SOURCE: “Ciano's Early Diary,” in Europe in Decay: A Study in Disintegration 1936-1940, Peter Smith, 1963, pp. 106-28.

In the following essay, Namier examines Mussolini and his regime using the diary of his foreign minister and son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano.

In a secluded room of the Italian Foreign Office, the Palazzo Chigi, Ciano kept his diary, making in it his daily entries. Married to Mussolini's daughter Edda, an ambitious woman, he was appointed Foreign Minister in 1936, at the age of 33, and retained the post till February 1943. The diary, which starts on August 23, 1937, covers practically his entire term of office. He greatly cherished these records, and would show them, or read passages from them, even to strangers; and in his last entry, written in Verona jail on December 23, 1943, shortly before his execution, he refers regretfully to the “excellent material” which they would have made for his autobiography, while in a letter...