ANTI-FASCISTS in Italy will march through the town where Benito Mussolini is buried tomorrow, 100 years since the March on Rome brought the dictator to power.

The northern town of Predappio was liberated from fascism on October 28 1944, so protest organisers the National Association of Italian Partisans (ANPI) have chosen the date to eclipse the memory of the March on Rome and prevent far-right demonstrators from commemorating the day.

Today’s Italian government is led by a far-right party with a neofascist past for the first time since World War II.

Brothers of Italy leader Giorgia Meloni became the country’s first female prime minister last week at the head of a coalition government.

While some have praised her appointment as a step forward for women’s rights, only six of her 24 government ministers are female. They include Family and Birth Rate Minister Eugenia Roccella, who has described abortion as the “dark side of motherhood.”

Ms Meloni has said that her initial focus is on helping Italians with soaring energy costs, but she has already made statements opposing an “LGBT lobby” and same-sex parenting as well as calling for a naval blockade of Libya to stop migrant crossings.

The ANPI said it had seen signs of a rise in far-right activity in regions governed by the Brothers of Italy, including the cutting-off of maintenance funding for brass-plated “stumbling stones,” engraved with the names and dates of Holocaust victims outside their pre-war homes in the Marche region.

ANPI national president Gianfranco Pagliarulo said that social media attacks against his organisation had also increased.

“This is a disturbing signal,” he said.

“It is evident that the victory of the nationalist right will lead to a resurgence of neofascist provocative attitudes.”

Mr Pagliarulo said, however, that the group was not worried because “we will fight with political weapons, and if necessary, with legal weapons.

“The March on Rome is the founding myth of fascist Italy and, for us, it is a negative myth, as the origin of a disaster that led Italy into many wars, most catastrophically World War II,” he said.

“We must combat the positive myth of the March on Rome and sustain this day as the start of the darkest period in modern Italian history.”