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Let’s Meet Count Galeazzo Ciano
As I’ve pointed out before, most of the stories about the war in Europe during World War II center around the Americans, British, French, and German-occupied countries. Rarely have books been written about the Soviet Union or even Italy in the same way historians have covered other parts of the European theater (click here to read the blog, Women of the Italian Resistance and here to read The Night Witches).
While the focus seems to always be on the Italian Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini (1883−1945), one of the recurring Italian political personalities during the 1930s and the war years is Gian Galeazzo Ciano, 2nd Count of Cortellazzo and Buccari. You may know him better as Mussolini’s son-in-law. He played a major role as Mussolini’s foreign advisor as well as serving in several important government positions. Ciano’s involvement as a senior Italian diplomat brought him in close contact with Hitler and high-level Nazi party officials. In the end, a family dispute forced Mussolini to permanently dispatch his son-in-law.
However, Ciano’s greatest gift to historical posterity was his diary written between 1937 and 1943.
Did You Know?
Did you know that while almost impossible, there are several documented successful
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The Illusionist
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Deciphering Mussolini’s Beloved Daughter
Caroline Moorehead, Edda Mussolini:
The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe
(Vintage, 2023)
Edda Mussolini was the oldest and favorite child of her father, Benito Mussolini, il Duce, the leader of Fascist Italy from 1922 to 1943. By the late 1930s, while still in her twenties, she was known to the world, her name often bracketed with that of Eleanor Roosevelt. A Zurich newspaper called her the “most influential woman in Europe” (p.161). During the summer of 1939, she was on the covers of Newsweek and Time, America’s two leading weeklies. In early 1942 an Egyptian magazine described her as the “most dangerous woman in Europe,” one who ruled her father with an “iron fist” (p.235). The Egyptian magazine gave Carolyn Moorehead the subtitle for her thoroughly documented and often riveting biography, Edda Mussolini: The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe.
Moorehead dismisses these reports as overestimating Edda’s role in her father’s regime. She lacked patience for the details of policymaking. But she was always enigmatic and hard-to-decipher, and Moorehead ably demonstrates that she was indeed a force to be reckoned with in her father’s life, and thus necessarily a force in the Fascist world t