The section of these pages that I found most interesting was the section on Empire. This goes along really well with many of the articles that we read that talked about the ways the colonies were portrayed to the Italian people. Mussolini’s quote, “Our peninsula is too small, too rocky, too mountainous to be able to feed its 40 million inhabitants,” is a great example of the government finding justifications for colonialism. As Duggan points out, the primary reason for expansion was to raise the moral of the nation. What I found surprising was that the government wanted to send a half of a million peasants in the “fertile palm groves.” The government misrepresented the fertility of the land and in fact, after World War Two, on 39,000 were tricked into moving to Libya. Mussolini was determined however to become the leader of an Empire and wasn’t going to continue the “weak and tentative policies” of his predecessors in Africa, and he used Graziani and Badoglio to do it.