For almost all nations the First World War was an unparalleled disaster, but the Italian experience especially was to have catastrophic consequences. Weakened and embittered, trying and failing to come to terms with 600,000 dead and with an entire generation of men militarized by fighting, Italy gave birth to a new form of political life: Fascism. Richard Bosworth brings to life the period when Italians participated in a vast and ultimately ruinous political experiment under their dictator, Benito Mussolini, and his fascist henchmen. The fascists were the first totalitarians, aiming to reshape Italy and its people utterly. Their regime was based on a cult of violence and obedience. Yet, despite this, Italians found ingenious ways of adapting, limiting, undermining and ridiculing Mussolini's ambitions for them. The heart of this book is its engagement with the life of these ordinary Italians and their families, struggling through terrible times. Bosworth creates a powerful, plausible and entertaining picture of Italian life and a regime which - as the world hurtled towards the cataclysm of the Second World War - was to force humiliation, defeat, invasion and the utter collapse of the nation state.

"An Australian scholar and one of the outstanding historians of modern Italy, Bosworth is the author of a 2002 biography of Mussolini that was rightly acclaimed as perhaps the best yet written. As a companion to that life of the man who ruled the country, he has now written an absorbing book about the country Mussolini ruled.... On the one hand, he gives numerous short biographical sketches of people drawn to fascism, many (though not all) of them worthless, marginal men for whom the party offered a career. On the other, he paints a broad canvas of ordinary Italian life in the 1920s and 30s and shows how it was affected—or not—by the regime.... While Hitler succeeded all too well in making many Germans into a nation of conquerors and killers, the Italians quite ignored Mussolini's attempt to do the same thing to them."—Washington Post