Word: fascistically
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...perhaps fair to observe that Italian Jewry was spared the worst of genocide. Mussolini's Fascist government only belatedly and halfheartedly embraced the nightmare racial theories of its German ally. Not until after the Italians made a separate peace, late in the war, and the Germans occupied much of their country did deportations begin in earnest. This meant that many Italian Jews stayed only a relatively short time in the camps, which enhanced their chances of survival...
...could charitably be described as Chaplinesque, or perhaps more accurately as Robin Williamsish--devotes much of his film to peacetime passages overestablishing Guido's childlike yet shrewd, cheeky yet romantic character as a wise innocent, an idealized Everyman. His pursuit of his principessa, who is engaged to a local Fascist leader (and is sweetly played by Benigni's wife Nicoletta Braschi), and his casually farcical assaults on decorum and authority are, if you have a taste for simpleton comedy, inoffensive...
...germinates. The first half of the film--which takes places against the beautiful landscape of a Tuscan village in the early 1940s--follows Benigni's character, a hapless, intelligent and endearing waiter named Guido, as he courts a local schoolteacher, Dora (Nicoletta Braschi). Dora, who is engaged to a Fascist official, falls for his antics from the start, though it takes time for her to decide to leave her other life behind...
...There are also, however, hints of what is to come, but it's not in Guido's nature to let these threats impede his lifestyle. When Guido's family horse is spray-painted green and covered with anti-Semitic slogans, he uses it to carry Dora away from her Fascist husband-to-be. In another scene, Guido pretends to be chief inspector at a school so he can turn an intended lecture on the superiority of the Aryan race into a discussion of the superiority of his own "Aryan" ears, feet and bellybutton...
...novel Bend Sister, Vladimir Nabokov has his hero, the philosopher Adam Krug, attempt to escape with his little son from a communo-fascist state in Eastern Europe to America. Krug imagines David growing into a teenager, playing the strange game of baseball. He imagines him as a man of 40. When David is killed by thugs, Nabokov himself cannot bear it: Krug goes mad, sees his creator is a benevolent artist, and the book ends...