How the Communist Party nearly finished Mussolini’s wrecking of Italy

In his new book, Mark Gilbert doesn’t deal solely with Italy’s post-1945 transition to democracy, and rehabilitation among the comity of civilised nations. He also offers, at the outset of Italy Reborn, a superb, concise and objective history of the country from unification in 1860 to the Second World War, describing well the delusions about the recreation of imperial Rome – after a mere 15 centuries – that led to the installation of Fascism. For anyone wishing to know why Italy is as it is today, this book is an essential primer. It ends in 1954, by which time Italy has entered Nato and the nascent European Union, and is using Marshall Plan aid to begin its reconstruction.

Italy took a terrible pummelling in the Second World War, not merely its buildings and infrastructure, but also its people. One of Gilbert’s many achievements in this warts-and-all history of a painful era is to acquaint his readers with the detail of the atrocities committed by the Italian people against each other after the removal from power of Mussolini in July 1943, and during his leadership of the Nazi-backed puppet regime in the Republic of Salò to the north. That latter experiment ended with him, his mistress and a few of their cronies being shot in April 1945, and the defiled corpses being strung up by the feet on the gantry of a Milanese petrol station. To say that scores were settled between Left and Right understates what happened: but Gilbert explains how Italian society was so divided after the war that even peace was illusory, until a communist faction devoted to Stalin was finally disregarded by the Italian people, using a democracy the hard Left despised.

The hero of this book is a man whose name is too often lost to modern European history, Alcide De Gasperi, who led eight successive coalition governments from December 1945 to August 1953. He had been born in the Austro-Hungarian empire, in the Italian-speaking Tyrol, and in the early 1920s had been secretary of a leading anti-Fascist party. He was, inevitably, arrested under the Mussolini dictatorship and sent to prison, but on his release in 1929 was given a job cataloguing books in the Vatican library. He effectively sheltered there until 1943, when he was able to emerge and establish his leadership of the Christian Democrats, who would lead the transformation of their country. The Italy we have today, and its values, are largely down to him.

The communists set out, by contrast, to impose a very different stamp on post-war Italy. Gilbert’s book raises yet again the question that awaits perhaps the definitive historical treatment: how far the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917 inspired the rise of Fascism, but also how far the experience of Fascism inspired an almost deranged Left-wing extremism in post-war Europe. Italy had various communist factions after the Second World War that in time merged to form a reasonably coherent, and proto-totalitarian opposition to the Christian Democrats. Its main agents had either suffered appallingly under Mussolini and, later, the Nazis, or they had escaped to Moscow early on and experienced Stalinism at close quarters.

Notable among these was the man who ended up at the forefront of the Communist party in Italy, Palmiro Togliatti, who led them from 1927 until his death in 1964. Driven out of Italy once the Fascists took over, Togliatti became a citizen of the USSR in 1930. He survived Stalin’s purges, but saw the latter and his works at close hand; Togliatti’s failure to be shaken in his communist faith by what he saw says much about the sycophancy post-war Italian communists felt towards Stalin.

Gilbert is under no illusions about the toxicity of post-war Italian communism. He details the party’s absurd hatred of the Americans, whose money allowed Italy to revive and rebuild after the war; he points out that “there was always a new international threat looming, or an insidious plot or intrigue, that was used to mobilise the party base and keep them in a mood of indignation and fear”. The Communists certainly had good raw materials to work with: poverty was endemic, with slums, overcrowding and poor health widespread.

Yet these things were slowly improved by injections of funds made possible by the hated capitalism, and from the north downwards Italy gradually became better paid, better housed and better fed. When Togliatti hectored his countrymen about how “American aid encourages the enslavement and starvation of the Italian people”, they knew it was untrue from the evidence of their own eyes – and stomachs. Nonetheless, the toadying to Stalin continued right up to the dictator’s death in 1953, with senior Italian Communists refusing to acknowledge the repression and murder that his acolytes performed in other European countries such as Czechoslovakia and Hungary.

Eventually, De Gasperi himself over-reached, with a failed attempt at constitutional reform, in what Gilbert describes as the constant Italian search to match the ability to govern with a truly democratic electoral outcome. This excellent book shows that whatever the failures of democracy, the system remains superior to the tried, and bloody, alternatives.

Italy Reborn is published by Penguin at £35. To order your copy at £30, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books