"For the common reader as well as the professional one, Victoria de Grazia opens doors and sheds new light on a fascinating subject."—Mary Gordon, author of T

The never-before-told story of Benito Mussolini's Jewish mistress and how she helped him come to power. The beginning of the turbulent love affair in 1911 of Ma

"Italy has been made; now we need to make the Italians," goes a familiar Italian saying. Mussolini was the first head of state to include women in this mandate.

A portrait of the dopolavoro, or leisure-time organization, the largest of the regime's mass institutions.

Peasant women were the largest female occupational group in Italy between the wars. They led lives characterised by great poverty and heavy workloads, but Fasci