During a state visit to Italy in June 2004, President George W. Bush was taken to the Ardeatine Caves, outside the Aurelian Wall of Rome. Here, 60 years earlier, 335 Italians had been massacred by the Nazis in reprisal for a partisan attack that had led to the deaths of 33 members of a regiment of the SS. The Italian fascist elite by that time had even less control over events unfolding across the country than Bush's own hubristic team now has over the evolving catastrophe of Iraq. Many German officials made no effort to disguise their contempt for their onetime Italian allies, let alone for the partisans. The German ambassador to Italy, Rudolf Rahn, declared it "a real tragedy that the Roman Mussolini has as his followers almost in toto merely decadent Italians. . . . Only a virile state can found an empire and Italy is not virile."

Mussolini himself did not escape the derision of the Nazis. Although Hitler never entirely forgot the Duce's chronological priority, lauding him as the man who paved the way for the Führer's own "achievement," the Italian was left in no doubt as to who the junior partner was in the Axis. Characteristically, he was given merely fifteen minutes' official warning before the start of Operation Barbarossa, the Russian campaign of 1941, despite having conferred with German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop a week earlier at the Palazzo Volpi in Venice. A sumptuous dinner for the honored guest, replete with servants dressed in black velvet with buttons of glittering (fake) diamonds, was to no avail. As one Nazi onlooker, shown a photo of the Duce, sneered: "Look at our Gauleiter in Italy."

A plethora of such anecdotes and quotations enrich R. J. B. Bosworth's panoramic study Mussolini's Italy: Life under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915–1945. The term totalitarianism, Bosworth reminds us, had its provenance in 1920s Italy. Critics and supporters contested the practical efficacy and moral consequences of the new ideology that aspired to ensure, as Mussolini put it, that "all is for the state, nothing is outside the state, nothing and no one are against the state." There was always a gap between the myth and the social reality of fascism, but with the assumption of full dictatorship in January 1925 came a cascade of political and economic reforms, producing massive and lasting material effects within and beyond the nation's borders.

This book ranges very widely, synthesizing in often-colorful prose the author's compendious knowledge of Italian social and political history. Bosworth delves into many forgotten nooks and crannies of domestic and public life, up and down the peninsula. He offers an excellent blow-by-blow account of fascism's military performance (generally dismal) and reassesses its economic record (at best patchy). We are also offered a forensic account of the actions, intuitions, and miscalculations that led Mussolini into military alliance with Hitler, with such devastating effects on the Italian people. Before this ghastly denouement, Bosworth provides illuminating discussions of the heady, if often vague, modernizing aspirations of fascist ideologues in the 1920s and '30s and has much to say about the ways in which radio, cinema, and the press were mobilized for the cause. He also analyzes the brutalizing impact of the new politics on the built environment. EUR, the suburb of Rome that provides the most complete monument to its architecture, remains the "dead heart of fascist planning." The regime produced gleaming brochures, airy speeches, glitzy exhibitions, and synchronized parades, but its soldiers often went without boots. It manufactured submarines and created autostrade, but in the rural economy, especially in the south, countless roads were unpaved and donkeys sometimes remained the fastest means of transport.

Bosworth deftly documents fascism's uneven and complex political and ideological history, charting Mussolini's tortuous road to power, the gathering popular appeal of his leadership, and the final implosion of the system. In the inauspicious early days of the movement, Mussolini was but one of several movers and shakers and was even overshadowed by the poet, pilot, and grandstanding nationalist Gabriele D'Annunzio (whom Bosworth calls "the gaudiest candidate for the post of national warrior-saint") and by the provocative (and sometimes spectacularly silly) Futurist artist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who advocated the destruction of Venice and extolled the culturally cleansing properties of war. But soon Mussolini emerged at the head of a movement and, in a complex political poker game, well recounted here, obliged the king and the old political regime to take him very seriously. The celebrated March on Rome of 1922 symbolized his triumph, but in fact the deal to ease him into government had already been done, by means of a telephone call to Milan. Mussolini was thus not required actually to tramp to power alongside his troops, but the idea of a hard physical slog, redolent of the nineteenth-century trials and tribulations of the Garibaldini, made good copy.

