M. Gli ultimi giorni dell’Europa

On 3 May 1938, at the new Ostiense station, Mussolini, together with Vittorio Emanuele III and Foreign Minister Ciano, awaited the train carrying Hitler and his senior officials to Italy for a visit that would take in Rome, Naples and Florence. A few weeks earlier, Hitler had proclaimed the Anschluss of Austria, and Mussolini, after deciding to withdraw Italy from the League of Nations, was preparing to enact racial legislation of unprecedented severity. Yet there are still many who hope that the two heads of state’s delusions of power can be stopped: among them Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, the archaeologist tasked with guiding the Führer through the ruins of the Eternal City; Renzo Ravenna, decorated in the Great War, a zealous fascist and podestà of Ferrara, who, like thousands of other Italian Jews, cannot come to terms with the measures that place him on the margins of civil life; Margherita Sarfatti, who until the very end hopes for a shift in the balance of power towards the Anglo-French axis but has to give way to the young Claretta Petacci and flee; and Ciano himself, distracted by romantic entanglements and senseless political schemes such as the plan to conquer Albania, who only a year later, in May 1939, found himself signing the Pact of Steel with Ribbentrop, whereby “Italy and Germany intend, in the midst of a restless and disintegrating world, to fulfil their task of securing the foundations of European civilisation”. Antonio Scurati reconstructs with feverish precision Mussolini’s frightening delirium, pathetically deluded into believing he could influence the Führer’s decisions, aware of Italy’s unpreparedness, more alone than ever until the evening of June 1940, when he proclaimed “the hour of irrevocable decisions” from the balcony of Palazzo Venezia. In this new instalment of his great literary and civil project, Scurati frames the fateful three-year period from 1938 to 1940, the culmination of fascist Italy’s self-deception, which bowed to the infamy of racial laws and alliance with Nazi Germany, and retraces the last days of a Europe shaken by acts of barbaric abuse and unable to escape the spell of totalitarianism: a tragic and powerful novel, full of warnings for our future.