A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary, 1939-1940 By Iris Origo

A harrowing account of life in Italy in the year leading up to World War II, available in the US for the first time._x000D_
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In 1939 it was not a foregone conclusion that Mussolini would enter World War II on the side of Hitler. In this  previously unpublished and only recently discovered diary, Iris Origo, author of the classic War in Val d’Orcia, provides a vivid account of how Mussolini decided on a course of action that would devastate his country and ultimately destroy his regime._x000D_
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Though the British-born Origo lived with her Italian husband on an estate in a remote part of Tuscany, she was supremely well-connected and regularly in touch with intellectual and diplomatic circles in Rome, where her godfather, William Phillips, was the American ambassador. Her diary describes the Fascist government’s growing infatuation with Nazi Germany as Hitler’s armies marched triumphantly across Europe and the campaign of propaganda and intimidation that was mounted in support of its new aims. The