A master historian illuminates the tumultuous relationship of Il Duce and his young lover Claretta, whose extraordinarily intimate diaries only recently have become available Few deaths are as ...gruesome and infamous as those of Benito Mussolini, Italy's fascist dictator, and Claretta (or Clara) Petacci, his much-younger lover. Shot dead by Italian partisans after attempting to flee the country in 1945, the couple's bodies were then hanged upside down in Milan's main square in ignominious public display. This provocative book is the first to mine Clara's extensive diaries, family correspondence, and other sources to discover how the last in Mussolini's long line of lovers became his intimate and how she came to her violent fate at his side. R. J. B. Bosworth explores the social climbing of Claretta's family, her naïve and self-interested commitment to fascism, her diary's graphically detailed accounts of sexual life with Mussolini, and much more. Brimful of new and arresting information, the book sheds intimate light not only on an ordinary-extraordinary woman living at the heart of Italy's totalitarian fascist state but also on Mussolini himself.
Abstract
BACKGROUND
Studies have shown that self-monitoring of blood pressure (BP) is effective when combined with co-interventions, but its efficacy varies in the presence of some co-morbidities. ...This study examined whether self-monitoring can reduce clinic BP in patients with hypertension-related co-morbidity.
METHODS
A systematic review was conducted of articles published in Medline, Embase, and the Cochrane Library up to January 2018. Randomized controlled trials of self-monitoring of BP were selected and individual patient data (IPD) were requested. Contributing studies were prospectively categorized by whether they examined a low/high-intensity co-intervention. Change in BP and likelihood of uncontrolled BP at 12 months were examined according to number and type of hypertension-related co-morbidity in a one-stage IPD meta-analysis.
RESULTS
A total of 22 trials were eligible, 16 of which were able to provide IPD for the primary outcome, including 6,522 (89%) participants with follow-up data. Self-monitoring was associated with reduced clinic systolic BP compared to usual care at 12-month follow-up, regardless of the number of hypertension-related co-morbidities (−3.12 mm Hg, 95% confidence intervals −4.78, −1.46 mm Hg; P value for interaction with number of morbidities = 0.260). Intense interventions were more effective than low-intensity interventions in patients with obesity (P < 0.001 for all outcomes), and possibly stroke (P < 0.004 for BP control outcome only), but this effect was not observed in patients with coronary heart disease, diabetes, or chronic kidney disease.
CONCLUSIONS
Self-monitoring lowers BP regardless of the number of hypertension-related co-morbidities, but may only be effective in conditions such obesity or stroke when combined with high-intensity co-interventions.
In this piece, Richard Bosworth wryly reviews his academic life. Set into a hereditary academic family, with ties to Adelaide, Sydney, Perth and Cambridge, Bosworth explains his many enriching ...sojourns in Rome libraries and archives and his eventual passage to the comforts of Jesus College, Oxford. When asked by bureaucrats - these days, in his physical decline, likely to be from the NHS - what is his ethnicity, Bosworth always refuses to answer but is never quite brave or pompous enough to say 'rootless cosmopolitan'. In any case, as he demonstrates in this piece, his real commitment, as well as to his family, is to 'words, words, words' and, only at the very end, he trusts, will the 'rest be silence'. He may have made some historical books, but they have also made him.
Richard Bosworth's overview of Italy's role in European and world politics from 1860 to 1960 is lively and iconclastic. Based on a combination of primary research and secondary material he examines ...Italian diplomacy, military power, commerce, culture, tourism and ideology. His account challenges many aspects of current Italian historiography and offers an original vision of the place of Italy in modern history.
In this elegant book Richard Bosworth explores Venice-not the glorious Venice of the Venetian Republic, but from the fall of the Republic in 1797 and the Risorgimento up through the present day. ...Bosworth looks at the glamour and squalor of the belle époque and the dark underbelly of modernization, the two world wars, and the far-reaching oppressions of the fascist regime, through to the "Disneylandification" of Venice and the tourist boom, the worldwide attention of the biennale and film festival, and current threats of subsidence and flooding posed by global warming. He draws out major themes-the increasingly anachronistic but deeply embedded Catholic Church, the two faces of modernization, consumerism versus culture.Bosworth interrogates not just Venice's history but its meanings, and how the city's past has been co-opted to suit present and sometimes ulterior aims. Venice, he shows, is a city where its histories as well as its waters ripple on the surface.
The choice by different regimes as to what matters in the past and what does not is always a telling factor in their character. Mussolini’s dictatorship in Italy made major play with romanità through ...its representation of the dictator as a new Caesar and its claim to be ‘restoring’ the Roman empire. The centro storico of Rome is still full of such Fascist messaging. The regime was also the first to call itself totalitarian and, since the 1980s, a standard interpretation has developed accepting that Mussolini did indeed push his people far along the road to having their minds and actions fascistized. This interpretation, however, with its focus on culture above other issues, underestimates the extensive sectors of Italian life where rival ideas and behaviour survived and flourished. So, too, romanità could signal Catholic, Vatican, class, family and national allegiances as well as ones favoured by the regime. The real message of inter-war Rome was therefore as much about an Italian dictatorship as a Fascist one.
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud claimed that Rome must be comprehended as "not a human dwelling place but a mental entity," in which the palaces of the Caesars still stand ...alongside modern apartment buildings in layers of brick, mortar, and memory. "The observer would need merely to shift the focus of his eyes, perhaps, or change his position, in order to call up a view of either the one or the other."In this one-of-a-kind book, historian Richard Bosworth accepts Freud's challenge, drawing upon his expertise in Italian pasts to explore the many layers of history found within the Eternal City. Often beginning his analysis with sites and monuments that can still be found in contemporary Rome, Bosworth expands his scope to review how political groups of different erasthe Catholic Church, makers of the Italian nation, Fascists, and "ordinary" Romans (be they citizens, immigrants, or tourists)read meaning into the city around them. Weaving in the city's quintessential figures (Garibaldi, Pius XII, Mussolini, and Berlusconi) and architectural icons (the Vatican, St. Peter's Basilica, the Victor Emmanuel Monument, and EUR) with those forgotten or unknown, Bosworth explores the many histories that whisper their rival and competing messages and seek to impose their truth upon the passing crowds. But as this delightful study will reveal, Rome, that magisterial palimpsest, has never accepted a single reading of its historic meaning.
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