Fascism

The word ‘ghetto’ is said to derive from the Venetian dialect term for ‘foundry’: ghèto. In the early 16th century, on the orders of the Doge, Jews were herded en masse from the centre of Venice to the Ghetto Nuovo, or New Foundry district, where metal workers had long cast cannon for the Venetian fleet. The Ghetto – the first of its kind on the Italian peninsula and anywhere in the world – became a model for segregated Jewish quarters throughout Europe. It was soon blighted by poverty, malnutrition and disease. The Ghetto Nuovo was a landmark in the history of Jewish persecution. In this fascinating history of the New

If you read books for a living, the calling probably started with a moment of utter entrancement: a novel you couldn’t bear to set down; a few unforgettable days, as Bleak House, Earthly Powers, The Woman in White or Titus Groan worked its unsuspected magic on its millionth reader. Such books are rarer these days, but they do still happen, and Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch is an absolute corker. Randall Jarrell once wistfully imagined a novel that would ‘bear up under the weight of hundreds of thousands of readers a plot that higher critics could call crude and that bewitched families could pad over in house slippers’. Nonesuch does the trick,

Giorgia Meloni has emerged as one of the most significant politicians in Europe since she became Italy’s first female prime minister in October 2022. I Am Giorgia, already a bestseller in Italy, is her account of how a short, fat, sullen, bullied girl – as she describes her young self – from a poor, single-parent family in Rome managed to do it. Her explanation is that she refused to play the victim, and found iron in her soul – even if, as she admits, she has never found happiness. It is an amazing story: how she transformed from an ugly duckling into the swan who is now a familiar figure

One of the key charges made by the hard of thinking is that because the devastating accusation ‘racist’ has been thrown around so casually in these days of febrile public discourse, it no longer has meaning. Similarly, ever since Rik called Vyv (and a bank manager and the BBC) a fascist in The Young Ones, that insult has been devalued to the point of meaninglessness. Or has it? One can never truly know the heart of another person, so short of them lighting a crucifix on their front lawn and perpetrating violence exclusively against one racially designated group over another, we are compelled to only assume that if you often

When the Yale historian and bestselling author Timothy Snyder was 14, his parents took him to Costa Rica, a country lauded for its conservation of natural resources that is rated freer and happier than the United States. He recalls feeling liberated and unfettered as he hiked in cloud forests with his brothers, seeing monkeys, sloths and spectacular birds. One day, a local friend led the boys on a mysterious quest to view something special; after walking for three hours through a maze of paths, they arrived at a cascade hiding a cave, where they could gaze out at the green world through curtains of falling water. Trump’s ‘big lie’ over

For Mussolini’s 60th birthday, Hitler gave him a de luxe edition of Friedrich Nietzsche’s complete works, bound in blue pigskin. After the war, writers vied to revile the philosopher. Then, in the 1960s, he suddenly became philosophy’s darling. How come? Enter two erotically entangled Italians: Georgio Colli, a philosophy teacher at Lucca from 1942, and his pupil Mazzino Montinari, who in 1943-4 was beaten, interrogated and imprisoned for anti-fascist activism. Both found Nietzsche’s philosophy irreconcilable with fascism. Rumours had been swirling that the Nazifying of Nietzsche emerged from the Nachlass, a mysterious hoard of Nietzsche’s manuscripts suspected to contain forgeries that were the work of his sister Elisabeth and her

‘The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks… And therefore I raise my glass to you, writers, the engineers of the human soul.’ The quote is usually attributed to Stalin, though the phrase ‘engineers of human souls’ most likely came from someone else. Who’s to argue? Purges, executions, deportations – what’s a little light plagiarism in comparison? Whoever coined the phrase, it certainly struck a chord and indeed continues to ring various alarm bells whenever one comes across writers who deliberately set out to influence politics and ideas – and not just the big beasts, the Nobel Prize winners, say, or the shopfront-filling non-fiction authors hawking

In 1930, when she was 19 years old, Edda Mussolini married Galeazzo Ciano. His father was a loyal minister in her father’s government: it was a suitable match. Five hundred wedding invitations went out to the Roman nobility, to diplomats from more than 30 countries and to all the senior fascists, the gerarchi. After the ceremony the newlyweds left for Capri, Edda driving her own white Alfa Romeo, with servants and luggage following in another car and bodyguards in a third. They set off at top speed. Then Edda came to a sudden halt. She had noticed a fourth car behind them. She might have supposed that as a married

Towards the end of Dandelions, Thea Lenarduzzi’s imaginative and deeply affecting memoir, the author quotes her grandmother’s remark that there are tante Italie – many Italys. ‘Mine is different to hers, which is different to my mother’s, which is different to my father’s, and so on down the queue,’ she writes. These Italys – of fascismo, of Garibaldi, of emigrants living in Sheffield and Manchester, of 31 dialects – are not far-flung historical oddities confined to documentaries or textbooks but are, in Lenarduzzi’s account, the patchwork story of one family. Sitting at her Nonna’s (grandmother’s)table with ‘the blinds pulled down against the morning sun and the rest of the family

In 1926, while putting in place the repressive laws and decrees that would define his dictatorship, Mussolini appointed a new chief of police. Arturo Bocchini was 36, a lawyer and former prefect of Brescia, a cynical, vengeful, witty and corpulent Neapolitan. Under his 17-year tenure, fascist Italy became one of the most sinister and efficient police states of the years between the wars, with overlapping and rivalrous legal and illegal police bodies, fed by a vast army of informers and spies. Said to number around 10,000 at their peak, these men and women were to be found in every corner of Italian life, from the civil service to the Vatican,