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Reviews of Books
worthy service, as he portrays that piece of Rome then
inhabited or shaped by Spaniards.
The crux of Dandelet's argument is that, by dint of
pomp, flattery, patronage, and fat subsidies, the kings
of Spain, from Ferdinand but especially from Philip II
down through Philip IV, shaped a Roman bloc of
partisans who kept most popes tame and friendly.
Dandelet goes further: Spanish influence calmed Roman politics and ballasted the papal state, and Spanish
subsidies so mulched Roman soil that the sprouting
baroque monuments-churches, palaces, and their internal finery-owe much to Iberian largess.
Perhaps! The argument from subsidies to Rome's
global wealth has problems. Dandelet himself allows
that it is hard to pin down figures. But, clearly from his
text, cash flowed both ways. It was a trade in favors,
like modern lobbying, probably detrimental to the
general good. In came fine gifts and pensions, but out
went vast concessions (to kings for fleets and armies)
of annual monies owed the church. How much of the
huge church revenue lost had been meant for Rome,
and how much not, is a question never raised. Net
flows favored whom? What the book does make clear
is how extensive, deliberate, and assiduous was
Habsburg giving. It also stresses the honorific military
orders of Calatrava and Santiago, much coveted by
Rome's elite, dealt out by royal hands.
When it comes to his more modest aim-to show
what in Rome was Spanish-Dandelet does fine service. His portrayal of the busy Spanish confraternity at
San Giacomo dei Spagnoli (his "Santiago") and his
survey of the geography, work, and wealth of the city's
Spaniards are both interesting and useful. He finds a
wide range of careers and occupations, some endogamy, but much exogamy, causing easy assimilation via
intermarriage. His work on wills is suggestive; he finds
much female property and female control of its disposition. It would be interesting to know if Spanish law
and custom for women's goods made for difference.
He traces the church geography of wills' charities and
notes an eclectic mix of many Spanish but some
Roman beneficiaries.
Another useful service of the book is its survey of
wishful texts by Spanish humanists who romanized
their national history or hispanized Rome's tale to
prettify the Italian ambitions of Borgia popes or
Habsburg emperors.
The author's approach has risks. To come in from
away, and do it well, requires good local knowledge.
Here the book falters glaringly. We find a pasticcio of
queer errors, most small but so irritatingly abundant as
to subvert a worthy project. Many stem from taking
Spanish texts on Italy at face value. Titles, offices,
monies come out in odd Espaliano, as do, especially,
places' and persons' names. Most we can decode, but
not always. The usual documentary jumble blurs the
identities of cardinals, known promiscuously by family,
office, titular church, or homeland: they need consistent tags. Sometimes, too, Italian paleography trips the
author up, inventing fictitious families (Capitocchi for
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
Capizucchi, Comellino for Lomellino, Albertini for
Albertoni). And there is a lovely mirage, the "Palatina" family-actually the palace staff. All these errors
signal that, often, the author did not really understand
quite what his documents pointed at. Responsibility
for some of these failings lies squarely with Yale
University Press. An august press owes its public and a
young scholar better service.
One more criticism: I would like to see documents
taken with a bigger pinch of salt. Dandelet's sources
are often wrapped in courtesy, guile, or speculation;
they need more siting, more decoding. For facts, the
avvisi (weekly Roman newsletters) are often too far
from central politics to take so literally, especially for
sums of money or numbers of men. And dispatches,
petitions, and fulsome thank-you notes to Madrid all
need glossing; no such rhetoric should ever be taken at
face value.
That said, this is a useful book, a worthy empresa,
and an interesting new approach. It gives Romanists a
new subject, new questions, and new facts to keep in
mind.
THOMAS V. CoHEN
York University
ALEXANDER DE GRAND. The Hunchback's Tailor: Giovanni Giolitti and Liberal Italy from the Challenge of
Mass Politics to the Rise of Fascism, 1882-1922. Foreword by SPENCER M. DI ScALA. (Italian and ItalianAmerican Studies.) Westport, Conn.: Praeger. 2001.
Pp. x, 294. $69.95.
The life of the Italian statesman, Giovanni Giolitti
(1842-1928), links Italy's Risorgimento to the fascist
period. His long career, which started with service in
the state administration in 1862 and culminated in five
terms as prime minister (1892-1893; 1903-1905; 19061909; 1911-1914; 1920-1921), makes him Italy's most
important political figure between Camillo Cavour, the
architect of Italian unification, and Benito Mussolini,
the fascist leader. Equally, Giolitti was the most controversial figure of his generation. As Alexander De
Grand tells us, Giolitti's attempt to hold the center
ground in Italian politics aroused hostility on both the
Left and Right, while what De Grand calls his "cold
realism" made him the enemy of "a self-absorbed
generation of intellectuals who sought poetry in politics" (p. 4). Moreover, Giolitti's unrivalled mastery of
the political game earned him an enduring reputation
for sharp practice. "At best," De Grand comments,
Giolitti seemed "an efficient bureaucrat," at worst he
was "an unprincipled schemer" (p. 4). For the socialist
Gaetano Salvemini, Giolitti was the "ministro della
malavita" (minister of the underworld), a parliamentarian who corrupted parliamentary institutions and a
liberal who exploited the political backwardness of
southern Italy for his own short-term ends. For fascists, Giolitti's rule had separated the "real" people
from its government, thereby destroying the unity,
greatness, and strength of the Italian nation.
