The Perfect Fascist: A Story of Love, Power, and Morality in Mussolini’s Italy Cover
Podcast Mentions

The Perfect Fascist A Story of Love, Power, and Morality in Mussolini’s Italy

Victoria De Grazia

Winner of the Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize When Attilio Teruzzi, Mussolini’s handsome political enforcer, married a rising young American opera star, his good fortune seemed settled. The wedding was a carefully stage-managed affair, capped with a blessing by Mussolini himself. Yet only three y...

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The Ezra Klein Show

Ezra Klein highlighted it as a phenomenal book about Mussolini's chief enforcer and his Jewish American wife, using their story to explore why people became fascists.

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The second book I'd like to recommend is Victoria de Grazia's The Perfect Fascist. Victoria de Grazia is a historian at Columbia and she's specialized across her entire career in Italy and she's writt...

— Episode: Sanctioning Russia Is a Form of War. We...

Episode: Sanctioning Russia Is a Form of War. We Need to Tr...

Ezra Klein highlighted it as a phenomenal book about Mussolini's chief enforcer and his Jewish American wife, using their story to explore why people became fascists.

"

The second book I'd like to recommend is Victoria de Grazia's The Perfect Fascist. Victoria de Grazia is a historian at Columbia and she's specialized across her entire career in Italy and she's written this phenomenal book which is about one of the main henchmen in Mussolini's regime, the head of Mussolini's black shirts in fascist Italy and his wife who was a Jewish American opera singer from the Upper West Side of New York City. She married him and it's a story about their marriage but also about why people became fascists and how that affected people in their private lives and the public responsibilities of being in this authoritarian regime versus people's private doubts and idiosyncrasies.

Note: The book recommendations on this page are discovered automatically from podcast transcripts, and may be incorrect or incomplete.