Victoria de Grazia. The Perfect Fascist: A Story of Love, Power, and Morality in Mussolini’s Italy.

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A masterful interweaving of the personal and political, The Perfect Fascist: A Story of Love, Power, and Morality in Mussolini’s Italy bathes the triumphs and tragedies of Mussolini’s Italy in rich new light. Using an impressive array of fresh primary and multifarious secondary sources, the narrative recharts the panorama of Italian fascism through the ill-fated marriage of a “perfect fascist” to an independent-minded American Jewish opera singer. As Victoria de Grazia’s second book showed definitively in 1992, this was not the fascist wifely ideal, and if a scriptwriter proposed this story in Hollywood, it might seem too contrived. Yet a cornucopia of documentary evidence was felicitously made available by the diva’s relatives, and de Grazia uses it to create an extraordinary diorama of upper-echelon life in fascist Italy. A prologue begins the book by linking fascism’s capricious moral compass—corrupted by the regime’s “preoccupation with virility”—to today’s issues of “ultra-nationalism, white male supremacy, and racial conflict” (8–9). The main body is structured chronologically in four substantial parts. These cover 1912–1923, 1924–1928, 1929–1939, and 1940–1950—an uncontroversial periodization that maps smoothly onto the career of the man whose life drives the narrative. The parts’ one-word titles—“Strive,” “Grasp,” “Overreach,” and “Fall”—portend the story line while echoing staccato fascist slogans, such as “Believe, Obey, Fight.”