A British woman Angela Thompson has shared her horror at finding mugs adorned with Hitler’s face and Nazi slogans on sale in Italy, supermarket on July 29.
Thompson posted a picture of the €5.90 items to Twitter with the caption: ‘Wtf. Just arrived in Italy on holiday and I knew fascism was on the rise here but still shocked to see these in the local supermarket.’
Another tourist, Peter Davanzo, told Metro.co.uk he also found wine bottles with Hitler on the label in a small grocery store in Foggia, Puglia, in the south of the country.
He said: ‘The owner had turned his back on me while he was serving another customer and I quickly took [pictures] without him noticing me.’ He added that after taking the photos he ‘left quickly’.
The owner of the supermarket where it is believed the mugs were being sold in Venice, Stefano Nopetti, last year told La Repubblica: ‘It’s just business.’
He said the products are sold across Italy in major tourist areas from Venice to Bologna and along the Adriatic coast.
Mr Nopetti said: ‘I have been selling the bottles for thirty years, no one has ever forbidden me to do so. ‘I’m neither fascist nor Nazi.
But if people buy them – and these bottles, they buy so many – I keep selling them.’ Last year anti-fascist groups campaigned to have the mugs and wine bottles also featuring Hitler banned, filing complaints with local authorities and the police.
But the products, with labels that also feature Benito Mussolini and other dictators, remained on the shelves as there is no ‘national legislation’ against the products.
According to the Times of Israel, bottles and mugs on sale in Rimini attracted ‘five or six’ complaints a year but the mayor of the town said his ‘hands were tied’.
Andrea Gnassi said that attempts to press for national legislation against the fascist products had so far been unsuccessful and the courts ruled in favor of traders.
Winemaker Vini Lunardelli is behind the products which also feature Stalin, Napoleon and Franco.
The company has insisted the products are a ‘joke gift’ and come under Lunardelli’s ‘historical series’ products that have been sold in Italian shops since 1995.
According to the company’s website, about half of their wine production is devoted to creating the series, called ‘cult objects among collectors’.
At the European elections in May, the eurosceptic far-right movement won major gains across the continent – including in Italy. Traditional centrist leaders were wiped out by the nationalist, anti-immigration far-right.
Matteo Salvini, who has been likened to Donald Trump for his far-right views, won with his Lega Party in a shock result for the country. After the win he said: ‘A new Europe is born’.
