Italy Reborn: From Fascism to Democracy

"Though this is undoubtedly an important academic work, it doesn’t necessarily read like one. That is quite an achievement, given that it’s dealing with very dense material. Encompassing the various acronyms coming out of the post-war Italian left, distinguishing between them and conveying their shades of pink to the general reader, is a definite challenge. But Mark Gilbert really rises to it. He starts with a very lucid, clear, surprising, and counter-intuitive argument, and sticks to it throughout. Though his case pounds along with sustained force, it is never dull or repetitive or anything other than keenly coherent. Reading Italy Reborn is not like being stuck with an obsessive or a preacher. Rather this is an ideal tutorial, a lesson very well and entertainingly taught. I found it explained so much that I personally had never quite got to grips with about Italy before. For example, I had always thought, ‘Well, didn’t the king get rid of Mussolini in the end? So why were the Italians then so eager to get rid of the king?’ In this book, we see the complexity and depth of the nightmare that Italy endured during the war, and we see how mixed up in it all the house of Savoy was—rather as we’re recently coming to learn about the Hohenzollerns and the Nazis. I now understand why there was no question, even on the centre right, of the royal house staying around. The other great aspect of this book is the quiet emergence of an unexpected hero. He’s this very sedentary, intellectual, subtle figure, a Catholic centrist, Alcide De Gasperi, whom I knew absolutely nothing about coming into the book. He’s in that fascinating category of heroes through compromise. As I’ve just written a book, Friends in Youth , about political compromise in the 17th century, I was particularly drawn to this. Mark Gilbert traces the implementation in Italy of ideals that I had been writing about and that I admire, but that, sadly, it often seems you more usually see fail than succeed. But De Gasperi somehow pulled it off. Italy Reborn also reminded me of a book that I love by Javier Cercas, The Anatomy of a Moment , about the aftermath of Franco in Spain. Again, it’s about the ability of heroes of liberalism to compromise, to come through sordid, tainting times in a very complex human, grown-up, difficult way. It’s very contorted material, but it very seldom feels like that. It’s very human and surprisingly often even funny. It’s a great book. Simply that Italy was well designed in the aftermath of the Second World War, and holds up relatively well as a democratic state. That’s at odds with its reputation in the Anglophone world as a bit of a basket case. In this moment of nemesis for said Anglophone world, where our institutions are not looking so Whiggishly shiny as all that, it feels particularly apt and well put as a case."