"Too many painters, sculptors and architects have represented Italy in Poland in the past," Galeazzo Ciano, the Italian Foreign Minister, complained in his diary during a visit to Warsaw in early 1939. "They love in us the poetry of the pen rather than the strength of our arms, in which they still do not completely believe. We must work hard to correct the bad name they have given us for centuries."
A few weeks later Italy invaded Albania, and less than two months after that sealed the pact with Nazi Germany that eventually brought Italy into World War II. The invasion of Greece -- like that of Albania, promoted and planned by Ciano -- started in October of 1940. Such were the feats with which the Italian Fascists hoped to impress the Poles and the rest of the world. Ciano would have been worse than chagrined had he known as he wrote these words that his most significant and lasting achievement would turn out to be not a military victory or a diplomatic coup but a book.
Ciano's diary of 1937-1943 is one of the most important sources of information we have about the political side of the Axis war effort. It is also a collection of vivid and devastating portraits of the principal Nazis and Fascists -- above all, Benito Mussolini, Italy's dictator and Ciano's father-in-law. A lust for power and a lack of principle led Ciano to the heart of the Fascist regime, but his intelligence and intermittent moral sense enabled him to make acute and illuminating observations once he got there. That combination of opportunism and integrity makes Ciano's story, as told by Ray Moseley in Mussolini's Shadow, an absorbing historical and personal narrative.
