Sorry if he ate babies or something like that, but I was just curious if he was really as horrible a dictator everyone says he was.

Just some background, my family is Sicilian and very Southern Italian, and from what I hear from my great grandfather (and grandfather) was that he was a pretty good leader, and internally, did a lot of great things for Italy. According to them, he was the one who had roads built to connect Italy, he was the one who gave them an official language (from what I know, they weren't much above city states before World War One, and after that the country fell back down again), he brought the country into a modern era, made a public schooling system and a bunch of other things that sound more like FDR than Hitler.

To add to my confusion, the history books said he didn't do that bad of things either, other than invade Ethiopia and Albania, which kicked him in the ass. In fact, I've got the impression that the only reason he worked with Nazi Germany was to keep all the roma in Italy away from the holocaust.