Shortly after he was forced out of office in November 2011, Italy’s longest serving postwar prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, told the press he was spending his time reading the last letters written by Mussolini to his mistress Clara Petacci. ‘I have to say,’ he confessed, ‘that I see myself in many aspects of those letters.’ In the Duce’s view, according to Berlusconi, Italy was ungovernable. ‘What sort of democracy is this?’ Mussolini had wondered. When a journalist suggested that it might not be entirely accurate to describe Mussolini’s Italy as a democracy, the former prime minister replied: ‘Well, it was a democracy in a minor way.’

LRB 7 February 2013 | PDF Download