Italians salute Mussolini on the iPhone

Fascism? There's an app for that

By Lester Haines, 29th January 2010

Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery

An iPhone app which allows nostalgic Italians to enjoy speeches by Benito Mussolini has proved a big hit, having attracted over 6,000 downloads since it launched on 21 January.

Creator Luigi Marino claims the one hundred speeches and 20 audiovisual files available via the €0.79 application are of "documentary interest", and allow "unprejudiced analysis of what happened during those years in Italy", as Spain's El País puts it.

Marino said: "I am amazed at the amount of downloads and I am aware that there have been complaints to Apple, but as I say it is not an application in praise of Mussolini but simply a tool of history."

Indeed, the Daily Mail notes that the app's comments page featured some serious stick, including "iPhone Italia should be ashamed of themselves" and "I can't believe it. I feel sick."

One patriot, however, was moved to write: "At last, a serious application."

iPhone Italia yesterday closed the comments page and issued a statement which read: "The comments posted do not represent the views of iPhone Italia and any which expressed a political viewpoint have been removed."

Confirming it would not pull the app, the company added: "The application is not a political item but one of history and concerns a person who wrote an important page in our history." ®

Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery

COMMENTS

House Rules Send Corrections

All Reader Comments (10)

Highly Rated

Posted Friday 29th January 2010 15:08 GMT

sandman

psst...

I think they would rather you forgot that "unfortunate" lapse in taste. Mind you, looking at the Mail it seems their ideas haven't changed that much since the 1930s.

Posted Friday 29th January 2010 14:12 GMT

Graham Marsden