John Foot opens his book on fascist Italy with a family anecdote: a convivial mealtime discussion in which his great-grandmother reminisced fondly about life under the dictatorship. I recall lunching at my own grandmother’s table, hearing her refer to her youth in 1930s Italy. She told a joke: over dinner, a small boy asks his father: ‘Daddy, what’s fascism?’ The father replies: ‘Shut up and eat!’
‘Shutting up’ lay at the heart of fascism and has dogged its afterlife. Despite the work of generations of historians, silences endure in Italy concerning Mussolini’s murderous regime. This matters: the resurgence of fascist parties and movements around the world makes it essential to understand the origins of totalitariansim. Instead of shutting up and swallowing the narratives we are sometimes fed, Foot digs into the real lives of Italians under fascism, in all their messy complexity. He is not the first to focus on the history of everyday life, but his fascinating book offers a new and disturbing reading of the Fascist era and its origins – a third of the text explores the years before the seizure of power in 1922.
