Cardinal Domenico Tardini, Secretary of State of John XXIII, in the book Pius XII reconstructed, in 1961, with a rich set of documents, the figure and work of Pius XII, of whom he had been the closest collaborator, together with monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini. The book, translated into many/various languages, is now republished in an anastatic edition with an introduction that reconstructs its publishing success and the appreciation of scholars.
It is followed by a very interesting unpublished diary of 1954, the year of the long and painful illness of the Pope, in which Tardini annotates the conversations that took place in the audiences. As evidenced in the introduction, the complex dynamics of the Curia and the limits of the late pontificate of Pius XII and his solitudinarian government of the Church emerge from the lucid powerful reports of the papal audiences. In these encounters with Pius XII seen up close, Tardini captures the rich human and religious personality of the suffering pope with psychological finesse
