Before irate heroin dealers knocked out his front teeth, Chet Baker was the boy wonder of West Coast “cool jazz.” Tact, however, was not among the gifts that made him a star. Addressing a young musician while touring Italy in the early 1960s, Baker was heard to introduce himself with a clunking icebreaker for the ages: “Gee, it’s a drag about your old man.” The jazz pianist in question, then going by the name Romano Full, was by birth the youngest son of ex-dictator Benito Mussolini. The “drag,” as Baker delicately put it, involved Romano’s father being shot and strung up from a petrol station on Milan’s Piazzale Loreto in April 1945.

But if the ensuing US occupation put paid to official restrictions on jazz, Mussolini’s death did not signal the end of fascism in the land of its birth. For although the postwar constitution forbade the reformation of the National Fascist Party (PNF), it took barely a year for diehards of the ancien régime to found a successor: the Italian Social Movement (MSI).

The reconstitution of the Fascist party thus went forever unchecked. On top of that, there would be no reckoning, no Nuremberg trials, no “defascistization” process of the kind seen in Germany. Indeed, the birth of the MSI on Boxing Day 1946 made Italy a unique case among the defeated nations; in no other was a party founded in continuity with the fascist regime permitted to contest elections.