As president of the Italian Liberal Party, Benedetto Croce was one of the most influential intellectuals involved in Italian public affairs after the fall of Mussolini. Placing Croce at the centre of historical events between 1943 and 1952, this book details his participation in Italy's political life, and his major contributions to the rebirth of Italian democracy. Drawing on a great amount of primary material, including Croce's political speeches, correspondences, diaries, and official documents from post-war Italy, this book illuminates the dynamic and progressive nature of Croce's liberalism and the shortcomings of the old Liberal leaders. Providing a year-by-year account of Croce's initiatives, author Fabio Fernando Rizi fills the gap in Croce's biography, covering aspects of his public life often neglected, misinterpreted, or altogether ignored, and restores his standing among the founding fathers of modern Italy.

On July 25, 1943, news of Mussolini's resignation and subsequent arrest stunned Italians leaving them dumbfounded. After two decades, fascism had fallen without any advance warning. As festive events marked the incredible outcome and reminders of the past were destroyed, an uncontainable joy seemed to pervade Italians. But what did people actually celebrate? How did they understand the bygone dictatorship, which was soon to be reincarnated in the Italian Social Republic (RSI)? Drawing on more than one hundred diaries written by ordinary citizens (and some prominent figures as well) and inspired by Raymond Williams's concept of structures of feeling, the book examines Italians' perspectives on fascism at a very critical moment in their history. With the country mired in a devastating war further complicated by the September 8, 1943 armistice with the Allies and subsequent German occupation—followed by the eruption of an Italian-against-Italian conflict, the switching of alliances, and the declaration of war against Germany on October 13, 1943—the fast pace of history seemed to deflect Italians' attention from their immediate past. Amidst the daily experience of bombings, hunger, displacement, and death, coming to terms with twenty years of dictatorship turned out to be an arduous enterprise. Whether those who had lived under the fascist regime wished 'not to think of it and not to speak any more about it' as philosopher Benedetto Croce maintained, it is hard to ascertain. In truth, little is known of what Italians felt and thought about fascism after its precipitous demise. This book remedies the gap in historical scholarship by assessing how Italians confronted their present and negotiated their past during the two years from the fall of the regime to the definitive defeat of the RSI and the end of the world war in May 1945. By bringing to life the cultural imaginaries and practices of the past, the book raises ostensibly intractable questions on the epochal impact of what often appears as inconsequential: the typically unseen and seemingly banal power of everyday experiences.

On the Edge of Democracy examines the emergence of democracy in Italy in the wake of World War Two. It examines the nature of the democracy forged in the liminal period after Benito Mussolini, the Duce of Fascism, was removed from government in the summer of 1943. Instead of pouring through institutional accounts, which root the origins of democracy in the establishment of parties and in electoral outcomes, Forlenza focuses on the lived experiences of ordinary people and elites in extraordinary times. Meanings of democracy are not variations of a universal model but emerge as contingent interpretative acts and a symbolization following political and existential crisis under condition of violence and war. On the Edge of Democracy captures a series of key events which saw people torn between going home or staying at the front, between clinging to a disrespected but habitual monarchy or engaging with a republican experiment. Becoming a democracy was also a kind of politically spiritual act: the power of the myth of America and the struggle for order as a function of the cosmic fight between communism and ant-communism in the incipient Cold War had a formative power on the origins, meanings, and characters of post-fascist democracy in Italy.