Right-wing Rome mayor Gianni Alemanno on Monday condemned the holocaust as ''absolute evil'' after recently stirring polemics with what critics claimed were pro-Fascist comments.
Alemanno, who is currently on a trip to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi extermination camp, told 250 Rome students accompanying him that it was important ''not to forget'' the tragedy of the holocaust to prevent it happening again.
The mayor added that he felt ''really a very strong emotion, the strongest that history can give us'' during his visit to the camp.
Rome Jewish Community leader Riccardo Pacifici, who also accompanied the mayor, praised Alemanno for ''accepting this challenge (to visit Auschwitz) in light of his cultural provenance''.
''If there are political parties who, even late on, decide to make the memory of the Shoah and anti-fascism part of their own shared cultural heritage, I think that this is a high point that unites the country and brings Italy in step with other European states after 60 years,'' Pacifici said.
Alemanno was formerly a leader of the neofascist Italian Social Movement (MSI) youth federation, which later became the more moderate National Alliance and moved into the political mainstream.
The National Alliance is now part of Premier Silvio Berlusconi's People of Freedom Party.
In April Alemanno was quick to distance himself from extremists who hailed him as 'Duce' and gave him the Roman fascist salute of Benito Mussolini following his election as mayor.
But he infuriated Rome's Jewish community in September when he said that although Fascism's racial laws were an ''absolute evil'', the movement itself was not.
He later clarified that while he condemned ''without hesitation'' the antidemocratic and repressive nature of Fascism, this did not stop him from ''paying homage to those who fought and died for that cause in good faith''.
This failed to satisfy the Jewish community, who called for an ''explicit condemnation of Fascism''.
The mayor has since tried to smooth over relations with the community, which on Monday he described as ''an inextricable part of Rome''.
Ahead of Alemanno's trip to Poland with Pacifici, a far-right movement blasted him for making the journey, affixing huge banners to two Rome bridges reading ''Alemanno-Pacifici: Rome-Auschwitz one-way ticket only''.