Fascism's allure proved sufficient to attract a motley array of supporters from across classes, professions, and regions and even to draw back to the old country a clutch of Italian Americans. Some, such as Amerigo Dumini, born in Saint Louis in 1896, had come earlier to fight and been radicalized in World War I. Dumini particularly excelled in his role as fascist thug and went on to become leader of the gang that murdered socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti in 1924. The brutal beating death of Matteotti, who was seized while walking by the Tiber in central Rome, is widely regarded as a turning point in the destiny of the regime.

Bosworth has plenty to say about brawling fascist squads, the intrigues of various regional leaders and underlings who vied for power, and the spiraling course of officially sanctioned violence, but he is also at pains to make relative judgments, thus noting that for all its horrors, Italy saw "no Night of the Long Knives or Great Purge" and no cancerous "SS state" within the state, akin to that of Germany. The author openly acknowledges that he finds Mussolini odious and appalling but also points out that it would be hard to imagine a Hitler or a Stalin providing financial assistance, as the Duce did, to the widow and children of the murdered Matteotti. Comparisons with tyrannies and tyrants elsewhere turn out to be fraught with difficulty, and despite referring here and there to life in the USSR and Nazi Germany, as well as to Franco's Spain and even, in passing, to Saddam, the author is most convincing when he points to Italy as a peculiar case and notes the inevitable idiosyncrasies and incommensurability of states.

Bosworth catalogues the very particular features of Italy's homegrown tyranny, tracing the causes and consequences of fascism's fundamental assault on liberalism. Although in broad outline this may have been duplicated often enough elsewhere, fascist Italy had very particular inflections and limitations. Whatever the comparative reckoning, the charge sheet is very extensive. Mussolini and his companions banned rival parties; arbitrarily arrested, exiled, and sometimes murdered opponents; destroyed the free press; liquidated nonfascist trade unions; made a mockery of the law; and fostered a secret police and a climate of spying. Thousands of dissidents and other unfortunates were persecuted and many sent away from home to far-flung villages and islands under the notorious rule of confino. We are offered an abundance of statistics about the quality of everyday life, but the narrative is also punctuated by poignant personal stories of internal exile and worse.

Grim reading though that makes, Bosworth's account has its lighter moments and rhetorical flourishes. This was a theater of cruelty and of the absurd, and in some ways the very caprice of decision making and the serendipitous factors that determined personal destiny exemplified the wanton arbitrariness of power that fascism stages. In theory, the dictatorship's versions of the truth were meant to penetrate every aspect of the citizen's body and soul, but practice was another matter, and some of the zealotry was so extreme as to lend itself to mirth (Bosworth manages to include an account of antifascist jokes before noting that they sometimes landed their tellers in jail). Among the more surreal passages are a description of a recipe for a green, white, and red omelet (in homage to the flag) and a passing reference to how zuppa inglese was patriotically renamed zuppa Impero, in celebration of Mussolini's African imperial adventures, but whether anybody took these to heart we cannot be sure. Bosworth assiduously archives such trifles before turning back to weightier matters.

As the personality cult around Mussolini intensified, so did the price of dissent. Outright opposition of course carried intense personal risk, but even staying silent was often insufficient to smooth the citizen's way through the labyrinth of power. The essence of fascism, as Roland Barthes once remarked, is the demand for our active assent. By 1928, journalists were compelled to be registered fascists. The leader's mystical charm was extolled in ever-more-breathless sentences. In 1939, a lexicographer published a "Mussolinian dictionary," advertised as a "manual of practical use," allowing the reader to recover the dictator's deepest thoughts on just about everything. The very name "Mussolini" was said to have a universal resonance. As one fawning hack declared: "The Revolution is Him. He is the Revolution." The Eternal City was apparently now inseparable from his radiance: "Rome is where the Duce is, it is in Him, with Him, in His divinations, in His struggles, in His torments, in His will, in His many creations." Not to be outdone, another commentator ingratiated himself with the sentiment "He is the GENIUS who brings good fortune to the Italic people."

