When battle lines were drawn in Charlottesville, standing among the white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and Ku Klux Klan members (“some very fine people,” according to President Donald Trump) were men brandishing shields bearing the image of an ax bundled with wooden rods—a symbol of fascism. That weekend’s tragic events, which swirled around a “Unite the Right” rally against the city’s decision to remove a public Confederate statue, reminded Northwestern University history professor Bill Savage of the disturbing fact that there’s a 2,000-year-old Roman pillar on Chicago’s lakefront, donated to the city by fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

The day after the August 12 Unite the Right rally, Savage tweeted, “CHICAGO: Time to remove monuments to racism & fascism, ‘Balbo Column’; & rename Balbo Drive too.” “Every time I bike by that column it irks me,” he later told me. “A street in our city center named for a fascist? No.”

The next morning, the Sun-Times‘s Michael Sneed reported that Burke and northwest-side alderman Gilbert Villegas were calling for “righting a wrong” by removing the Balbo tributes. “I’m amazed the citizens of Chicago have not demanded that these symbols of fascism . . . be removed decades ago,” Burke told Sneed. The aldermen said they plan to lobby the Chicago Park District, which owns the column, to remove it, and petition the City Council to rename the street for former mayor Martin Kennelly, who was Irish-American.

Sposato, whose family immigrated from Italy in the early 1900s, is in favor of taking down the Mussolini-donated column. “Anyone who sided with Hitler was not a friend of America, I’ll tell you that,” says the alderman, who adds that his great uncle died fighting the Axis powers in World War II. Still, he opposes changing the street name on the grounds that erasing geographic names that honor problematic leaders could be “a slippery slope.”

While DiFrisco makes no apologies for Mussolini, he argues that, despite claims that the Balbo is a symbol of bigotry, the aviator was the only leader of the Fascist party to oppose the anti-Semitic legislation the dictator passed in 1938. “Afterwards,” DiFrisco says of Balbo, “he made a point of hosting his Jewish friends in public restaurants to show his disdain and disgust for the law.” He says that Balbo was also alone among Fascist party leaders in opposing Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler, partly due to the fact that Nazis viewed Italians as genetically inferior to northern Europeans.

“I know when we’re gone [the memorials will be taken down] because there won’t be anyone to voice opposition,” Fiore says. “But while I’m still here I’m going to say what I’m going to say.”   v