April 15, 1919

April 15, 1919, was the day a general strike in Milan turned into a violent confrontation between socialist demonstrators and their armed opponents, followed by the destruction of the socialist newspaper Avanti!. The sequence joined mass protest, street fighting, and the attack on a political institution; that evening, Benito Mussolini described the conflict as a revolution and the opening episode of civil war. In the book’s chronology, the date becomes an early, concentrated image of a political struggle increasingly conducted through organized force as well as public speech and parliamentary maneuver.

A city brought to a halt

The day opened in a citywide stoppage. Tram drivers and gas workers had been off the job since midnight, public services were suspended, and factories across Italy’s most industrialized city were closed. The strike reached beyond the outskirts where proletarian neighborhoods lay: shops and gathering places along Corso Vittorio Emanuele, Piazza del Duomo, and the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II were shut, as were banks, municipal offices, and business offices. Police and soldiers guarded the banks, but the institutions themselves were closed.

At the same time, tens of thousands of workers gathered at the Milan arena. The prospect of upheaval shaped the mood of the assembly, but the break that brought violence was not presented as a prearranged operation. In the early afternoon, several thousand demonstrators separated from the enormous procession and went along Via Orefici toward the Duomo. Their movement carried the protest from the stadium into the city’s central public space, where two political processions would meet.

The confrontation in Piazza del Duomo

In Piazza del Duomo, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti addressed a small, mixed crowd near the equestrian monument to Vittorio Emanuele II. A poet and founder of Futurism, he advocated a movement that celebrated destruction, rebellion, and war. Nearby, Ettore Candiani tried to speak as people repeatedly called out that the socialists were arriving. The Arditi drew their revolvers. These scenes of anticipation gave way to a direct confrontation when the socialist column approached, led by women carrying a portrait of Lenin and a red flag.

A cordon of Carabinieri blocked the route from Via dei Mercanti. When it opened, uniformed officers and Arditi advanced in small groups. The battle lasted about a minute. Demonstrators threw rocks and a few clubs; officers, Arditi, and Futurists fired first into the air and then toward the socialist column. The marchers stopped singing, and the procession broke apart in panic. The contrast in organization and arms was stark: thousands of marchers faced hundreds of armed opponents. The attackers then pursued and beat demonstrators; the book presents the episode not as an extended battle but as a sudden reversal from procession to rout.

From the street to Avanti!

The confrontation did not end with the dispersal of the march. The attackers returned to Piazza del Duomo, where Marinetti was urged to speak again, and later turned toward the Milan headquarters of Avanti!, the leading newspaper of Italian socialism, on Via San Damiano. Uniformed soldiers initially guarded the building, but the defense gave way to a siege. After a guard was killed by a rifle shot from inside, a gap in the cordon opened for the stretcher; the attackers entered through it. The socialist defenders had already left by the rear, and the building was looted. The attack thus moved from a clash with a street procession to the destruction of the press that represented its political adversaries.

A former printer, Mazzucato, used an iron bar to damage the printing machinery. Half an hour later, the building was burning. Police watched alongside the men who had set the fire, while firefighters were prevented from intervening so that the blaze could continue. Avanti! was more than a building: in the account, it was described as the socialists’ home. Its destruction made the day’s violence an assault on the means by which a movement published and circulated its politics.

Mussolini’s distance and declaration

Mussolini did not take part in the street events. After a private meeting with activists on the evening of April 14, he remained in the small office of Il Popolo d’Italia throughout the following day and did not go out to eat. He had lunch brought from a nearby trattoria and kept a short-barreled revolver close at hand. Marinetti recounted the events to him that night. The separation between the editor and the violence outside is part of the date’s political significance: Mussolini was absent from the confrontation, yet his newspaper office became the place where its meaning was announced and organized.

After Marinetti finished, Ferruccio Vecchi handed Mussolini a wooden sign. Mussolini briefly recoiled, then addressed the Arditi gathered in the courtyard. He declared, “This is a day of our revolution,” and followed with, “The first episode of the civil war has taken place.” He ordered armed veterans to guard the newspaper from its basement and placed an old Fiat machine gun on the roof, with barbed-wire defenses at the alley entrance. A newspaper office was thereby secured like a command post in a war zone. The declaration did not merely describe the day’s events; the defensive measures gave that language an immediate material form.

The date in the wider conflict

The events of April 15 took place amid a wider postwar contest over work, political authority, and control of public space. In Bologna, labor organizations and socialist institutions had become powerful, while disputes over union membership and workers’ demands intensified pressure on employers and the middle classes. In Ferrara’s countryside, labor leagues fought over hiring, wages, and landowners’ obligations. These conflicts help explain why political mobilization could involve not only speeches and demonstrations but also organizations capable of closing workplaces, directing labor, and contesting local authority.

The book’s later chronology shows the conflict taking different forms rather than ending with the Milan clash. In the summer of 1920, peasant leagues exercised extensive control over hiring and agricultural work in parts of Emilia, amid disputes over grain, farm labor, and landowners’ power. In January 1921, a Ferrara punitive expedition was organized with military methods, trucks supplied by the Agrarian Association, and simultaneous targets in nearby rural settlements. That May, Italo Balbo mobilized tens of thousands of impoverished farm laborers into Ferrara to press the government for public works. In July, a general strike called in defense of political and union liberties met a Fascist ultimatum claiming the right to replace a state deemed impotent. Later, government attempts to regulate Fascist paramilitary formations were openly challenged by party leaders. These episodes do not make April 15 the sole cause of what followed, but they place it within a developing pattern: organized mass action, counter-mobilization, and violence increasingly tested the authority of the liberal state.