It is well known that the Italian archives were maltreated, for the best of reasons, in September 1943: partly by destruction, partly by export, partly by concealment; in the effort to hide from the incoming Germans what some of the Italian civil servants and generals had been doing. It took a long time after 1945 to recover what could be recovered and not everything could be recovered and not everything that has been recovered is yet available in print. But in 1990 I Documenti diplomatici italiani (series 9 vol. 10) printed Foreign Office documents for those last months of Mussolini's power. They are edited by Pietro Pastorelli, the professor of international politics at the Sapienza, who has been president of the commission for the reordering and publication of the diplomatic documents; and they are important. Some of these documents had been published before in various collections but nothing before this has enabled us to see the full force of the documentation; especially as it comes in the letters of two leading Fascists, Alfieri the ambassador in Berlin and Bastianini who from February 1943 was in effect running the Foreign Office.

The Fascist administration contained quite a number of sensible people. For though it had promoted loyal party bosses to high posts – to be heads of departments or even ambassadors for which some of them were not well suited if ambassadors ought to be suave and groomed and courteous – it had also used the civil service without many sackings and the civil servants did what civil services do, the best for whatever the government was in power without asking questions.