A judge in the northern city of Bolzano on Tuesday acquitted two 50-year-old men of promoting Fascist ideology, which in Italy is punishable with up to four years in prison. Piero Puschiavo and Francesco Paravano, both from the northern Veneto region, had been indicted for singing the Fascist-era war song Faccetta Nera (Little Black Face) at a 2012 gathering of Italy's Alpini mountain army unit over a megaphone. The court found the men sang the song in a spirit of "irreverence". Puschiavo is a prominent local member of the extreme-right Fiamma Tricolore party. Italy defines promoting Fascist ideology as "publicly exalting Fascism's members, principles, facts, methods, and/or its antidemocratic objectives". It was made a crime in 1952 in a move designed to prevent the dissolved Fascist Party from reconstituting itself.
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