ROME LETTER: The other day, my wife came home with a strange looking bottle opener, picked up at an antique market. On one side, there is the unmistakeable face of fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, complete with his Latin title Dux.
On the other side, there are the dates 1943-1983 with the letters, RSI-MSI.
The "RSI", of course, is the 1943-45 Repubblica Sociale Italiana, whilst the "MSI" is the post-war Movimento Sociale Italiano, the latter day fascist party which, as our bottle opener points out, assumed the political heritage of Il Duce.
In 1995, of course, the MSI became Alleanza Nazionale, currently the second largest party in the centre-right governing coalition of media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi. As the bottle opener would also indicate, for much of the post-war era the MSI made no secret of its nostalgia for the good-old fascist times.
Only 10 years ago, the MSI celebrated the 70th anniversary of Mussolini's historic march on Rome with a packed-out rally in Piazza Venezia, complete with fascist hymns and the infamous fascist or "Roman" salute. (Mussolini made many of his most famous speeches from a balcony in Palazzo Venezia, overlooking the square).
Under the leadership of Gianfranco Fini, however, the MSI signalled a radical break with its past at a celebrated party congress in Fiuggi in 1995 which saw the party change its name to Alleanza Nazionale.
As a leader of the MSI youth movement in the late 1970s, Mr Fini had earned himself a reputation for being a hardline "Blackshirt" enthusiast.
He did little to harm that reputation when in 1994, shortly after Mr Berlusconi's first general election victory, he stated his view that Mussolini was "the greatest \ statesman of the century".
Perhaps stung by the international criticism engendered by that remark and also alarmed by the cold reception afforded by (some) European partners to the five MSI members of that first Berlusconi government, Mr Fini has ever since devoted much careful time and energy to reshaping and redefining his party, steering it carefully away from its fascist past towards a modern European centre-right position. Party motions repudiating all forms of anti-Semitism, a visit to Rome's Fosse Adreatine graves, site of a infamous March 1944 German reprisal massacre that owed much to Italian fascist collusion and a February 1999 visit to Auschwitz have been just some of the steps he has taken down the road to international and indeed national rehabilitation.
Last weekend, Mr Fini, who is also Deputy Prime Minister in Mr Berlusconi's cabinet, took another step down the middle of the centre road when conducting a highly successful party conference in Bologna.
In a key-note speech, he reiterated that his party had broken with the past, once and for all, at Fiuggi.
In a speech that cited Edmund Burke, Alexis De Toqueville and Pope John Paul II among others, he appeared to strike a conciliatory note when arguing that there were no "illegitimate governments or oppositions" in Italy, only parties that vie for the nation's helm.
Furthermore, he called for a climate of dialogue and consensus in which existing welfare measures cannot become market mechanisms and in which labour reforms must not mean "development without solidarity".
Many of the 70,000 who annually visit Predappio or the bus loads who visit Salo, seat of Mussolini's RSI puppet state between 1943 and 1945, are perhaps nothing more than curious tourists.
After all, signs of the Italian fascist past, from the mosaics near the Olympic Stadium in Rome to the experimental Roman suburb EUR, are all around. Nostalgia for things fascist may not necessarily mean a belief in fascist ideals. As the fascist era recedes over the historical horizon, it may seem more like folklore than politics to many Italians today.
Yet, the suspicion remains that there are those in Mr Fini's party who, notwithstanding his leadership, experience a nostalgia that is as much ideological as folkloric, a yearning for an era that was (allegedly) a time of order and modernisation, a time when family values were all important and when police cracked down on mafiosi and crime in general.
Take the words of party eminence grise and former RSI militant, Mirko Trevaglia, speaking last week in Bologna: "You can abandon your father's house, but not your father."