A senior official in the northern Italian region of Veneto has defended a birthday cake that was made for him and decorated with Nazi and fascist symbols, saying that Benito Mussolini had modernised Italy and was “fine”, apart from his alliance with Adolf Hitler and the adoption of race laws during the country’s fascist era.

“I am not resigning and I am not ashamed of the fascist symbol,” Massimo Giorgetti told the radio show La Zanzara. The Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi’s “exultation” of Raúl Castro in Cuba was worse, he added.

Giorgetti, the vice-president of the Veneto legislature and a member of Forza Italia, the conservative party led by the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, said on his Facebook page that the cakewas simply a “playful gesture by old comrades and friends at a private party”. “If the publication of the photo has hurt the sensitivity of someone, I’m sorry and I apologise. It wasn’t my intention to do so,” he said.

The cake was decorated with two SS bolts, as they are known, which are derived from Hitler’s paramilitary Schutzstaffel (SS) and are considered neo-Nazi and white supremacist symbols. The cake was also decorated with a second symbol that is also considered fascist.

The populist Five Star Movement’s demandfor Giorgetti’s immediate resignation has been rebuffed. The centrist Democratic party called on Veneto’s governor, Luca Zaia, to publicly dissociate himself from Giorgetti and state his opposition to the use of the Nazi and fascist symbols.

Zaia, a member of the rightwing Northern League, has not commented.