While a ride on that bus offered little more reminder of the Fascist past than a racist slur against immigrants – and perhaps just a whiff of Lateran Pacts – the number seventy bus hosted debates that were routine both in their regularity and in their political predictability. It had little in common, for instance, with the slick and overcrowded number sixty-four bus, that at Largo Argentina parted ways with its counterpart, triumphantly to ferry its load of expectant tourists across the Tiber towards St. It might have been a vagary of its itinerary, but the number seventy was always quieter and its passengers older than those of more dynamic services that shared part of its central route. The perennially shabby carcass of the number seventy bus wound its way across Rome, from Termini railway station to Piazzale Clodio. From the narratives of innocence and sacrifice that populate the canon of Italian film about Fascism to the sanitised representations of Italy’s wars of aggression or the boycott of Moustapha Akkad’s The Lion of the Desert (1981), this paper argues that recurrent presences and absences in Italy’s cinematic memories of the long Second World War have not been random but coherent, cogent and consistent. The dominant narrative of italiani brava gente explains popular amnesia and institutional silences that still surround the darkest and bloodiest pages in Italy’s history. Through an examination of the long-term trends in Italian cinema about the Fascist period, this article explores its recurrent tropes alongside its recurrent absences, isolating in particular the act of killing and Italy’s African Empire as crucial absences in Italy’s memory. In Italy, cinema has contributed to constructing a paradox of memory in which the rememberer is asked to prevent past mistakes from happening again and yet is encouraged to forget what those mistakes were, or that they ever even took place.
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