Emilio Lussu

Emilio Lussu was an Italian MP and Professor of Political Economy, who was imprisoned because of his opposition to Mussolini. In 1929 he escaped with two fellow prisoners from the island of Lipari. Enter Mussolini combines an account of Mussolini’s rise to power and a critique of the Italian fascist movement that was influential at a time when many observers were still sympathetic to fascism, at least in its Italian guise. It was first published in English in 1936.

Emilio Lussu was an Italian MP and Professor of Political Economy, who was imprisoned because of his opposition to Mussolini. In 1929 he escaped with two fellow prisoners from the island of Lipari. Enter Mussolini combines an account of Mussolini’s rise to power and a critique of the Italian fascist movement that was influential at a time when many observers were still sympathetic to fascism, at least in its Italian guise. It was first published in English in 1936.

Taking its place alongside works by Ernst Junger, Robert Graves, and Erich Maria Remarque, Emilio Lussu's memoir is one of the most affecting accounts to come out of the First World War. A classic in Italy but virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, it reveals, in spare and detached prose, the almost farcical side of the war as seen by a Sardinian officer fighting the Austrian army on the Asiago plateau in northeastern Italy, the front so poignantly evoked by Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. For Lussu, June 1916 to July 1917 was a year of continuous assaults on impregnable trenches, absurd missions concocted by commanders full of patriotic rhetoric and vanity but lacking in tactical skill, and episodes often tragic and sometimes grotesque, where the incompetence of his own side was as dangerous as the attacked waged by the enemy. A rare firsthand account of the Italian front, Lussu's memoir succeeds in staging a fierce indictment of the futility of war in a dry, often ironic style that sets his tale wholly apart from the Western Front of Remarque, and adds an astonishingly modern voice to the literature of the Great War.