Even so, the cult had its constraints (there was of course still that other, older religion to contend with, and however equivocal its political role, the church still constituted an alternative center of gravity). The fascist creed, Bosworth is at pains to show, was interpreted in many different ways, according to circumstance. Opposition also took diverse forms and stemmed from a variety of political and moral objections. The fascist inner circle was riven by its own rivalries and squabbles, sometimes of murderous proportions. Yet the leadership and its secret police, obnoxious though they were, never altogether lost their ramshackle air. Bosworth is particularly good at recalling the weakness and bombast of the regime without minimizing the seriousness of what was done in its name. For every gang of fanatics, there was a legion of fellow travelers, negotiating their way through its mass of contradictions and inconsistencies. Personal fortunes might change at a stroke when the favor of a boss (through the ubiquitous raccomandazione) was summarily offered or removed.

In 1926, when Arturo Bocchini became police chief in Rome, his office was said to lack a telephone that worked. After his early death in the arms of a younger, aristocratic lover, the spying networks and secret policing that he had overseen remained hit-or-miss. It turned out that the Duce himself was subject to phone tapping by his agents, and as a result our historian is able to confirm that Mussolini's conversations with his mistresses were lamentably banal. Bosworth's assumption that none of the reputed four-hundred-plus women the Duce was said to have "conquered" found him sexually satisfying ventures rather further into conjecture than it strictly ought, but one can understand why any right-minded chronicler might assume and wish that to be so. Perhaps it was. At times, this narrative becomes excessively bogged down in minutiae or strains too far in search of the killer one-liner ("Bocchini believed in nothing except a satisfying coitus and a succulent lobster"), but overall, this is an impressively full and fair record of an entire epoch. The fascist maestro emerges as a complex figure indeed, and for the most part the cameo roles of his followers, mistresses, and flunkies are also well drawn, each significant contributor brought vividly before us, then allowed to slip back into the shadows of the appropriately named Sala del Pappagallo (Room of the Parrot) at the Palazzo Venezia, where Mussolini held court.

Bosworth's account of fascist imperial forays into Africa, crucially into Ethiopia in 1935–36, is accompanied by telling observations on the Italian racial anthropologists who conveniently rationalized such conquest as the necessary imposition of a superior civilization (commentators were split as to whether that superiority was a function of Latin blood or sheer will, or both). Military deployments of chemical weapons, in contravention of the binding international promises Mussolini had earlier made, are carefully detailed, and some effort is made to assess the scale of violence and killing that went on in subduing opposition to Italy's new empire. By the 1940s, Italy had become an openly racist dictatorship, although earlier fascism's attitudes to race and ethnicity, or at least particularly to Judaism, were more equivocal. Some Nazi critics had even denounced the vices of the "Judeo-Fascist regime" entrenched in world-polluting Rome. Fascist Italy, abhorred by some elements of the far right for having given sanctuary to foreign Jews escaping persecutions elsewhere, ended up complicit in the Holocaust. To become thoroughgoing fascist warriors, Italians needed to learn to "hate their enemies," the Duce declared ominously as the regime turned ever nastier.

Mussolini's Italy moves skillfully through such sorry chapters, as adept at describing the machinations of the power brokers in their elegant salons as it is at portraying the anxious struggles of humble denizens, scrabbling for enough to eat. Bosworth is not sentimental about the "Liberal Italy" that preceded Mussolini's rule or about the political system that replaced it, but it is the direct impact of fascism itself on the lives of millions that constitutes the dark heart of his dense and disturbing narrative. This scholarly and passionate book will doubtless be required reading for students of modern Italy, but it deserves a still wider audience than that.

Daniel Pick's publications include Rome or Death: The Obsessions of General Garibaldi (Cape, 2005).