Canale Mussolini, first of all, is a novel describing the history of one of the most ambitious projects of the fascist regime, the bonification of the Pontine Marshes, the construction of the Agro Pontino project and the settlement of the region with arrivals from the whole territory of Italy. This projects dates from the time of the Roman Empire, never being fully finished, with every new regime in power failing to tame the power of nature until the fascist regime completed it in the 20th century. All of this points to the conclusion that Pennacchi took upon this topic because it represents a fruitful metaphor for the history and the process of the formation of the modern Italian state and nation. This impression is only intensified by the knowledge that the canal was almost destroyed at the end of the war, yet it managed to rise from the ashes, be restored and continue function, though it need constant tending, care and mending to avoid a new apocalypse, just like the latest reincarnation of the state of Italy.
The novel, second of all, is also a depiction of the history of a family, the Peruzzi. It serves as a picturesque tableaux of the life, suffering and challenges faced by three generations of this family. The events in the novel take place over a long historical period spanning almost a century during which Italy shakes off the last remnants of feudalism, enters a rapid process of industrialization and attempts to become an imperialistic force, a undertaking which infamously fails in the course of World War II. The premise of telling the history of a nation and era through the story of a fictional family is a well-known and practiced literary device, especially in the tradition of realism and modernism from which Pennacchi draws. However, what breathes freshness into this trusted recipe is the narrative perspective of the subjective narrator who with a deft and light skill leads us through the story and plot. Though it seems he always randomly skips from period to period, from topic to topic, from character to character, but never loses the thread like a popular common storyteller, rather than a professional historian. When you think better of it, that is the most common manner in which we initially receive and perceive our personal and family history, but also the history of our community and nation. We learn and remember by listening to the stories told by our elders, sitting at the dinner table, during family celebrations or when visiting a relative, those are the theaters where all apocryphal histories are played out, the stage where events are told which have been hidden and suppressed from the official history, the fire around which myths and legends are born, such as the yarn that Mussolini had the hots for their grandmother, the matriarch of the Peruzzi.
Still, it is this rather informal and dialogic narrative structure which allows the Peruzzi story to be interspersed with all the most important structural elements which comprise the body of Italian identity and narrative: events and persons starting from the time of Garibaldi and ranging in a broad sweep all the way to the time of Berlusconi. The spiral movement of the narrator through the narrative of history just illustrate the repetitive nature of living in a certain region and the immutability of the mentality of its community, but also the gradual progress taking place and the adaptability of the common folks to the changes brought on by the new age. What lends the credence of truth to this textual historical panorama is the common sense thinking that shines through the contemplations of the narrator which helps lift the veil of illusion which official history pull over our eyes. It is this approach allows us bot to be surprised by the neglected fact that Mussolini and his whole fascist movement were socialist and left-wing in the beginning, only for the degradation of old social and political traditions and institutions to lead it along another path which inevitably ends in racism and dictatorship. This makes it easier to accept the fact that the common people only looks at ideology through the point of view of their bare survival and existence, just as means of being afforded protection, thus it is only normal when they are exploited by the local landowners to seek protection from a well-organized movement such as the Fascists. Ultimately, for the common man all totalitarian systems look the same when he has to do his farm chores, but the common man also remembers that even Roosevelt and Stalin watched and learned as Mussolini managed to successfully take a backward agrarian society such as Italy and modernize it in flurry of activities and projects.