Italy’s road to ruin

These days it is fashionable to claim Mussolini as a fundamentally decent fellow led astray by an opportunist alliance with Hitler. Whether this revisionism is the song and dance of a minority, or something more widespread and daft, is hard to say. Italians understandably wish to view themselves as brava gente — good people — so they prefer to blame Hitler for Mussolini’s murderous 1938 racial laws against the Jews. The truth is, Nazi Germany never demanded an anti-Semitic campaign as the price of friendship with Italy. On the contrary, Mussolini resented the imputation that his anti-Jewish legislation was imposed on him from without.

By the time Iris Origo’s Italian war diary opens in 1939, the racial laws have declared Italian Jews a contaminant akin to the Nazis’s Fremdkörper, an alien within the state. The anti-Semitic propaganda was of course endorsed by the Fascist Party and the muzzled Italian press, but it was not taken seriously by the larger public, and certainly not by Origo.

Born Iris Cutting in 1902, the Anglo-American diarist and biographer was living at this time with her aristocratic Italian husband, Antonio Origo, at La Foce, a Tuscan estate in the Val d’Orcia. The region gave its name to her bestselling work, War in Val d’Orcia, a diary account of the year 1943–1944, when Hitler invaded northern Italy.

A Chill in the Air, a precursor to War in Val d’Orcia, shows Italy facing imminent catastrophe in 1939 from the ‘Juggernaut of war’. The diary was not intended for publication; it was a private venting of anxieties. Antonio Origo remains cautiously loyal to Mussolini throughout, not least because the Fascist government had subsidised the renovation of La Foce and its fabulous gardens (celebrated today throughout Italy).