Perfect Fascist - A Story of Love, Power, and Morality in Mussolini's Italy (De Grazia Victoria)(Paperback / softback)

A New Statesman Book of the YearWinner of the Helen and Howard R. Marraro PrizeWinner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies“Extraordinary…I could not put it down.”—Margaret MacMillan“Reveals how ideology corrupts the truth, how untrammeled ambition destroys the soul, and how the vanity of white male supremacy distorts emotion, making even love a matter of state.”—Sonia Purnell, author of A Woman of No ImportanceWhen Attilio Teruzzi, a decorated military officer and early convert to the Fascist cause, married a rising American opera star, his good fortune seemed settled. The wedding was blessed by Mussolini himself. Yet only three years later, Teruzzi, now commander of the Black Shirts, renounced his wife. Lilliana was Jewish, and fascist Italy would soon introduce its first race laws. The Perfect Fascist pivots from the intimate story of a tempestuous courtship and inconvenient marriage to the operatic spectacle of Mussolini’s rise and fall. It invites us to see in the vain, unscrupulous, fanatically loyal Attilio Teruzzi an exemplar of fascism’s New Man. Victoria De Grazia’s landmark history shows how the personal was always political in the fascist quest for manhood and power. In his self-serving pieties and intimate betrayals, his violence and opportunism, Teruzzi is a forefather of the illiberal politicians of today. “The brilliance of de Grazia’s book lies in the way that she has made a page-turner of Teruzzi’s chaotic l
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