Volume 20, Number 15 · October 4, 1973
Bad Dreams
By Luigi Barzini
D'Annunzio
by Philippe Jullian, translated by Stephen Hardman
Viking, 356 pp., $12.95
In 1898 Benito Mussolini was a fifteen-year-old boy with a full head of hair. He lived in Forli, a small city of Romagna, a proverbially unruly region, where in every age political passions reached (and still reach) fever heat. A rebellious schoolboy, expelled from one school after another for threatening his classmates with a sharp penknife (he wounded two of them), he saw himself as the champion of liberty, the enemy of 'law and order,' the opponent of all authorities, the scourge of capitalists, priests, and militarists. Above all, he scoffed at patriotism: his only fatherland was the world. He bore proudly the name given him by his anarchist father (the owner of a cheap wine shop, the rendezvous of revolutionaries), that of Benito Juarez, the Zapotec Indian who condemned Emperor Maximilian of Mexico to be shot at Queretaro.
Review, 2528 words
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