Death In Alto Lario |
Foreign Policy > Europe
As much as human life is torn between good and evil, between beauty and ugliness, we must, as a condition of life, learn to distinguish one from the other.
Lars Møller | May 27, 2026
From Wikimedia Commons: An Italian Garden (William Merritt Chase, 1909)
In the northern reaches of Italy, where Lake Como narrows into austere corridors of blue-green silence, spring arrives with deceptive innocence. Around Dongo, the mountains descend in soft gradients towards the water, and the season unfurls itself with almost liturgical patience.
There is a particular red that belongs to Lombard springtime. It appears first in the petals, then in the evening sky above the lake, where clouds become streaked with crimson and copper before dissolving into violet dusk. One could mistake this redness for vitality alone, for nature’s annual proclamation that death has again been outwitted. Yet Europe has too often discovered that the colors of renewal can darken abruptly into the colors of slaughter.
On April 27, 1945, Benito Mussolini was captured near Dongo while attempting to flee towards Switzerland amid the collapse of the fascist regime that he had built upon intimidation, theatricality, and violence. The following day, in Giulino di Mezzegra near Lake Como, he and Clara Petacci were executed by partisans. Before the bodies were transported to Milan and hung upside down in Piazzale Loreto, Mussolini’s corpse lay exposed to the bright daylight. The dictator who had once filled Piazza Venezia with his voice, posing conceitedly on a balcony, now possessed only the mute eloquence of ruin. Bullet wounds punctured his body like obscene signatures written by fate. His face, once inflated by certainty and command, would already have begun to lose its human coherence. Flesh collapses quickly after death; power even more quickly.
One imagines the spring grass nearby continuing its inaudible ascent towards the sun. There is something profoundly unbearable in this juxtaposition: the fertility of nature surrounding the wreckage of political fanaticism. The birds continue singing while men execute one another. Water reflects the mountains with the same serenity whether dictators rise or fall. The earth does not interrupt its blossoming for human madness. Indeed, barbarism unfolds beneath skies of unbearable beauty. The twentieth century understood this with horrifying clarity. Concentration camps existed within reach of orchards. Gulags were buried beneath auroras........