The Mussolini Canal

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The Mussolini Canal is one of the great achievements of contemporary Italian fiction. It spans 100 years of Italian history as seen through the lives of the Peruzzi family, who are among the 30,000 peasants from Northern Italy sent down to farm the newly-drained Pontine Marshes outside Rome in the 1930s. Mussolini is revered by the Peruzzi family, who must reconcile their admiration for Il Duce with the failings of Fascism which slowly envelop them. Contemporary events permeate the book and the hardship and misery of earlier periods are seen against the background of modern prosperity. It won the Strega prize in 2010 in Italy and has sold over 400,000 copies in Italy