Ciano

Through the last decade, Eugenio Di Rienzo has been the editor of the time-honoured Italian journal, Nuova Rivista Storica. It has specialised in ‘realistic’ explorations of foreign policy of the kind common in anglophone historiography before the 1970s but less usual now. With a colleague, Emilio Gin, he published in 2013 Le potenze dell’Asse e l’Unione Sovietica 1939–1945, a study of relations between the Axis powers (Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and Fascist Italy) and the Soviet Union. Neither ideology nor the mass murder of Jews or ‘Slavs’ were viewed as driving the frequent contact between the four, which rather sprang from Realpolitik. Di Rienzo has also been a trenchant and combative reviewer; it may therefore be what A.J.P. Taylor called a ‘goak’ (joke) that his latest book is dedicated to the great comic actor, Totò, celebrated as a ‘mild, patient and benign character’. In this new study, Di Rienzo retains his belief in Realpolitik, although the biographical form adds a human context not given much space in his earlier work. Casting doubt on the familiar thesis that ‘fascism [the small ‘f-’ signifying places beyond Italy] means war’, Di Rienzo urges major revision of the stance of such foreign scholars of Italian foreign policy as MacGregor Knox and Robert Mallett, who have seen Mussolini as hell-bent on revisionist aggression from 1919. Instead, the dictatorship’s international relations are depicted as owing most to the traditions of the ‘least of the Great Powers’, never powerful enough to act on its own, but always looking for an opportunity to lessen the gap with the more established European empires

Art · Humanities · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies