s valet, saw Matteotti’s bloodstained wallet in the drawer of his employer’s desk. The blackshirts never staged a vast, orderly rally along the Appian Way and Mussolini surely never flung himself backwards into the arms of his yelling, flame-throwing followers. Cesare Rossi, the regime’s press and propaganda man, is shown here as the Duce’s main confidant – when that role was in fact occupied by his brother, Arnaldo.

Does this matter? Luca Marinelli gives a convincing performance as the narcissistic, bombastic, insecure Mussolini who, when not addressing Rossi or a vast bust of himself in the Palazzo Venezia, speaks directly to the camera, to us, his audience. There are very few scenes in which he is not present, filmed a little from below, glowering over us, confiding his thoughts, his triumphs, his contempt for his companions. This is fascism as theatre, hectoring and loud. More important than the details, perhaps, is the lack of subtlety, the crude juxtaposition between the sanity represented by Matteotti and the noisy, inarticulate barbarity offered by the fascists.

There are few moments of respite. This series is not for the faint-hearted. Many people were indeed bludgeoned, dosed with castor oil and killed by the fascists, but not on this vast, orgiastic scale. The March on Rome was, in fact, concluded not in widespread bloodshed, as the series suggests, but remarkably peacefully. In Milan, Turin and Parma, where opposition was expected, the fascists took control quietly and smoothly. Rome, on the day the king lost his nerve and offered Mussolini the prime ministership, has been described as being in a “fever of delight” and florists ran out of flowers.

Some of the more interesting wider perspectives have been lost. Mussolini won friends abroad: by 1923, Sir Ronald Graham, British ambassador to Rome, was reporting to London that Mussolini was a “statesman of exceptional ability and expertise”. And you get little sense of Italy itself in the early 1920s, a country that felt betrayed by the allies, but was full of clever, articulate people, such as the historian Gaetano Salvemini and the philosopher Benedetto Croce, highly intelligent anti-fascists who, like Matteotti, fought hard to save the country from the dictatorship.

The miniseries aired in Italy before the UK release, and has attracted a great number of viewers, many of them admiring. In contemporary Italy, Mussolini is never far away. At the end of the war, the allies planned to rid the country of all visible signs of the dictatorship. They discovered that Mussolini had successfully imprinted fascist ideology on to the landscape, stamping his mark on to houses, sports stadiums and entire towns.

Predappio in Emilia-Romagna, where he grew up, remains a place of pilgrimage for Italians who descend on the anniversary of the March on Rome, to raise their arm in the fascist salute and buy replicas of the Duce’s various helmets and berets. On Lake Garda, where he had his last government, the villas in which he and his mistress Clara “Claretta” Petacci lived are now five-star hotels. The rooms that bear their names are booked out years in advance. Books about him, his family and the fascist leadership never stop appearing. Mussolinismo, as the cult is known in Italy, is not illegal. Not surprising, then, that when Giorgia Meloni, a former member of the neofascist MSI, was made prime minister, there was much talk of Mussolini’s legacy.

It would be hard to watch the series today without being conscious of the warning it contains. When Mussolini boasts that his plan is to “make Italy great again”, his words resonate.