Academic Spotlight: Dr Paolo Heywood

In our next 'Academic Spotlight' we interview Dr Paolo Heywood about the release of his new book 'Burying Mussolini - Ordinary Life in the Shadows of Fascism'.

'Academic Spotlight' is a series on our social media channels and website which aims to highlight the achievements of our academic staff by asking them questions about their work.

What was the inspiration behind your book?

The idea for this book emerged from a wider project I was part of at Cambridge that studied the different ways in which ideas about 'free speech’ play out across the world. Because of its relation to fascism Predappio sees quite a lot of free speech controversies. But the book also emerged from my personal connection to Predappio, where my aunt was born and near where my Italian family has a summer house. Growing up, I was struck by the contrast between the town I knew - where people went about their ordinary lives - and its public image as a shrine to fascism. As I describe in the book, local people work hard to maintain a sense of normality despite their town being famous for something many would rather forget. This made me wonder about how communities live with difficult histories, and how ordinariness itself can become something people actively work to achieve rather than just their default state.

What was the most challenging part of writing this book?

The obvious thing to say here is something about doing ethnographic research with neo-fascists, but actually most of my research and most of the book is focussed on people who live in Predappio, rather than on its controversial visitors. So actually the biggest challenge was capturing how people actively try to make things unremarkable. As an anthropologist, I'm trained to observe and analyze what people do, but in Predappio, I had to figure out how to write about what people deliberately don't do - how they consciously ignore certain aspects of their surroundings, how they work to make extraordinary things seem ordinary. This was particularly challenging during the fascist commemorative marches, when locals would conspicuously continue their normal routines while surrounded by political tourists and media attention. How do you make the conspicuousness of that ‘normality' clear to a reader?

What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing your book?

When I was planning the project Predappio suddenly started popping up everywhere I looked because of controversial plans to site a ‘museum of fascism’ there. It felt like perfect timing that a place I’d always wanted to study was now suddenly in the news. But one of the most surprising and immediate discoveries I made there was how little local people cared about all this international controversy. While these debates among intellectuals and politicians worldwide were going on, Predappio's residents were far more passionate about local issues like recycling collection. This really highlighted how differently insiders and outsiders can view the same place, and how what counts as "political" often depends on where you're standing.

Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Find something you care about and are interested in and write about it. Don’t try and chase theoretical or topical trends. If other people are interested in what you write it’ll be because you care about it and write about it accordingly, not because you picked the perfect topic or idea.