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Europe: Early Modern and Modern
De Grand's study of Giolitti's political career belongs firmly to an American historiographical tradition
that has long sought to rehabilitate the Italian statesman. Some forty years ago, A. William Salomone
argued that Italy under Giolitti moved decisively toward democracy, a step tragically interrupted by World
War I and its chaotic aftermath (Italy in the Giolittian
Era: Italian Democracy in the Making, 1900-1914
[1960]). According to De Grand, this moment of
transition, and Giolitti's role in guiding it, provide the
keys to understanding his beliefs and actions. Thus, it
is "wrong and profoundly ahistorical to judge (Giolitti)
by democratic standards" (p. 273). He was not a mass
political leader and did not seek to build a mass
movement; democratic politics were "distasteful" to
him (p. 7). Instead, Giolitti must be judged by the
standards of "the old liberal tradition" (p. 273) represented by Cavour and the historic Right. And here
Giolitti's achievement was to have built a relatively
stable coalition, based on a very Italian mixture of
parliament, bureaucracy, and business, which worked
to promote "gradual and unglamorous progress" (p. 5)
and which continued the tradition of state-building
and modernization started by Cavour.
Equally important, De Grand tells us, was Giolitti's
pessimism about the possibility of real change in
Italian politics. Giolitti saw much in Italian political
life that was "ugly and displeasing" and compared his
own role to that of a tailor who "does not succeed in
dressing a hunchback if he does not take the hump into
account" (p. 1). De Grand seems to share this bleak
vision. The late liberal Italy dominated by Giolitti was
divided by "deep regional, class and ideological differences" (p. 271), ruled by self-serving politicians, and
beset by financial, political, and military scandals. Yet
what is perhaps missing in this account is any explanation of why this should be. Oddly lacking, in such a
carefully researched and well-argued study, is a deeper
sense of either Giolitti the man or the Italy in which he
lived and died. The reader learns very little about the
connections between Giolitti's personal and public life
(or if, indeed, there were any), while an analysis of the
social and economic context of the politician's career,
of the kind that made Rosario Romeo's biography of
Cavour (Cavour e il suo tempo, 3 vols [1979-1984])
compulsive reading, is also absent. What exactly "the
old liberal tradition" represented by Cavour and inherited by Giolitti consisted of is left unexplained. The
impact of political developments in other European
states, or of foreign policy on the domestic scene, is
rarely discussed. It is, in short, frustrating that so few
general conclusions are drawn from such a detailed
and richly illustrated study. The opportunities for a
reassessment of the legacy of Cavour, the nature of the
"new nationalism," the transition to mass politics,
and/or the rise of fascism are never really seized by the
author.
The close focus of De Grand's study, and his meticulous account of the political machinations of Giolittian Italy, ensure that his book is and will remain a
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crucial work of reference. The book has much to say to
the Italian specialist. But the non-specialist will struggle to find a way through the bewildering succession of
governments and the collision of political personalities
and problems. The political confusion so characteristic
of late liberal Italy and described so aptly here can
often overwhelm the reader as well.
Lucy RIALL
Birkbeck College,
University of London
MAcGREGOR KNox. Hitler's Italian Allies: Royal Armed
Forces, Fascist Regime, and the War of 1940-1943. New
York: Cambridge University Press. 2000. Pp. xiv, 207.
$24.95.
With this book, MacGregor Knox emphasizes that
cultural limitations affected technological and strategic matters and prevented the Italian armed forces
from preparing for modern warfare. Benito Mussolini's regime was unable to reform and revolutionize the
military traditions, to mobilize the resources, to modernize industry, or to stop the venality of the high
command and its bureaucratic incompetence. In the
end, all of these caused the defeat of fascist Italy.
Knox notes that the military disintegration of September 1943 requires a more comprehensive analysis.
In the global clash of World War II, Italy was a dwarf
among giants; Mussolini could not hope to escape if
Adolf Hitler was defeated. Knox considers the military
cultural background, the precarious relationship between Mussolini and the king, and the lack of a
military ideology capable of linking the goals of the
Duce to the ethos of the Italian ruling class. When the
war began, Mussolini hoped to implement a more
thorough fascist revolution through the militarization
of his nation and thus to endow his people with the
ability to create a permanent revolution. But Italian
dependence on foreign raw materials, lack of preparedness of the armed forces, public opinion, and the
king's veto forced Mussolini to declare Italy's nonbelligerence. Nevertheless, ideology, geopolitical considerations, and the victories of Nazi Germany in 1940
introduced Italy to the parallel war. Knox describes the
technical problems and intelligently highlights the
absence of any realistic plan for prosecuting an Italian
campaign. When Nazi victory was secure, Mussolini
opened new theaters just to underline the right of Italy
to participate in future peace talks and try to dictate
conditions. Within six months, the opportunity for a
fascist victory dimmed. The military impasse changed
Italy's strategic aims in the subaltern war: Hitler saved
the Duce, but Mussolini now had to fight his war under
German tutelage.
The catastrophe of 1942-1943 struck Italy very hard.
In that summer, Anglo-American forces invaded the
Italian peninsula and the fascist war was over. Knox
attributes the total loss of dignity in defeat to the army.
The tension between Mussolini and the king caused
deep ruptures that were worsened by the conflicts
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