Mussolini's Shadow: The Double Life of Count Galeazzo Ciano [Hardcover]

Mr. Ray Moseley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 9, 2000

Married to Benito Mussolini's favorite daughter Edda, young Count Galeazzo Ciano (1903-1944) became il Duce's confidant, emissary, and heir apparent in the years preceding World War II. Appointed foreign minister in 1936, Ciano played a central role in the Axis partnership negotiations with Hitler and von Ribbentrop and masterminded Italy's invasions of Albania and Greece. But Ciano came to disagree with his father-in-law over Italy's partnership with Germany, and he joined with other dissident Fascists plotting to remove Mussolini from office. Ciano was found guilty of treason, and despite desperate attempts to trade his sensational diaries for his life, he was shot. This is the first biography of Ciano in English, and it is based in part on those diaries, smuggled by Edda out of the country in her own dramatic escape.

Mussolini's Shadow peels away much of the mystery of the Fascist era, provides an eye-opening account of the ruling figures of Germany and Italy, and offers a close-up view of the daily workings of Mussolini's regime. Count Ciano's story is that of a highly intelligent man-but one also frivolous, arrogant, and overbearing -- whose short life was characterized by espionage, intrigue, sexual scandal, assassination, and the abuse of power. As a leading player in Italy's alliance with Germany, Ciano gambled with his own fate and with the fate of his country.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Italian Fascist leader Galeazzo Ciano was convinced that he was loved by Italians when in reality he was, according to Moseley, "the most hated man in Italy." Moseley, chief European correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, tells the tale of the rise and fall of this man, who believed he was Mussolini's heir apparent. A vain, frivolous and corrupt bon vivant immersed in Roman aristocratic society, Ciano was married to Edda Mussolini, Il Duce's favorite child. He rose rapidly through the ranks of the Fascist hierarchy: by 1936, when Italy was winding down the Ethiopian War and preparing to intervene in the Spanish Civil War, Ciano had become foreign minister, at the age of 32. But in 1943, the Allies were invading Italy, and Ciano was wary of continuing Italy's alliance with Germany: in July of that year, as a member of the Fascist Grand Council, Ciano voted against his father-in-law in a coup d'?tat. For this act, he was arrested, tried and executed (despite Edda's poignant appeals to her father). Moseley suggests here that the greatest tragedy of Ciano's life was that he lacked the moral and political courage to break with Mussolini and Fascism back in 1939, when he began to have his first doubts about the Nazi alliance and the war. Moseley has reconstructed Ciano's infamous life with a great deal of humanity (portraying him as a caring husband and loving father), while still showing his ruthless side (he assassinated political enemies). Using a range of secondary sources, including documents from the National Archives in Washington, D.C., interviews and, most extensively, Ciano's richly detailed diaries, Moseley reconstructs the dark world of Italian Fascism, adding an important new dimension to the study of its internal workings. 26 b&w photos. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Not until now has an English-language biography appeared about Mussolini's foreign minister. Moseley's research certainly benefited from Ciano's chief interest to history--his diaries' commentary about Axis leaders--but Moseley ranges amongst all relevant sources to round out a portrait of Ciano that Ciano himself might have endorsed as a fair one. A sybarite who relished the perquisites of power, Ciano was a parvenu par excellence--yet he, like Talleyrand in another era, usually understood Italy's actual stature and interests in the world. That his Duce didn't heed his counsel to distance Italy from Hitler in the prelude to, and early stages of, World War II emphasizes Ciano's role as formulator of policy rather than as its executant. That is, until he voted to overthrow Mussolini in July 1943, initiating the complex subterfuges that eventuated in his diaries being secreted in Switzerland and his own ending before a Fascist firing squad. Moseley, expressing sympathy for Ciano, has produced an engaging, critical, but measured biography. Gilbert Taylor

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 314 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (February 9, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300079176
• ISBN-13: 978-0300079173
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #563,845 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing., June 10, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Mussolini's Shadow: The Double Life of Count Galeazzo Ciano (Hardcover)

This is a wonderful book. I will probably read it twice, because it is literature as well as history. But is must have been a very tricky book to write. Every person who appears has good reasons to make up lies or shade meanings in discussing or recording the historic events recounted in the book.

It is an amazing cast of characters: Count Ciano, his wife Edda Mussolini, Emilio Pucci, Ciano's many mistresses including at least one German spy, Benito Mussolini, Claretta Petacci, various high party officials from the Fascist era, Hitler, Goebbels, Ribbentrop, Goering, Roosevelt, Churchill -- and Allen Dulles and many other spies.

What you get is essentially a work of fiction, contrived variously by each of the many characters. But it works. The author has arranged the material in such a careful way that you can reconstruct for yourself, from the progression of this deeply researched story, what the real truth might have been. It would be hard to say if the net effect is precisely Shakespearean or Freudian, but this book is certainly a page turner.

Count Ciano seems to have been a born actor, a sort of human putty who could mould himself to suit every situation. It was a wonderful skill for a professional diplomat. He was Mussolini's son in law and benefited enormously from his family connection. (Mussolini appears to have benefited from the relationship as well, perhaps in material ways which are not at all clear, but it is clear that Ciano was no mere sycophant).

Ciano was instrumental in deposing Mussolini in 1943, and this work cost him his life. Withal he was not an admirable man, but one cannot help but admire his style, his self-interested drive, his wry intelligence and his physical courage. He had a sense of humor and he was a hedonist in the European manner. He liked golf, whiskey, courtship, warplanes, intrigue and conversation. There is a whole lot of sex in this book. Not overtly, but it is sort of like a motor running somewhere just offstage. It never stops and it tugs the story this way and that. For an English or American reader, this biography offers the first good look at Count Ciano we have ever had. Sixty years after the fact.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good background for Ciano's diary, December 5, 2003

By 

Bill Stevenson (West Palm Beach, FL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mussolini's Shadow: The Double Life of Count Galeazzo Ciano (Hardcover)

Moseley has written a readable and well researched book on the life of the enigmatic Count Ciano. It is certainly the first comprehensive study of Ciano to appear in English. Ciano is worthy of the attention of anyone interested in Twentieth Century Europe, diplomacy, or World War II. Moseley does a good job of revealing Ciano's evolution from a blind follower of Mussolini to active and effective foil. There can be little doubt that in anything less than an unrestricted dictatorship, Ciano's efforts to keep Italy out of WWII would have succeeded. In the end Ciano's undisguished contempt of the Nazi Heirarchy cost him his life. I recommend this book as a precursor to reading Ciano's diary.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Couldn't put it down, November 23, 2003

By 

Wilhelm Snyman "Wilhelm Snyman" (Cape Town, W Cape South Africa) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mussolini's Shadow: The Double Life of Count Galeazzo Ciano (Hardcover)

This is a superb read and Mr Mosely coveres an intensely complex period with majesty and skill. Here and there it is a bit difficult who the subject is of a sentence, as the relative pronoun sometimes doesn't come after the immediately preceding subject of a sentence, but that happens rarely. Mr Moseley's reads like a thriller, but at the same time is a thoroughly researched, critical reading of a tragic, through fascinating period of history. I cannot recommend this book more highly for anyone interested obviously in history, but also for those interested in human behviour and our ability to deceive and contradict ourselves. Do read!