Faced with the rain of reactions, he tried to open the umbrella: “I was not thinking of Arnaldo Mussolini, I was thinking of my grandfather Raffaele, not a fascist but a true Christian Democrat and man of the Church … He made it Latina, indeed Littoria, together with all the other settlers, the other very poor pioneers who arrived from Veneto in 1930 ». But Claudio Durigon from Latina, indeed Littoria, born in 1971 and a Pontine member of the League, as well as undersecretary for the economy of the Draghi government, was unable to divert the flow of controversies triggered by his proposal: to remove the name “Parco Falcone” from the municipal garden of his city -Borsellino ”to pay homage to the Duce’s brother.
Confident man of the Duce
The younger brother whose image Benito Mussolini had tried to “clean up”, immediately after his death (which occurred from a heart attack in 1931), from the rumors of business and economic speculations that had accompanied his career always alongside the leader: a man of trust with a central role in the reorganization of the press but also in the definition of the relationship between fascism and the Catholic Church. An actor in the stabilization of the regime of which he also embodies a characteristic kept well hidden by the dictatorship but now brought to light for some time by historical studies: corruption.
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The “Sinclair Convention”
The biggest story was the Sinclair Oil affair: after long negotiations, in 1924 the American oil company secured the oil exploration monopoly on Italian territory by paying bribes to members of the fascist government but also to Arnaldo Mussolini. Someone, however, had managed to obtain evidence of those hidden funds and was ready to report: it was the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti. He was prevented. On June 10, 1924, the day of his murder, he was supposed to give a speech in the House after the famous one (and remained his last) on the electoral fraud of fascism. According to many historians (including Emilio Gentile) this was the reason for his killing. He was killed so as not to reveal a financial scandal that also involved Arnaldo Mussolini. Of which the declarations in favor of fascism throughout the Matteotti affair remain famous and the links with the perpetrators of that crime have now been ascertained.
The toponymic war in Latina
In Latina, what the defascistization of toponymy had already renamed simply “Parco Comunale” in 1943, continued to be “Parco Mussolini” in urban use. Only in 2017 the center-left junta decided to officially call it “Falcone-Borsellino park”. Now Durigon, thinking of his grandfather Raffaele, would like to return to the brother of the Duce Arnaldo.