Here man feels himself to be infinitely small because there can be no greater tragedy than the Holocaust. It may well not be possible for man to create heaven on Earth but he is certainly capable of building a hell on Earth. Let every man remember, let all the young people know about it, may its memory be always renewed.
The above is the message left in the visitors' book at Auschwitz concentration camp by Gianfranco Fini, leader of Alleanza Nazionale, the ex-Fascist right-wing party that traces its roots to Mussolini.
Mr Fini's visit to Auschwitz last month was perhaps the most significant, if symbolic, step yet taken in his mission to reshape his party, casting off its Fascist past to transform it into a modern, rightwing, democratic party.
For much of the 1990s, he has been engaged on nothing less than a rehabilitation programme for his party. It was he who, in 1993, urged the party to adopt its current name, Alleanza Nazionale (AN), scrapping the old title of Movimento Sociale Italiano, (MSI), the name under which the post-war Fascists recycled both themselves and their Fascist ideals.
In that same year, Mr Fini also made a surprise visit to the Ardeatine caves in Rome, site of Italy's worst wartime civilian massacre in March 1944 when 335 civilians, including 85 Jews, were slaughtered by Nazi troops in reprisal for the killing of 33 German soldiers by partisan fighters.
The fact that Mussolini's minister for the interior, Guidi Buffarini Guidi, and the Fascist chief of police in Rome, Pietro Caruso, had helped the Gestapo round up Italian civilians for the slaughter means that, until this day, the Ardeatine massacre remains one of the most controversial and painful of all Italian war memories. Symbolic gestures like the visit to the caves, the denunciation of Mussolini's infamous 1938 racial laws, the drafting of a party statute denouncing anti-Semitism and an obvious attempt to keep his party separate and well clear of Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front in France may not have worked an overnight change in the party DNA. But it has all helped to reap huge electoral benefits, as evidenced by the 15.7 per cent of votes won by AN at the 1996 general election.
For most of the post-war period, the MSI vote hovered about the 5 to 7 per cent mark.
Mr Fini's visit to Auschwitz last week was the logical consequence of his sustained drive to make his party the acceptable and modern face of the right, one ready to take over control of centre-right forces when and if the political fortunes of the media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, and those of his party, Forza Italia, fade with the same meteoric alacrity with which they rose in 1994.
Not everyone, however, is yet convinced by Mr Fini. When the AN leader sought to visit Israel in recent years, Israeli government officials were less than welcoming, telling him that such a visit could only come about when and if it had the blessing of Italy's 40,000-strong Jewish community. Even last week's visit to Auschwitz prompted a less than enthusiastic reaction from Italian Jews.
"I am convinced that Fini sincerely wants to make AN into a democratic right-wing party," a Jewish community leader, Tullia Zevi, wrote in the Rome daily La Repubblica. "To this end, and in an attempt to exorcise the past, for years now he has gone looking for legitimisation and approval, both by visiting the sites of the martyrdom of the victims of Nazi-Fascism and by looking for contacts and dialogue with Jewish institutions and communities in Italy and elsewhere.
"In my modest opinion, however, the road to be taken is another one, one which will lead to the heart of his own party where there are certainly supporters of his line but where there are also opponents and those unwilling to listen . . . and where there are the very young rebels," she wrote.
And she asked: "Where is the demarcation line between the Youth Front and those extreme right-wing groupings, those with the shaven heads, the Celtic crosses and the anti-Semitic and racist slogans often seen at football stadiums?"
Curiously, AN insiders such as Enzo Palmesano, who helped to draft the party's 1995 anti-Semitism statute, tend to agree with Ms Zevi, saying last week that the problem of the relationship between Jews and Alleanza Nazionale "is one that has to be fought within our own ranks".
There can be no denying the suffering and hardship inflicted by Mussolini's 1938 racial laws on Italian Jews, a point underlined by an ongoing government commission investigating property confiscation from Jews.
Notwithstanding that legislation, however, many war historians suggest that Mussolini, senior Fascist officials and thousands of Italian civilians all systematically attempted to thwart the Nazi pogrom of Italian Jews. In the end, more than 7,000 Italian Jews perished in camps, meaning that 85 per cent of them survived the second World War.
It may be worth remembering that in 1944 Federick Bosshammer, the extermination expert sent to Italy by Adolf Eichmann of the SS, reported to Berlin in frustration saying that the "final solution" of the Italian Jewish problem was "not a practical proposition" because of the lack of co-operation of Italian Fascists.
Perhaps Mr Fini may well win his own internal party battles and, who knows, one day may even win over an understandably cautious Italian Jewish community.
The Leaning Tower of Pisa is leaning a little less, 1.5 mm - due to intensive efforts to prop it up. The head of the committee to safeguard the landmark, Dr Michele Jamiolkowski, said yesterday it was hoped another four millimetres could be gained before a second phase of excavations started to stabilise the tower, which was closed to the public in January 1990 because of security concerns.