A thrilling biography of Edda Mussolini-Benito Mussolini's favorite daughter one of the most
influential women in 1930s Europe-and a heart-stopping account of the unraveling of the Fascist
dream in Italy from award-winning historian and author of the acclaimed Resistance Quartet
Caroline Moorehead Reads like a page-turning thriller.-BookPage Edda Mussolini was the Italian
dictator Benito Mussolini's oldest and favorite child. At 19 she was married to Count
Galleazzo Ciano Il Duce's Minister for Foreign Affairs during the 1930s the most turbulent
decade in Italy's fascist history. In the years preceding World War II Edda ruled over Italy's
aristocratic families and the cultured and middle classes while selling Fascism on the
international stage. How a young woman wielded such control is the heart of Moorehead's
fascinating history. The issues that emerge reveal not only a great deal about the power of
fascism but also the ease with which dictatorship so easily took hold in a country weakened by
war and a continent mired in chaos and desperate for peace. Drawing on a wealth of archival
material some newly released along with memoirs and personal papers Mussolini's Daughter
paints a portrait of a woman in her twenties whose sheer force of character and ruthless
narcissism helped impose a brutal and vulgar movement on a pliable and complicit society. Yet
as Moorehead shows not even Edda's colossal willpower her scheming nor her father's avowed
love could save her husband from Mussolini's brutal vengeance. As she did in her Resistance
Quartet Moorehead delves deep into the past exploring what fascism felt like to those living
under it how it blossomed and grew and how fascists and aristocrats joined forces to pursue
ten years of extravagance amorality and excessive luxury-greed excess and ambition that set
the world on fire. The result is a powerful portrait of a young woman who played a key role in
one of the most terrifying and violent periods in human history.
