Mussolini's Shadow : The Double Life of Count Galeazzo Ciano

Married to Benito Mussolini's favorite daughter Edda, Galeazzo Ciano was a brilliant, ambitious and ruthless young Italian. Throughout his period in office Ciano kept a diary so detailed and revealing that both Mussolini and Hitler sought to impound and destroy it. The diary was smuggled out of Italy by Edda, who sought unsuccessfully to trade it for Ciano's life. The diary was later acquired by the American spy, Allen W. Dulles (later head of the CIA) and published in full in the Chicago Daily News. It remains one of the classic insider accounts of the workings of the Fascist and Nazi governments. Ciano's glamorous, violent, and promiscuous life was acted out at the highest levels of European politics and society. There has never been a biography of him in English: this is one gripping read.

Italian Fascist leader Galeazzo Ciano was convinced that he was loved by Italians when in reality he was, according to Moseley, "the most hated man in Italy." Moseley, chief European correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, tells the tale of the rise and fall of this man, who believed he was Mussolini's heir apparent. A vain, frivolous and corrupt bon vivant immersed in Roman aristocratic society, Ciano was married to Edda Mussolini, Il Duce's favorite child. He rose rapidly through the ranks of the Fascist hierarchy: by 1936, when Italy was winding down the Ethiopian War and preparing to intervene in the Spanish Civil War, Ciano had become foreign minister, at the age of 32. But in 1943, the Allies were invading Italy, and Ciano was wary of continuing Italy's alliance with Germany: in July of that year, as a member of the Fascist Grand Council, Ciano voted against his father-in-law in a coup d'?tat. For this act, he was arrested, tried and executed (despite Edda's poignant appeals to her father). Moseley suggests here that the greatest tragedy of Ciano's life was that he lacked the moral and political courage to break with Mussolini and Fascism back in 1939, when he began to have his first doubts about the Nazi alliance and the war. Moseley has reconstructed Ciano's infamous life with a great deal of humanity (portraying him as a caring husband and loving father), while still showing his ruthless side (he assassinated political enemies). Using a range of secondary sources, including documents from the National Archives in Washington, D.C., interviews and, most extensively, Ciano's richly detailed diaries, Moseley reconstructs the dark world of Italian Fascism, adding an important new dimension to the study of its internal workings. 26 b&w photos. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A lively account of the life of Galeazzo Ciano, fascist Italys Foreign Minister and Mussolini's son-in-law. Bred in aristocratic circles, Ciano was raised in the nationalistic milieu of his fascist father, Costanzo Ciano, a veteran of the March on Rome. The younger Ciano rose through the diplomatic ranks rapidly, married Edda Mussolini in 1930, and was appointed Foreign Minister by the Duce in 1936. Ciano aped the bombastic speech and devil-may-care antics of his father-in-law, whom he greatly admired. He was a captain in the Italian Air Force and participated in bombing raids in the Italo-Ethiopian War, the Spanish Civil War, and the 1940 Greek Campaign. Although he acted as a restraint on the Duce at times, Ciano was largely responsible for the fiasco in Greece (where the Italian army was embarassed by the staunch resistance of tough Greek troops). Italian losses were considerable, and shortly after the Greeks pushed the Italians back into Albania, Hitler sent German divisions to the aid of Italy. Ciano's Janus-like relationship with the Germans is discussed at length: he could never quite resolve his disgust at the barbarity of the ``Huns,'' as he called them, but he risked his life and that of his country in the Pact of Steel alliance with Nazi Germany in the hope of sharing in the spoils of war. His relationship with Mussolini strained over time. He was instrumental in the Fascist Grand Council's vote of no confidence in the Duce, which led to King Victor Emmanuel III's removal and arrest of the dictator. Arrogant and foolish to the end, Ciano fled to Germany, of all places, despite his fear of the Nazis. There he was handed over to the fascists and put to death by Mussolini's Italian Social Republic in January 1944. In general, Moseley weaves a good biographical narrative, but there is a tendency to rely too much on the testimony of participants (such as Ciano's diaries and Edda's memoirs). Events and interpretations are not always weighed by documentary evidence nor placed within the larger diplomatic context. A highly readable life, leaving room for the work of other biographers. (26 b&w photos) -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Not until now has an English-language biography appeared about Mussolini's foreign minister. Moseley's research certainly benefited from Ciano's chief interest to history--his diaries' commentary about Axis leaders--but Moseley ranges amongst all relevant sources to round out a portrait of Ciano that Ciano himself might have endorsed as a fair one. A sybarite who relished the perquisites of power, Ciano was a parvenu par excellence--yet he, like Talleyrand in another era, usually understood Italy's actual stature and interests in the world. That his Duce didn't heed his counsel to distance Italy from Hitler in the prelude to, and early stages of, World War II emphasizes Ciano's role as formulator of policy rather than as its executant. That is, until he voted to overthrow Mussolini in July 1943, initiating the complex subterfuges that eventuated in his diaries being secreted in Switzerland and his own ending before a Fascist firing squad. Moseley, expressing sympathy for Ciano, has produced an engaging, critical, but measured biography. Gilbert Taylor