Many, many little vignettes, interwoven into a long month-of-reading patchwork, 740 pages thick.

Keeping track is impossible, so read as though you are living through a turbulent mess of a time, watching new shows, hearing gossip, and forgetting who is who half the time, until they come to get you, that is.

And if it is a library book, do not underline fascist speeches that sound like Republicans on Fox TV. Let the future readers figure it out themselves. ( )

Fascist Italy is a fascinating era, but this book tended to slog a lot in between the good bits. ( )

While I'm tempted to mark this sprawling tome down just for its overflowing nature, perhaps that is an indication of the messy quality of the topic. As while the Fascists prattled and blathered about refining Italy into a single well-honed weapon, the reality is that they had to deal with the amorphous nature of Italy as it actually was: a relatively poor country incompletely cobbled together and with aspirations that in retrospect look absurd. Bosworth never loses sight of the surreal interaction of the whole project; particularly at the level of the man in the street.

The paradox of it all is that while the impact of the regime was relatively shallow, at least in terms of impacting the traditional mediating structures of Italian society, Mussolini and his bosses still had enough reach and menace to make their influence felt, particularly in the first ten or so years of the regime before Mussolini began to wither under the pressure of being the strong man. There was also the matter that across Italian elites (and that includes the Catholic Church), the great project of building the Italian nation was seen as being worth pursuing, and so long as the Fascists pushed this agenda forward they were tolerated by the people that mattered.

That might be the dirty little reality of the whole experience; that there are limits to how much a state can be built out of blood and iron and the Fascists were the Italian establishment's answer to their own failures in this regard. This is at least until the solution failed, leaving Italians damned with the faint praise that they at least weren't the Nazis or the Stalinists, though leaving the example of the dead end that is the politics of resentment. ( )

Excellent social history of fascism. Bosworth profiles prominent members of the regime (Grandi, Farinacci, Balbo, Bottai) as well as ordinary Italians and thus gives us a perspective from a variety of sources. Bosworth writes convincely of the the superifical nature of the regime and the Duce. There wasn't a "there" there. Well written and recommended for anyone interested in modern European history. ( )