Description: Attilio Teruzzi, Mussolini's commander of the Black Shirts, exemplified fascism's obsession with male strength. Through the story of his broken marriage to a young Jewish American opera star, Victoria de Grazia explores the cult of masculinity on which the New Rome was to be built, revealing the seductive appeal of fascism.
Brief description: Victoria de Grazia is Moore Collegiate Professor of History at Columbia University and a founding editor of Radical History Review. Her widely translated, prizewinning books include Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe and How Fascism Ruled Women. She has received the Woodrow Wilson, Jean Monnet, and Guggenheim fellowships and the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome.
Review Quotes: [A] fascinating book on the Fascist years, and particularly its social mores...Teruzzi was indeed the perfect Fascist: disciplined, unscrupulous, brutish, fanatically loyal to Mussolini... The brilliance of de Grazia's book lies in the way that she has made a page-turner of Teruzzi's chaotic life, while providing a scholarly and engrossing portrait of the two decades of Fascist rule.--Caroline Moorhead "Wall Street Journal" (10/2/2020 12:00:00 AM)