2/7: In The 1920s, What Did I Do To Turn Italy Into a Super Power?

The land is given. The money is found. The country begins to work. And in March 1923 an agronomist in a suit that does not fit tells the Regent that the credit terms will ruin four thousand families inside two years. He is thanked. He is overruled. He is right. SEASON 2 is the season in which winning starts to cost something. Alessandro is nineteen, then twenty, then twenty-one. He electrifies nine southern provinces out of four hundred and eleven Alpine dams — white coal, the water that replaces the coal Italy does not have — and one of those reservoirs drowns a village and a churchyard, and a photographer takes eleven plates and holds them for eight years. In August he drafts an ultimatum to Greece that is not intended to be accepted. The only man in the room who says so out loud is told no, and goes to Geneva, and argues the case honestly and well, and never mentions it to another living soul for five years. And on the last night of 1925 he copies two failing pages onto one clean sheet and burns the originals, and comes to a line worn into a crease, and cannot afterwards tell whether he copied it or invented it. There are four such lines. He did not mark them, because to mark them he would have had to know which they were.