SOURCE: “The Not-So-Great Dictator,” in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXI, No. 16, October 17, 1974, pp. 22-4.

In the following review of Mussolini: An Intimate Biography by His Widow, Barzini describes conditions in Italy that led to Mussolini's rise to power and many personal and character traits that may have led to his fall.

Perhaps the ruin of Benito Mussolini was Giuseppe Garibaldi, the legendary hero of the Risorgimento. Like Mussolini, Garibaldi was a rough, self-taught, and credulous man of the people; in his youth he had had utopian and confused revolutionary ideas, but, in the end, he rallied to the king and, perhaps unwittingly, became a prop of the establishment. His ardent patriotism inflamed Italian radical nationalists, with pernicious consequences. His charm was magic, scores of women fell in love with him and men died for him in his presence and smiled. Garibaldi was always or almost...