MUSSOLINI'S DAUGHTER

Edda Mussolini was the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s oldest and favorite child. At 19, she was married to Count Galleazzo Ciano, Il Duce’s Minister for Foreign Affairs during the 1930s, the most turbulent decade in Italy’s fascist history. In the years preceding World War II, Edda ruled over Italy’s aristocratic families and the cultured and middle classes while selling Fascism on the international stage. How a young woman wielded such control is the heart of Caroline Moore’s fascinating history. The issues that emerge reveal not only a great deal about the power of fascism, but also the ease with which dictatorship so easily took hold in a country weakened by war and a continent mired in chaos and desperate for peace.