Mussolini’s Missing Medallions Found In Missouri Scholars Say They Have Artistic Merit, But Their Chief Value Is As Historic Artifacts
A collection of large copper medallions created for one of Mussolini’s principal Fascist shrines in Rome and missing since American troops occupied the Italian capital in World War II has come to light at a cattle ranch here in southwestern Missouri.
Jay Anderson, who operates the 800-acre ranch near the Kansas border, said his father, a major in the U.S. Army who died in 1976, said that he had removed nine medallions from a marble map on the side of a building when his unit, part of the 45th Infantry Division, became one of the first to occupy Rome in June 1944. Maj. James Anderson then mailed the medallions to his home in Kansas City, his son said.
After his father’s death, Anderson explained, he divided the medallions with his sister, Nancy Ekern, who lives in Mexico, Mo., and he and his sister have been using them, unaware of their significance, to decorate their homes.
Anderson said that his father had told him that he had asked his commanding officer if he could have the medallions, and the officer had said: “Yeah, if you want them, get them!”
“My dad then got an extension ladder and pulled them off the wall,” Anderson said. “He told me he just tied them up with cord, and didn’t even wrap them in anything. He put his address on them and mailed them home. And when he got back from the service, they were on our porch in Kansas City just the way he had tied them up.”
Anderson said that he and his sister have yet to decide what to do with the medallions now that their historical significance is known.
It is possible, although unlikely because of their limited monetary value, that the Italian government will try to recover the medallions by filing a civil suit against the Andersons in Missouri.
The Andersons could be prosecuted under the National Stolen Property Act, which makes it a crime to knowingly possess stolen property. That is unlikely because the Andersons, until recently, were unaware of the importance of the medallions. The Andersons were contacted by a New York Times reporter who had learned of the existence of the medallions through a letter from a third party.
Scholars say that although the medallions are the work of Antonio Munoz (1884-1960), a prominent Italian artist of his time, and have artistic merit, their chief value is as historical artifacts that reveal Mussolini’s carefully cloaked lust for empire.
“They’re very important documents,” said Denis Mack Smith, an emeritus professor of modern Italian history at Oxford University’s All Souls College and the author of a biography and other works on the Italian dictator.
“Mussolini talked about imperialism in deliberately confusing and contradictory terms, but here you have exact illustrations of what he was thinking.”
The medallions, made of finely hammered sheets of copper, measure about 3 feet by 4 feet.
They depict industrial, agricultural and maritime scenes, and were highlights on a wall-sized marble map of Mussolini’s Fascist empire in 1936, when it dominated the Mediterranean and extended into North Africa through Libya, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia.