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A history of fascist Italy draws on private diaries, letters, and memoirs to show how ordinary people lived and experienced Mussolini's regime leading up to World War II.

This is the compelling story of Pope Pius XI's secret relations with Benito Mussolini. A ground-breaking work, based on seven years of research in the Vatican and Fascist archives by US National Book Award-finalist David Kertzer, it will forever change our understanding of the Vatican's role in the rise of Fascism in Europe. Both Pope Pius XI and Mussolini came to power in Rome in 1922. One was scholarly and devout, the other a violent bully. Yet they also had traits in common. Both had explosive tempers. Both bristled at the charge of being the patsy of the other. Both demanded unquestioned obedience from their subordinates, whose knees literally quaked in fear of provoking their wrath. Both came to be disillusioned by the other, yet dreaded what would happen if their alliance were to end. The book unravels for the first time the key role played between pope and dictator by the shadowy Jesuit go-between, dubbed Mussolini's Rasputin. It also reveals the details of the secret agreement worked out by Mussolini with the pope's personal envoy, offering Vatican support for Italy's notorious, anti-Semitic 'racial laws'. And dramatic new light is shed on the controversial figure of Eugenio Pacelli, who (as Pope Pius XII) would later come to be idolized by some and reviled by others for his silence during the Holocaust. In his role as Vatican Secretary of State, Pacelli had to struggle to keep the pope's explosive temper from leading to a break with both Mussolini and Nazi Germany, as the Italian dictator increasingly embraced the German Fuehrer, whom Pius detested. With the recent opening of the Vatican archives covering Pius XI's papacy, the full story of the two men's relationship can now be told for the first time. It is an account that destroys the widely accepted myth of a heroic Church doing battle with the Fascist regime. On the contrary, as David Kertzer shows, Mussolini would not have been able to impose his dictatorship on Italy without the pope's support. In exchange, the pope expected Mussolini to use his repressive reach to enforce Catholic morality - and return the Church to a position of power in Italy.

Lucia Ceci reconstructs the relationship between the Catholic Church and Fascism. New sources from the Vatican Archives throw fresh light on individual aspects of this complex relationship: the accession of Mussolini to power, the war in Ethiopia, the racial laws, the comparison between Pius XI and Pius XII. This book offers a comprehensive reconstruction of this encounter, explaining the criteria that led Catholics to support a dictatorial, warmongering and racist regime. In contrast to the traditional periodization, the history begins with the childhood of Mussolini in the final years of the nineteenth century, and ends with the sudden collapse of his puppet regime, in 1945. This means to some extent placing in a different light the exceptional nature of the ventennio. The Italian original L'interesse superiore, Il Vaticano e l'Italia di Mussolini has won the \"Friuli Storia\" Prize for Studies of Contemporary History.

An account of the alliance between the Catholic Church and the Italian Fascist regime in their campaign against Protestants Based on previously undisclosed archival materials, this book tells the fascinating, untold, and troubling story of an anti-Protestant campaign in Italy that lasted longer, consumed more clerical energy and cultural space, and generated far more literature than the war against Italy's Jewish population. Because clerical leaders in Rome were seeking to build a new Catholic world in the aftermath of the Great War, Protestants embodied a special menace, and were seen as carriers of dangers like heresy, secularism, modernity, and Americanism-as potent threats to the Catholic precepts that were the true foundations of Italian civilization, values, and culture. The pope and cardinals framed the threat of evangelical Christianity as a peril not only to the Catholic Church but to the fascist government as well, recruiting some very powerful fascist officials to their cause. This important book is the first full account of this dangerous alliance.

Brava gente, the good people of Italy opposed Mussolini's Fascist regime and the racial laws it produced. The Catholic Church in Italy resisted Italian Fascism. Its cantankerous pope, Pius XI, fought Mussolini and his dictatorship, as did other high-ranking Vatican churchmen. When Italy's racial laws were published in 1938, church leaders protested them vigorously. Most of all, Pius XI and the dictator, who both came to power in 1922, depended on each other for support and for achieving mutual goals. They shared many political ideas; both loathed democracy and Communism. Pius gave sacred legitimacy and removed political obstacles to Mussolini's Fascist regime. For his part, Mussolini pleased the Vatican by restoring crucifixes to the country's classrooms, adding church holidays to the civil calendar, and showering the church with funds to rebuild places of worship damaged in the Great War. In 1921, in one of his earliest speeches as leader, Mussolini pledged that Fascism would help restore a Christian society in Italy. He would build a Catholic state appropriate to a Catholic nation.

From Fascism to Democracytells the story of the birth of the post-war Italian political system through the lens of a single event: the Italian national election of 1948, the first parliamentary election of the Republican era. Robert A. Ventresca offers the first comprehensive analysis of this central topic of contemporary Italian and European history. Bringing together the broad political and diplomatic narrative of 1948 with the social and psychological dimensions that determined how ordinary Italians experienced the election campaign, this book is about much more than just a political event. Broad in scope, it is a story about the fall of Fascism and the achievements of the Italian Resistance, Italian political culture, American influence in Italian politics at the start of the Cold War, and the interaction between Italy's secular and religious traditions.From Fascism to Democracyexpands on the common understanding of what is 'political' to examine how such factors as popular piety, gender, and historical memory became intertwined with the politics of Italy's fledgling democracy.