If there was a half-decent explanation for why many of them stayed around and the whole experiment had been able to survive for so long, it was in part because of the political force against which it had seemed for a time to stand. The fascist dream, like its communist cousin, began as a sincere effort to answer the severe problems of the age – in particular to address unemployment and want in the devastation of Europe following the First World War. It never carried the intellectual class as communism did, but it was able to enrapture some romantics and sadists in a similar manner. And though it crashed sooner than its communist counterpart, largely with that counter-part’s assistance, the devastation it left was as great.

Italy was able to survive the catastrophe, partly because its fascism had been a slightly different beast from that of Germany, partly because the truest believers had never reached as great a depth in as great numbers as their allies to the north. It was also possible to downplay Italian fascism as a response to the country’s pervasive chaos, a chaos that those who planned the post-war Italian state made sure would continue. But while the Italians had drawn deeply at the well of Italian and Roman history to justify their state and their role, the whole well of their history did not seem to have been contaminated, or poisonous from the start as it seemed to much of Germany. The famous and often-asked question of Germany, namely how the most sophisticated artistic culture in the world could have become the most barbaric, was a question with a sting in its tail. For always afterwards would come the possibility that it was that very culture and sophistication that had made the ensuing barbarism possible: that German culture and philosophy were not the things that had been contaminated by Nazism but were the very things that had watered it. The well had always been contaminated.

Countless stings remained, some of which became clear only with time. For example, now that decades have elapsed it is easier to understand the twentieth-century struggle between two competing totalitarian visions for a disbelieving world. But it is also easier than it has ever been to feel a fear not only of these ideologies but of any ideologies. If two apparent opposites (as they seemed at the time) could lead where they did, then perhaps anything can lead there. Perhaps all ideology and certainty are the problem?