Tim Small, our Italian editor, was walking to the office yesterday, reading a folded-up paper's coverage of the upcoming general elections. All of a sudden he looked up, abruptly stopped walking, and did seven double-takes in a row. He had come upon an electoral poster for MUSSOLINI. Yup. Mussolini. You know, the dictator? The guy who invented fascism? Well, his grand-daughter Alessandra is running for the right wing Alternativa Sociale.Could you imagine this happening in Germany? Having Hitler's graunddaughter running for elections against Angela Merkel? Wouldn't it be weird to be walking out of a club at 2 in the afternoon, rubbing your eyes and suddenly seeing a poster for a smiling HENRIETTA HITLER? That's impossible, and not only because Hitler left no offspring. It's that Germans really have a powerful sense of guilt about World War 2. Italians somehow don't. They can be all like, "Yeah, we were bad, but not really, the Germans were the bad ones, we were too busy writing up mouth-watering recipes and hanging out by the beach making delicious ice cream, by the way, do you want some delicious ice-cream? There you go. Have some ice-cream. Isn't it delicious? What were we talking about anyway?"