In the 1930s, Curzio Malaparte set out to write a book on the "main motor of fascism": Benito Mussolini. For various reasons - including their various imprisonments at the hands of the regime commanded by the Duce - Malaparte never managed to complete the project as such. Muss is, then, a fragmentary book written in a period that extends from those years until 1950, when the object of its study already had been assassinated. The fascinating part of the text is Malaparte's ambivalence towards a figure whose immense capacity for seduction would not explain the power he came to concentrate and the disaster and destruction occasioned. As a sort of late redemption, in Muss / The great imbecile, Malaparte performs a beautiful satire where the once-powerful Duce is reduced to a character of a pathetic comedy, subjected to the derision of a people who, although crushed and mistreated for more than Twenty years, never managed to pull off his dignity.