The place of the Jesuit Pietro Tacchi Venturi in Mussolini's Italy remains controversial. As Robert Maryks notes, Tacchi Venturi's archive contains material ‘on an astonishingly broad range of issues’. It provides responses in regard to ‘actions against the “Masonic and Protestant” propaganda’ in Italy or the conduct and purpose of Italian imperialism in Ethiopia and other colonies, in regard to film censorship or the ‘type of swimming outfit to be worn on public beaches’, in regard to diplomatic relations with the USSR or the availability of ‘diplomatic license plates for the Vatican's secretary of state's automobile’. The Fascist regime may have boasted that it was forging a totalitarian state and society, but it certainly had not atomised Fr Tacchi Venturi (born 1861) into thinking Fascist and merely that. Throughout Mussolini's dictatorship, this Jesuit, for all his Fascist sympathies, remained his own, his order's and the Vatican's man. As Roberto Farinacci, the ex-party secretary who was the most anticlerical among the Fascist leadership, put it sardonically, ‘Tacchi Venturi was a phenomenon, he is a super-phenomenon. For him the day consists of sixty hours. He handles everything for everyone. … A lawyer, an engineer, an accountant, a businessman, and with extra time, he also cares about religion and his religious order. Now you see him in the antechamber of a minister, now on the stairs of the military departments, now at his desk to write left and right in favour of his recommendees.’

Stationed at the Gesù Church, helpfully near Mussolini's office in the Palazzo Venezia, Tacchi Venturi patrolled many of the channels leading towards the summit of power.

In the book under review, Maryks, a prolific student of Jesuit studies, is enlarging an earlier work (2011), where he provided an introduction to Tacchi Venturi's many dealings, some of it repeated in this second volume. But the main purpose of volume i was to assemble forty-four of the numerous petitions prepared by converted Jews, whether Italian-born or not, who sought ways to achieve ‘discrimination’, that is, bureaucratic admission that they were ‘Aryan’, and so circumvent the virulently anti-semitic legislation that the Fascist regime adopted from 1938. In volume ii, Maryk offers instead personal correspondence from those trapped in the labyrinth of the dictatorship's laws, with their fear and perplexity often complicated by the fact that, until 1938, over a quarter of the nation's Jews had belonged to the Partito Nazionale Fascista and few were anti-Fascist. 139 letters are printed in their original Italian with English translation on the facing page. Only fifteen are replies from Tacchi Venturi but Maryk introduces each case and often usefully knows the fate of the petitioner. We are assured that, although the forty-one authors are meagre in number, the choice is ‘representative’, both in terms of regional background and class. None the less, no correspondent sounds poor, peasant or proletarian.

All are men and women who, at some stage in their lives, sometimes belatedly, had converted to Catholicism and were drawn from 2,600 of an overall population of 37,241 Italian and 9,415 foreign Jews then resident in Italy. In Maryks's view, they saw Tacchi Venturi as ‘a paternal compassionate consoler, ready to bring relief to their hearts’, as well as a priest who was well connected and effective. Maryks does concede that Tacchi Venturi believed that unconverted Jews were perfidious carriers of a dangerous and wicked ‘superstition’, although he adds charitably that, in a public lecture in 1940, Tacchi Venturi maintained that ‘Ignatius Loyola felt a peculiar predilection for the Jews’ and urged that a kind approach was best tailored to fostering conversion to the true faith. Similarly we learn that, in 1943, the priest wrote to Pius xii to express his horror at ‘the barbaric treatment used by the Germans against these unfortunate people’. When it comes to the correspondence assembled in his book, Maryks, in sentimental vein, suggests that it is best read as a tragic expression of how ‘the racial laws affected their authors psychologically’.

Richer material, however, might be located in the case studies that expose the complex texture of hope and action in Fascist Italy. What each of the forty-one assumed was that the regime's laws were not iron-hard which, as one writer put it boldly, ‘actually is the case for all human laws’. How to get around them and what seemed their cruel fate or that of their loved ones? Contacts and ‘raccomandazioni’ (special pleading) were the answer. Somewhere, someone, in the power structure could yet make it function beneficially. Tacchi Venturi was the obvious person; he might enjoy fruitful ties with Buffarini Guidi, the long-serving (and notoriously corrupt) Under-Secretary of the Interior (1933–43), or Bocchini and Senise, successive police chiefs, and he could approach Mussolini himself. Paths might twist and turn. An ophthalmologist in Verona persuaded Tacchi Venturi's nephew, Pino, to urge his case, with the Prefect of the city also alerted. Pino wrote to his uncle, saying that ‘I would be most grateful if You [he used the intimate Tu form] could send me a letter of recommendation for him so that His Excellency [the Prefect] … should not think that I am your totally unworthy nephew.’ In two instances there were suggestion of monetary offers to smooth the way. But, mostly, as with nephew, Pino, the motives combined honour, family and all that the long history of patron client networks (and Catholic influence) in Italy entailed, despite Fascism's regular pronouncements of its revolutionary spartan purity, compared with less ideologically-driven regimes.

If he is not ready fully to damn or to explain away Tacchi Venturi's anti-semitism, Maryks does agree that the racial laws marked a dark phase in Italian history. He does not add, however, that, when it came to killing fields, Fascist Italy's major tally lay in its empire, where the regime liquidated up to half a million Arabs, Berbers and the peoples of Ethiopia. Maybe, in a third volume, Maryks might explore his Jesuit's attitude to Italy's belated but notably vicious, racist (and Catholic-approved) imperialism there.