Fascist salutes are not criminally liable if they are made on the occasion of mere commemorations, but only if there is a real risk of restoring the Fascist party that ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943, the supreme Court of Cassation said Thursday in a keenly awaited ruling in the light of a headline-grabbing incident in which hundreds of neofascists made the salute on the anniversary of the 1978 Rome murder allegedly by far left militants of three teen members of the youth wing of the neofascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), a distant precursor to Premier Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy (FdI) party.
The 1952 Scelba Law against apology for Fascism and attempting to restore the Fascist party must be used in the case of people making Fascist salutes, it ruled.
In issuing the ruling, the high court ordered a second appeals trial for eight far-right militants who were found guilty of making the salute during a commemoration in Milan in 2016. Their new trial will thus probably find them innocent in light of the Cassation's ruling, legal experts said.
Their lawyer stated, in fact that the ruling "shows that such salutes are not criminally liable in the case of mere commemorations, but only when is the concrete risk of trying to restore the Fascist party."
The Rome-based neofascist group CasaPound said that in effect the ruling authorised them to keep making the salute during their ceremonies.
The 1952 Scelba Law against apology for Fascism and attempting to restore the Fascist party must be used in the case of people making Fascist salutes, said the Cassation.
The Cassation Court said Article 5 of the law should apply in these cases, which states that "anyone, by taking part in public meetings, stages demonstrations used by the dissolved Fascist party or Nazi organisations is to be punished by detention of up to three years and by fines between 200,000 and 500,000 lire.
It goes on to say: "The judge, in pronouncing the verdict, may order stripping rights...of the criminal code for a period of five years." More than 10 people are under investigation in a Rome probe into the Fascist salutes made by the many participants at the January 7 commemoration of the 1978 Acca Larentia massacre.
Over 100 people have been identified in relation to what happened at the commemoration of the Acca Larentia massacre, in which the three far-right youth militants died.
Far-right groups from many parts of the country made 'Roman' salutes and shouted "present and correct" like Mussolinis blackshirts during the commemoration, and the Rome branch of the DIGOS special security and political police unit is working with police in several cities to identify other people involved during the event outside the former MSI HQ in Via Acca Larentia, which takes its name from a Roman fertility goddess.
The event was not attended by Premier Meloni's rightwing FdI party, whose roots go back to the MSI.
Lazio Governor and FdI bigwig Francesco Rocca was present at a separate ceremony in via Acca Larentia.
Several FdI members have condemned the incident but not Meloni, who has come under pressure to do so.
Italy's first woman premier, shortly before she was voted in in autumn 2021, once more condemned Fascism for its suspension of democracy and its "odious" racial laws against the Jews.
She has rejected attempts to over-emphasize FdI's lineage from the MSI, while also rejecting calls to remove the MSI's Tricolor Flame from the party logo, a flame originally representing the one burning over Mussolini's tomb.
FdI is a member of the European Conservative and Reformists caucus at the EP, a group founded by former British prime minister and current Foreign Secretary David Cameron.
Other members are Poland's Law and Justice party , the Sweden Democrats, Spain's Vox, Alliance for Germany and the Finns Party.
In the Acca Larentia massacre on January 7, 1978, two members of MSI's youth wing Fronte della Gioventù, Franco Bigonzetti and Francesco Ciavatta, aged 18 and 19, were shot dead, allegedly by far left militants, outside the party's Rome headquarters.
A third MSI youth wing member, Stefano Recchioni, 19, was fatally injured by a stray bullet during ensuing clashes between members of the Fronte della Gioventù who rioted after the two deaths, and police.
The Italian right has claimed no effort was ever made to find the alleged shooters, as allegedly in a number of other cases involving far-right victims.
Then Fronte della Gioventù leader Gianfranco Fini, later a foreign minister in Silvio Berlusconi's second government from 2001 to 2006, was wounded by a police gas canister.
Fini caused a row in 1994 by initially calling Benito Mussolini the greatest statesman of the 20th century before some time later, in 2003, calling Fascism "absolute evil".
Fini in 1995 turned the MSI into a more moderate party, National Alliance (AN), which was later subsumed into Berlusconi's Freedom Front, in 2009, before Meloni set up FdI four years later, in 2012.
It was polling at around 4% of the vote in its early years but surged in popularity more recently after remaining in opposition to all recent governments, of all stripes.
It polled just under 30% at the September 2021 general election and is still that high thanks to Meloni's popularity.
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