Last Friday night my wife and I were entertained to dinner at a large and apparently fashionable restaurant in the small town of Artena, which is situated about 25 miles south-east of Rome, and just three miles off the autostrada to Naples. The place was packed with a very assorted clientele: family groups, one or two large parties, several young couples. The food, the service, the wine - all were impeccable. There was a huge fire blazing in the hearth and the atmosphere was relaxed and congenial.

Yet we were uneasy, for it was apparent that we were dining in what amounted to a shrine to Benito Mussolini. All around us were memorabilia; the walls were festooned with photographs of the dictator at various stages in his career, as well as framed newspaper cuttings. The image of that large leonine face with the great jutting jaw was everywhere, even on the labels of the house wine and the ties of the waiters (who were, we noted, amiable and efficient but uniformly large and thick-necked, rather like bouncers.) Our hosts, I hasten to say, are not and never have been fascists or fascist sympathisers; and looking around the cheerful clientele, fresh-faced, animated and happy, it was hard to discern any ugliness or meanness of spirit, any undercurrent of menace or brutality.

A restaurant whose theme is the celebration of the life and times of a fascist dictator clearly is neither politically correct nor in the best of taste. But many people in Italy are ambivalent about Mussolini. The Oxford historian, Dennis Mack Smith, has pointed out that for the long period in which he ruled the country successfully before the Second World War, he attracted more popular admiration than anyone else in the entire course of Italian history. Then there are the well-honed claims: he got the trains to run on time, he took on the Mafia and so on.

Beyond this, there has been considerable revisionism in recent years, not least from the British historian, Nicholas Farrell, who lives in Mussolini's birthplace, Predappio, and whose controversial biography of Mussolini was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 2003. Farrell reminds us that people such as Pope Pius XI and Winston Churchill admired Mussolini. He argues that Mussolini gained power and held it almost bloodlessly for two decades before his disastrous alliance with Hitler; and that during those 20 years, he achieved much that was worth while.

That is indisputable, yet the case against Mussolini is much stronger. His fascism may have been much less extreme than Hitler's but it was still predicated on the idea that violence is a legitimate component of politics. His invasion of Ethiopia was barbaric. The atrocities committed by the Italian invaders were inexcusable and the cost of supporting the invasion placed intolerable strain on Italy's national finances, which Mussolini had worked hard to improve.

The ultimate condemnation must be his alliance with Hitler. Churchill desperately wanted Mussolini to stay neutral - and in that case Italy could have been like Spain, a country led by a fascist who none the less kept out of the war. Instead, Mussolini backed Hitler and invaded Greece. The vast invading force showed no military competence whatsoever as the Greeks fought valiantly in defence of their homeland. Hitler had to deploy troops to Greece who accomplished in two weeks what the Italians had not managed in six months.

From then on, Italy was doomed. The country ended with the worst of all scenarios: two great invading forces - the Allies and the Germans - slugged it out across its length and breadth as a civil war simultaneously raged. Mussolini, for 20 years a winner, was now an abject loser, and his erstwhile supporters turned on him viciously.

Yet he was not as bad a man as Hitler or Stalin or Mao. I know of nobody who will defend Hitler, but I know several who speak up for Stalin and Mao. I reckon there are many people in Britain who would not find it offensive to dine in a restaurant dedicated to the cult of Mao, though he did infinitely more evil than Mussolini. Some would say that any celebration of Mussolini must be extremely offensive to Jews - although the French voluntarily sent far more Jews to their deaths than the Italians did under Mussolini. And we must remember that the Allies did not go to war with Germany to save the Jews. I believe that the Holocaust is the worst crime in human history, but Italian complicity in it was substantially less than French complicity.

The problem is that Italians are engaged in constant national introspection and they are searching for an authentic, unifying hero.

I'd have thought that Giuseppe Garibaldi was just the man - and the 200th anniversary of his birth is approaching - but I am told that far more Italians venerate Mussolini than Garibaldi.