Banners pro and against Mussolini appear in Rome overnight.

Rome police removed two banners featuring Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini from a footbridge near the Colosseum where they appeared on Thursday night, on the eve of the centenary of the March on Rome, the event that gave rise to the fascist regime in Italy.

The first banner bore the message "28-X-22 We know how it ends" with a giant upside-down photo of Mussolini, recalling the dictator's fate in Piazzale Loreto, Milan, in 1945.

The image of Il Duce was subsequently turned upright and the banner replaced with another that read "100 years later the march continues".

• Italy marks 100 years since Mussolini's March on Rome

The second banner was claimed by the far-right Movimento Nazionale which wrote in a statement: "We want to reclaim a piece of Italian history that a certain political faction would like to fall into oblivion. The March on Rome, at a time when the country was devastated by the rubble of world war one, gave strength, hope and greatness back to a nation and a people of fighters."

Earlier on Thursday Rome police removed posters from streets around the city that read "Marching!" with an image of Mussolini surrounded by Blackshirts and the inscription "The centenary of the March on Rome. 28.X.1922 - 28.X.2022".

Inaccettabili e vergognosi i manifesti abusivi per celebrare il centenario della marcia su Roma apparsi questa notte in alcune strade. Ho disposto la loro immediata rimozione. #Roma, medaglia d'oro al Valore Militare per la #Resistenza, è e sarà sempre antifascista.— Roberto Gualtieri (@gualtierieurope) October 27, 2022

The city's mayor Roberto Gualtieri wrote on Twitter that the posters were "unacceptable and shameful" and stressed that Rome "is and always will be anti-fascist".

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