Bestseller

Scurati's rendering of the turbulent years from 1919 to 1925, the first volume in a projected tetralogy, is translated by Anne Milano Appel. It begins in Milan ...

“The masses are already longing for a dictator,” Mussolini proclaims in 1921, and it’s clear that the “sense of humiliation, failure and injustice” pervasive in postwar Italy fosters a longing for a strong leader and a willingness to turn a blind eye to the sources of his strength. This bumpy mix of fact and sort-of-fiction kills the book’s momentum and makes it much longer than it needs to be. Mussolini’s complicity is so obvious that he’s abandoned by his non-fascist allies, and the previously subservient press calls for his resignation. “All it would take is for just one person to speak up and he'd be done for,” Scurati writes. Writing in the present tense, Scurati immerses us in the hurly-burly of politics on the ground. But socialist-led peasant leagues and the urban proletariat’s general strikes lead wealthy landowners and industrialists to donate to fascist causes, while recruits materialize from the anxious middle class, “who no longer know what [their] place in the world is.”