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STORY: Italy this week marks 100 years since the dictator Benito Mussolini grabbed power in Rome...

... the man being one of the central figures of World War Two.

And the city has yet to shake off his fascist legacy.

Monuments glorifying Mussolini's command dot around Rome.

Emblems of his fascist party, and carvings of his square-jawed troops embellish public spaces.

While Germany systematically scrubbed clean any symbols of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime after the war, Italians took a much less rigorous approach to removing traces of their dictator's 21-year rule.

Paul Corner is a British historian, who last month published a book that delves into Italy's persistent nostalgia for fascism.

"I think it is true that Italy never...has really never come to terms with its fascist past. This remains true, I think."

The 100-year anniversary also coincides, with the swearing in of Italy's most right-wing administration since World War Two, led by Giorgia Meloni.

Her own party, the Brothers of Italy, has post-fascist roots.

Meloni praised Mussolini in her youth but has since changed her stance.

She told parliament on Tuesday that she has "never felt any sympathy for fascism" and denouncing the racist, anti-Jewish laws of 1938 as "the lowest point of Italian history."

Tens of thousands of Romans worked for the fascist administration and took little or no part in the resistance.

After the war, they saw no need to rub out their past.

Sofia was born in 1939.

"In those days you could go to sleep at night leaving the front door open and with the keys attached to the lock. The ugly side of fascism was the war. That didn’t have to be. Mussolini gave fair rules though, it was the people he had around him, like it is now, that did bad things."

Corner estimates that as many as 500,000 Italians died as a result of Mussolini's catastrophic decision to fight alongside Hitler, including some 7,700 Italian Jews sent to Nazi death camps.

"The Italians have always taken a certain distance from fascism. The theory behind or the rhetoric behind the post-war period was the Italians have been victims of fascism."

In recent years, demonstrators in Britain have pulled down symbols of their country's racist colonial past.

While in the United States, Confederate monuments have been removed, denouncing them as expressions of white supremacy.

No such historical revision is expected in Italy.

"Nobody is asking for these monuments to fascism or built by fascism should be destroyed. I think they are going to blend in. The problem, of course, is what they mean to people and this, I think, is something that people have to think about."