This Monday marked the 80th anniversary of Benito Mussolini’s last journey: from a village on the shores of Lake Como, where he had been held since his capture the day before, to a farmhouse a little ways to the north, where partisans positioned him in front of a wall and executed him by gunfire. When Adolf Hitler took his own life in a Berlin bunker two days later, it became clear that the first fascist era had come to a sudden, bloody, and well-deserved end.